Hard Links, Router Security & the Wildest Stuff at Computex — Ed & Stefano Unleashed - The Uncast Show

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Ed
and Stefano Unleashed.
So today is episode four, butunfortunately, due to real life
getting in the way and Stefanoletting me down, look at him
there miming away.
Hey, he's always the joker,isn't he?

Speaker 2 (00:17):
I'm just repeating what you're saying.

Speaker 1 (00:18):
Stefano is not able to join us because, like I said,
real life's getting in the way,so we've had to record this a
week early.
So where are you going to bewhen this goes live then,
stefano?

Speaker 2 (00:28):
I will be in Chicago away for my birthday weekend.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
Oh, nice.
Well, we all hope you have agreat time.
You know, not too much drinking, I hope.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
I don't plan on it actually.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
Awesome man.
Anyway, let's move straight onto our first segment, which
let's talk about YouTubechannels.
Now I just want to say toeveryone out there who may
follow my Space Invader 1YouTube channel that I haven't
made a video for quite a longtime, basically because of my
new job role over at LimeTechnology.
I've been settling in andgetting used to how everything

(01:02):
works, so I decided to put thatchannel on pause for a while and
I've only been making contentover here.
But I've got a few videos thatare in production that are going
back onto my channel, and sowatch out for them soon, because
the channel will be coming back.
So what I thought I'd do,stefano, is we both run YouTube
channels and you know how do youfind running your channel on a

(01:25):
day-to-day basis and what do youfind the challenges of running
a YouTube channel.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
So just to kind of back up a little bit I almost
hardly ever post anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
Um, I work a full-time job, um, and then that
takes up a lot of my time.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
Can I ask what your full-time job is for the viewers
who don't actually know?

Speaker 2 (01:45):
Yeah, I'm just assistant administrator, so just
you know typical system adminstuff so that takes up a lot of
my time, and you know.
Then you come home and you gotto like do chores and we spend
eight hours a day at work andthen you have to do chores and
you get home or just likegenerally just cleaning up or
whatever.
Even the act of eating dinnertakes time right and you gotta

(02:05):
clean up after yourself.
Like it's just hard to staymotivated to continue making
stuff.
So if I do make content I'mstaying up till 11, 12, one
o'clock at night and it can bereally tough.
And then on top of that, youknow, if you have kids you've
got to go do their activities,and then there's holidays and
just all these things that arealways getting in the way and
it's actually pretty challengingto consistently make content,

(02:28):
especially like you, I'm theonly person on my team, so I got
to do the filming, editing,recording I guess I said that
twice like you know, planningeverything or like emailing all
these different companies, andit's just a lot to manage.
You got taxes that get in theway.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
I think a lot of people don't realize the amount
of time it actually takes tomake a short video and many
times I've had people say oh, ed, can you make a quick 10 minute
video on this?
But on the creator side, a 10minute video is certainly a lot
more than 10 minutes or even anhour, two hours.
You know, for me, a lot of myvideos will take me, you know,

(03:07):
20 to 30 hours, to be honest,from start to finish to make.
I'm not sure if that's me beingsuper slow, but you know what's
your experience with the timeto make a video, stefano.

Speaker 2 (03:17):
I try not to think about it too much, but I can
definitely say that short videostake way longer for some reason
.
I guess because you're tryingto figure out like it's like a
puzzle.
You're trying to figure out howto put the most information in
and keep it as short as possible, so you have to be very, very
specific with your words.
I think that makes it morechallenging.
And, just using the UnraidDigest as an example, those are

(03:39):
typically like four to sixminutes, sometimes less, and it
probably takes me a solid likeeight hours to make just one of
those, and then meanwhile I canmake a video that's like 20
minutes long and that probablytakes like six hours.

Speaker 1 (03:53):
So I don't know yeah, you know, very different to
what people think.
Anyway, on, my channel iscoming back and the first video
is going to be about a containercalled ersatz tv, which is a
really awesome container.
Not sure if you've ever heardof that one of you, stephano
what is?
It's super cool.
It allows you to make your owntv channel basically.
So you kind of like choose whatmedia that you've got that you

(04:17):
want to be in your tv channel.
So if it's a bunch of, say,1980s tv shows, you can kind of
put them all in and say I wantthese to show and the tv channel
will basically broadcast thoseepisodes randomly or in a
certain order, whatever youprefer, nice.
And you can also interspersethem with actual ads.

(04:40):
So a lot of people they'lldownload an ad pack from, say,
the 1980s, 1990s and so they'llhave the official adverts from
those kind of years being playedat the same time.
And so you can come home fromwork and go into your office.
What have you into your kind offront room you can put on the
channel and the channel willplay through things like MBplex.
You can add it as a channel andyou might be kind of halfway

(05:02):
through a Stargate Atlantisepisode.
So it's just like the old dayswhen you'd come home from school
or college and there'd be anepisode half playing and you'd
have to kind of fill in the gapsin your mind of what happened
beforehand.
So it's really kind of fun andyou get to see episodes that
you'd never normally watch.
And you know a lot of times, youknow for me, when I'm watching

(05:22):
something on my media server.
It A lot of times for me, whenI'm watching something on my
media server, it's sometimeshard to think what to watch and
you're thinking, oh yeah, I'veseen that.
What should I watch this?
But then when you've gotsomething on a schedule that's
coming up maybe random sci-fiepisodes if you make your own
sci-fi channel it's reallyreally cool.
So that's the first episodeback on the Space Invader 1
channel.
And one thing I was worryingabout with that is I was

(05:45):
thinking well, if it's likestreaming out 24-7, I don't
really want it to be using myhard drives, but it doesn't
actually wear the hard drives.
It's not reading from the harddrives unless actually someone's
watching the stream.
So it's keeping track of whereeverything should be internally
and then only when someoneaccesses the stream it starts
transcoding and pushing that out.

Speaker 2 (06:07):
Yeah, that's cool.

Speaker 1 (06:08):
So it's really, really cool.
So, you know, look out for that, guys.
On my Space Invader 1 channeland on the Uncast channel we've
got a really cool video that itmay have actually been released
before this episode, so, if ithas, look at the video before
this one.
But we've got a reallyinteresting podcast interview

(06:28):
where I have interviewed Tiffany, the co-CIO of Unraid, and Eli,
and it's a deep dive into whereUnraid is now, where it came
from and what's coming next andsome really cool announcements
of some new features.
So check that out, guys, if youwant to know all about that,
about the state of where Unraidis now.
But talking about videos on theUncast show, there was recently

(06:52):
a Jellyfin video out and I hada question on that video that
I've heard many, many times andthat is about hard links.
Now, stefano, I wonder if youcan just explain to our audience
what hard links are before I goany further.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
So I don't really know, to be honest, because I
only use soft links.

Speaker 1 (07:14):
Okay, sorry, right, okay.
So hard links, okay.
So basically, imagine you'vegot a city.
Okay, so you to chicago, yeah,like for your birthday, yep,
right now, while this is beingbroadcast.
So if you're going from whereyou live there might be a
signpost pointing to chicago,okay, but then from where I live

(07:36):
there'll be oh, I see on thecamera there there was my hands
two signposts pointing tochicago.
But chicago only exists in oneplace, okay.
So a hard link is basically tworeferences to that same file on
the same disk.
So if you delete one of thehard links, the file is still

(07:56):
there.
It's only deleted when youdelete both of the hard links.
So when there's nothing elsereferencing that actual physical
file on the drive, then thefile is no longer there.
So hard links have to be on thesame file system.
So if it's like a pool of disks, it has to be in the same pool.
Or if it's on individual harddrives, a hard link can only
exist on the same file system.

(08:19):
It can't exist across, say,from disk one.
A soft link, a symlink, know,it can be anywhere.
It's just like a shortcut.
So hard links are slightlydifferent, but it allows the
file to exist in two places inthe file system and to and to
the file system it is.
It's a separate file in in asense.
So a lot of people have said tome why do I not like hard links

(08:41):
?
Because I always push that.
I think the best way to storemedia is to have you know.
Well, on the unread arrayanyway, you know if you're using
a Z pull it's slightlydifferent.
But on the unread array, becausewe can have drives spin down
when they're not in use, Ialways really like to have, say,
my movies on one disc and my TVshows on another, or kind of

(09:03):
movies on two discs, tv shows ontwo discs, just so they're not
mingled up together.
So if I'm watching a movie, allof the other discs can spin
down in my server.
But if I have them spreadacross everything using high
water, every time I go to myserver and browse a movie or go
into the movies it's going tospin up all of my hard drives.
So I like it when I'm watchinga movie that only one drive

(09:25):
needs to be spun up or a tv show, only one does.
And if I watch the next episodeof a tv show, that drive's
already spun up, nothing elsehas to spin up okay, so that's
why I like to keep it like that.
But, um, people use hard linkswho use torrents like I don't
use torrents personally, I'd ripall my own blu-rays and dvds

(09:45):
and I prefer to have likecontrol over you know the bit
rate and how things are that way.
So for me I don't really needto actually use hard links
anyway.
But if I was to use hard linksI would actually do it in a
slightly different way than.
There's a guide online calledtrash where it's recommended
that you set up a media shareand you have all of your media

(10:08):
inside of that.
And then inside the media shareyou have, like, say, tv shows,
music movies in separate foldersand you have a download share
inside of that as well.
So that's on the array acrossall of the disks, the cache, all
of the hard drives in yourarray.
So then if you're usingtorrents and you download your

(10:33):
favorite Linux ISO and that goesinto the download share and
then you want to look at that onPlex, you have the Rs make a
hard link to it.
So it's still physically in thetorrent software and it's able
to be seeded still physically inthe torrent software and it's
able to be seeded, but it's alsoable to be in plex, mb or
jellyfin renamed as the correctfile, and it can be there
instantly.
And people call it an atomicmove.

(10:54):
So that's why people like it,because you don't have to
actually copy the file from, say, your torrents, interplex and
have the file exist twice,taking up twice as much space
while you're seeding.
So then when the seeding'sfinished, the torrent software
can delete that hard link andit's no longer in the torrent
software, but the file stillexists and it's there for Plex.

(11:17):
So people say, why don't I likehard links?
I think hard links are cool,but if I was to set them up, I'd
it slightly differently.
I would still have my granularshares set up, so I'd have
movies on disc one, so tv shows,tv shows on maybe disc three.
But then inside of movies Iwould have a downloads folder
and inside of tv shows I'd haveanother downloads folder and

(11:40):
then in my torrent software,such such as Deluge, I would map
separate paths into thosefolders and then using kind of
labeling so if it's a TV show ora movie, linux, iso, I would
have it, when it's finished,move it into the completed and

(12:00):
then with the subcategory ofwhat it is, which will then put
it actually in the correct disk,so you know, in the movies
downloads or TV shows downloads.
I hope I'm explaining myselfwell here.

Speaker 2 (12:13):
I think it's a little too early for me.

Speaker 1 (12:15):
And yeah, it's very, very early for you, and so the
hard links would work exactlythe same.
But you can keep it onindividual disks.
But it's just a lot.
It's a bit more setup to do onthe torrent client side because
you need multiple paths to wherethe file ends up after it's
been downloaded.
So I did promise in thecomments of jellyfin to explain

(12:37):
why I do or don't like hardlinks.
Um, I do like them, they'rereally useful, but I don't need
them.
So that's my answer for that.

Speaker 2 (12:48):
Very concise and well explained, sir.

Speaker 1 (12:52):
And so, anyway, talking about other videos, by
the time this video goes live aswell, we should have our app of
the month, which is Duplicatithis month, which is a really
cool piece of backup softwarethat allows you to backup your
well, backup, really anythingfrom your Unraid server, any
share you want, either to localstorage elsewhere, another

(13:15):
server elsewhere, cloud storagelike Google Drive, onedrive, all
of the kind of normal culpritsit can be backed up to, and the
good thing is, you can actuallyencrypt it locally and then it
uploads it in chunks to cloudstorage, so when it's in rest in
the cloud, even Google or stuffcan't see what your files are.

(13:36):
So it's very secure and itgives you a way of being able to
send backups to the cloud butstill stay private.
I'm not sure if you've everused any software like that
yourself, stefano.

Speaker 2 (13:47):
Nope, it's all too advanced for me.

Speaker 1 (13:53):
I'm going to ask you do you actually make backups of
your important stuff and, if so,how do you do it?

Speaker 2 (13:58):
Yeah, yeah, I do backups.
I have a server locally and Ijust use rs sync to go from one
server to the other.
And I used to have a server inFlorida and I would just have
WireGuard VPN set up between myserver and that server and then
I would our sync over that.

Speaker 1 (14:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:14):
And obviously I use user scripts to have some sort
of like automation to it Right.

Speaker 1 (14:18):
Yeah, well, at the same time as the duplicative
video goes out, there should bea blog post on the unread
website in to do with backing up, where you'll see a blog post.
I've written about backups andI've included like a script that
I use where you can basicallyjust put into an array the
various shares you want backedup.

Speaker 2 (14:39):
For people who don't like kind of scripting and stuff
, I've tried to make it as easyas possible because rsync is
super powerful and I think it'ssuch a great tool, but it could
be quite um inaccessible for newusers if they're not
experienced with any cli stuffyeah, and it's funny because,
like, people ask me all the timelike, oh well, what about file
versioning, and you know, orwhatever, and I'm like I don't,

(15:01):
I'm just backing up data, like Idon't need file versioning, I
don't need, you know, snapshots,like I, just I, it's worked
well for me for I guess 10 yearsnow.
Like I, I don't, if I neededthat level of you know, uh, I
guess, protection or recovery, Iwould probably look at
something else, but I just, Ijust have good practices, I

(15:24):
guess I don't know, like three,two, one, right, so yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:27):
So you know there's quite a lot you can do with with
our sync as well.
Is you can, you can set it sowhen you've got, you know your
source and destination.
If something's deleted out thesource, you can have it deleted
at the destination.
So it's like a strict kind ofmirror of how it is yeah, but
what a lot of people don'trealize.
What you can do is you can haveit.
So when it actually deletes thestuff out of the destination is

(15:49):
it doesn't fully delete it, itjust moves it to another file
and you can have it renamed likedeleted on this date, and so
you keep the files.
So you've got the best of bothworlds.

Speaker 2 (15:58):
See, I just never deleted anything.
It's never a problem.

Speaker 1 (16:01):
Yeah, but anyway, for those of you who have watched
the podcast with myself, tiffanyand Eli, you may have heard Eli
saying that there is a newfeature in Unraid being worked
on currently where there's goingto be a full backup system
built into Unraid so you canback up to another server or

(16:24):
another destination all from theGUI, and it's going to use
rsync on the back end, I believe.
So that's something it's notout yet, but it's definitely
coming and I think that's goingto be a real game changer really
for for unraid, for us to beable to have yeah, that'd be
really cool built into the guisomething especially with
scheduling, yeah so yeah, youcan.

(16:46):
You can do it all from the GUI.
So you know that's going to besuper cool.

Speaker 2 (16:50):
Do you use Unrain's like cloud backup for your USB?
You use that right.

Speaker 1 (16:57):
I do, yeah, I actually really like that.

Speaker 2 (16:59):
Yeah, it's nice.

Speaker 1 (17:01):
I find it really useful.
But also, what's changing withthat as well is there's going to
be an option to be able toactually upload it to a cloud
provider of your choice and haveit encrypted before it uploads.
So yeah, I think Eli was sayingit's going to use Rclone on the
back end for everything.

Speaker 2 (17:20):
That's a good idea.
That'll be really nice.

Speaker 1 (17:23):
That's definitely something to look out for.
I'm really excited about thatbecause it's a built-in backup
system for shares and the flashflash drive.
It's going to be really, really, really useful.
So anyway, just I'm talkingabout duplicati.
Again, there's a very similarcontainer called duplicity.
I think that's how you say it.
I'm probably pronouncing itwrong.
I don't think anyone's everquite worked out how you're

(17:45):
meant to pronounce that yet but,and another.
Another very cool piece ofsoftware that I like is another
one, another container I'm notsure how many of you guys out
there have used it is calledyour backup.
Backup is a awesome piece ofsoftware, um.
What it is is it?
Basically you run it on windows, mac, linux as well, and it

(18:06):
just allows you to do a backupof whatever computer it's
running on, either just likefile backups or a full system.
Well, and it just allows you todo a backup of whatever
computer it's running on, eitherjust like file backups or a
full system image, and it allowsyour unraid server to be the
target.
So you run like a server onunraid of your backup and then
on on the um pc clients.
You run it on there as well andit will just, at scheduled

(18:26):
times, do full image backups andfile backups across your unraid
server.
And it will work across theinternet as well if you set it
up to do so, or across tailscale, something like that.
So that's really cool as well.
So anyway, um, should we moveon onto unraid news stephano?
yeah sure yeah, so unraid news.

(18:49):
So we've had unraid 7.1 sincewe last spoke, stephano, I
believe yep 7.1, 1 and 1, 2, Ibelieve yeah, so you know, 7, as
everyone knows, or 7.1, youknow, introduce wireless support
importing foreign cfs pools.
as we mentioned before on thepodcast, there's some fixes to

(19:09):
various bugs.
There was a mover empty diskbug that potentially could have
caused data loss.
That's been patched.
And a VM OVMF boot problems forFedora VMs, where Fedora VMs
wouldn't boot or you couldn'tinstall them due to the OVMF.
That's now been fixed and theOVMF changed, so Fedora VMs can
be installed and boot absolutelyfine.

(19:31):
So on to other news the Asusrouter botnet exploit, stefano.
What's all that about, man?

Speaker 2 (19:37):
It's a big problem.
Big problem, ed.
So apparently there's been afirmware hack where the
attackers have loaded their SSHbackdoor into the firmware and
so now, even allegedly, even ifyou update the firmware on some
ace asus routers not all of them, but some of them, specifically

(19:59):
soho routers uh, even with afirmware update, that backdoor
will stay there forever.
I don't know how theyaccomplish this.
That's's pretty impressive.
This also seems to me toindicate that, like, if you have
one of the affected routers,that, like, the only way to get
rid of it is by trashing therouter.

Speaker 1 (20:17):
Wow that's crazy.

Speaker 2 (20:19):
Yeah, and then there are other routers that are also
affected, but updating thefirmware will actually clear out
that, I guess that backdoor.
And then there's alsorecommendations for, like,
blocking some ip, ip addressesafter you've removed them,
deleting the authorized keys, um.
So there there are some knownworkarounds, and this apparently

(20:39):
doesn't just exclusively affectasus.
Uh, some other brands have beenaffected, but we're not sure if
it's like the same exploit, uh,or quite exactly how they went
about it so I'm assuming this isaffecting routers that are
having, like the admin web, uiexposed on the wan side?

Speaker 1 (20:59):
am I correct in assuming that?

Speaker 2 (21:01):
um, so I think for some of the other brands, yeah,
like if you haven't changed thedefault password or the
password's too weak, then theattacker was able to gain access
, upload their custom firmwareor whatever it was, and then,
alternatively, for some otherones, the users actually had to
download some package and thenthe exploit was basically

(21:23):
installed by the user.

Speaker 1 (21:25):
All right okay.

Speaker 2 (21:26):
But there's also some uncertainty.
It affects VPNs as well andopen ssl uh on the routers.

Speaker 1 (21:34):
So there's a there's a lot of like complexity going
on and and just I don't know,attackers always amaze me with
like the things they come upwith to to hack people's devices
and stuff so you know, you know, my opinion is, with these
things like never expose yourrouter's web interface online,
no matter how strong yourpassword is, because, yeah, it

(21:55):
might, you know, you never knowwhen there's going to be an
exploit, and these kind ofthings, these kind of things
happen.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
So I wonder how many like people's devices they've
done that by accident or theycome out of the box already
exposed.
Or they come out of the boxalready exposed because like a
good example of this and it'snot really like a home seho
device, but like even like myubiquity stuff.
Like oh it's, yeah, I mean it'snot directly exposed to the
internet, but I can still accessmy router through the internet

(22:25):
and I hate that that's like thedefault thing and you can
disable it, but still it's justlike this whole everything
connected to the web all thetime is is not good next, it'll
be your dishwasher well, I don'tcare if anyone hacks my
dishwasher you say that until itstarts running water 24 7 no,

(22:46):
but um.

Speaker 1 (22:47):
I think you know it's time to wash that dishes.

Speaker 2 (22:52):
That was my dishwasher mouth opening
impression it looked totallygood to me.

Speaker 1 (22:57):
I thought you were my dishwasher for a minute, but
but no, like um, it just goes toshow how useful things like
tail scale are.
You know, if you need to accessyour router, like if I ever
need to access mine, it willalways be through tailscale or,
before I use tailscale, it'll bethrough open vpn.
And it's just another goodreason why you should use
something like pf sense, use anopen source firewall, because in

(23:20):
my opinion, it's much moresecure than these commercial
routers, like you know, asus,etc.
But yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:26):
Plus like you get pf sense sounds like cetera, yeah.
And plus like you get PFSensehas like IDS right.
So Active Detection andPrevention right.

Speaker 1 (23:33):
Yeah, you can do all of that on it.
It's not easy to set up, butyes.

Speaker 2 (23:36):
And I'm sure a lot of these like home routers have no
sort of IPS at all.
I mean, I understand it'sprobably like expensive to do or
set up, but I but I mean most alot of home routers are like
nearly 300 now and that'ssomething that's so expensive,
yeah and you can get a like anentry-level enterprise.

Speaker 1 (23:55):
They look cool those stuff.
Now they've got lots of aerialsand they look like a spaceship.
Come on like crowns.

Speaker 2 (24:00):
I'm not hating on them, I'm just saying they're
expensive and you could spendfor the almost the same amount
of money.
You could get an enterpriserouter that has ids and ips and
that should, in theory, protectyou from malicious attempts
access.

Speaker 1 (24:12):
Yeah, for sure, you know these cheaper routers.
Well, you know, not evencheaper, like you say, but these
, these isp routers, man, you'rereally just asking for trouble,
in my opinion yeah, they're,they're so bad you know, in
britain anyway we've got like btsky and there's kind of major
isps.
They just buy the cheapestrouters they can.
You know they're not going toput any investment into the

(24:35):
router.
They give you the router andyou rarely ever see any type of
firmware updates.
Most people don't even knowthat it's possible to do that
for their router.
It will be there as long asthey have the router on day one.
It will be there and it won'tever be updated, unless it's
been built in to have autoupdates built into the router.

Speaker 2 (24:55):
And the same kind of goes with like modems and
gateways, like the ISPs usuallyhave the ability to remotely
access those devices and updatethem or modify them so that like
oh hey, you change your DNSns,we're changing back to our dns,
like all that kind of stuff.
A lot of people don't know thatyou know normally you can in

(25:16):
the united states anyway you candisable it most of the time,
like I've heard comcast, um,basically, um, divert dns.

Speaker 1 (25:23):
I'm not sure if that's true, but um, you can
change your dns, say on your PCor something, and Comcast will
have a rule in their actualfirewall of the router to
redirect any traffic on portUDP53, and it will still go
through their DNS.
But you know a good reason touse DNS over HTTPS, so they

(25:46):
can't do that.

Speaker 2 (25:48):
Yeah, the problem, I think too, is we're kind of
moving away from routers and wenow have these super advanced
modems.
They're not really even modems,they're just gateways, right,
and the gateways can do routingand switching.
But it's like a lot of thetimes, at least in the United
States, you're stuck with thatand removing it, especially for,
you know, I'm somewhat skilledwith computers, as you might

(26:11):
know.
I mean, I've been around for afew years and a lot of the
undertaking, even for me, isdaunting and there's no way the
mass population is going to tryand bypass their gateway to
prevent things like that.
So it's, I don't know.
It's only a matter of timebefore you get locked in and
they're just scraping all yourDNS stuff.

(26:32):
Everyone's going to have to besubscribed to a VPN.

Speaker 1 (26:36):
Yeah, everything's just monetized nowadays, so I'm
sure forcing the DNS through,from what I've read about
Comcast it happening, it'sbasically just to collect data
and be able to sell it, Sell ityeah.
What are you searching?

Speaker 2 (26:53):
So Comcast don't want to give that up, you know.
So yeah, I'd always likehearing they're like oh, your
data is worthless.
And it's like if it's soworthless, why is everyone
collecting it and selling it?
Now I understand they'recollecting and aggregating it
and that's how they make money,but it's like, hey, man, you
should just give me 10 of thosesales just saying, yeah, if,
imagine if we aggregated all ofthe data that like so Plex is
selling our data, or everyone'sselling our data, if we
aggregated all those companies,we would actually make some

(27:14):
money back.

Speaker 1 (27:14):
We've actually got a little thing to talk about Plex
again doing more shenanigansthan you know this episode, but
you know we'll leave that tillwe get to that section.

Speaker 2 (27:22):
Sorry, I'm jumping ahead.

Speaker 1 (27:23):
Yeah, but you know.
Going back to the ASUS routers,I guess what users should do,
in my opinion disable any WANaccess, as I've already said in
your router's admin panel.
Never expose a web UI to theinternet.
Always use a VPN if you need toconnect into your home network.
Update the firmware as soon aspossible.
Change the password on yourrouter.

(27:43):
Update the firmware to thelatest one.
I'm sure there's patches forthis exploit.
Now, if you x, if you updatebefore you've been exploited,
you should be okay do homerouters typically update
themselves like?

Speaker 2 (27:55):
can you schedule that on?
What, sorry, do home routerstypically like have a scheduling
process for them to updatethemselves, or that's a really
good question.
I haven't used one a long timeI couldn't tell you exactly.

Speaker 1 (28:06):
I don't know.
I don, I don't know.
Yeah, neither do I.
I would kind of think no,because if they updated at a
certain time it would cut offthe internet for the people
using it, and that might youknow.

Speaker 2 (28:17):
I feel like it's a no , because I mean, every month
now it's like oh, you know, thisTP-Link home stuff has joined
the botnet.
That now is you know, ddsingstuff has joined the botnet.
That now is you know, uh,ddsing, you know, or part of the
dds, or oh my gosh whateverit's part of a bot.

Speaker 1 (28:33):
I know what you mean.
I know what you mean, stephanieand now it's asus.

Speaker 2 (28:36):
The next week it'll be cisco and linksys.

Speaker 1 (28:39):
It's gonna be every d-link who still exists somehow
but anyway, like you know,talking about security um
stephano, yep, it's always goodto um have a password manager,
but microsoft think don'tactually agree that's such a
great idea from what I'm hearingabout Microsoft Authenticator
dropping its password feature.
Have you heard about that?

Speaker 2 (28:59):
I have heard about that.

Speaker 1 (29:00):
Yeah.
So you know, for the audienceout there, if you're using
Microsoft Authenticator andyou're using it to store
passwords, well, I think fromJuly 2025, microsoft removing
that feature fully and you'reusing it to store passwords,
well, I think from july 2025,microsoft removing that feature
fully and you will probably bewarned that stored apps in the
password, stored apps in thepassword stored, stored

(29:22):
passwords in the app.
You're being warned to exportthem before they're deleted,
because microsoft are justpulling that feature and they're
going to delete all of yourpasswords.
But they are saying that youcan actually export easily to
the Edge browser and all yourpasswords will automatically go
there, surprise, surprise.
But if you want to put itanywhere else, well, you have to

(29:42):
export it manually.
So, thank you, microsoft, butno, thank you, I do not want to
be using the Edge browser.

Speaker 2 (29:48):
Not for my password manager anyway.
So I actually have MicrosoftAuthenticator and I had no idea
you could use it as a passwordstore.

Speaker 1 (29:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:57):
And so I just opened the app just to like check it
out, and I clicked on passwordsand they have a big banner that
clearly says Autofill viaAuthenticator ends July 2025.

Speaker 1 (30:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:08):
It's safe to show this on screen, maybe.

Speaker 1 (30:10):
Yeah, but via authenticator.
Ends july 2025.
Yeah, yeah, it's safe to showthis on screen?
Maybe?
Yeah, but you know this isn't afeature removal.
It's microsoft saying use edgeor else.
In my opinion, yeah, that'swhat it feels like it's like the
software version of gettinglocked in a room with clippy and
bing together, isn't it so?

Speaker 2 (30:23):
what password manager do you use, if at all?

Speaker 1 (30:25):
I use.
I use self-hosted bitwarden ohyeah, that's right I expose it
only through tailscale, so itisn't exposed online at all that
?
yeah, that's good so, moving onto kind of ai news, this is
quite interesting.
I think I'm not sure if you'veheard that um united arab
emirates have made chat gpt plusfree for all of its citizens,

(30:46):
did not?
You know, obviously they'rethinking that it's important for
their citizens to have accessto a good AI.
You know, obviously United ArabEmirates is a you know, a very
wealthy country, so they canprobably afford to strike up
deals like this.
But I would never imagine theUK or United States giving all
their citizens free chat GPTplus.

Speaker 2 (31:08):
Yeah, yeah, interesting to be hearing about
that you know, like it it'sactually kind of funny and in a
way, and I think this isactually a good move, because
think about how bad searchengines have become.
And I don't know about you, butlike, even using chat GPT to

(31:30):
just shop online has becomeremarkably good.
And it I don't know like what'sgoing.
I guess, like search enginesare so focused on trying to make
money by serving, you know,like links, specific links or
ads or whatever that they've.
They've really shot themselvesin the foot.
And I'm at the point now whereI've I basically go straight to
chat, gpt, dot com or whatever.

(31:50):
That they've really shotthemselves in the foot.
And I'm at the point now whereI basically go straight to
chatgptcom or whatever andsearch for whatever I want,
instead of just using Google orDuckDuckGo or whoever.
And their little AI assistthing is even worse than just
going straight to an AI.
Even Copilot's honestly prettygood.

Speaker 1 (32:09):
So do you use the paid version of chat, gpt, or
the free version?
Right now, just use the freeversion so what I'm wondering is
how long is it going to bebefore, in between your chat,
gpt chats, there will be aninserted ad?

Speaker 2 (32:21):
yeah, I am.
I do wonder about that prettyoften.
Um, I don't know, I don't know,like I'm not too worried about
it, like I like they should getpaid, I should probably pay for
it because at the moment, I'msure you know, the training data
of everyone using ai is farmore valuable than any ad
revenue yeah, yeah but as soonas, like um, we're not useful

(32:42):
for the training data, I'm surewe'll start seeing ads in both
the free and the paid versions.
In my opinion, yeah, basicallymy attitude right now is kind of
wait and see and keep using ituntil it gets so bad that I have
to do something else, kind oflike YouTube ads.

Speaker 1 (32:57):
Yeah, so yeah, excellent segue there, stephanie
.
So there's been a new versionof a paid version of YouTube,
youtube Premium Lite.
So it's a cheaper tier ofyoutube premium, but it has no
downloads, no background play,but it does remove ads.
So there is a major caveat.

(33:19):
Yeah, with that removing ads,stephanie yeah, some ads, uh.

Speaker 2 (33:23):
So there it's not perfectly clear, in my opinion,
just reading, uh, what youtubehas put out, it's not perfectly
clear what ads are actuallybeing removed.
Um, they have genres of youtube, uh, where there will be no ads
, like gaming, beauty news, uh,and some more, but they don't
specify what more is, uh.

(33:44):
But at least the gaming port.
I think there's a lot of peoplethat ingest gaming content me
specifically, and that's kind ofgood, and I imagine a lot of
young children watch a lot ofgaming as well, like Minecraft
videos and stuff.
So at least they got that onetarget.
But shorts you still have towatch ads on shorts, music

(34:05):
videos and also other content.

Speaker 1 (34:13):
Whatever that is.
Yeah, the no background play, Ithink, is like you know.
Surely they could let peopleyou know have background play,
so if they listen to a podcastor something, you can just
minimize the app and it canstill continue you know, yeah,
they should really have to paythe extra.
You know what is it?
It's like $7.99 for the Lite.
And how much is YouTube Premium, the full one, now $15?
.

Speaker 2 (34:31):
The United States is $13.99.

Speaker 1 (34:33):
$13.99, yeah, so consider it about more, although
you do get the YouTube Music.
I've never used YouTube Musicever, to be honest, neither have
I.

Speaker 2 (34:43):
So before, when their music app was separate and you
could host your own stuff oraccess your own stuff through it
or however it worked way backin the day, that's when I used
it and then, when they sort ofstarted trying to monetize it
and I don't know like, do theYouTube thing or the Google
thing of destroying it, Istopped using it and I've just
never gone back to YouTube music.

(35:05):
I've had YouTube premium for acouple of years now, youtube
music.
I've had YouTube premium for acouple of years now and for me
it's been worth it, especiallythe last couple of years, as
I've sort of made less YouTubecontent and I can also share it
with my kid and if you, if yourchild, is on YouTube, you
absolutely have to have adblocker.
I mean it is atrocious the kindof ads that get served.

Speaker 1 (35:29):
I'll tell you, stefano, once I was like this
close to making a video on myYouTube channel that was titled
these ads are not suitable formy YouTube, because when YouTube
started saying you had toverify whether your content is
suitable for advertisers, I wasquite cross because I'd be

(35:57):
watching one of my own videos.
You know, just you know, youknow, after I've uploaded it,
checking it seems okay andthere'd be adverts like I
remember there was one like itwas in the kind of winter, I
think, just after the Ukrainewar had started.
So in Europe the price of gasand things like that were very,
very expensive.
So people were really worryingabout, you know, being able to
heat their homes in the winter,and elderly people, you know, on

(36:19):
their pensions, who don't havea lot of money.
Obviously, you know, it'sreally really hard for them.
And there was this advert thathad this little kind of heater
like this that was meant to kindof plug into the wall and they
were trying to make out that itwould heat your whole house.
And you know, going, oh, thesetwo students at like harvard
university found out their dormroom was like too cold and they,

(36:41):
so they made this thing and youknow, like, um, big oil is
trying to suppress it.
Buy it before it gets banned,yeah, and, and I'm thinking like
, okay, youtube, so you canactually check my video, go
through it and check that.
I haven't got two seconds ofsome I don't know kylie minogue
song.
Sorry, that's a bit old.
I don't know some kind of musicin there, that will get me a

(37:04):
copyright strike or something.
You can actually check thatcontent every time the video is
uploaded, but you can't do thesame for adverts, for like scams
basically.
Yeah, you know, this was about ahundred pounds for this stupid
little heater that defies thelaws of physics, and I'm
thinking.
Well, you know, that's why Iwanted to make the video and,
kind of, I actually collected awhole load of adverts.

(37:25):
There was another one as wellwhere they were saying that isps
basically will give you apackage and then they will
throttle it later on and this umplug-in device apparently keeps
the floodgates open.
What it was, it was just awi-fi repeater.
You know that was worthprobably about 10 bucks and
they're selling it for like 50.
And you know, yeah, it willprobably improve the wi-fi in

(37:46):
one room for someone.
So they they think, oh yeah,it's actually working, but it's
totally missold as what it'sactually doing yeah,
misrepresented yeah.
You know, and it's something youcould probably buy for like $10
off Amazon, the exact sameproduct, yeah, probably better
than this one.
So anyway, I kind of went offon a bit of a tangent.

Speaker 2 (38:03):
No, I feel like it's justified.

Speaker 1 (38:04):
I always kind of like rant.

Speaker 2 (38:06):
No, like I think you know you feeling crossed is
justified.
I mean, just looking at ads ingeneral, like oh, here's this
video game ad and look how funit is, but then the game itself
is totally not at all the sameas the ad.
And you know, the scrutiny thatwe as content creators get is
way more like oh, there's bloodin my advertisement.

(38:28):
Oh, there's blood in yourYouTube video.
Demontize, banned, but you canhave blood and guts and spit and
arse in your advertisement andit's just not fair.
And it kind of applies to AItoo.
Not to get too far off topic,but companies are allowed to
look at our YouTube videos andtrain their AI for free.

(38:48):
Or artists, all the paintingsthat get uploaded or whatever
they upload, they're allowed touse all that for free.
But God forbid, if we use twoseconds of a popular song on our
YouTube video, we getdemonetized and drop like a
strikeout on our channels orwhatever, and it's just like
where there's.
It's just not.
It's absolutely not fair.
And YouTube have you done anyof those surveys that youtube

(39:10):
sends about?
Like, hey, tell us what youthink about youtube, have you?

Speaker 1 (39:13):
done any of those.
I haven't, to be honest dude,they're so pointless.

Speaker 2 (39:17):
You should look at some of the questions they ask,
like how do you feel?
Uh, how youtube is fair for allcontent creators and it's like
youtube is absolutely not fairfor content creators.
Like, like, it's a self-feedingloop.
The algorithm is a self-feedingloop and just only serves
content that YouTube thinks isgoing to make money, which you

(39:37):
know is kind of fair in a way,but like I mean, not fair to us.
Right, they're the smallerchannels, but like I don't know,
man, youtube is nothing buthypocrisy in my opinion,
especially with their ads yeah,with the uncast channel.

Speaker 1 (39:53):
We only monetize the channel because we knew we don't
really want to have to havehave it monetized and have
adverts for everyone to watch init.
But if we don't monetize it,the youtube algorithm will just,
you know, it just doesn't wantto serve the videos because
youtube only wants to serve ads.
That's really only what what itwants doesn't want to serve the
videos because youtube onlywants to serve ads.
That's really only what what itwants to do.
And the video, the actualcontent creation, is just to

(40:15):
make you watch the ad, and youknow that's really what youtube
is and and honestly I've beenI've been really happy with
youtube premium.

Speaker 2 (40:22):
Um, I actually have completely forgotten what it's
like to watch youtube without apremium account and every time I
do I'm always like, oh my gosh,like there's pop ups and the
videos ads and they're all overthe place.
I am glad that YouTube is likeat least trying this premium
light.
We've been begging for acheaper option for I don't know

(40:44):
nearly a decade, but what reallyscares me is it's like they're
like a drug dealer like here trypremium light.
And then a year from now I'd belike, oh, it's only going up a
dollar, you could afford onemore dollar.
And then next year it's gonnabe like, oh, it's only going up
another dollar, you could affordanother dollar.
And then then now youtubepremium is going to become even
more expensive and premiumlight's going to be more

(41:06):
expensive.

Speaker 1 (41:06):
It's just like, oh, my gosh and gosh and probably,
like you know, they'll have aseparate one like oh, if you
want it on, you know, for yourkids, you know you need a
YouTube kids premium light.

Speaker 2 (41:16):
Oh, I hope not, because the other one doesn't
kind of cover that yeah.
And that's actually one thing.
That's nice about YouTubepremium right now is that I have
one account and it also coversmy kid, which is awesome.

Speaker 1 (41:27):
You know I'm using YouTube premium, but actually
another family member is givingme access to theirs, Although we
don't actually live in the samehouse.

Speaker 2 (41:39):
And we just got demonetized this whole channel.
Strike.
One strike for Uncashow.
Are we allowed to get strikesfor this channel?
I think because as long as it'son our channels it's okay right
.

Speaker 1 (41:52):
Stefano, come on, stop it, man, you've got to
behave yourself.

Speaker 2 (41:57):
Me.
You're the one over heresuggesting terrible things.

Speaker 1 (42:00):
I wasn't suggesting, I was just saying that that's
just something that I have done.

Speaker 2 (42:04):
I do think this YouTube premium light may
actually be worth it.
So, you could find out reallyquickly.
You get one month for free.
You could try it out.
Don't forget to remove yourcredit card information and
start paying for it anyway.
But I would say, definitely tryit out, because I think YouTube
ads have gotten so bad.
It's finally, like you know, wetalked earlier about like I

(42:26):
like to sit and wait with chatGPT, like I gonna pay for it.
I probably will at some point,but I don't know when.
But I think youtube isdefinitely 100 at that point
where your experience withyoutube is absolutely a million
times better if you just pay forit, um, and the support that
you give to content creators isway better through youtube
premium than watching ads.

(42:47):
So I mean, just if you're onthe fence, just go for it.

Speaker 1 (42:52):
You're going to be happy in the end, I think you
know, if I had the choicebetween Netflix and YouTube
premium, I would choose YouTubepremium to most because you know
it makes me wonder.
You know, maybe YouTube makethe ad so bad and so annoying in
order to force you to that's's.

Speaker 2 (43:09):
I mean they have been doing that because I mean,
think about it like, think aboutthe history of youtube ads.
First it was ad at the beginning, ad at the end, or maybe just
ads in the beginning, and thenit was uh, now we're going to
force ads at the beginning andend.
You either opt in or out, andthen they're like oh, now we're
going to have mid-rolled ads andand you can opt out of

(43:30):
mid-rolled ads or we're justgoing to force apply them and
choose where they go.
And they've gotten so good atad delivery that now, if you
just checkmark mid-rolled ads,whatever programming they have,
will find very perfect spotswhere it knows people are
watching and put an ad right atthe cliffhanger.

(43:50):
So you basically are forced todo I stop watching this video or
do I wait for the ad to end toactually find out how the
YouTuber resolved an issue ordid this thing right.
So they've gotten really goodat making it annoying.
It's like trying to watchDragon Ball Z back in the day
and they're like just about tofight and it's like, oh,
advertisement.
So you know, I go use SAR TV orwhatever you said like to get

(44:14):
that original experience.
Yeah, that's what they're doing.

Speaker 1 (44:18):
Yeah, yeah, I think you're right.
So, anyway, some gaming updates.
Yeah, cyberpunk fans, cyberpunk2 is coming out.
You've only got five years towait 2030.
We should see that apparentlybetter than 10 years but we have
got doom.
The dark ages was released acouple of weeks ago, I believe,

(44:40):
stephanie are you?

Speaker 2 (44:42):
have you played any of the dooms?

Speaker 1 (44:43):
the new ones like 2016 plus, yeah, I played the
2016 one, yeah yeah, did youplay the one after that?
No, no for shame.
How about, how about you?

Speaker 2 (44:53):
I've played all of them except for this one.
Um, I've been, uh, I'm stillplaying oblivion, so I haven't
like I don't like to have toomany games queued up at the same
time.
Um, and there's this other gamethat I'm on the verge of buying
that also has dark in the nameAge of Darkness, or it's got age

(45:15):
and dark, actually Age ofDarkness.
I'm thinking about picking upto play with some friends.
So this, for me, is on the backburner, but it looks amazing.
I've watched a lot of peopleplay it and it has like kind of
the same sound track as theother games.
And I mean, who doesn't likemedieval combat with guns?
Yeah, in the future Sounds cool.
And you get to drive around ina giant mech, and everyone loves

(45:39):
mechs, right, yeah?

Speaker 1 (45:40):
And there's another game called Roadcraft, some sort
of vehicle simulation indisaster zones video game.
That was released a couple ofweeks ago.

Speaker 2 (45:49):
Yeah, games like this are always interesting, like
there's one in like Russia whereyou drive through like thick
mud and snow and recovervehicles and stuff.
I'm not saying that this thingis the same, but like you got to
go like make roads, to gorepair bridges and things like
that, and it's got like yourvehicles can get stuck.
I think, and I don't know, itseems interesting.

Speaker 1 (46:11):
It's like the farming simulator, which, by the way,
looks like a lot more fun thanyou would assume okay, so moving
on, um, we've recently hadcomputex recently and looking
through various things that havebeen released there, there's
been some pretty interestingthings, seems it seems to be.
If you remember last episode, Iwas ranting about my recent

(46:31):
trip to Japan where I saw a CPUcooler that had a screen on it
and I thought it was the bestthing ever I'd ever seen.

Speaker 2 (46:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:39):
But it seems sticking screens on things is getting
very, very popular, and atComputex there were lots of
all-in-one coolers that hadwater blocks with animations on
them.
We will show a few on screen.
Now I'm going to try and sharemy screen so you can see while
uh, oh, you got it already.

Speaker 2 (46:56):
Hang on a second.
That's an advertisement.

Speaker 1 (46:57):
You tricked us so, yeah, look at that, look at that
screen there, stephanie.
Yeah, um, yeah, make it a bitbigger.
It's kind of curved um andapparently it's motorized and
can turn around.
So oh, that's cool you know,I'll tell you I'm gonna have to
rebuild my server now.
Not in a rack mount case,because how am I going to see
that in my rack mounted servercase?

Speaker 2 (47:19):
hey, um, so there's also one.
I think it's called I'm tryingto look it up real quick
minikube.
Yeah, so I think it has fourscreens on it.
Um see, minikube cooler.
Yeah, so it's kind of uh, gotthis, uh, minecraft theme going
on to it and the ai cooler hasscreens all the way around it

(47:43):
and I'm trying to pull up Ithink it may have a screen on
the top as well, but anyway,like it looks really cool.
And, um, my kids like reallyinto minecraft and I'm we're on
the verge of him needing a newcomputer and so he, since he
loves minecraft, this, I thinkit's called a minecraft, it's a
mini node, I think it's calledmini node.
Uh, it'd be perfect to buildhim like a minecraft theme uh,

(48:06):
computer with that thingminicube, minicube sorry, not
mini node.
Yeah, it's got.
Yeah, it's got screens on allsides, even on like a
Minecraft-themed computer withthat thing Minikube, minikube
Sorry, not Mininode.
Yeah, it's got screens on allsides, even on the top, nice.

Speaker 1 (48:14):
Yeah, talking of case and stuff, there's a really
cool case that I saw.
If I share my screen again,there's another advert for you.
Check out that case.
There Isn't that weird.

Speaker 2 (48:29):
Yeah, I kind of like nonstandard cases.
I can't think of thermal tank,thermal tank, no-transcript, uh,
but it's just.

Speaker 1 (48:41):
It's like 500 just for the chassis yeah, check out
that look check out that casethere that looks like it should
be on, kind of like the set ofthe latest aliens or something,
doesn't it?
It looks like it's straight outof a sci-fi show it does.
I love that though it's just socool, isn't it?
I would really like that see ifthere's any other photos of it
we can see.

Speaker 2 (49:02):
That's it from the side yeah, yeah, no, no, that's
awesome.
I love that.

Speaker 1 (49:05):
You know audience question would you have that as
your next on RAID server?
Maybe, if we can fit enough,drives in?

Speaker 2 (49:11):
It seems like it's a very big case.
I don't see the option to storeany drives in there.

Speaker 1 (49:16):
Maybe around the back somewhere or something, or in
that top piece, maybe, I don'tknow.
Maybe.

Speaker 2 (49:21):
I assume it's water cooled, so maybe the radiator is
up there.

Speaker 1 (49:30):
Definitely we can make it work, okay, yeah, I mean
sure I wouldn't, but sure.
So we've had an announcement aswell from AMD another graphics
card, the 9660 XT, which is onlygoing to be $299.
And apparently it's 6% fasterthan the RTX 5060 Ti.
I do like how AMD are copyingNvidia's numbers, kind of thing.

(49:52):
Yeah, yeah, so like 9060, 5060.

Speaker 2 (49:56):
They're all synced up .

Speaker 1 (49:57):
Yeah, but yeah, it's like a nice little graphics card
, quite compact as well.
It looks like it's going to bepretty good for 1440p games.

Speaker 2 (50:04):
That's really good, because I don't know what the
whole industry has switched offover, uh, if they've switched
over 1440p or not, but I think,uh, if you haven't, that's
probably about perfect 2560 by1440 yeah for gaming.

Speaker 1 (50:19):
Whatever you do, just don't get 4k yet, because then
you'll never go back so, youknow, I've got my rtx 5070 ti
and we've got these kind ofreports coming in um.
This is, you know, back fromapril, user reports of melted
power cables on rtx 5070 andwe're wondering if the rtx 50

(50:40):
series are safe.
Well, there's actually been apsu um shown at computex this
year.

Speaker 2 (50:49):
Um, if I can find that and bring it up, from c
sonic, I believe so yeah my 4090has survived the last couple of
years so far I have.
I haven't removed the cable,the 12 volt power cable, from it
yet to check for damage.
It's been running, so I'm justgoing to assume everything's
fine.

(51:09):
But I also have my GPUvertically mounted, so that way,
you know, there's like nogravity, like if you have it
like this right, gravity isalways pulling down on it and
they're always like oh yeah, I'mgoing to get it in there
perfectly straight and no bends,and like, oh, there's all these

(51:30):
like requirements, right, andso I figured, if you do it,
vertically, there's pretty muchno way to destroy it.

Speaker 1 (51:33):
And another thing that can make things um more
likely to have problems with thepower cables is these little
angular bracket things you canget to redirect the cable in a
different way.
So a lot of times they're madereally poorly and, um you know,
that can cause a lot of problems.
But this new psu, this seagatepsu, basically it detects heat

(51:56):
on the actual wires going to thegpu and it will actually
monitor that and shut it off ifit gets um too hot to prevent.

Speaker 2 (52:04):
Yeah to bauer has a has a great segment about that
gpu.
I don't know if you've everwatched a bauer on youtube.
I haven't.
No, a fantastic channel.
It goes into pretty good detailabout it and explains, explains
it really well.
Um, it's kind of funny howadvanced power supplies are
becoming.
They used to be just thesesimple little machines, I guess,

(52:27):
and now it's like, oh, they doall these different.
We have PFC and checking, Imean there's all sorts of things
these days, and it's allbecause graphics cards are
getting worse somehow.

Speaker 1 (52:41):
Yeah, just my 5070 Ti .
I just can't believe howstupidly big the card is.
It's just, yeah, it's justridiculous.
You know, luckily it's in a youknow for you rat case and it's,
um, you know, not putting anystrain on the pcie socket, but
you know, for a normal, for anormal tower it.

(53:03):
You know, in my opinion it'sjust ridiculous, it's just yeah,
like it's just, we went fromwaiting to happen.

Speaker 2 (53:09):
You know we went from like one slot size cards um to
two slot, because they neededthese massive coolers and and at
the time it was like, oh,they're so massive now and it
was like, okay, fine, it becamethe new normal and actually, let
me, let me grab something fromright there so we went from

(53:29):
those those one u or not one usorry, I'm thinking about
servers those one slot to twoslot, and then we got these
behemoths.
This is a 50 set, or a gtx 5070.
I believe yep gtx 50, 70.
Absolutely massive right A GTX5070, I believe Yep GTX 5070.
Absolutely massive right, Threeslots.

Speaker 1 (53:45):
What one's that sorry ?

Speaker 2 (53:47):
GTX 5070.

Speaker 1 (53:48):
5070, so Pretty old oh 570.

Speaker 2 (53:53):
Oh yeah, sorry, 570.
I'm used to just saying addingzeros in front of everything.

Speaker 1 (53:57):
now, I was getting confused.
I was thinking yeah, 570, 570.

Speaker 2 (54:01):
Add a one and 2 zeros in front of that.
So you know, back in, this cardwas controversial because it
was so massive for the time, andthen so to think about how not
powerful this card actually is.
And then you get a Titan right,Titan X and it's 2.
And now we have like the new4,000 series plus, or even 5,000

(54:24):
series.

Speaker 1 (54:24):
that's somehow bigger than this yeah, and I think
I've got a card over here.
Have I got one of my cards here?
Um, I don't know where it is.
I had a 3080 somewhere that Ithought was quite big, oh no um.

Speaker 2 (54:39):
How does this happen?
We're reverting chat.
We're reverting.

Speaker 1 (54:42):
You know, here's, um, a 2080 ti.
I can't find my 37, my 3080,but the 3080 was much bigger
than that and when the 5070 ticame it just made the 3080 just
look like it was a young child.
Yeah, basically, and um, I wasjust thinking to myself, can you
imagine if the same hadhappened with cpus?

(55:02):
So can you imagine if, like, acpu is as big as the gpu, kind
of thing?
No, not at all you know, butwith the cpu coolers.

Speaker 2 (55:12):
Air coolers have gotten massive, yeah, especially
because, like you know, some ofthese cpus are like oh, 500
watts, yeah, that's just likeidle.

Speaker 1 (55:20):
Yeah and um.
Take a look at this, um,stephano.
Okay, talking about cpu callersand air callers, well, noctua
have now, actually in 2026, theyare going to actually release
their first actual liquidall-in-one caller oh, this isn't

(55:41):
.

Speaker 2 (55:41):
This isn't their pumpless one.
I thought they were coming outwith a pumpless one have you
seen that?

Speaker 1 (55:45):
no, I haven't.
No, that's interesting oh yeah,so Computex also.

Speaker 2 (55:49):
Noctua had talked about releasing a pumpless AIO.
This has been a thing for years, as far as I'm aware, but it's
never really come to market andI think Noctua is going to bring
it to market, so it'll be thefirst one to have a pumpless aio
.
I'm gonna try it out.
Well, it depends actually if it.

(56:10):
If it can't cool a 14 700k,then I'm not doing it, but I
really want to get one just tolike try it out yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (56:18):
That's why, with the air coolers, they even started
putting screens on the top ofair coolers.
You know, the head computex islike an air cooler and on the
top of the air cooler it's got ascreen.

Speaker 2 (56:28):
So and even on the sides of the radiators there's
screens now so you can have likelittle animated things jump
across we're slowly going tocyberpunk you're having your
dreams come true.

Speaker 1 (56:38):
I think this is the new rgb, isn't it screens on
yeah, rgb is so 2019 it is, it'sjust so.
Yesterday man like yeah, um,that's something else I want to
show you before we stop talkingabout computex and it's about
noctua again.
Yeah, they're making somethingquite different oh yeah making a

(57:00):
mouse, so a mouse with a faninside of it.
Do you think it will be cheaperthan a normal mouse?
Because part of it's missing?
It does look a bit like a deadskeleton of a mouse or something
, doesn't it?
Like a kind of decayingskeleton.

Speaker 2 (57:14):
No, I imagine it'll be 10 times more expensive than
a normal mouse.
Considering mice have basicallyskyrocketed in prices.
I mean, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (57:24):
Yeah, once I did pay a ridiculous amount of money for
a mouse, and I'm not going totell you how much it was.
It's too embarrassing, okay,okay.
So some interesting things inComputex this year, I think.

Speaker 2 (57:38):
Let's see how many of it actually comes to market
though.
Yeah, they always releaseinteresting things or talk about
releasing interesting things,and they usually don't come to
market.
I'm actually curious now when agtx 5570 I keep wanting to say
5070 came out 2010 wow so so thegtx 570 came out 2010.

Speaker 1 (58:00):
What's that?
15 years ago?
It's crazy.
Time flies it, man.
I'll tell you I was watching areally interesting video.
I'm going to go off on anothertangent.
I'm really sorry.

Speaker 2 (58:09):
You don't have to apologize to me.
It's the whole point of havinga show.

Speaker 1 (58:14):
I'm apologizing to the audience.
Oh, okay To have to listen tome.
Totally go off on a wildtangent, ed.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
I think the whole reason whythey're here is to listen to you
.
I feel sorry for the audience,anyway.
So I saw a super cool video andit was about the theory that
the world ended in 1999.

Speaker 2 (58:36):
That sounds familiar.

Speaker 1 (58:36):
Because they're saying the 50s had its distinct
style and kind of culture withthe kind of hairstyles the 60s
did, with all of the colors.
The 70s, the 80s and the 90swere all really distinct then it
kind of got to the year 2000and we've had, yeah, tech
increasing really, reallyquickly and the tech has changed
.
How people dress in 2005 andnow is pretty much exactly the

(58:58):
same.
There's no distinct culturalstyle of anything.
And so they were comparing itto the matrix, when in the
matrix it says that in 1999 itwas the peak of yeah, and it's
kind of going about that, andthen it was just saying about
various things that could havemaybe caused things to change,
and it was talking about themandela effect.
Now I'm going to ask you aquestion, okay?

(59:20):
Um, do you remember when nelsonmandela died in the 90s?
I feel like I do well he didn'tdie in the 90s he died in 2013?
Yes, but I have distinctmemories of him dying in the 90s
and apparently hundreds ofthousands of people around the
world do as well.
I'm one of those people and it'scalled the mandela effect.
There are other loads of otherthings, like um c3po he actually

(59:42):
has.
One of his legs is silver andno one remembers that.
And when you actually look atthe original footage, his leg on
the left-hand side, I believefrom the knee down is actually
silver, and that's another thingthat people never remembered as
being a fact.
And this video is all aboutsaying how maybe there was some
kind of weird event thathappened that kind of changed

(01:00:03):
time and reality slightly andmade it very similar to how it
was, but slightly different.
Anyway, I'm not.

Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
Well, hold on, hold on.
I got on about that Before youmove on, though, I will.
This is one thing I got to say.
Is I like about living today isI've now lived long enough that
my clothes that I wore back inyou know early 2000s are back in
style.
That my clothes that I woreback in you know, early 2000s
are back in style, so like Iliterally just get to bust out
the same shoes I've been wearingfor the last 15 years and wear

(01:00:31):
them again today Like nothing'sever changed.

Speaker 1 (01:00:32):
Anyway, I think I better get things back on topic,
really.
Okay, fine, and let's talkabout some contained open source
stuff.
So Miniio, which is a containercontainer for what is it?

Speaker 2 (01:00:46):
Storage Object S3 storage.

Speaker 1 (01:00:49):
Yeah, object S3 storage.
Apparently it had an updaterecently where about 120,000
lines of code were removed in anupdate which basically removed
key features like user bucketmanagement from the free web
interface, and a lot of the webinterface was just totally
removed from this container.

(01:01:09):
And now, if you want those,it's enterprise only feature
with a paid license and the paidlicenses I'm sure you'll all be
going out and buying one.
It's only 24,000 a year for 200terabytes of storage and, by
the way, you need to provide thestorage yourself.
You don't actually get anystorage, that's just to be able
to use 200 terabytes of storageand, by the way, you need to
provide the storage yourself.
You don't actually get anystorage, that's just to be able
to use 200 terabytes of storageand it's for the privilege 24

(01:01:31):
000 a year per 200 terabytes.
So what was um not behind apaywall before?
Um in the community edition isnow behind a paywall.
Personally, I think thecompanies when they do this are
shooting themselves in the foota little bit, because the
community gets to know thesecontainers from using them, the
community editions of them, andthen they are used in enterprise

(01:01:53):
more when people discover them.
I don't think NextCloud wouldbe adopted half so much, but
it's people like us who enjoytinkering with things.
We will install things likeNextCloud and then maybe kind of
suggest having it used in ourdaytime jobs.

Speaker 2 (01:02:13):
Okay, hear me out.
Maybe it's a problem withexpectations.
Everybody wants free software,and so, obviously, developing
software is expensive, and so,as these tools become more
popular, they start being abusedby being used in a business

(01:02:36):
environment.

Speaker 1 (01:02:37):
That's very true.

Speaker 2 (01:02:38):
And then that's how we end up with this situation
occurring over and over and overagain.
Now, should their pricing modelbe that expensive for home
users?
Probably not.
But I mean, I think we're kindof become our own victims with
the expectation that open sourcesoftware should be free, and

(01:02:58):
I'm using the royal we here.
And I mean people just don'twant to pay If they don't have
to, they don't want to pay ifthey don't have to, they don't
want to pay for it, including me.
There's things I don't want topay for either, uh, which I've
been trying to do better at, andby actually donating money and
subscribing to, like open sourceprograms or whatever.
But you know it's.
I think we've become victims toour own circumstances, because

(01:03:20):
think, if I try to think back tothe 90s, when it was like, oh,
power dvd, you could use thefree one to make copies of your
cds, and that was it right so,and you could hand out copies of
starcraft to your friends.
Um, but then, you know, overtime they started putting those
features behind the paywall andyou had to buy the full copy of

(01:03:41):
power dvd 9 in order to get thatfeature.
But you know, you bought itfeature, but you bought it.
At least, when you bought it itwas good for life, at least for
all the updates for thatversion.
Anyway, I don't know.
I feel like we're just victimsto our own expectations.
Maybe.

Speaker 1 (01:03:56):
Yeah, but with things like this MinIO, I think when
you've got the community usingit, they're kind of testing it
out.
Bugs are kind of found.
It's just going to really kindof get rid of that, you know,
for them as a company.
I think they should have likedone this slightly different, in
my opinion, because there wasno warning about it.
People just found out with theupdate.

Speaker 2 (01:04:17):
Yeah, that's not cool .
That's absolutely not cool,it's a total rug pull.

Speaker 1 (01:04:20):
It's like oh, you know, here's the update.
Oh, by the way, half the userinterface has disappeared.
You now need a $24,000 licenseto continue using it how you
were before.
Yeah, you could still use theold version, but then you've got
the problems with no securityupdates.
But apparently it's going to beforked.

Speaker 2 (01:04:42):
People are talking about forking it and calling it
MaxIO instead.
Of.
I always say I always call itmini io, even though I know it's
mini oh or min io, I don't knowwhat it is actually I always, I
always say every name, of nameof every software incorrectly
well, yeah, like branding hasactually become kind of
difficult.
You know like, uh, everything'sbecause of urls, everything is
like put together.
So you look at the url andyou're like, oh, that's all one

(01:05:05):
word well, I I blame the mandelaeffect.

Speaker 1 (01:05:07):
I'm sure it used to be called that once yeah, I
think you're right.

Speaker 2 (01:05:11):
I mean, it has been around since 2016, so it's
almost old enough yeah, it'slike nine years moving.

Speaker 1 (01:05:16):
Moving on to our favorite topic, stefano.
Yeah, our favorite topic,plaques so another victim
plaques have done something else.
The same thing.
I'm going to share somethingthey've done.

Speaker 2 (01:05:34):
Remember when Plex was free and awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:05:37):
A lot of people don't realize that Plex is a fork of
XBMC in 2008, which also went onto be cody I feel bad.

Speaker 2 (01:05:47):
Maybe I should have given them, like you know, five
or ten dollars, you know, 10years ago, for using plex, so we
wouldn't be in a situationwe're in well, I shouldn't say
we, because I left plex foreverago yeah, I've actually got a
plex lifetime license.

Speaker 1 (01:06:01):
That I got probably in about 2016 and I've never
used it.
Oh, really, so I'm theirfavorite user, I guess.

Speaker 2 (01:06:08):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:06:08):
Somebody bought a lifetime license and never used
it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:14):
I was so close to finally buying it and then they
shot themselves in the foot solong ago and I'm like thank God
I didn't buy it when I did.

Speaker 1 (01:06:17):
So what has happened is users have actually got.
Let me share my screen a moment, stefano, so everyone can see
this.
So, basically, plex users havehad this pop up on their Plex
accounts recently saying forPlex accounts created before the
20th of March 2025, we requireyour consent to sell your

(01:06:38):
personal data as described inour privacy policy.
Well, selling personal data andprivacy doesn't really sound
like very much, so their privacypolicy doesn't sound very
private to me.

Speaker 2 (01:06:50):
No, Well, they anonymize it so that way they
don't know it's specifically you, Ed.
I somehow don't believe it.

Speaker 1 (01:06:59):
But you know, this is just another thing where it's
just so obvious that Plex arejust collecting every single
piece of data about what you doon there.
Apparently they're collectinglike when do you pause?
When do you do this?
You know how engaged are youwith this and just selling it.
And when you're paying for aproduct.
Say, if I was to buy a lifetimePlex subscription now for $250

(01:07:22):
and then I find they're sellingmy data, I really wouldn't be
very happy.

Speaker 2 (01:07:26):
Does this only apply to their streaming stuff or also
any content you stream toyourself?

Speaker 1 (01:07:31):
This is just anything basically.
So when you sign up for a Plexaccount, and obviously if you've
joined after March the 20th,you've already agreed to this.
It's probably on page 20 of theEULA.

Speaker 2 (01:07:44):
And the text that you have to use a magnifying glass
on.

Speaker 1 (01:07:46):
So you know, because we all read 20 pages of that
before we click accept.

Speaker 2 (01:07:51):
I think on the plus side at least you do have to opt
in Like you're notautomatically opted in currently
.

Speaker 1 (01:07:58):
You do here, which is really you know, which is you
know?
I must give Plex their due.
You know that is good that youactually get the option to opt
in.
It doesn't kind of say you'vebeen opted in.
If you don't want to, you canopt out.
I've got to say full respect toPlex for doing that.
But really, do you really needto sell data as well?

(01:08:18):
Come on, most people want Plexfor self-hosting, for privacy
and not so data can be mined andsee what we're doing.
I believe Netflix have beenboasting recently about how they
sell data to advertisers andthey can tell how engaged people
are with the content and thatkind of thing.

Speaker 2 (01:08:42):
I can go ahead and tell you now that as soon as an
ad comes on, I basically pullout my phone and start browsing
the internet, or, like I justtotally zone out.
So every ad that ever plays, Ijust I basically turn off as a
human being and it's like Idon't know how effective
advertisements are.
Apparently they work, becauseif they didn't, there would be

(01:09:04):
no ads, right yeah but I'm, Idon't, I, there's no way that.
Like.
Well, I guess maybe that's nottrue, because you know the
amount of people that I hearsinging ad songs and like, oh,
do you see that advertisement?
It was so funny.
I'm like, why are you watchingads like I don't understand.

Speaker 1 (01:09:20):
The most effective ad is the ad that you don't know
you've been affected by yeah,yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:09:24):
But like I don't know , man, like there's so many
people that just like lovewatching ads and I don't
understand like.
Like if you go to youtube likeyou can look up like oh, the
state farms ad for funny ad orwhatever, like you can watch
that stuff.
I'm like, are ads really thatgood?
I don't think so.
I don't know because Iliterally turn off, but it's

(01:09:47):
such a weird thing to me.

Speaker 1 (01:09:49):
But yeah, talking as well about you know, we're
saying that at least plaques aresaying this is opt-in and there
is a button to opt out, whichis really good.
You know, there are kind ofsome things where you don't even
get the option to opt out, likeI think we spoke about it.
You know, in a previous episode,the roku tvs, they had oh, yeah
, yeah had an update where it'ssaying, basically, if you want

(01:10:12):
to continue using your tv and beable to change the source of
the hdmi, you have to clickagree, and there was no disagree
button.
So it's like either you clickagree or you can't do it, and
that basically the what you'reagreeing to is you couldn't
actually take roku to court.
You had to use one of thoseforced arbitration courts, which
basically means that thecompany runs their own court

(01:10:33):
really and um, and so you knowyou're being, you know any kind
of grievance you have againstthe company, you're pretty much
taking it to the company.
And a really interestingexample of that was I'm not sure
if you ever heard of the storyis there was a lady and her
husband went to one of thedisney theme parks and went into

(01:10:54):
a restaurant there and had asevere allergic reaction to
peanuts or something, or or somenut allergy yeah that shouldn't
have happened.
I think she died.
Did she die?
I think I don't remember I'mpretty sure the lady died, yeah,
and so what disney tried to dois their 12 year old daughter
had actually signed up for adisney plus trial and in the

(01:11:19):
terms and conditions of signingup and clicking, I agree.
In the disney plus trial it'ssaying you're agreeing with
disney to have arbitrationrather than be able to go to
court.
So they tried to use that sothe husband couldn't take disney
to court for his wife dying intheir restaurant.

Speaker 2 (01:11:35):
Yep, so yep, I'm pretty sure, if I remember, that
was the story dr ting chungtang son suffered an allergic
reaction after eating at RoglinRoad Irish Pub Love Irish pubs,
by the way so she had a foodallergy, died, and they had a

(01:11:55):
Disney Plus subscription andbecause of that they tried to
withdraw.

Speaker 1 (01:12:02):
They're so kind, aren't they, these companies?
You know it's interestingwatching they're.
So they're so kind, aren't they, these companies?

Speaker 2 (01:12:06):
you know it's interesting watching the
downfall of of companies, likeyou know, plex, it's like you
know I kind of wonder if theyshot themselves in the foot,
like who was asking plex toprovide tv?
I don't, I don't know anyone inour community or I've never
seen anyone ever be like youknow be great idea if plex
provided free tv to us.
And and I think because of allthat development work and all

(01:12:29):
the additional research andlicensing, they've kind of shot
themselves in the foot becausenow they need to earn more money
to provide the, that servicethat, as far as I know, nobody
actually wanted.
Yeah, and so now they're kindof they're spiraling to try and
make up money for those lossesor that investment.
I guess really, and it's justlike, but could all of this have

(01:12:50):
been avoided if they just stuckto what they originally sought
out to allow people to?

Speaker 1 (01:12:55):
stream their own media.
I wonder if they had a biginjection of cash from some kind
of investor and then theinvestor starts steering the
direction of the company morethan the actual company itself
is usually how it goes and soyou know, then they kind of
start bringing in the tv stuffand then it kind of spirals from
there yeah, I mean, look atvmware, right, like vmware used
to be everywhere, like vmware isthe greatest, it's the best.

Speaker 2 (01:13:19):
And then one day they're like, oh, we changed our
licensing model.
Uh, no more perpetual licensesand basically, if you're not
making multiple billions ofdollars a year, we don't want
you as a customer.
Yeah, or even like Jira haveyou ever heard of Jira?
I think it's called Jira.

Speaker 1 (01:13:33):
I don't think so.
No, what's that, Stephanie?

Speaker 2 (01:13:35):
Yeah, it's from this company called Atlassian, so
it's like an issue and projecttracking software and so J
tracking software, and so jirawas was really super popular.
And then they basically werelike oh, you can no longer
self-host this software.
And it's like, well, hang on aminute, we've have, we bought
this license.
You know, it's perpetual.
We want, we want to self-hostit, for whatever reason.

(01:13:58):
And they're like nope, no more.
And it's like you know, they,they always start off so great
and at some point I don't knowif it's because agreed or I
don't know what the root causeis I'm sure it's money, it's
always money, but at some pointthey just they're always like
make these just decisions thatmake no sense.

Speaker 1 (01:14:16):
It's like like I just I don't get it yeah, the people
making the decisions are notthe people who are in touch with
their user base.
That's the the problem.

Speaker 2 (01:14:24):
Yeah, and again like people should get paid for the
work.
But there's definitely a pointwhere you start asking, you
start doing things that nobodywants, like selling data, Like
does Plex really need to sellour data for money?
I don't know, man, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:14:40):
Yeah, Anyway, all I'm going to say to that is check
out the recent video on theUncast show all about Jellyfin
If you're interested in analternative to Plex where they
don't sell your data.
It's fully open source and youreally are in control of your
own media server.

Speaker 2 (01:14:57):
I actually I went to Jellyfin's website cause I was
like you know what I shoulddonate to Jellyfin, and they
have a link where it says helppay for other expenses.
I've been clicking on it but asfar as I could tell, it doesn't
actually let you do anythingbecause it says they don't ask
for donations.
You're the volunteer, uh, orintend to help, uh, you can, you

(01:15:18):
can do a like a sponsorship,like digital ocean or jet brains
, but I don't think I canactually donate any money oh
right at least.
I mean, I haven't really lookedinto it.
I want to, I feel like I should.

Speaker 1 (01:15:28):
I am going to check and I'm going to put a link in
the description if I can find away that we can actually donate
to the jellyfin project we can'tlet jellyfin turn into place.
No, and I'm donating as soon asI find out.
So yeah, that's a great idea,stefano.
Anyone else in the audience whowants to donate to Jellyfin as

(01:15:49):
well, join Stefano and I intrying to do so.

Speaker 2 (01:15:53):
I'm just tired of Lucy Kidd's software.
It's a corporate greed.

Speaker 1 (01:15:59):
Anyway, Stefano, I think that pretty much brings us
to the end of what we got tosay this month.

Speaker 2 (01:16:04):
There is so much more that needs to be said, though,
ed, but no, I do agree.

Speaker 1 (01:16:08):
So have a great time for your birthday, which is
today, when this goes out nextweek.

Speaker 2 (01:16:16):
Almost, but yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:16:17):
So, yeah, have a great time.

Speaker 2 (01:16:19):
I'm having a great time.

Speaker 1 (01:16:22):
And I can't wait to have you back for another live
episode um the beginning of july.
So let's hope that the um thatthe first saturday of july isn't
the fourth of july.

Speaker 2 (01:16:34):
So yeah, doing it oh, I didn't even think about that.
Yeah, doing it live is isreally fun to be able to
integrate with the audience.
I mean, imagine like dealingwith the audience right now
about all these like donationsand plex and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 (01:16:43):
Anyway, sorry, yeah, anyway, um, thank you very much
for joining us today, stefano.
I just can't take you seriously, can I?
Yeah, you're putting me off.
Anyway, thank you very mucheveryone for watching and please
catch us in the next episode.
And please subscribe to theuncast channel, if you haven't
already, and do all the normalthings like hitting the
notification bell, etc.

(01:17:06):
And we'll catch you all in thenext episode.

Speaker 2 (01:17:09):
Peace okay, bye.

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Hard Links, Router Security & the Wildest Stuff at Computex — Ed & Stefano Unleashed

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Hard Links, Router Security & the Wildest Stuff at Computex — Ed & Stefano Unleashed