Episode 458 - “The Cloud Crashed: When the Net Goes Dark.” - TechtalkRadio

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The following program is produced by the Tech Talk Radio Network.
And welcome to another episode of tech Talk Radio. I'm
Andy Taylor, I'm Sean de Weird, and we hear the
show that talks about well computers, technology and of course
the Internet and everything encompassing all of that. Just a
couple of guys talking about tech. Hopefully we'll have some

(00:21):
tips for you, stuff we could share. We got listener
questions for today. And yeah, just the two of us say.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
If you can get to us today, Oh yeah, maybe
you're having a problem with Amazon.

Speaker 1 (00:35):
People are with People are so confused, Sean, with this
past week of course, in case you didn't know, there
was an outage and people were just told it was
AWS and they hear Amazon. They think Amazon is messing
up with their internet. Can you kind of explain a
little about why does Amazon have anything to do with

(00:56):
the services that people use, whether it be coin base
or Snapchat or you know, roadblocks or any of that stuff.
Why that affected so many people this past week when
they had an outage.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
So when you connect to a website, you're pointing your
computer at a name, Google, Reddit, Verge, whatever, whatever, whatever, Yeah,
Tech Talk Radio whatever ONBS that you're going to that name.

(01:32):
Your Internet provider points you to what is called a
DNS server Domain Name Registration DNS. That then in terms says,
oh you want Reddit, which is this IP address, and
it provides that for you, and it connects you Amazon.
So those websites host their content in the cloud or

(01:56):
at storage servers on prem solutions, but they use Amazon
for resolving that DNAs information.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
That's a huge that's a huge business portion for Amazon,
isn't it.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
Yeah, it's billions of dollars a year, like billions, Like
it's ridiculous. And so a Amazon AWS East one, Yeah,
that's had had an outer and that is regionally right.

(02:28):
So but that was a large portion of that DNS piece.
So on October twentieth, twenty twenty five, AWS had a
major outage centered in its US East one region, which
is in northern Virginia. Many services that rely on that
ADBs portion just didn't work, couldn't work anymore. The root
of that problem was a DNS resolution failure. Basically, the

(02:50):
systems knew where their data was stored, just couldn't find
the street address. Basically, think of it like streets and
addresses and stuff. They you just couldn't find it. Yeah,
basically your computer didn't know where to go to find
the information, and until it was resolved, you couldn't get
down the street. I mean, it was a lot of websites,

(03:13):
It was a lot of stuff. It was coinbase, it
was robin Hood, it was banking information in the UK,
it was Reddit was down, Snapchat was down, McDonald's was down. Yeah.
I mean, you're trying to play monopoly and you can't
do not pass go.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
And even Amazon was affected by this.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
They even Amazon like your ring camera, your Alexa's Like,
I mean, it's crazy how much how decentralized this has become.

Speaker 1 (03:46):
Yeah, we tried to ask the Alexa something in the morning,
is that I don't know what to do or you know,
I don't know how to do that. It was, you know,
it was there, but it didn't know how to get
that information because well they were they were affected by
that as well.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
Yeah. So, I mean I didn't even really notice anything.
And I got a couple of emails from work saying
some of some of our stuff was down. I figured
it was just like a scheduled outage, but then I
started seeing some more stuff because I wasn't able to
get on Reddit. I just read it's down, big deal.
I don't have any other social media, so I wasn't
getting And then finally somebody mentioned that there was a

(04:23):
huge Amazon outage, and then I started to pick up
on a couple of things and did some some searching
to see what was going on. But yeah, it's it.
It wasn't a global ottage like we had it two
or three years ago regionally, so yeah, yeah, So, I
mean it's a critical infrastructure. Literally everything you do on

(04:48):
a data debate day to day basis in the US,
it's tied to the Internet.

Speaker 1 (04:52):
Yeah, hands down. Even I know that Roku was down,
and that's the thing. You know, a lot of people,
at least for some a lot of people rely on
that for their entertainment. And we've talked about this before
about the need to have digital media versus having physical media.
That having the physical media can be in case there

(05:14):
ever is an outage that lasts a long time. The
longest one was that one in twenty twenty one. We
talked about that when it was like three days. Yeah,
and people weren't able to connect to certain things and whatnot,
and that kind of reminds you, like, well, This is
a good reason if you ever had to subsist without
the Internet, but you have your devices, you want to
use them to have that physical media. Yeah, it's it's wild, and.

Speaker 2 (05:44):
You know, it's it's weird, it's it's it's hard to
talk about this because it's piracy is not a big
topic to talk about, but it's like it's forcing people
to look at alternative ways to get media.

Speaker 1 (05:55):
Yeah, so, well, even with your own media. You know,
in the case of well like services like Plex where
you can easily use programs like the DVD Ethinic's Next Copy,
where you could take your DVD or your Blu Ray
and make a digital copy of it, store it on
a device, connect it to your your router, your computer,

(06:18):
or put it on your computer and then be able
to access it. So you want to watch you want
to watch you know, Lost in America or Into the
Night or I'm talking to some of my favorite movies
here American, Werewolf, London. You can easily do that without
having to go find the CD or DVD and store
it on your device. Just make a backup.

Speaker 2 (06:37):
So yep, my whole book. I have a bookshelf just
off off screen here that has my DVDs on it.
I have a physical DVD collection. It's not as big
as it used to because I've gotten rid of some,
but all of them are digitized. I spent most of
COVID really doing just in rip in rep in rip

(07:00):
and if you're interested in preserving your media from physical
to digital, right make mkav will do Blu rays if
you have a Blu ray, burner, Handbrake will do DVDs.
Those are both free programs. They're both open source, so
they're both great.

Speaker 1 (07:16):
You give me a little challenging to use, but once
you get it, it's.

Speaker 2 (07:19):
Pretty straightforward, and they both have very very well fleshed
out tutorials on how to do these things. The communities
around these projects are very open to answering questions and
there's tons of tutorials on it. It's almost point and
click at this point. You put the disc in, you
click burn, you pick the format you want, the resolution

(07:42):
you want. Do you want it to have all the menus?
Do you want it to have all the special features? Yes? No? Yes, no,
yes no. Burn rep You've got a four and a
half gig file for DVDs, upwards of eighteen to twenty
gigs for a Blu Ray if you multi layer.

Speaker 1 (07:57):
So, I mean some people like to get the menu
systems on DVDs, Like if they're going to make a
digital copy, can they do that so it's not just
the movie. They can have the interface so they could
go to the menu system and say, I want to
see behind the scenes, I want to see this. Is
that possible for people to do?

Speaker 2 (08:17):
No, I've never tried it that way. I've never tried
to do to burn a DVD to emulate it as
a DVD in a player. I've just always ripped the
VOB files for DVDs and then compress them into an
MP four. So I don't know. I know that you
can still just put a DVD into your computer and

(08:37):
play it that way too, So if you're looking for
that emulation, it's it's very easy to do. Maybe not now,
Maybe not now, because hardly hardly any computer you buy
now comes with a comes with a CD, any Blu
Ray CD anything. I mean, you're hard pressed to get one,
let alone. They make USB ones now and things that,

(09:00):
so it's relatively easy to get them, but they're not
a common thing in PC builds anymore.

Speaker 1 (09:06):
LG makes makes one. I know I've got a couple
of them that I use and it saved my butt recently,
which I'll tell you about coming up. But it's really interesting.
There's a story that I read on one of the
one of the tech blogs that optical drive demand has
gone up with Windows ten. Retirement Japan was one of those.

(09:28):
They found users switching to Windows eleven. We're buying up
Blu ray drives to have inside the machines. So they
go ahead and they whether either putting them in their
machines or they're doing the externals. They wanted to have
that capability to be able to watch their content on
those devices, and they found that the sales went up.

Speaker 2 (09:49):
I think we need to go back since I started
on the show and count the number of times that
I've said there is going to be a analog revolution,
not necessarily an analog revolution, but a a physical media revolution.
People are going to there is going to be a

(10:09):
demand back for physical media. And I think with the
chaos of all the streaming platforms and you know, having
to have ten subscriptions to get the content you want,
and you know, the raising of the prices the game
passed this stuff like that, it's like I just want
to play my games. I just want to watch my movies.

(10:30):
Like I can play all my stuff. I have the
capability because I've I'm a little bit of a tech order, right.
I can play Blu rays, I can play DVDs, I
can play VHS tapes like, I can play all that.
But a lot of people what the way of the
DODO wants to have that stuff? Right? It's like they
they said, a streaming is the next it's the best thing.
Here's all my DVDs at a yard sale for fifty

(10:51):
cents apiece and somebody came and bought them all up. Well,
with this outage, you may have not been able to
get to Netflix, HBO Max was down, so you couldn't
you couldn't watch your content there. Again, with the way
the licensing stuff works, it's like even when you're paying
for Prime or Disney Plus, they bump you up into

(11:15):
the next, the next tier, they raise your price. All
of a sudden, you log in and you start streaming
Malana for your your three year old, and you get
served two and a half minutes of ads. It's like,
whoa wait, I didn't think I was paid for Like,
I didn't think my plan included ads on Disney Plus.
And then you look and they say, oh, by the way,
the price went up, you're not paying for that price,

(11:36):
so you got shifted into an ad plan.

Speaker 1 (11:38):
Yeah, well, what the heck. It's like, if two minutes
of ads for a four year old, we'll just lose
their interest compleatly.

Speaker 2 (11:45):
That's that's why we pay for YouTube Premium. Our boys
like to watch YouTube. There. You know, there's a handful
of shows. Nickelodeon has a couple of things on YouTube, Blippy,
a handful of those shows that are on YouTube. Trying
to watch any of that content on YouTube without YouTube Premium,
without the ads, with the ads was a literally a

(12:06):
miserable experience. And getting ads, it's just it's it's a
it's a nightmare, and I get it. People don't have it.
Not it's I feel very privileged to be able to
pay for a handful of subscriptions to not have ads,
and it's it's it's a you know, I understand that,

(12:26):
but it's a miserable experience.

Speaker 1 (12:28):
And there was there was just a price increase too
this week in case you didn't know. And it's weird
they didn't really talk about it. I don't think they
talked about it before they made the announcement, but Warner
Brothers Discovery and now you know, there's big talk now
about there's gonna be a sell or a purchase outright.
Comcast is one of those that could possibly be interested

(12:50):
in buying, but Warner Brother's Discovery. As of this past Tuesday.
So the cost of your HBO Max plans gonna increase again,
another increase if you get HBO Max Basic with ADS,
which will allow you to stream on two devices simultaneously.
So if you've got a household and your kids are
watching in one or maybe you like a show and

(13:12):
you know your your other half goes and wants to
watch something else on that services monthly, it goes up
a buck. Now we might not think not a dollar,
but when you add paramount plus, when you add Discovery,
if you're paying for that, when you add you know, Netflix,
the Netflix, it's obscene. It gets crazy, it's obscene, and

(13:35):
you don't you.

Speaker 2 (13:36):
Just don't realize it, and it's all just gross marketing,
hostile marketing, and it's I wish sometimes we had digital
digital rights like the UK does in some some instances,
because that would shore up a lot of this stuff

(13:57):
and get us on track to actual having actually having
user rights to some of this stuff.

Speaker 1 (14:02):
And a lot of people that would tell me, you know,
they're getting rid of their DVDs, and they would say,
it's okay, because that's streaming. I can find it anywhere,
you know. I there's a website I love to go to,
and you can check this one out too. It's called
real Good uh, and it is a site you can
go to and you can type in a movie real
Good dot com and say you want to see this movie.

(14:25):
When uh, the missus Bucket from Keeping Up Appearances died recently,
I thought, oh, I want to watch some of those episodes. Uh,
And I don't have the DVD box set of Keeping
Up Appearances. It's good British comedy and you go there
and you find, okay, where can I watch it? It's
only available on brit Box, but it's also available on

(14:46):
the Roku channel, which anybody you don't have to have
a Roku device to be able to watch a Roku channel.
You could go ahead and just watch it there and
you go They've got a guide you can go through
and you could find it there on that that's so
it's a great way to find out where a movie
that maybe you liked or a TV show you like
is available to stream, and it might be on Netflix,

(15:07):
or it might be on HBO Max. But with the
price going up, a lot of people are just saying
this is ridiculous because they cut the cord and then
they went Internet only, and they said, Okay, we'll get HBO,
we'll get hu Hulu, we'll get Peacock, we'll get Paramount Plus.
That covers pretty much everything. Right then they found out no,
it doesn't, so they oh, let's add Pluto TV. Pluto

(15:30):
TV it's free, or some of the other free services.
But then with the added cost of all the subscription services,
people are saying this is outrageous. Like if you do
an HBO Max standard no ADS streaming on two devices
the same time, it's one hundred and eighty four dollars
a year, that's a lot of money for a lot

(15:50):
of people. So you know, it just it all adds up.

Speaker 2 (15:56):
It does, and it's we'll never go back to the
way it was with over the AIRTV because it doesn't
reach anybody anymore, and that nobody sits at home, nobody's
going home at four o'clock to watch Star Trek Voyager
after they get off the school bus like I did

(16:17):
growing up because I knew it was on at four o'clock.
But that structure doesn't work for the majority of society.
These days, there were always good, just really good shows
re reairing at between three to five up until primetime,
and then you hit your primetime stuff and then on

(16:38):
Friday nights it was you know, Naked Night. On Friday
nights it was Saturday Morning cartoons. Like there was set
times that the world knew you were watching TV and
they could cater. It's all about ads. It's all about money, right,
It's all about ads. This is the entirety of this conversation.
It's focused around how do we get eyeballs on money

(16:59):
and and when you have content that is available twenty
four to seven, three sixty five streaming anywhere in the world,
it's it's just free money and an ad free service
was so unrealistic and based on the amount of content

(17:21):
these places are pumping out. You're paying big, big bucks
for studio content, not network content. Not already invested money
into an affiliate NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, whatever. This is
a brand new production facility that's got to do these
very very high level productions. And there's the expectation just

(17:43):
kept getting high and higher. Right. You had these shows
that when Netflix first came out, you had Stranger Things,
you had Drive to Survive, You had all these other
series that just lived on Netflix that you wanted to watch,
and the expectation was it got better every time, and
the expectation was, I'm going to pay the same but
I wanted to get better. You can't expect it to

(18:06):
get better every time and have it available to you
all the time without it costing more money.

Speaker 1 (18:12):
I would rather, I don't know about you, but I
would rather pay a decent price and have Netflix with programming.
But now, like if you get on the Netflix, you
get lost in the guide itself. It's like, gosh, what
do I want to want to watch? There's so many
options because they're paying for that programming.

Speaker 2 (18:34):
This is this is my opinion on how the Internet
is right now. Everybody, every company that's on the Internet
neet wants to be the center of the Internet. They
want it to be. You come here to do everything.
You come here to stream, you come here to play games,
you come here to do social media. That's what that's
what everybody wants. That's the focus of everybody's your eyeballs.

(18:54):
And that's not how it was. That's and it's when
you have that much marketing going into trying to keep
everybody's attention on everything, and you have all these deals
and it's so confusing for a consumer to find anything.
I mean, this real good website is great. I just

(19:14):
looked it up. This looks fantastic. But it's frustrating because
a lot of the apps will reach out and look
at these other apps and CEO, it's streaming here. It's
not on here, but you can watch it on Amazon,
and then you're like, great, I can watch it on Amazon,
and then you click on the link rent or buy
for two ninety nine or four. Well, now I'm frustrated,

(19:37):
so let me go find it somewhere else where it is, Well,
it's only available here. Well if I rent it now
I don't own it. But if I buy it in
six months, what if they re what if they pull
the license and now I don't own it anymore.

Speaker 1 (19:51):
There was a real good documentary about Gordon Lightfoot that
was done some years ago, and I wanted to watch
it wasn't available anywhere except in Canada, and it was
available in Canada for you to watch on the I
guess it's CBC or one of those, so wouldn't let

(20:13):
me watch it? Just turned on the VPN. Turn on
the VPN pointed it, saying that it was a Canadian connection.
You're not doing anything illegal. And I was able to
watch it. And some people are finding out there's a website.
There's another here. We're giving you some good websites today,
and I don't know if you've heard about this one

(20:33):
Sean called TV dot Garden. If you go to TV
dot Garden, it's pretty amazing because you can actually watch
TV from around the world and it's free, so you
can watch their broadcast channels, whether you want to watch
something out of Britain, Italy, Spain, Greece.

Speaker 2 (20:55):
It's awesome.

Speaker 1 (20:56):
It has a globe and then it has you know,
where where do you want to watch? And like I
had to look, you know, because my family is got
a background from Mignon mar Burma and I thought, what
do they watch it over there? I wanted to take
a look and I clicked out it and I'm like, whoa,
look at this. This is a trip. This is what
they're watching over there, like a news program. Out of there.

(21:16):
You could see him from all the different countries streams again,
TV dot Garden.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
This is insane. There's you can just I'm I was
listening to you talk for a second, but I'm scrolling
through just you can literally find anything on here.

Speaker 1 (21:32):
You know one of those stories I heard, do you
remember Herve Villachet. I don't know if you know that name.
There's a movie called My Dinner with Hervey that is
really great, and if you ever get a chance to
watch that, I'd say take a look at that. Hervey
was a tattoo on the show Fantasy Island. And I
read a story once about Herve and how he learned

(21:52):
to speak English. He was from France. He actually learned
by watching television, watching American television. Now, back in the seventies,
you know, growing up, there was a lot of choices.
Sesame Street you can you can still watch Sesame Street.
You can watch Sesame Street, I Love Lucy. You could
watch shows and reruns. You could watch shows like Emergency,

(22:13):
Adam twelve, the whole bit, and you could pick that up. Now,
I wonder if the same thing could be applied to
TV dot Garden where I want to learn to speak Spanish.
So you go to Spain or you go to Mexico
and you watch what is streaming out of there and
maybe help you understand the language a little better. It
could be could actually be good and educational source.

Speaker 2 (22:34):
Sure. Yeah, you immerse yourself into that, that language and
the help doc. I'm just blown away at this one's
TV dot Garden. It's I mean, it's incredible which.

Speaker 1 (22:46):
You can find. There's a lot of good stuff on there.
There's more stuff to talk about. I wanted to. I
want to go over this one really quickly, though. Do
you remember we were talking about driver Easy. I went
ahead and bought it and I been able to put
it on a system at work that was given us
some troubles. I put it on my main system here
at home. I've got one license still to use and

(23:08):
it helps you find the drivers for your system that
all at one time. But there's another one, and it's
been around a while. It's been around a long time
called win get. Have you ever used wing get wind? No,
wing Get is a command line program. It's a wind
It's called Windows Package Manager is what it is. It's
safe to use, generally saying it's an official Microsoft tool.

(23:32):
Not to get to it, what you'd have to do
is use your command key, So down on your bottom
search bar, you could type cmd. That's one way to
get to your command button. There's other ways, and then
you'll see a pop up and one of those options
is select run as an administrator and then you type
in wind get update and it will show you a

(23:54):
list of programs that can be updated that you may
have in your computer, like Adobe Acrobat, drop downloads that
you may have had you not updated yet. Wind get
will actually do those updates for you. So like Driver easy,
this actually focuses on the programs that are a part
of your computer. And I mean it's you can't go

(24:16):
wrong with that. Again, it's wind get, so you use
the command key to get to it, and again is
part of part of your Windows operating system.

Speaker 2 (24:24):
That's I didn't know about that. Yep, that's something, but
it's clever and I have a bunch.

Speaker 1 (24:32):
Yeah, you can actually do when when GETU I just
just did.

Speaker 2 (24:36):
I just did. It's audacities out of date. Driver EASi
is out of date. Wow, my Steel series stuff's out
of date. My stream decks out of date, obs studios,
out of date, Boy discards out of date.

Speaker 1 (24:49):
Don't do it while we're doing the show, please.

Speaker 2 (24:51):
Because it'll do a Windows probably. It's cool. So it's
like just for those like who are interested in Linux,
like this is pseudo app get we'll get you this
or should we have to update, we'll get you the
same thing and update libraries based on that's a similar concept,
which is pretty.

Speaker 1 (25:07):
Cool, making it making it easier for you. Or we
can take a quick break. We come back. A couple
of listener questions we will share with you. Maybe it's
yours that's standing by. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm sewan to
wear it.

Speaker 2 (25:17):
Find us on the web at tech talk radio dot
com if you can get there.

Speaker 1 (25:21):
Good luck. Now back to tech talk Radio. This is
Alice Cooper, the original Technoe Todd and you're listening to
tech talk Radio.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
So imagine it's three am, all right, and you're sleeping
and you have to get up and use the bathroom. Right,
so you use an eight sleep product, which is a
bed that has can move, can shift, can you raise?
You have it down?

Speaker 1 (25:48):
Oh yeah, those are kind of cool, but they.

Speaker 2 (25:51):
Don't have an offline mode. And it always has to
be connected to the cloud. Wait really, and so at
three am when Amazon Web Services has an outage, your
bed is now stuck.

Speaker 1 (26:02):
You're kidding me.

Speaker 2 (26:03):
I had no idea The AWS outage impacted some of
the users. There are eight sleeps two thousand dollars. Pod
mattress covers found their smartbeds had no offline mode and
we're stuck at high temperatures or odd positions during the night.

Speaker 1 (26:20):
Oh that's not good.

Speaker 2 (26:22):
So you can only imagine like, oh, I'm uncomfortable. Let
me raise up my bed and it's stuck. It's really hot,
let me turn it down and stuck because it doesn't
have an offline mode, meaning it's always calling to the
cloud for information.

Speaker 1 (26:37):
Wow, So so is it okay? I know this sounds
very you know, people will say, oh, you're just going
down a different path there, But isn't that giving up
a lot of your info how you sleep when you
get out?

Speaker 2 (26:49):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (26:51):
Do we? I mean, I know, our TVs relay a
lot of information, like what you're watching at night, what
your what commercials? You skip over the whole bit.

Speaker 2 (26:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:59):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (27:00):
There was a tech a tech enthusiast that posted that
said his pod locked itself nine degrees higher than room temperature.
Back end doubters means I'm sleeping in a sauna.

Speaker 1 (27:10):
Oh eight sleep.

Speaker 2 (27:11):
Confirmed there was no offline mode, but they were rolling
out a fix.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
So yeah, and that's the thing. We constantly are looking
at ways to connect, even our vehicles. You wonder, though,
what path are we going down?

Speaker 2 (27:23):
Yeah? I don't know, man, it's a had. I talked
a little bit about this at work with a coworker
about how do I explain the Internet to my children? Okay,
because I've and you've experienced this too, I experienced it
a little bit differently than even you did, right, because

(27:44):
growing up the internet in my young room, you know,
my preteens, the internet was very much non a thing.
It was very hard to come by. It was only
dial up, it was only it was expensive, and so
we just didn't have it. And then getting into grade school,

(28:06):
I you know, we had basic internet connectivity, got introduced
to you know, number mounchers on the Max and you
know games on you know the five, you know the
five at a Quarridge floppies and stuff like that. But
then into junior, junior, and senior high school, slowly got
into the Internet, learning what search engines were, and learning

(28:29):
what chat rooms were, and learning what you know, the
shadier sides of the Internet were as a teenager and
having to go to the library to get connected because
the Internet at home was not good enough, and spending
that time figuring out what the Internet was. Now, how
do I explain that to Max when he can just

(28:54):
sit at the computer and have everything availed to him.
You're right, right If I if I gathered up a
dozen of my friends from high school and said, ha,
do you remember that strong bad video from Homestar Runner,
Everybody's gonna know what that is. Do you remember playing
flash games? I know by No Black Sheep or Ebom's

(29:14):
World Flash Games right, or you know playing Uker on
Yahoo Games or chatting on al and Semessenger. It was
a shared Internet experience. Nobody has that now because it's
it's so user customers customizable that it's it's become its
own world. Everybody has a unique experience now. And I

(29:36):
just feel like, to me, that's the nostalgia of the Internet.
It's for me is I knew what my friends were
doing on the Internet all the time. I knew that
I could go into AOL messenger and talk to my friends.
There's a little bit of community building there. Now, communities
are much larger now and they're worldwide now, so it's like,

(29:58):
it's just weird to see that transition. But how do
I explain that to Max? How do I get him
into the Internet safely and curiously but safely?

Speaker 1 (30:09):
You know, I was just thinking about your talking about this, Sean,
And I remember, you know, when I learned to drive,
the warning came out from my parents, never pick up hitchhikers.
I remember in the late sixties going to San Francisco
with my parents in our station wagon, driving back, my
dad pulling over to pick up a couple of hitchhikers

(30:30):
that were in military uniforms. You would never ever think
about doing that today. Turned out they had just gotten
back from Vietnam and they were, you know, they were
working their way to get back to Los Angeles. Luckily
we were going that way and learned some things. I
don't remember. I was too young, but you wouldn't do
that these days. And now that's become the Internet danger

(30:54):
where you don't pick up, you know, strangers on the road.
Now you don't communicate with strangers on the Internet. That's
the new danger zone. Sean to talk to the kids
about don't do this, don't do that, and that's gonna
I think it's gonna get even stronger now they're worried
about telling the kids about AI and how to use
AI and not to get in trouble in school and
how to learn.

Speaker 2 (31:15):
Yeah, it's it's it's weird to think that in twenty
years the Internet has changed that much, twenty five years
since I've really been a user of the Internet, and
how much it's changed for my generation and then Max's generation.

(31:39):
It's just it's wild. And even even through major world
events like COVID that changed how a lot of people
viewed the Internet. So you have kids that are graduating
from high school for college that lived through COVID, and
even their experience is different, and how they see the
Internet and how they approach it and how they approach
classroom learning. And so it's so weird how mentally challenging

(32:05):
the Internet can be, and how from a society perspective,
how a important it is because it's literally the connectivity
of the world right now, and to how dangerous that is.

Speaker 1 (32:20):
I wanted to get my grandson. I've heard a story
of study the other day about the Internet and how
numbers are coming down when it comes to mathematics, when
it comes to writing, when it comes to reading, and
I wanted to get him into reading because that was
what pulled me, you know, as a I love reading.
I love always loved reading. So I wanted to find

(32:42):
like And the thing is, you can't just give them
a book and say here, read.

Speaker 2 (32:48):
Now.

Speaker 1 (32:48):
Many parents out there might be going, yeah, you can.
You can't because they're so distracted by technology that I
want to find a way for technology to help with
the reading. I don't don't know if that's possible.

Speaker 2 (33:01):
I believe you've hooked on phonics. Like, that's technology, right,
It's the it's the CDs or the tapes that played
and you read along with the books. That's technology. Right.
Everybody thinks that technology has to be a computer. It
has to be has to be the Internet. Technology is
the advancement of the human Technology not just Internet and

(33:25):
in electronics. Technology can be many forms. So it's like
going back and using technology that isn't meet like computer
related can be a huge part of that.

Speaker 1 (33:37):
Wow, all right, we got a listener comment. I definitely
want to answer this from an This was on our
Facebook page and it said, Hey, Andy, I want to
search the questions and discussions on the tech talk radio
site for advice about Windows eleven S mode, but I
didn't see any way to search, and maybe that's something
I need to start adding to the website. We're still

(33:58):
working on changing our websit over to maybe a little
more featured website, so hopefully that'll be coming soon, and
says what am I missing? And then she added to
that because I responded about what Windows was all about.
She said, I recently purchased a new laptop with Windows eleven,
and I'm not thrilled about Microsoft basically forcing us to
stay in S mode where only Microsoft products can be installed.

(34:22):
As you said, you can get out of S mode,
but when then you can't get back in, which gives
a person pause. I have malware bites virus software, which
I like very much, but I can't install it without
getting out of S mode, and the fact that I
can't get back in again is intimidating.

Speaker 2 (34:39):
It.

Speaker 1 (34:40):
It scares a lot of people, says I like to
use a Chrome browser sometimes, which you can't do in
S mode. You have to use the Edge browser. So
if I understand what you said, though, being out of
it is not that big a deal. It seems to
me as if it's just a way for Microsoft to
force people to use their products. Some people would benefit
from S mode. That would be people who are afraid

(35:04):
of installing the wrong thing.

Speaker 2 (35:07):
And these are the people that bought the Windows XP
for Dubby's books.

Speaker 1 (35:11):
Yeah, pretty much.

Speaker 2 (35:13):
I mean it's Windows es MO. So for those of
you who are listening that don't know what Windows S
Mode is, Windows s Mode is basically a stripped down
version of Windows that only lets you run Microsoft products.

Speaker 1 (35:24):
That's it. You going down upon the Microsoft Store.

Speaker 2 (35:26):
And you get Edge, that's it. So it just it's
sandboxed you a little bit. You can still get out
to the internet, but it's not gonna let you install files.
It's maybe it's gonna be good for a kid, but
any any kid that has any sort of technological curiosity
is gonna work around that in a heartbeat. Yeah the

(35:48):
five I just googled it, Okay, can't do that in
S mode. Stronger security, faster performance, longer battery life, simpler management,
those are the things. But again, if you want to
use Chrome, or if you want to get customizable, you
gotta get on a mode.

Speaker 1 (36:04):
Third party programs you may not be able to run
if they're not in the Microsoft Store.

Speaker 2 (36:08):
Yeah, why might you not want S mode? Right? You
can't install apps outside of the Microsoft Store, No Chrome, Steam, Discord, Photoshop, anything.
And it says once you get out of a S mode,
there's no way back. That is kind of scary, right
I had.

Speaker 1 (36:25):
I had bought a laptop for my daughter, and you'll
find these general You'll find S mode generally on some
of the lower priced, basic, you know, entry level laptops.
And I had bought one for my daughter who's going
to school in Phoenix, and it was grown up, but
it had S mode on it. So when I reached

(36:45):
out there, I said, listen, I'm going to remove S
mode on this because you don't need it. You know,
you know the basics, you know this, I can do this.
When I told her you couldn't run Google on it,
you know, she was like, wait a minute, forget it,
you know, because that's what she had been used to.
So again, S mode can be confusing and scary, but
I don't there may be a certain amount of you

(37:08):
that may benefit from using S mode. But generally I don't.

Speaker 2 (37:12):
I mean, maybe if you have elderly parents that just
need to use the internet for their email and to
watch Netflix or some streaming apps, great, no problem. It's
going to stop it from download and road programs.

Speaker 1 (37:26):
Yeah, I missed the calls from my mom. My mom's
no longer with us, but I miss those calls. What
does this pop up? Andrew? Do I need this program? Andrew?
I just want to play my solitaire Andrew. So Yeah.

Speaker 2 (37:42):
Having a mom who was a little bit more technical savvy, yeah,
she solved a lot of her own problems, which is great.
My dad, on the other hand, not so much. My
in laws are a little technical inapt, but it's great
I get to help them. I help them get a laptop.
You know, I went through all the one drive stuff

(38:03):
where it forced you into logging in, and it just
Windows is in a weird state. And it's again full
circle with the ads stuff we were talking about earlier,
with the web streaming, with the video streaming, it's like
that's they just want your eyeballs, right, they want to
put ads in these places. In my inexperience with experience

(38:25):
with computers and stuff, it's like going back to you know,
started on Windows, you know, Windows ninety five and Windows
ninety eight and Windows XP and Vista, and then once
Windows eight came along, that was really the first realization
that they could put ads in the home screen. Yeah,

(38:48):
now you click the start bar and all of a sudden,
there's an ad for a you might want to search
for this based on your recent searches. It's like whoa
hold on what?

Speaker 1 (38:56):
Yeah? Exactly?

Speaker 2 (38:57):
And then you know they skipped nine to ten and
ten wasn't awful. You could customize your build when you
installed it to say, feed me any of this garbage,
and you could get a pretty stripped down version of
Windows ten with just the install, the base install.

Speaker 1 (39:13):
Not evenmore. We got to take a break. We come back, Sean,
I told you about a problem I had. I fixed it.
I got it fixed. So when we come back, I'll
tell you what that problem was and how you may
be having the same issue, tell you how to fix that.
Coming up with tech talk Radio, I'm Andy Taylor.

Speaker 2 (39:29):
I'm Sean to Weird. Find us on your favorite podcasting
platform and give us a like thumbs up, share it, YouTube,
you name it, get us out there. We love you guys.

Speaker 1 (39:36):
That button and now back to tech talk radio. So
I had a problem, and I even had a comment
from somebody saying, you know, don't be so hard at yourself,
because I thought I did the stupid thing I have.
And I've mentioned this before. A computer in our studio
that originally was Windows ten. I had built a Windows

(39:57):
eleven computer. Seeing all this stuff was going to be happening,
and I went to install Adobe the suite that I
have that is phenomenal. I will say Adobe products are great.
This Adobe Creative Suite five to five was phenomenal. Did
everything I.

Speaker 2 (40:13):
Needed to do.

Speaker 1 (40:14):
I do video, I do you know after effects, I
do publishing, I do you know audio editing? And I
couldn't install it because it said I was installed too
many devices went through the rigamarole with Adobe. They said
they couldn't do anything for me. Their activation servers are gone.
So I had to preserve this computer Windows ten. So

(40:34):
I had to make the decision, well, how am I
going to upgrade it to Windows eleven. So I started
looking through it, looking at the computer. I made a
clone of that drive, put that in the system. It
booted up okay, and then I started going into bio
saying oh, can I prepare this to update it to
Windows eleven? And something? I did it just that was it.

(40:54):
It would not load anymore. Tried the backup drive that
would not load anymore. I thought, I've lost this. I've
lost this ability to have that extra Adobe Suite on it. Well,
as you know, I've talked about RUFUS and how RUFUS
has just been great, has allowed many people that have
not been ready to upgrade to Windows eleven yet to

(41:14):
do an upgrade. And the only upgrade feature I could
find was to update to Windows eleven on that computer,
which I could do because I did it on another drive.
I could do, but I would lose my programs. So
I thought, well, how am I going to get around this?
And I was reading about RUFUS and reading and I thought, well,

(41:37):
look at this and in place upgrade. I could do that. Well.
I tried and in place upgrade on another computer that
I had here at the station, and it worked. All
the programs there, everything's working, though, I'm going to try
that at home, And then I thought to myself, no,
you're better off fixing Windows ten. So I found my

(41:58):
LG backup DVD drive. I found my original disc that
I had for Windows ten, and I hooked it up,
booted up to the disc and went into repair mode,
and I thought, let's see if it can fix it.
I mean, who knows. Didn't change anything with the settings
that I had been messing with in the bios of

(42:18):
the UEFI. And it took two times. But then I
walked out of the room while it said repairing the computer.
And when I walked back, probably about a half an
hour later, there it was Windows ten with the Adobe Suite.
I clicked on it to make sure it's not going
to tell me I have to, you know, reinstall or
and it was fine. So I was able to save

(42:39):
that computer. So now I have to make the decision, Sean,
do I use that computer as my recording source in
the studio because it has Adobe. I'm using Audacity now
and it works fine. But use the Adobe and have
that computer in the studio I've won in my office
one of my studio, the one in the office is
already Windows eleven. I'd have Windows ten in the studio

(43:02):
with the Adobe Suite, or take the chance to do
an an in place upgrade to Windows eleven, or just
keep it Windows ten. Don't connect it to the internet.
Just connect it to the network, you know, using an
IP number and do it that way. What is gonna
be my solution? What do you think? What should I do?

Speaker 2 (43:23):
Keep it Windows ten?

Speaker 1 (43:24):
Yeah, and risk Why risk it?

Speaker 2 (43:28):
It's not gonna hurt anything. If as long as you're
running Windows Defender now war bites yep, and not doing
something stupid.

Speaker 1 (43:38):
Yeah, you're gonna be just fine. I only use it
for recording, recording and editing, and you'll.

Speaker 2 (43:44):
Be just fine. It's so, it's a fun fact, right,
I looked this up earlier. I'd read an article. So
with the push to Windows eleven freaked a ton of
people out around the world. Right, A lot of people
were like, oh, oh my god, I can't I got upgrade.
I got upgrade. Somewhere around sixty five million new computers

(44:07):
were purchased or will be purchased, sixty five million. One
of these tech blogs I just read estimates that there's
four hundred million, four hundred million active Windows ten machines.

Speaker 1 (44:21):
Wow, that's a lot.

Speaker 2 (44:23):
Yeah, four hundred million. Think about that. That's four hundred
million processors, it's four hundred million motherboards, four hundred million
hard drives. That's just a mind blowing amount of stuff.
And to think that sixty five million of that's going
to be brand new. What's going to happen to the

(44:43):
sixty five million that they replaced E waste? I'm seeing
all sorts of articles coming out that people are going
to recycling centers, you know, computer recycling centers and hazardous
ways and finding machines with early jen NI nine's, early
gen early Gen I seven's with memory because people will

(45:05):
just they don't they just don't know. They go to
the store, and of course, I say, a good salesperson
is gonna be like, yeah, you gotta go. You gotta
go to Windows eleven. You can't stay at ted it's unsecure,
And that's just the fear around that is. I'm skeptical
about that, but that's how you get people to move forward.
I mean, yeah, security compliance is gonna be good and

(45:27):
it's gonna help, but I don't like the way the
Microsoft's going around going about it. I don't think outside
of this computer that I'm on now, I'll put Windows
on another machine. Yeah, well this will be my only
Windows machine. I have a couple of macs that I
work on do editing on. I think I will move

(45:48):
all by other ancillary stuff. I already moved one of
my laptops, the Linux Mint, just to play with. I
moved a Lenovo desktop that I had that was running
games for for Max and stuff. I put that on
Linux Mint. It's just I'm because that was part of
the one, you know, moving to Windows eleven from the

(46:09):
licenses that I had for Windows ten. Windows eleven Home
doesn't have remote desktop, so I had to upgrade to
pro to get because I was doing the upgrade from
remote desktop. I ran the upgrade for Windows eleven, ran it,
it rebooted, and then all of a sudden, it's like,
you can't connect to the remote desktop. Before I didn't,

(46:29):
did you have a keyboard, mouse or monitor? PUG didn't
do it because I was just using it as a
you know, a play server, just to put stuff on son.
All of a sudden, I can't connect to it, and
I'm like, what what's going on? So I did some
research that that's just that kind of stuff is frustrating
as a as a user is having an expectation that
an upgrade, an up an upgrade that I'm paying for

(46:54):
will include the things they already have in this version,
Like I get it. Some quality of life stuff maye.
You know, I can lose a couple of things down
here that maybe I didn't care about, but they were
features of Windows ten. But you can't have certain high
level features and then not make them available in the

(47:16):
next upgrade without going to another price here. That's just
shady and frustrating as a user.

Speaker 1 (47:22):
I think a lot of people have been really frustrated
with with Microsoft in that respect. And like you went
the Linux on one of your boxes, you know, and
other people have said, well, I'll go Mac, you know,
and then they get into the learning curve and it's
it's it's not the same ball of wax. If they've
been used to using, you know, a Windows PC, well.

Speaker 2 (47:42):
For sure, Yeah, if you're jumping, if you've never I mean, okay,
if you have an iPhone and you're a piece of user,
it's going to be an easier transition to a Mac,
right because the iOS functionality is very similar in terms
of user experience that it is. Sign a Mac. You're
gonna be familiar with icons, you're gonna be familiar with
some of this stuff. But if you're an Android user

(48:03):
and a piece of user and you're coming to a Mac.
It's gonna be night and day different. It's gonna be
trying to drive, like trying to drive a standard transmission. Right,
you're gonna stalled a couple of times, and you're gonna,
you know, have to try to learn how to stop
at a stop side on a hill going up and
try and get going again. So there's some some learning curves,

(48:27):
but it's not impossible.

Speaker 1 (48:29):
But right, I mean, Max doing.

Speaker 2 (48:32):
Some stuff the same kind of the way. You know,
they dropped Intel support. They they're dropping potentially dropping Rosetta
going forward, so even older older software that runs on
Rosetta for Intel translation between Intel and the new M
chips that's rumored to be going away in a couple

(48:53):
of next revisions. So it's just weird stuff that we're
starting to get siloed again with acknowledge you either have
to be Mac or Windows, and there's no you know,
you can't be agnostic anymore. Like it's you gotta.

Speaker 1 (49:07):
Pick, you gotta pick which one? All right, here's something
do you ever get on next door?

Speaker 2 (49:12):
Yes, occasion occasionally, So Caitlyn has it for our neighborhood.
I put it on my phone for like two minutes
and then immediately regretted it.

Speaker 1 (49:22):
Next story is almost and I see a lot of
people commenting it's like Facebook, you know, but it is
your next door and there's a lot of people who
use it like we used to use Facebook. But I
saw I've seen a couple of things on next door
that I like, Oh, that's cool, you know. At somebody
on next door was asking about room of vacuums, and
there were some people who there that were keen on

(49:43):
sharing some of their experiences. When it came to the
room but vacuums, somebody said the pros the robot will
love you and cherish you. The cons it could turn
against you. I don't know how a rumba would turn
against you, but this one I thought was pretty good.

(50:05):
This guy has a name for his roomba for doing
the two parts of his home. He said, the new
roombas a guy named Michael who lives out in Picture Rocks.
The new roombas will map your space, then vacuum in
perfect lines. It even empties itself, which is true when
it has finished its job. He said, we have two
for different parts of our home. So he has two

(50:27):
roombas and he gave them a name. These are their names,
And if you're gonna name your rumbas, you can't go
wrong with this clean Latifa and dust Ben Bieber. Another
quick break. We come back. A couple of websites you
might want to check out for websites of the week.
We'll be back with more of tech Talk Radio. I'm

(50:48):
Andy Taylor, I'm Shana.

Speaker 2 (50:49):
Were to check out our website at tech talk radio
dot com.

Speaker 1 (50:53):
Be right back and now back to tech talk Radio.
John is still having fun looking at the TV garden.
TV dot garden is the website. You found a couple
of channels while we were doing the show.

Speaker 2 (51:05):
Sorry, yeah, distracted, What was the question? No, So I'm
literally scrolling through thousands of channels from around the world.
This is just the US. I'm a big motorsports fan.
So mav TV is a channel that airs a lot
of lower, lower tier race race circuits, a lot of supercross,
a lot of motocross, supercars, you know, Australian supercars. It's

(51:28):
on here.

Speaker 1 (51:29):
That's cool.

Speaker 2 (51:30):
So I'm watching some really low low production value supercross
race right now. That's on. That's the stuff that I
like to watch when I just want to have someone
on the background. So it's like this is inc this
is a website that people need to know about like this,
it's TV Garden, TV dot Garden. All right.

Speaker 1 (51:50):
Here, here's another one for you, Explore dot org. All right,
explore dot org. If you remember a site that was
very popular about ten years ago, Live cam, where you
could watch live cams from all over the world.

Speaker 2 (52:04):
I do not need another distraction like this, Andy, This
is the type of website I will spend hours sitting on.

Speaker 1 (52:12):
Oh no, and Explore on Org does it a little
differently too. You can look all over the world and
find out cameras that are in different places, maybe your
favorite town, and see what's going on down your boulevard.
But also they schedule cameras, so if you want to
see polar bears at in the Polar region, you can

(52:33):
do that. If you want to see airport operations at
a large airport, you can do that and they'll schedule it.
So tune in, you know, at ten am, you know,
on this day and watch it.

Speaker 2 (52:43):
So this is something similar that Caitlin and I watch
every year. It's the Katami National Park Fat Bear Contest.

Speaker 1 (52:51):
Well, yeah, that's on here.

Speaker 2 (52:52):
It's on here. It's one that is one of our
favorite things to watch because we track sit like we
always like to try and fit pick our favorite and
just track it and see. And then one of them
died this year, so it was this big ding, like
everybody's super sad about it. But they have webcams up
in that National Park that just livestream these fat bears
eating salmon on the river and like it's This is

(53:16):
the part of the Internet that I love is the
stuff like this where you could just somebody had an
idea to go stick a webcam in the middle of
nowhere with a satellite phone or something and get a
relatively low resolution webcam back, but you can see what
it is.

Speaker 1 (53:32):
Yeah, and you get.

Speaker 2 (53:33):
To track fat bears while they're fattening up for hibernation.

Speaker 1 (53:37):
All right, listen, we got to wrap the show, but
two websites to check out explore dot org and TV
dot Garden. Check those ones out. We'll be back next
week with more info. And you've got a question with
the show, email it to us tech guys at tech
talk radio dot com. I'm Andy Taylor.

Speaker 2 (53:52):
I'm trying to wear it again. Subscribe to us on spreaker,
Spotify your podcast ploporform choice. We really love for you
guys to hear and YouTube there yep, YouTube watch our
YouTube shorts. Justin's really great now he's pretty the popular
face of our YouTube channel.

Speaker 1 (54:09):
Have a great week. M

All Episodes

Episode 458 - “The Cloud Crashed: When the Net Goes Dark.”

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Dateline NBC

Are You A Charlotte?

Stuff You Should Know

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Episode 458 - “The Cloud Crashed: When the Net Goes Dark.”