hello welcome to the verge cast the flagship podcast of the verge.com a website about boats about boats i was gonna say website a youtube channel an instagram experience oh instagram hot hot our instagram is blowing up blowing up uh our editorial director helen had just gave an interview in which she said i think most media companies are massively uninvested instagram not the verge what's she doing give away all our secrets look you can't be invested in unless you have hot shit photography that's true we have that we have james you know you're all constantly going on welcome to the verge cast where we talk about the inside the verge is great um and i want you to know it uh we only have one podcast right now but it is proud it stands alone uh a bunch of talk about this week oh my god he's in studio hello hi he's here you're just here to hang out just here to hang uh actually i came to new york uh because walt mossberg received the lifetime achievement award from uh the lobe yeah lobe foundation lobe group he's the most achieved business reporter of his lifetime yeah according to true achieved achieved no we had a fancy dinner i bought a very expensive suit and uh within five minutes of a starting dinner uh sprayed steak sauce all over myself which is great i ripped the tag out of the pocket of my incredibly expensive suit because like there's a giant white tag which is meant to rip it out but i didn't like snip it out and i like tore the inside of my chest uh a show about deer's pratfalls uh paul's here let's just let's just acknowledge the elephant in the room which is the iphone wow wow that's rough no the iphone turned 10 today this very day uh dinner where were you i mean there's all kinds of stories i looked it up today 10 year is the 10 anniversary like t-i-m like the precious metal you give your significant other is 10 yeah well we made it this far i lived in florida was this come up did they make this up during the depression i was running the smartphone experts network sites our iphone site which you now know is i more uh back then i had found it as phone different oh my god uh we bought two iphones uh i thought that i would um do my first ever teardown of a device i thought a really good device to start with was the original iphone oh my god huge mistake uh lucky i didn't kill myself and everyone around me trying to take that thing apart um and yeah we uh later that year we we ran the first of i think three annual smartphone round robins where we compared um all the smartphones against each other because at the time the smartphone market was not a duopoly of uh two you know giant operating systems there was like a vibrant set of real competition between blackberry windows mobile symbion palm os and then the iphone it was like a party there's a real thing yeah i mean we've talked a lot about this anniversary i think we talked about in january when it's anniversary of the announcement we had brian merchant his book on the show it's just i've been looking at twitter all day and it's a lot of here i was on this day let me ask you this i think i know the answer i think the answer is unquestionably yes but is it the iphone that changed everything or is it the modern smartphone right over the past 10 years the so i think the answer is unquestionably that it is the iphone yes i was gonna say it's the iphone because the iphone i've got this whole article that i was supposed to publish today but it's coming just get ready literally before the show began came up to me and said we're gonna talk about the show i didn't say anything and he said here's what's gonna happen yeah you're gonna make me talk about this article i haven't written then i'm gonna talk about it and then i'm gonna have to write it yep you're doing this to yourself i know um every other smartphone maker out there was playing by the wrong rules so blackberry was like we're better than a feature phone because we do email but we still like know that you're we still believe your phone should last forever and we're being really nice to the carriers by having data go through our special server that compresses the data yeah paul was like we're better than a feature phone because like we're a pva that's like tacked onto it windows mobile was microsoft being we're gonna make a windows computer uh but they weren't thinking straight uh the most important thing that they did in terms of positioning the iphone was steve john said we're gonna take one percent of the phone market he didn't say he you know he showed the side of the other smartphones made fun of their physical keyboards he made fun of their web browsers they deserved all of that but he was looking past the smartphone market which at the time was very small and making a thing that was accessible to a regular user not a nerd he was making the case to normal people not to people who thought they wanted a smartphone and it took a minute for that to actually work a lot of people who had flip phones looked at the iphone and said i don't need that or it's too expensive but apple aggressively made the case that this is a phone for everybody not just a phone for you know people on wall street which is what blackberry was doing or people who you know are hyper organized which is what palm is doing or people who uh maintain you know windows xp servers which is what microsoft was doing and so the iphone plus then later the app store which everybody else had the idea to do it nobody had the courage to do it actually i do think it took real courage for apple to launch a centralized app store yeah um even though i fundamentally think that platforms should be open blah blah blah um those two things together i think the iphone had a bigger part in changing the world than just the idea of a smartphone because the idea of a smartphone as ryan merchant wrote you know it's been around since the 90s yeah everybody had the idea nobody thought to take the thing out of the category of you know hobbyist nerd stuff to we're gonna try and get one percent of the whole phone market and setting that goal and setting that competition it obviously meant they've got much more than one percent now uh but if they had said we're gonna take 10 percent of the smartphone market it would have been they would have done the wrong things but they're trying to aim for one percent of the entire market meant that they did the right things and they changed the you know they changed the world by the way i think i think platforms should be inherently open blah blah blah is the best description of the broadcast that's ever been written yeah i got two things to say yeah i think one really good because i can't decide whether it's smartphones or it's iphone but i think something that supports what Dieter is saying is how many smartphones came out after the iphone that had keyboards yeah like the pre the droid and the droid and those are they have many many other competitive vectors the main one was you can slide it up into your keyboard right but the the the smartphone is is exactly what the iphone was except also with a front facey camera because that's important yeah but other than that it's basically the same thing other thing i wanted to say is that i cannot figure out which precious metal it is because there's like four different websites two of them are saying diamond one says 10 and then one says crystal slash rock crystal slash aurora borealis that are you on the goop.com right now thing yeah it's the aurora borealis anniversary yeah just instead of getting a present go out and now we enter the six month winter of our relationship that's great it's been a decade and it's gonna be dark now for about six months um you know were you gonna need an iphone convert because i wasn't i was absolutely i i i wanted a better email experience i could get on the iphone and um i needed like i needed some of the apps that i was using on other smartphones that you could not do on the iphone so i had i had two phones it was like i just started a gadget for a second i was like you gotta buy this nokia in 70 so i bought it it was a dumb idea um it's not a great phone it looked real pretty it came in a great box um and i had you know whatever i always had the newest sony ericsson candy bar yeah that was that was my phone i had every every iteration of that phone i think the last one i had was the w810i which is a walk-in phone oh that was a good i love that phone um and i remember thinking this nokia can do so much but everything is such a chore it is so difficult to do everything that i can do yeah um i keep on trying to do it and then there was a what did the sony ericsson's run they ran some terrible they ran an option it was s40 instead of s60 did they i thought it was later it was something else but um it wasn't s40 but anyway it had a google maps app and i remember thinking about a web browser and i remember thinking to myself this google maps app is actually way better on my stupid feature phone than it is on the nokia n70 because it's so much simpler right and so when the iphone came out i was like well this is all the things that i it's it's all the things i like about the sony ericsson it's like simplicity it's paired downedness yeah in the hardware form factor that matches it and like they all weren't on the shelf and i was immediately and i very distinctly remember showing it to other people and their immediate reaction to it was this is too delicate because i treat my feature phone like shit yeah and that's still a problem yeah it's still it's still there but nobody nobody doesn't buy a smartphone because they're afraid of cracking screen or losing expensive thing anymore but i just remember that first day which was 10 years ago today um taking it to like a party and being like look at this thing like pinching zoom on photos and all the things we show people and everyone was like that's amazing it's really expensive and it's too delicate and it's funny how that perception is completely yeah there are two things that were requirements for phones before the iphone actually we recorded a video and then killed it because it felt too much like a weird review of like the things are still a problem with the iphone yeah and before the iphone everyone assumed that a phone battery would last somewhere between three and seven days and everyone assumed that you could make a phone that you would be able to drop and kick around and throw in a bag with keys and it would be fine yeah and no one thought what if we didn't have those assumptions what would we be able to do and are those things more important the answer has turned out to be yes i'm still not happy about the durability of smartphones and i'm definitely not happy about the battery life of smartphones but the trade-off is get a smartphone uh paul were you gonna meet a convert we were i remember that day very clearly i had to travel home for a wedding yeah i got to travel home it was a very special wedding i was very happy i was there uh and i for some reason had more money in my bank account than i normally do and i walked into a singular store and i bought an iphone and i activated it and i went to like a bowling alley with like some like hometown friends and like showed them all youtube i feel like that was the only thing that i could like impress anybody by which because it had that old-timey tv logo yeah and and you could just load videos and show yeah like i i don't know you just i just remember that youtube was like the killer feature at that at that time it's funny because i had you know i had a pda in high school a friend of mine had like a an ipac in high school um like it's you know all these all that's the thing is we'd had computers in our pockets before the iphone yeah but there was definitely something new about the iphone that just did it better but it really wasn't that interesting until until the app store i definitely agree with that yeah and i think that's the what's i was supposed to be on cnbc today and i got bumped because trump did something stupid on twitter no it was surprisingly it was not twitter it was the announced actions on chinese banks oh okay but like literally they're like nilai tell us about the iphone at 10 what's coming next and i started saying my first sentence and the anchor interrupted me and they cut to the white house wow for like a live press conference with the treasury secretary i was like okay all right so what were you gonna say here's what i was gonna say the the overwhelming this is why i think it's unquestionably the iphone and not smartphones because i think it comes down to the app store the overwhelming story of the last 10 years is that every other category has converged into the iphone so like cameras are not a market the way they used to be a market right because of the iphone uh taxi dispatch is not a market because it is now converged into the iphone uh that youtube app right espn is failing because people watch video on their smartphones everything has converged into this the iphone and i think the nintendo sells iphone games now yeah but they're still there's still other ideas over there um but yeah just like down you just keep going down the line the ipod is not a business anymore because it was converged into the iphone that was apple's biggest selling product from it there um and it's hard to think of another microsoft is no longer the dominant company in computing right because of the iphone and its cloud services run the back end of so many apps right and it's all it's all just converged into the iphone um literally just shopping amazon just bought a grocery store because you're gonna be able to push about new groceries um all of that is like deeply fascinating i think we talk about that at a very deep level on the show and on the site and other texts we all talk about like the specific turns of this group if you look back over the sweep of 10 years that is the whole story of the world right like in like our relationships to society are mediated by apps on the phone like just overwhelmingly that is true but so here's here's my question yeah you were gonna say all that on cnbc because typically when you're on cbc you only get about oh yeah so the second part of that sense because the second question was what's the next 10 years right and what i think i've said this in the show i had like a failed column attempt at this i think that might be like peaked yeah and now what's happening is we're putting sensors and screens and things in other objects and we're starting to diverge off of the phone right because people have different experiences elsewhere that aren't always completely mediated by the phone right and i think that cycle back and forth is really interesting i think it's a long it has a longer period than you might expect like we're always expecting like this year it's yes everything's like it's the echo like the echo's gonna kill the phone like that's gonna take a decade but what's super interesting about that swing away and we've been talking about the swing away for a while now is the rules are still not set in the same way that they were not set for smartphones before the iphone they're playing by the wrong rules uh and the competition is also uh broader and way fiercer than it is with phones now the same way that smartphones were so we just reviewed the echo show for example uh fascinating device it does not act like a tablet at all it acts like a speaker that happens to have a screen on it um apple's coming with their thing and their plays have a better music experience google's play is to know everything about you through your google account except for your google work calendar because they're terrible at multi-count stuff um but everybody at google has a personal email and a work email how do they have this all literally every google has this problem crazy soon after try has this problem um but when you look at what's happening in the just the smart speaker market and don't even don't even talk about the rest of the smart home stuff which i still feel like is more nascent than most people want to admit um it's a much fiercer broader smaller companies smaller terms of like the scale of the market competition and it hasn't had that crystallizing moment yet and nobody knew that there was gonna be a crystallizing moment from the iphone for sure until you know a here in the app store right it wasn't clear that it wasn't just gonna be a doggy dog five person fight for the next decade yeah um so it might be that we get that with whatever is next after the iphone like two years ago i wrote c yes we know it comes after the iphone it's internet of things um and that's a thankfully we're using that term less but this idea that computing like what calls it ambient computing right it's what that ecosystem looks like i think is going to be more interesting and more diverse than the duopoly between ios and android and smartphones yeah um i could be wrong like i could be totally done wrong but i i don't get the vibe that that like that competition being all these big companies are doing all this stuff is going to have a like really clear obvious oh everybody's doing it wrong we fixed it here it is bam moment that we have with the iphone yeah i think there's something interesting there's an interesting parallel in software where uh you basically you have uh monoliths and you have like well for a brief moment there's a really hot term in in software development where you build things with microservices monoliths are messy it's one big thing if you change one part you break another thing so let's split it up into lots of little parts that each do one thing they do really well and that's like the pre-iphone like i had my rio i had my uh mavica and uh i had my cell phone you have a floppy drive mavica was it was it mavica they had them for our high school years i never used them um you know you'd have one thing but that's just like that's those are disparate things they weren't networked they weren't connected and they weren't expected to work as a whole and then like apple kind of tried to make the computer the digital hub but they stopped doing that as much when the iphone was just a monolith that had everything all in it it was all one thing so what happened with the software is tons of companies commodities ten started like re-engineering their software to be microservices where you have these tiny little pieces of software that would do one business role and then it would communicate somehow with a system that would kind of manage all those things. It turns out that's really, really hard to create like a good distributed system. Who's in charge of restarting something if it fails? You know, who's in charge, period?
The internet works because everybody's kind of like we're all our own independent node and we know what we want and we know what we want to achieve and the internet's sort of a communication medium. But if it's something, if you ask the internet, hey, internet, can you go do something for me? And so, I mean, I did ask Twitter to tell me some jokes today are real success stories of like microservice-type architectures but that's still like an open question and software. So I'm just wondering like if we start moving to lots of little devices doing single purposes or that are focusing on one task, if that will remain really frustrating to use because of just like the inherent problems in creating distributed systems.
Like this whole idea that Google Assistant is different on every different system and sometimes my Chromecast doesn't work. You know, YouTube hardly ever breaks when it's all inside my phone. But once it starts talking to some other devices, it gets more complicated. There's no single logical home for it or canonical home for it.
It becomes a different thing. Yeah, who's in charge of that? It's funny because I know a lot of people are going to answer that question differently. Like was it the iPhone or was it smartphones?
In particular, Android, right? Like we can't discount the Android Explosions. Obviously Android has sold more phones and has more market share. But the reason I keep calling that too is it's the 10-year anniversary of the iPhone and it's useful to say the iPhone actually let all this change to me comes down to the App Store.
Like fundamentally, the notion that you're going to buy a beautifully designed device and developers can target it in a pretty fixed set of hardware constraints and that consumers will learn that downloading a new app will give this thing more capabilities has not yet played out in the same way on the, what is it called? But I don't think that's going to happen in the Play Store, right? Like people buy Android apps but the vibrancy of that market is not yet matched to the vibrancy of the App Store. It's fundamentally the App Store that drove the iPhone to be the thing that is now.
I would say the vibrancy is there. I think the quality of your median iPhone app is higher than the quality of your median Android app for various reasons. And the money that you can make on iPhone for developers is higher than the money you can generally make on an Android phone for, again, various reasons. The reason that I give more credit to the iPhone than to Android is Android fundamentally started its life as a reaction to the iPhone.
As it was originally conceived by Andy Rubin and Google, it was basically a BlackBerry competitor. It wasn't even necessarily going to have a touchscreen. And they redid the whole thing when they saw the iPhone. Right.
And there's that great photo of the HTC phone. Yep. The one before the G1 was actually a Windows mobile phone that had been. You're just trolling me right now because you know the answer.
It was an HTC phone. It looked very strange. It's a show. We're supposed to talk to each other.
It's not just me saying things I know you know. When Google said, no, we don't want that phone anymore, HTC said, okay, we'll put it back on the shelf. And then when Palm was flailing and needing to make yet one more Windows mobile Trio while they tried to create WebOS in the background which was itself a backup plan because they were trying to do this other Linux thing which was itself a backup plan and they screwed up another thing. They walked up to HTC and said, you got anything?
And they're like, well, Google didn't want this and that turned into the Trio Pro which, by the way, was an amazing phone. It had a button for Wi-Fi. You could toggle the Wi-Fi by hitting the button on the side. So let's talk about that and we can take a break and move on to other things because you actually did review the Echo Show this week.
I did. There's a lot of conversation about iPads and laptops that we should talk about. But let's talk about that kind of state. I think one of the other really important things of the iPhone and of Apple and I think it's actually now a huge challenge for Apple.
Apple did the iPod. It was a beautiful piece of design. They did the iPhone. It was the first kind of beautiful phone.
Nokia made a bunch of beautiful phones but this was the first one that Skyrocketed and sailed like this. It feels like the mass appeal of the iPhone as a status object, as a design object has actually taught every other company that they need to think this way. So famously for years, Mac hardware was better than Windows hardware. That's not the case anymore.
Windows hardware is really nice. Famously for years, there was the iPhone and there was the Droid and the Droid basically looked like a muscle car. It was a cool piece of hardware but the fit and finish of that thing was not the same as the iPhone at that moment in time. That is just not the case anymore.
The S8 is a beautiful phone. I thought you were leading up to saying that the Echo show is beautiful because dude, it is not. I'm just saying I think that expectation from consumers that everything should be designed well and thoughtfully created. I mean, Hannah Spaniel was on the show two weeks ago now and he just said the word craftsmanship like every other word because he knows that's what consumers want.
Apple started selling that. Do you think that Apple still occupies that space exclusively or is it encroached? That to me is the other main legacy of the iPhone is it created this expectation that you would have this thing in your pocket all the time that was really well designed and it was designed on you as a person rather than a computer in your pocket. Yeah, I don't think they act on that space exclusively.
I think they created that expectation and many other companies have risen to meet it. I think that Apple has slightly more freedom to design the thing that it wants to design because it also designs the software and so when it wants to make a pair of Bluetooth headphones it could just make whatever it feels like because it doesn't really care if it works with anything else when some other company needs to design a pair of Bluetooth headphones they have to test that shit up against a bunch of Android phones and all of a sudden and they have to make sure that it will work across that stuff and it limits what they can physically design whereas Apple when Apple makes a new laptop they just make the exact thing that they want because it matches the software when HP goes to make a laptop they have to make sure that it'll work on Windows and they also have to please a bunch of other stakeholders. Apple doesn't care about the carrier stakeholders they don't really care about enterprise stakeholders as much as other companies have to so they have fewer outside constraints on what they make and so they generally are able to make slightly nicer things. Yeah, I was going to say it feels like Apple's the only company that's really writing its own script so while there are tons of companies that beat Apple in almost each type of thing that Apple does Apple kind of has that freedom.
I also wanted to point out that there's this really good artist technical piece that's about the first iPhone SDK and it's really cool to think of like Steve Jobs left Apple and then he started Next which is an operating system based on Unix and then Next became OS X and then OS X became the iPhone and there's these like deep software roots and I think it's part of what made the app so good like Apple basically made a new skin on top of it and locked it down in a lot of ways but there's like real quality software underpinnings. Can I blow your mind? Yeah. Go back a step earlier in that story and Unix was developed at Bell Labs from AT&T and then go a step later in that story AT&T was explicitly told they're not allowed to make any customizations to the Unix software.
Really? Because that's singular turned to AT&T blah blah blah. Yeah, Unix came out of Bell Labs. In the end.
It's all AT&T. It's always just AT&T. It's all Bell. If we're complimenting our competitors from all we have to do there's also a great story on Motherboard about the first iPhone dev team and like how the jailbreak scene took off and it's wild because it's still there.
There's like 20 year olds in Italy jailbreaking iPhones and they can jailbreak the 7 running iOS 11 like plug your computer but the market for it is gone. People don't want to do it anymore. Anyway, go read The Verge mostly and then go check out I'm going to read an ad and then we're going to do a quick segment I talked to Russell Brandom about the crazy cyber attacks that happened all over the world this week. It's actually like in another time and place it would be the biggest story in the world actually that there are viruses bringing down some of the biggest corporations in the world.
So I'm going to read the ad we'll talk to Russell and come back we're going to talk about The Echo Show Dan reviewed The Eero which I think is an interesting thing to just talk about so generally what's happening there and then I'll just put up a Sierra thing. Let me read this ad. Let me tell you about Norton Wi-Fi riders. Do you have the internet at home?
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Go to Norton.com slash VergeCast to save $30 for your pre-order before July 1. That's Norton.com slash VergeCast. Alright, so I have here today, live in the studio Mr. Russell Brandom.
How's it going Russell? It's great, thanks for having me. Here's what I know about you Russell. You are the only person that has ever made me interested in cyber security.
Not even the Mr. Robot program, Hackers the Film. No, but you were there with me when we were there. Hackers the Film was not about cyber security in any sense of the world.
That was about haircuts. Okay, there were massive cyber attacks this week. Can you just start at the start? Okay, so yeah, so essentially if you got hit by this, your computer basically immediately shut down, encrypted everything on your hard drive, all of your data, and then you got a screen saying send $300 to this Bitcoin address and send us this email if you ever want your data back.
And it hit a lot of places. Merck, the giant pharmaceutical company, someone who worked there at the end nationally, said that more than 50% of their computers worldwide were hit by this in some form or another, which is, if you know the size of that company, you know, Maersk the shipping company, which a lot of people don't know but it's the largest shipping company in the world, is still not running ships into this New Jersey harbor like today's afterwards, which is like, it's just an insane amount of financial damage. Does this not have a name? It has too many names.
It's almost a problem. So Petya is one because it was, this code was similar to a family of ransomware that was known as Petya. But then there were important differences. So another firm called it Not Petya and those two names were equally popular for a while, which was really confusing.
And someone else decided to call it GoldenEye. We've just been saying Petya because I don't think people really... So Petya hit, Maersk hit, Merck, any companies not, Roseneff, the Russian oil company, FedEx, we got some Danish, it was like weirdly regional, but yeah, a lot of people. Yeah.
So like world under attack, right? Oh yeah. What, what happened? Were they after money?
Like what was the goal here? So this is what's weird. Normally, if you see this kind of thing, it happens often enough that there's a name for it, it's ransomware. And it's a pretty, like if you're a cyber criminal, this is like a pretty reliable scam.
It's usually look for some medium-sized company that doesn't have great cybersecurity. $300 is not a lot of money for someone in that situation who wants to recover from like a disastrous cybersecurity. So usually they will just pay off and then you decrypt their computer and everyone walks away at least moderately happy. And this works.
This is the thing that happens. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, if you're like a cybersecurity officer for like a company, this is one of the main things we're looking at. It's like, okay, we might get hit by ransomware.
But this was different. So it was really, really big, which usually you don't want ransomware because you want to stand under the radar. You want people to be paying you to avoid publicity. So you pay a payment for $100 so you don't have to tell your boss, basically.
It was really, really big and it also wasn't very good at being ransomware. It was around 50 people worldwide paid up, which is just not very many. And in part, it's because it doesn't seem like they were able to actually decrypt any computers. So they asked for payment.
After you pay them, you're supposed to email them at this random email address. And they didn't even pick like ProtonMail or some sort of robust email provider. It was just this random German company that was like, oh, they're using this for crime. We'll immediately shut down the email.
So you couldn't contact them. And then as people look at the code, it turned out that they were deleting these boot files, which you would need in order to run the decryption. So they couldn't decrypt them remotely. Like it's possible someone could recover it, but like it's just, you would not be able to perform the service of ransomware on this.
So he's basically wiping these computers. So then, okay, maybe are they bad at ransomware or are they after something else? The other thing about it is that it hit Ukraine really, really hard and not just like companies in Ukraine, a lot of really central infrastructure. So the central bank was involved and the Kiev metro, the Kiev airport, just a lot of kind of really central services.
And it seems like that was deliberate. The virus itself was really good traveling kind of within networks, which is so once one person at the company got it, everyone got it, which is one of the reasons these really big companies were so vulnerable to it. But it seems like the initial infection points were mostly Ukrainian in nature. There was like a sort of poison software update for this Ukrainian tax software.
And then there was what they call a watering hole attack where they got this Ukrainian news site and sort of anyone who visited got this malware. But it was really specific to Ukraine, which is weird. It's not like a choice you would make usually if you were a ransomware guy. So who is like really good at cyber things and hates Ukraine?
A lot of people are looking at Russia and thinking, is this part of a larger cyber campaign? Is this maybe like more in the lines of an ongoing guerrilla warfare campaign rather than just like straightforward criminal acts? Right. And obviously Russia is constantly in the news because of whatever may or may not have happened with our election.
Well, what did happen with our election, to be honest. Is this starting to be like the dawn of a new way of thinking about Russia and cyber capabilities or is this well known and now they're just doing it and they don't have repercussions? So the other thing is there was a more sophisticated attack arguably against this sort of electric utility in Ukraine in December of 2015 that a lot of people saw as, you know, electric utility, it's critical infrastructure. It's like extremely cold in Ukraine in December.
So having this go down for like six hours and the ability to deprive people of electricity is like a fairly fundamental thing. It wasn't down for that long but it really got a lot of people's attention and it was widely attributed to Russia. So yeah, I mean, this is definitely a weird and new thing and I think the weirdest and newest thing about it is we don't 100% know what happened and it's very difficult to respond in like in a sort of national diplomacy political way if you're not really, really sure that this was something that the Russian government chose to do. It's kind of like you just get away with it.
Like you can't really respond in any different way. What is that vulnerability here? Is this something that you can update from when there's 95? This is one of the other weird things about it.
So WannaCry, which was kind of like this last month, there was this specific vulnerability and it's something that was leaked publicly by this weird group. The general assumption is that it was an exploit developed by the CIA or sorry, the NSA and one of their kind of remote staging posts was compromised and this thing got out in the wild and these criminals leaked it and then two weeks later it was being used in ransomware and it was really damaging because not everyone was patched. This is not really like that. I mean, it used that same exploit but after the other global ransomware attack most people were patched.
And certainly a company like Merck, one of those large companies, they're going to be prepared against this. The problem was not that they weren't patched. It was one of them. The vulnerability was something kind of more fundamental and kind of stickier.
I think for years, cybersecurity people have been talking about over-provisioning in networks, which is one of these, like, it's not very sexy, like, it's not like the spy expert thing, but it's just like too many people have admin access in every network. And it's like absolutely a classic thing. Well, if you have admin access in your own Windows network, there are lots of Windows tools that let you remotely install software on other computers on the network. And so that's what this did.
I mean, I was talking about lateral movement. It exploited a lot of those systems. And it wasn't that there was a vulnerability in that particular version of Windows. It was just that you had admin access, so you had the power to install the software.
And you probably shouldn't have had it. And so the guy who was clicking on the sort of, you know, the Ukrainian news site shouldn't probably have had full admin access, but over-provisioning. It's everywhere. So, like, literally, Merck, too many people had admin access in the network, and Windows software pages were just traveling across the network.
I don't 100% know. I mean, I don't want to say specific to Merck, but, like, I assume, yeah, it was very, like, large companies. There's a lot of over-provisioning. There's a lot of, there's sort of these, these rarely used features of Windows networks that let you, it was W-I-M, or W-I-M-S, depending on which one, which I forget, it's like instrumentation or something.
But no one ever uses it unless you're, I mean, the thing they say is this is a favorite of penetration testers, which is the people who get hired to break into Merck so that you can, they can say, well, this is what the hackers are doing in this. But cast them to be sneakers. Oh, yeah, exactly. So, so, those people love this and do it all the time.
Generally, we don't see it outside of that a ton, and this is kind of the first high-profile instance of it really being used to do damage. And just to do damage and chaos, right? That's, that's the goal, it seems like? Yeah, I mean, they stole- So, I mean, we don't know.
The thing is, if the question is what were these people trying to do, once you put it out there, it just spreads, and you can't control how far it spreads, you know? So, so that, we don't know, we haven't found any vectors of them specifically targeting like Merck or Russ after any of that. We have found these vectors that seem like the stuff you would do specifically to target Ukrainian targets, and specifically like Ukrainian banks, which seems weird. But, I mean, to play like the other side of the coin, maybe you just wanted to rob a major central bank, and you thought Ukraine would be like an easy target.
That's very possible. I don't know, that seems kind of dumb, but criminals do lots of dumb things. So, it's just really hard to know. But, I mean, the vectors we've found so far are really the ones you choose to go after Ukraine, and it's just kind of suspicious, given how heated things are between Russia and Ukraine right now.
It just looks really bad. So, what do people need to know? Do you need to, like, take any action? Is it one of those, like, oh, Russ lost to write a post about changing passwords again?
Well, last time it was, you know, patch windows, which is always good advice. This one, it's really tricky. I don't think, I mean, I definitely think if you are running a network, you know, check who really needs to be an admin. That's a good one.
But, there isn't a silver bullet. I mean, I'll say, you know, there are people who were doing tests, and they said, you know, I had all the patches installed, I had all of the right settings, and I tried this out and I still got infected. So, be careful. I mean, there has not been a single sort of golden rule piece of advice that protects you from this so far, which is a little unsettling.
But, I'd also say what we're looking at is a few single points of infection that mostly happened on Tuesday, and then a lot of lateral movement within networks after that, and just, it's spread so far because everything's so interconnected at this point. So, I think, if you haven't been hit already, you're probably safe. Probably. Don't get too comfortable.
Very unsettling way to end this. What's Microsoft saying? They have said that their current existing antivirus is aware of the thing, and they say we'll stop it. I don't want to, like, print that until it's confirmed.
Like, I'm sort of... But that's what they say, and they have a statement, and they're very, you know, unhappy about this happening. But I will say, it doesn't seem like this is... When Y-Cry happened, it was really like the spotlight was on Microsoft, and when they had patched everything, and how much they had patched.
They released this emergency XP patch, and it was really like the focus was on Windows patch management. And it seems like this time around, that's not really as true. Like, that's not as big a part of why this happened. So, in a sense, I mean, that's good news if you're running PR for Microsoft, but I think it's a little unsettling because there's no one at the wheel.
Yeah. So, I don't know. Very unsettling at the end here. It's like, if you're not dead, you're still alive, and no one's in control.
On an uncertain note, it's taking after Twin Peaks. I don't want you to know too much about what's going on. There's still mysteries to unravel. Well, I am excited that you are covering it, and I'm excited that, like I said, you're one of the few people I know who can make it as interesting as you is.
Thanks so much for having me. Talk to you soon. Yep. All right, that was Russell.
Russell, I said this to him, but I'll say to everyone, literally the only person I talk to that makes cybersecurity seem extremely exciting and interesting. Also, literally the only person who doesn't make me completely panic about cybersecurity while also actually telling me the stakes in such a way that I understand why I should be panicking. He's just a very calming presence. Yeah, but also very exciting.
We're all doomed, but it's fun. I'm telling you, random security across all random is going to be a new segment. Okay, so a lot. Just a lot of reviews and previews and things happening.
We can't hit it all. Internet-wide fight about iPads versus laptops. Josh Jopolsky went on a Twitter rampage about why the iPad running iOS 11 is real bad, which I mostly agree with. Actually, I think everyone kind of agrees with me.
And now it's a semantics argument over what you're... Okay, let's just start at the start. Dieter, you reviewed the Echo Show. I did.
I got mine yesterday. I said it yesterday. What do you think? Yeah, right?
Don't think of it. You are expecting too much because you see the screen. No, that's not it. Really?
Here's the one thing that I don't like about it. Okay. It's ugly as hell. That's not it.
When you talk to the regular Echo, you say Alexa, the top lights up and it spins around and looks at you. Right. Right? So it is active in 360 directions.
360 degrees. 360 directions? If you're in that 360 first direction, fuck you. So it's active in 360 degrees.
That's really useful because it's in a very central location in my apartment. And so sometimes I talk to you in the living room, sometimes I'm in the kitchen like wherever. The show has directionality, right? The speaker's face forward, the screen faces forward, the light's on the front.
It sits on the counter and the Echo was in the counter before, so it's always been on a wall away from, not in the middle of the room. Yeah, this is probably just very unique. You just have your setup on the table. So wait, you move your Echo.
Where did you put your Echo? It is in a bathroom now. I have a tap. We also have to do a bunch of work to debate about what Amazon accounts and different Echos are going to be on because Amazon does a thing where when you say Alexa, only the one that is closest to you is supposed to respond.
But that only really works if all the Echoes are on the same Amazon account. So I had to change the Echo show to computer because the other Echo got switched to my wife's Amazon account. It's a whole thing. We're going to have a big fight when I get back.
That aside, this seems like a nice, like if I get a new iPhone, I'm like, I wish I could plug my old iPhone into like Bitcoin mining or something, but no, it's just a worthless piece of trash. So if you get another Echo or get an Echo show. Oh, so this is something I think is really important for the show. It uses the same plug as the big Echo.
Oh, interesting. So like I literally took it out of the box and just unplug it. I think Amazon thinks about things like that. Yeah.
Like you just put it in place and you can take the other one, you got a new plug and just do it. Yeah. They should have used USB-C for all of them. I'm just saying.
Everything should be USB-C. It doesn't charge. Who cares? I didn't get into this as much as I probably should have in the written review, but this is a very, very V1 platform.
Yeah. The screen when you ask for a recipe doesn't stay on as long as it ought to. There are not enough apps that are enabled to show stuff on the screen. And so the knock on the thing is the screen is generally kind of pointless.
Yeah. But I stand firmly by my opinion that that's the right move and to not have put a tablet OS on this. I did not have made it like a Fire tablet because then you would be angry at it because you have to go over and touch it all the time. Farhad actually interviewed Charlie Kendall that had hardware over at Amazon.
And he says that their first cut at the Echo show was just putting a tablet on it, making a tablet OS like the Fire tablet. And they realized that was wrong. And I'm very glad that they did that. My TLDR for the review is thank God it's not an Android tablet because it would have been a disaster.
It's not. Buy this thing if you believe that the screen will be useful later and if you want to have a nice little kitchen TV. But don't buy this thing because it's like an amazing tablet computer in your kitchen. It's not going to be that for a while.
Just having a share of the timers is useful. Yeah. The timers thing is great. Like it's a thing.
I set up last night and played with it. And this morning Becky walked out and I'm like, that's the new one. It's just a timer. She's like, oh, that's really useful.
And then she looked at me and she goes, we have too many voice assistants on our camera. Because I'm like, the old guy with Google Home. And he's like, this has to stop. I'm pretty sure I'm going to put black tape over the camera.
Yeah. The camera seems super useless to me. You guys aren't going to give each other the drop-in privileges? No.
I shall take the bank off. It asks you. What? Really?
Oh, yeah. When you plug it in and you set up in the Amazon app, it's like, turn this on. Like it's like excited. If they just named that like auto answer and you could go and turn it on, I think it would seem less creepy.
Auto answer? What do you mean? Because that's basically all it is. It auto answers the call for you.
Calling it drop-in and like making it a feature, I think it's like a little, I think they're going to get less uptake on it. It's just weird. It's just a weird idea. Like that whole thing about don't give this to people, you give keys to your house.
Yeah. Like, sure, I'm with you. But being able to, like, that's different. You have to show up.
You have to come in. You have to be there. You don't just get to start looking at me without any sort of like larger thing happening. I don't know.
I don't know. Like, I think, I don't know. I wonder if that's a generational thing. Like, I feel like I'm like pretty uncomfortable with video chat.
But like other people do it differently. No, so it's different. You video chat differently on the Echo Show than you do other devices. You don't sit there and look at it.
It's just, the video is there. You sort of walk by, talk to the person, and then you go about doing other stuff. It's at a stupid angle. And so I was like, oh, no, this is bad.
And I don't understand. Blah, blah, blah. But when you start playing with it, you can like go and look at it. Or you can just walk across the room and keep talking.
It's a very, very good speakerphone. The microphone's picked up everything really well. It handles Echo really well. And so the video calling ends up feeling a little bit more like a hangout.
And you don't have to give direct attention. Like, video calling on a phone is really a pain in the ass. Because you're like, you got to stare at the thing. You look at yourself.
You look at the little thumbnail. You look at the camera. And you can't let it drift too low. It's a really intensive attention thing.
But with the Echo Show, you just, you start a video calling. If you're not standing directly in front of it, that's okay. You just start like talking to somebody like they're in the room. And you can like wander over and look at their face if you feel like it.
Yeah. I have to use a speakerphone card. You know, I was, again, excited last night. And I didn't realize there was plastic over the front of the speakers.
And so everyone was like, these speakers are great. And I turned out, it was like rattling and shitty. And everyone just lied to me. It took me and saw this morning.
I really wish I just put that circle light on top. There's something really powerful about that circle light. The Google Home has it on the top. I think it's why we use, I think that's nice to say.
But just having it in the middle of the room and like being able to say, like, it's still. Why don't you just not look at it at all and just trust that it hears you? There's something about having it like, it's user feedback. It's like good.
It's pleasing to have that happen. I don't know. Push eye contact. So you know someone's listening to you.
With your robot. Oh, other thing that's weird when you set up. Amazon explicitly refers to it as she. Yeah.
Which I'm not great about that. Okay. You also looked at iOS 11. I did.
It's an iPad. Yeah. Well, it's on an iPhone. Don't install the beta on your phone.
Yeah. Just don't do it. It literally is a fire. Your phone gets hot every day.
I have to reboot this iPhone 7 like twice a day. I'm sure it'll get better very soon. It'll be fine. You can install it on your iPad unless you use it for work every day, which that's a whole other debate.
Yeah. I don't know. I wrote 3,000 words and did a 10-minute video. So I'm sort of out of things to say other than it radically changes the iPad.
It makes the best case ever that you can make it in your main computer. That doesn't necessarily mean it does make the case. Does that make sense? Yeah.
So I watched Dieter at my house over the weekend that he was doing the work, right? Right when he first got it. Yeah. And I watched him use the iPad, the 10.5 iPad, the new one with iOS 11 on it, swiping like a maniac, keyboard cover.
Right now, Dieter's got his MacBook. That's because the iPad's not a hotel room because I didn't want to carry two devices around. But you picked one. For the office, yeah.
My plan is I'm using the iPad at home instead of a Chromebook or taking my laptop home. And I'm going to go buy a beefier laptop and leave it at the office. Oh, nice. And I will have the iPad at home or a Chromebook, depending on if they ever make an iPad there.
So here's the big debate. Yeah. We're just everywhere this week. iPad versus laptop.
Can one replace the other? Should we even think about it this way? Yeah. Tell me.
It's the question, right? Yeah. Literally, we've gotten to the point with the question where we are litigating the validity of the question itself, which indicates to me that the question is important, right? I feel that it is a 90% device.
Yeah. And that if you don't have a computer, you either are just okay accepting that you can't do the other 10% or you will go to your computer for the other 10%. And that 10% of stuff you've got to do on a quote-unquote real laptop tends to metastasize and grow. And they're like, oh, I need this all the time.
So for me, I work a lot in the browser. And not being able to multitask multiple browser windows side-by-side with another app over there is a pain point for me. I also don't love the way that they've set up spaces where apps get locked to each other when you set up a split screen. There's a lot of little things that you have to play with and get used to.
But there's a lot of stuff that was in that. It used to be like, I don't know, 30% of the stuff you couldn't do. They've cut that down to 10. And so we can have arguments about the UI multitasking.
We can have arguments about the form factor and why don't they just make a good clamshell. We can have arguments about a bunch of stuff. But I believe with the new files app and with a push to get more developers to make stuff like Affinity Photo, that a lot of the stuff that you assumed you would never be able to do an iPad and you need a laptop for, will go away and you'll be able to do it just fine if you can get over the mental shift to tapping and swiping instead of pointing a mouse at it. The lack of fine-grained control for text stuff is still a problem for me.
And the other thing, I don't know, it's super hard to really nail down what it is other than comfort. But not having just a free-form windowing system is limiting in a way that I don't feel like really it needs to be. I think they're just going to keep playing around with the interface on it over and over again. I think what is clear to me is that it's now far more powerful.
You can do a bunch of stuff on it. And that bunch of stuff might eat into the time that you would otherwise use your laptop. But I think the phone and laptop combo is still such a powerful thing. that the iPad has to figure out what it does better than both of those.
Right. Like the argument, I do think it's like hard to, hard to say the question is narrowly whether the iPad will replace laptops. Like there's something about that that doesn't quite get it right. Right.
Because a lot of people buy iPads just to watch Netflix and if it does email pretty good, then you might just do some email. You know, like it's that kind of like slowly biting away at things you need your laptop for. But the core promise of the laptop is that it can just do everything without, without limitation. Or at least the core promise of a desktop.
It's not a laptop necessarily. The form factor is not the thing. But I don't think the iPad is at that point where it can incredibly make that promise. And so if you're going to spend $1,000, $1,200, you're going to pick utility.
Yep. And I don't, I don't know that we're talking about it in those terms, but every time I see this conversation come up, a lot of the assumptions that the iPad will eventually get there, right? The core assumption is that the iPad will start biting off more and more and more. Eventually it'll just bite off everything that most people need.
But I don't think that counts for how much people want to do the maximum amount of things for the money they spend. Right. The case that I tried to make in the preview, and I don't know how coherently I made this case, but by trying to make the interface on the iPad radically simple, it made doing more complicated things more complicated. You had to have a certain kind of like iOS or Apple expertise.
You needed to know the tricks to do it. And they've solved some of those things with iOS 11, but fundamentally getting good at being super productive on an iPad is a different skill than being productive on a computer, on a traditional desktop OS. And my hunch, I don't know if it's a harder skill than it is on a computer, but I do know it's a less prevalent skill. Everybody knows how to use a computer.
And to Apple's credit, they put stuff in iOS 11 that basically recognized that fact and got rid of a bunch of the stuff that we assumed was dogmatic refusal. The file system, to me, they do deserve credit for doing that because until then, it was assumed that Apple didn't believe from a religious perspective that computers should have that thing available to the user. And they're like, yeah, sure. They definitely swung the pendulum.
You can have two split-screen windows, a slide-over window, a pop-up from the doc showing a thing, a notification drop-down that you're expanding to reply to somebody, and a picture-in-picture video window open on that screen if you want to. So that's one, two, three, four, five, and a half kind of things. And it looks crazy. I like, understanding what's happening on a screen with that much crap happening on it is fundamentally more complicated than, oh, there's some stuff on my screen.
My window's over here. I just put it there. And now I know what's going on. I can go back and find it again.
It's almost like the real question here is, is this actually simpler? No. Right. But it's funny because it's being framed as the simple thing will eventually consume more and more of your time.
But there's a real case to be made that the desktop OS for that kind of workflow is much simpler. And I think that's kind of what I'm going to do. But for simple tasks, the desktop OS is more complicated. So for simple tasks, the iPad is simple.
For complicated tasks, it's more complicated. But on a computer, the simple tasks are complicated and the complicated tasks are simple. Wait, no. Yes.
On a computer, everything is kind of the same level of complexity. Okay, fair. Right. It's a fixed level of...
Right. But that complexity is higher than doing basic stuff on iPad. Sure. Right.
I remember this thing years ago where it turns out Japanese kids were so into their phones that they just weren't learning how to use desktop computers. Yeah. And I know that there's a generation of people who have way higher literacy of how to use their phone than they have for their desktop computer. But what's interesting is all these productivity...
I guess the Files app is on iOS, or on the phone version. Yep. But all these kind of new multitasking tricks and like the multi-hot drag and drop and stuff as far as we know is not coming to the phone. The only drag to drop to the phone is the thing where you can drag multiple apps around the home screen to reorganize your home screen.
It really seems like if enough people can play Apple will, think about it. Like if the iPad could be here's a computer you already know how to use. That's the problem with it now. But it's not because the actual productivity stuff is a whole new interface paradigm.
Yeah, but the basic... If you don't use that stuff, it's not there. It's actually the most complex thing about the iPad is that so many of its interface patterns are hidden from you. That's not the West.
So many of its interface patterns are in your face that that's why it's more complex. My thing was like I'd gotten to this point where I was doing most of my programming on my PC. So I was like, okay, cool. I could use my PC for like Visual Studio and Unreal and Unity type programming stuff and then I could live this iPad life because I'm just a writer in the Mac world.
But then I'm super stoked on ARKit and Xcode only runs on Mac OS. Yeah, let's talk about ARKit for a minute. I feel like you and I have been sharing much ARKit stuff back and forth a little bit. It seems amazing.
Like the demos that are out there, the little toys people are making. I saw one that was made in Unity of like a robot lady dancing in a living room. Yeah. I think that's probably the best one I've seen so far.
It's one of the measuring tape which is comically inaccurate but still kind of amazing that it exists. It's better than like just like eyeballing things. Yeah, it's better than nothing but it's still an inch inaccurate. I'm with you.
I just find it so, it's just so impressive. It's just like really, really good software. You can just feel it. Like I have like been kind of experimenting with it on my evenings and it just like, it just kind of makes sense and they give you so much.
Yeah. They give you this like the ambient light of the scene so you can like, if you have like physically based like materials on your 3D objects they can kind of take on the tint of like, you know, you can adjust your exposure as the physical camera's exposure adjusts and it's just like, there's just lots of little things that make it more compelling but it's just also, it's just so easy to use that there's going to be a lot of this stuff and I feel like this will be a great like proving ground for like if there is any useful AR it's going to be discovered in the next year of this, you know, of people, of developers experimenting with AR now that's so accessible to them and maybe AR won't prove to be that useful but I do think it will be very important in fundamental shape to computing and so I'm pretty excited. What's the best thing you've seen? There's just a blank look.
The best thing is in my mind is the thing that I haven't built yet. You want to hear my idea? Yeah, pitch me. Okay, so what I want to do is I want to like create this like virtual gallery and you like, you know, drop these objects in the scene but every object is playing like a loop of sound and based on how close you are to them like the sound will get louder so you can kind of do this like live audio mixing by like moving around through these objects.
Apple changed it so maps when you hit flyover it just lays it down in AR so you can walk through a city like not in real life you're huge but you can just wander around the city in AR. Like that's the sort of thing where every other AR platform is trying to be like very targeted things and Apple's just going to layer it throughout the system in different ways that seems really fascinating. Well, I think I said this before on the Vergecast but what's so impressive to me about ARKit is Apple has solved Apple has figured out that you don't need 50 Project Tango sensors on a phone. They're not trying to eat the elephant.
They're like, if you just enable through software 80% of what people tend to expect from AR it feels like 100%. Yeah. Like I believe that Project Tango's spatial awareness is way better than Apple's spatial awareness on a current iPhone. I also believe that just knowing that there's a flat surface here and this is the color temperature on it is enough for a vast array of things that are going to be really fun and potentially really useful and so Google by like trying to solve the whole problem before they get real devices out to humans is doing itself a disservice because Apple is solving a big enough chunk of the problem that it's going to get a huge leg out.
We're going to have to just start doing like lots and lots of ARKit demo roundups. We're putting one on Facebook I put a bunch together a bunch of little things. I mean this is the argument about the next iPhone. They're going to monkey with the camera and make it better for this.
They're going to have the next great A-series processor that has even more horsepower. Well right now it's like using 10% of the phone's processing power. Only 10%? Mm-hmm.
That's wild. But you know they can't just count on design and the leaks that are coming out like if that's really the design of the next iPhone it's better it's not substantially different but if they close the circle this will be the argument Do you think this is Apple building up to AR glasses or this is just them just like making phones more interesting? I think glasses are so hard. I think so too but man do it work.
Yeah. I don't know. It's just so hard. Like yes the answer is like yes I do but I don't think you build up to the glasses by doing it on the phone first.
I think you make the glasses to the glasses. Do you know what I mean? Like you can't if you do all this stuff on the phone you build a huge investment on the phone That's an applications versus like understanding difference. So you build like the applications on the phone are not going to be applications on the glasses.
Right. But the things that Apple developers learn about doing it on the phone they will be able to apply those learnings to the application on the glasses. So they are currently teaching a million teenage developers how to put a dancing wookie on a table. You know half some half a percent of those teenagers are going to make something that they learn on the glasses that they learn how to do by making the dancing wookie.
Yeah. That's what I'm thinking exactly. The dancing wookie. Yeah.
Yeah. I'm thinking about a dancing wookie. All right. Paul.
Uh huh. Every week you do a segment. The same name. I didn't forget this week.
Yeah. Did you forget the second ad though? No I did not. Okay good.
It's kind of a two-parter. Okay. It's called Spin Safety. So.
Stop the story. So was it two days ago I wrote about this company called Blue Spin that I put on Indiegogo a Bluetooth fidget spinner. Which is the first I've ever heard of a Bluetooth fidget spinner. Yeah.
And it's a fidget spinner that like tracks your spins with a magnet and also tracks movement with accelerometer and touch sensor. It's very exciting. I'm really stoked on it. It has like a tiny battery in it that's not rechargeable and it just like lasts for a really long time because I guess they're using Bluetooth low energy.
Yeah. But today I see this story on our website or actually no it needed to be edited by somebody so I saw it in our chat it was like Bluetooth fidget spinners exploding I was like no no no no So it turns out that there's these Bluetooth fidget spinners that are like Bluetooth speakers and so like it's happened twice where these Bluetooth fidget spinners have exploded while charging and like it's so funny like one of them didn't even come with a charger and like this lady's like saying like I wanted to contact the company but there's no company name it just says made in China. Yeah. It's a wild world and I feel like that like Wild West mentality is kind of working for fidget spinners because you can buy a $5 fidget spinner like if you walk 10 meters in any direction in New York you can purchase a fidget spinner.
Yeah. But that's probably not a great thing to do with Bluetooth devices that have a built-in rechargeable battery. I really enjoy the fact that every product eventually has a Bluetooth speaker integrated into it. Yep.
It's just a thing. It just happens. Like we had hoverboards here the other day. Happened to have Bluetooth.
On that same note I actually had an entry for a second this week. Oh. The Galaxy Note 7 fandom edition. Oh my god.
Which is amazing. It's just amazing. The Samsung is releasing a Note 7 called the Note 7 FE which stands for Fandom Edition so people who are sad that they don't have Note 7 can buy a Note 7. I think that's great.
If you're going to just own something that completely and you're like this phone kind of exploded a bunch but it was actually a great phone. I'm just going to say and this is a verge cast so sometimes our humor maybe is not appropriate. I'm just going to say having it end it isn't dumb and it's a thing that could potentially burn you. Yeah.
There it is. If you don't understand that joke ask your parents. This is like if somebody at this party spilled the steak sauce on Dieter's jacket and then they took his jacket away from him and they framed it and they took it and they took it and they took it I think it's great. I love it.
I mean someone at Samsung had that idea. Like first you're going to refurbish them and sell them as another phone in a different country because we have them and I bet Samsung fans still want to buy one. You're right. Calling it a fan fandom edition is a really great way for them to try and like maybe give the brand a little bit of shine before they announce the next one because now there's going to be a bunch of people saying I'm a fan I wish I could have this and so I got the fandom edition and so they're like giving the Note brand a chance to have a nice happy moment to maybe possibly the next Note which is rumored to be coming soon.
The Galaxy Note 7 still banned on planes are they going to have to write a letter to the FAA being like no no this is the fandom edition and they have to change the announcement because they already but we can check to see if you have the fandom edition before you fly. A lot of questions here. Alright that is the show I want to mention something very important at the very end here Game of Game of Thrones is back on the verge Game of Thrones is starting in two weeks Emily of Shida has handed the throne master I don't know what you call somebody who runs a fantasy you say you hand the baton it's like a scepter it's a commissioner it's a scepter what's the egg thing that kings have to carry the egg of the egg of no it's a thing it's like the Roman emperor had an egg and that signified the Roman emperor-ness not like the signet the egg of authority the ovoid of responsibility the sphere of the kingdom maybe it wasn't Roman maybe it's like Holy Roman we can't just move past this it's like a king's had an egg that allowed them to give their powers very confidently too what was the egg that king's had everybody wrote the egg right that's what I said in my tongue I don't know what to search for I'm searching for like rich person eggs rich person eggs alright if you know the answer to that question egg for kings the point tweet I'm sure he would like to know the answer about his egg question anyway Emily of Shida has handed the scepter of commissioning to Caitlin Tiffany on our team she's been running Game of Thrones you can go to Fantasizer sign up for Game of Thrones or Fantasy League for Game of Thrones it's coming back there's a post on the site check it out I love it it's one of my favorite series we do so that is my last week you can also tweet at us Dieter he's still furiously googling FYI I just googled the accoutrement of power to see if that would do it well that just sounds like garnishing that just sounds like carefully sliced radishes of authority it's Dieter's at back one Paul's at future Paul I'm at reckless you can tweet at us we love your feedback you can go to iTunes leave us feedback there you can also check us out on Anchor which is a new podcasting platform Andrew Marino our producer has been putting cool experiments with Caitlin with Casey Newton with other people on Anchor I think Casey's been running it this week so check us out there that is where we're piloting new podcast ideas we love your feedback you can also listen to most of the Verge Extras podcast feed just let us know we need to have more shows we're going to start making more shows we're just doing a lot of little pilots and experiments to figure out what that next thing is so we're dying for your feedback on that. In the meantime, you can also listen to other great podcasts about tech from Recode.
Recode has To Embarrass to Ask with our wonderfully talented senior editor, Warren Good. It has Recode Decode with Kara Swisher and Recode Media with Peter Kafka. And if you're a media nerd, highly recommended. That's it.
That's Verge Cast. Rock and roll. The Globus Krusiger. Yeah.
The Globus Krusiger. I got it too. Well, that is not a good name for a podcast. Thank you.
Yahoo Answers. The Globus Krusiger. Use the coins and iconography along with the setter as part of the royal regalia. It's Latin for cross-bearing orb.
Yeah, it's an orb with a cross on the top of it. Well, now Caitlin has it. She runs game games. She runs sign- That is Verge Cast.
It's over this time for Rock and Roll Paul. Pull this. The Globus Krusiger.