The Uncast Show
Owning an Unraid server gives you the ultimate control over your data and reduces your dependence on The Cloud. Join host Ed Rawlings to learn how to get the most out of your Unraid server, stay up to date on relevant news and topics, and get to know members of the Unraid community!
The Uncast Show
Hard Links, Router Security & the Wildest Stuff at Computex — Ed & Stefano Unleashed
In this episode, Ed and Stefano explore the real-world challenges of running tech YouTube channels—from the time commitment behind content creation to upcoming innovations on their platforms. They dig into technical topics like hard links, backup strategies, and the latest Unraid updates, while also addressing broader issues such as router security, changes to Microsoft Authenticator, and how AI is becoming part of everyday life.
The discussion continues with a look at YouTube Premium’s impact on creators, new hardware innovations from Computex, the evolution of graphics cards, and the future of cooling solutions. They also reflect on the Mandela Effect, the expectations placed on open source software, and Plex’s controversial data policies—before wrapping up with thoughts on the direction of their podcast.
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The hosts of Ed & Stefano Unleashed are passionate about home servers, open-source tech, and sometimes going off on tangents. The views and opinions expressed on the show are solely those of the hosts and guests and do not reflect the opinions, policies, or positions of Lime Technology, Inc. This show is intended for entertainment and informational purposes only. Listeners are encouraged to do their own research, experiment responsibly, and not hold the hosts accountable for any questionable home lab decisions. Most importantly, enjoy the show!
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Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Ed and Stefano Unleashed. So today is episode four, but unfortunately, due to real life getting in the way and Stefano letting me down, look at him there miming away. Hey, he's always the joker, isn't he?
Speaker 2:I'm just repeating what you're saying.
Speaker 1:Stefano is not able to join us because, like I said, real life's getting in the way, so we've had to record this a week early. So where are you going to be when this goes live then, stefano?
Speaker 2:I will be in Chicago away for my birthday weekend.
Speaker 1:Oh, nice. Well, we all hope you have a great time. You know, not too much drinking, I hope.
Speaker 2:I don't plan on it actually.
Speaker 1:Awesome man. Anyway, let's move straight on to our first segment, which let's talk about YouTube channels. Now I just want to say to everyone out there who may follow my Space Invader 1 YouTube channel that I haven't made a video for quite a long time, basically because of my new job role over at Lime Technology. I've been settling in and getting used to how everything works, so I decided to put that channel on pause for a while and I've only been making content over here. But I've got a few videos that are in production that are going back onto my channel, and so watch out for them soon, because the channel will be coming back. So what I thought I'd do, stefano, is we both run YouTube channels and you know how do you find running your channel on a day-to-day basis and what do you find the challenges of running a YouTube channel.
Speaker 2:So just to kind of back up a little bit I almost hardly ever post anymore.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Um, I work a full-time job, um, and then that takes up a lot of my time.
Speaker 1:Can I ask what your full-time job is for the viewers who don't actually know?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm just assistant administrator, so just you know typical system admin stuff so that takes up a lot of my time, and you know.
Speaker 2:Then you come home and you got to like do chores and we spend eight hours a day at work and then you have to do chores and you get home or just like generally just cleaning up or whatever. Even the act of eating dinner takes time right and you gotta clean up after yourself. Like it's just hard to stay motivated to continue making stuff. So if I do make content I'm staying up till 11, 12, one o'clock at night and it can be really tough. And then on top of that, you know, if you have kids you've got to go do their activities, and then there's holidays and just all these things that are always getting in the way and it's actually pretty challenging to consistently make content, especially like you, I'm the only person on my team, so I got to do the filming, editing, recording I guess I said that twice like you know, planning everything or like emailing all these different companies, and it's just a lot to manage. You got taxes that get in the way.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of people don't realize the amount of time it actually takes to make a short video and many times I've had people say oh, ed, can you make a quick 10 minute video on this? But on the creator side, a 10 minute video is certainly a lot more than 10 minutes or even an hour, two hours. You know, for me, a lot of my videos will take me, you know, 20 to 30 hours, to be honest, from start to finish to make. I'm not sure if that's me being super slow, but you know what's your experience with the time to make a video, stefano.
Speaker 2:I try not to think about it too much, but I can definitely say that short videos take way longer for some reason. I guess because you're trying to figure out like it's like a puzzle. You're trying to figure out how to put the most information in and keep it as short as possible, so you have to be very, very specific with your words. I think that makes it more challenging. And, just using the Unraid Digest as an example, those are typically like four to six minutes, sometimes less, and it probably takes me a solid like eight hours to make just one of those, and then meanwhile I can make a video that's like 20 minutes long and that probably takes like six hours.
Speaker 1:So I don't know yeah, you know, very different to what people think. Anyway, on, my channel is coming back and the first video is going to be about a container called ersatz tv, which is a really awesome container. Not sure if you've ever heard of that one of you, stephano what is? It's super cool. It allows you to make your own tv channel basically. So you kind of like choose what media that you've got that you want to be in your tv channel. So if it's a bunch of, say, 1980s tv shows, you can kind of put them all in and say I want these to show and the tv channel will basically broadcast those episodes randomly or in a certain order, whatever you prefer, nice. And you can also intersperse them with actual ads. So a lot of people they'll download an ad pack from, say, the 1980s, 1990s and so they'll have the official adverts from those kind of years being played at the same time. And so you can come home from work and go into your office. What have you into your kind of front room you can put on the channel and the channel will play through things like MBplex. You can add it as a channel and you might be kind of halfway through a Stargate Atlantis episode. So it's just like the old days when you'd come home from school or college and there'd be an episode half playing and you'd have to kind of fill in the gaps in your mind of what happened beforehand. So it's really kind of fun and you get to see episodes that you'd never normally watch.
Speaker 1:And you know a lot of times, you know for me, when I'm watching something on my media server. It A lot of times for me, when I'm watching something on my media server, it's sometimes hard to think what to watch and you're thinking, oh yeah, I've seen that. What should I watch this? But then when you've got something on a schedule that's coming up maybe random sci-fi episodes if you make your own sci-fi channel it's really really cool. So that's the first episode back on the Space Invader 1 channel. And one thing I was worrying about with that is I was thinking well, if it's like streaming out 24-7, I don't really want it to be using my hard drives, but it doesn't actually wear the hard drives. It's not reading from the hard drives unless actually someone's watching the stream. So it's keeping track of where everything should be internally and then only when someone accesses the stream it starts transcoding and pushing that out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 1:So it's really, really cool. So, you know, look out for that, guys. On my Space Invader 1 channel and on the Uncast channel we've got a really cool video that it may have actually been released before this episode, so, if it has, look at the video before this one. But we've got a really interesting podcast interview where I have interviewed Tiffany, the co-CIO of Unraid, and Eli, and it's a deep dive into where Unraid is now, where it came from and what's coming next and some really cool announcements of some new features. So check that out, guys, if you want to know all about that, about the state of where Unraid is now. But talking about videos on the Uncast show, there was recently a Jellyfin video out and I had a question on that video that I've heard many, many times and that is about hard links. Now, stefano, I wonder if you can just explain to our audience what hard links are before I go any further.
Speaker 2:So I don't really know, to be honest, because I only use soft links.
Speaker 1:Okay, sorry, right, okay. So hard links, okay. So basically, imagine you've got a city. Okay, so you to chicago, yeah, like for your birthday, yep, right now, while this is being broadcast. So if you're going from where you live there might be a signpost pointing to chicago, okay, but then from where I live there'll be oh, I see on the camera there there was my hands two signposts pointing to chicago. But chicago only exists in one place, okay.
Speaker 1:So a hard link is basically two references to that same file on the same disk. So if you delete one of the hard links, the file is still there. It's only deleted when you delete both of the hard links. So when there's nothing else referencing that actual physical file on the drive, then the file is no longer there. So hard links have to be on the same file system. So if it's like a pool of disks, it has to be in the same pool. Or if it's on individual hard drives, a hard link can only exist on the same file system. It can't exist across, say, from disk one. A soft link, a symlink, know, it can be anywhere. It's just like a shortcut. So hard links are slightly different, but it allows the file to exist in two places in the file system and to and to the file system it is.
Speaker 1:It's a separate file in in a sense. So a lot of people have said to me why do I not like hard links? Because I always push that. I think the best way to store media is to have you know. Well, on the unread array anyway, you know if you're using a Z pull it's slightly different.
Speaker 1:But on the unread array, because we can have drives spin down when they're not in use, I always really like to have, say, my movies on one disc and my TV shows on another, or kind of movies on two discs, tv shows on two discs, just so they're not mingled up together. So if I'm watching a movie, all of the other discs can spin down in my server. But if I have them spread across everything using high water, every time I go to my server and browse a movie or go into the movies it's going to spin up all of my hard drives. So I like it when I'm watching a movie that only one drive needs to be spun up or a tv show, only one does. And if I watch the next episode of a tv show, that drive's already spun up, nothing else has to spin up okay, so that's why I like to keep it like that.
Speaker 1:But, um, people use hard links who use torrents like I don't use torrents personally, I'd rip all my own blu-rays and dvds and I prefer to have like control over you know the bit rate and how things are that way. So for me I don't really need to actually use hard links anyway. But if I was to use hard links I would actually do it in a slightly different way than. There's a guide online called trash where it's recommended that you set up a media share and you have all of your media inside of that. And then inside the media share you have, like, say, tv shows, music movies in separate folders and you have a download share inside of that as well. So that's on the array across all of the disks, the cache, all of the hard drives in your array. So then if you're using torrents and you download your favorite Linux ISO and that goes into the download share and then you want to look at that on Plex, you have the Rs make a hard link to it. So it's still physically in the torrent software and it's able to be seeded still physically in the torrent software and it's able to be seeded, but it's also able to be in plex, mb or jellyfin renamed as the correct file, and it can be there instantly. And people call it an atomic move. So that's why people like it, because you don't have to actually copy the file from, say, your torrents, interplex and have the file exist twice, taking up twice as much space while you're seeding. So then when the seeding's finished, the torrent software can delete that hard link and it's no longer in the torrent software, but the file still exists and it's there for Plex.
Speaker 1:So people say, why don't I like hard links? I think hard links are cool, but if I was to set them up, I'd it slightly differently. I would still have my granular shares set up, so I'd have movies on disc one, so tv shows, tv shows on maybe disc three. But then inside of movies I would have a downloads folder and inside of tv shows I'd have another downloads folder and then in my torrent software, such such as Deluge, I would map separate paths into those folders and then using kind of labeling so if it's a TV show or a movie, linux, iso, I would have it, when it's finished, move it into the completed and then with the subcategory of what it is, which will then put it actually in the correct disk, so you know, in the movies downloads or TV shows downloads. I hope I'm explaining myself well here.
Speaker 2:I think it's a little too early for me.
Speaker 1:And yeah, it's very, very early for you, and so the hard links would work exactly the same. But you can keep it on individual disks. But it's just a lot. It's a bit more setup to do on the torrent client side because you need multiple paths to where the file ends up after it's been downloaded. So I did promise in the comments of jellyfin to explain why I do or don't like hard links. Um, I do like them, they're really useful, but I don't need them. So that's my answer for that.
Speaker 2:Very concise and well explained, sir.
Speaker 1:And so, anyway, talking about other videos, by the time this video goes live as well, we should have our app of the month, which is Duplicati this month, which is a really cool piece of backup software that allows you to backup your well, backup, really anything from your Unraid server, any share you want, either to local storage elsewhere, another server elsewhere, cloud storage like Google Drive, onedrive, all of the kind of normal culprits it can be backed up to, and the good thing is, you can actually encrypt it locally and then it uploads it in chunks to cloud storage, so when it's in rest in the cloud, even Google or stuff can't see what your files are. So it's very secure and it gives you a way of being able to send backups to the cloud but still stay private. I'm not sure if you've ever used any software like that yourself, stefano.
Speaker 2:Nope, it's all too advanced for me.
Speaker 1:I'm going to ask you do you actually make backups of your important stuff and, if so, how do you do it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I do backups. I have a server locally and I just use rs sync to go from one server to the other. And I used to have a server in Florida and I would just have WireGuard VPN set up between my server and that server and then I would our sync over that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And obviously I use user scripts to have some sort of like automation to it Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, at the same time as the duplicative video goes out, there should be a blog post on the unread website in to do with backing up, where you'll see a blog post. I've written about backups and I've included like a script that I use where you can basically just put into an array the various shares you want backed up.
Speaker 2:For people who don't like kind of scripting and stuff, I've tried to make it as easy as possible because rsync is super powerful and I think it's such a great tool, but it could be quite um inaccessible for new users if they're not experienced with any cli stuff yeah, and it's funny because, like, people ask me all the time like, oh well, what about file versioning, and you know, or whatever, and I'm like I don't, I'm just backing up data, like I don't need file versioning, I don't need, you know, snapshots, like I, just I, it's worked well for me for I guess 10 years now. Like I, I don't, if I needed that level of you know, uh, I guess, protection or recovery, I would probably look at something else, but I just, I just have good practices, I guess I don't know, like three, two, one, right, so yeah.
Speaker 1:So you know there's quite a lot you can do with with our sync as well. Is you can, you can set it so when you've got, you know your source and destination. If something's deleted out the source, you can have it deleted at the destination. So it's like a strict kind of mirror of how it is yeah, but what a lot of people don't realize.
Speaker 1:What you can do is you can have it. So when it actually deletes the stuff out of the destination is it doesn't fully delete it, it just moves it to another file and you can have it renamed like deleted on this date, and so you keep the files. So you've got the best of both worlds.
Speaker 2:See, I just never deleted anything. It's never a problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but anyway, for those of you who have watched the podcast with myself, tiffany and Eli, you may have heard Eli saying that there is a new feature in Unraid being worked on currently where there's going to be a full backup system built into Unraid so you can back up to another server or another destination all from the GUI, and it's going to use rsync on the back end, I believe. So that's something it's not out yet, but it's definitely coming and I think that's going to be a real game changer really for for unraid, for us to be able to have yeah, that'd be really cool built into the gui something especially with scheduling, yeah so yeah, you can.
Speaker 1:You can do it all from the GUI. So you know that's going to be super cool.
Speaker 2:Do you use Unrain's like cloud backup for your USB? You use that right.
Speaker 1:I do, yeah, I actually really like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's nice.
Speaker 1:I find it really useful. But also, what's changing with that as well is there's going to be an option to be able to actually upload it to a cloud provider of your choice and have it encrypted before it uploads. So yeah, I think Eli was saying it's going to use Rclone on the back end for everything.
Speaker 2:That's a good idea. That'll be really nice.
Speaker 1:That's definitely something to look out for. I'm really excited about that because it's a built-in backup system for shares and the flash flash drive. It's going to be really, really, really useful. So anyway, just I'm talking about duplicati. Again, there's a very similar container called duplicity. I think that's how you say it. I'm probably pronouncing it wrong. I don't think anyone's ever quite worked out how you're meant to pronounce that yet but, and another.
Speaker 1:Another very cool piece of software that I like is another one, another container I'm not sure how many of you guys out there have used it is called your backup. Backup is a awesome piece of software, um. What it is is it? Basically you run it on windows, mac, linux as well, and it just allows you to do a backup of whatever computer it's running on, either just like file backups or a full system. Well, and it just allows you to do a backup of whatever computer it's running on, either just like file backups or a full system image, and it allows your unraid server to be the target. So you run like a server on unraid of your backup and then on on the um pc clients. You run it on there as well and it will just, at scheduled times, do full image backups and file backups across your unraid server. And it will work across the internet as well if you set it up to do so, or across tailscale, something like that. So that's really cool as well. So anyway, um, should we move on onto unraid news stephano?
Speaker 1:yeah sure yeah, so unraid news. So we've had unraid 7.1 since we last spoke, stephano, I believe yep 7.1, 1 and 1, 2, I believe yeah, so you know, 7, as everyone knows, or 7.1, you know, introduce wireless support importing foreign cfs pools.
Speaker 1:as we mentioned before on the podcast, there's some fixes to various bugs. There was a mover empty disk bug that potentially could have caused data loss. That's been patched. And a VM OVMF boot problems for Fedora VMs, where Fedora VMs wouldn't boot or you couldn't install them due to the OVMF. That's now been fixed and the OVMF changed, so Fedora VMs can be installed and boot absolutely fine. So on to other news the Asus router botnet exploit, stefano. What's all that about, man?
Speaker 2:It's a big problem. Big problem, ed. So apparently there's been a firmware hack where the attackers have loaded their SSH backdoor into the firmware and so now, even allegedly, even if you update the firmware on some ace asus routers not all of them, but some of them, specifically soho routers uh, even with a firmware update, that backdoor will stay there forever. I don't know how they accomplish this. That's's pretty impressive. This also seems to me to indicate that, like, if you have one of the affected routers, that, like, the only way to get rid of it is by trashing the router.
Speaker 1:Wow that's crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then there are other routers that are also affected, but updating the firmware will actually clear out that, I guess that backdoor. And then there's also recommendations for, like, blocking some ip, ip addresses after you've removed them, deleting the authorized keys, um. So there there are some known workarounds, and this apparently doesn't just exclusively affect asus. Uh, some other brands have been affected, but we're not sure if it's like the same exploit, uh, or quite exactly how they went about it so I'm assuming this is affecting routers that are having, like the admin web, ui exposed on the wan side?
Speaker 1:am I correct in assuming that?
Speaker 2:um, so I think for some of the other brands, yeah, like if you haven't changed the default password or the password's too weak, then the attacker was able to gain access, upload their custom firmware or whatever it was, and then, alternatively, for some other ones, the users actually had to download some package and then the exploit was basically installed by the user.
Speaker 1:All right okay.
Speaker 2:But there's also some uncertainty. It affects VPNs as well and open ssl uh on the routers.
Speaker 1:So there's a there's a lot of like complexity going on and and just I don't know, attackers always amaze me with like the things they come up with to to hack people's devices and stuff so you know, you know, my opinion is, with these things like never expose your router's web interface online, no matter how strong your password is, because, yeah, it might, you know, you never know when there's going to be an exploit, and these kind of things, these kind of things happen.
Speaker 2:So I wonder how many like people's devices they've done that by accident or they come out of the box already exposed. Or they come out of the box already exposed because like a good example of this and it's not really like a home seho device, but like even like my ubiquity stuff. Like oh it's, yeah, I mean it's not directly exposed to the internet, but I can still access my router through the internet and I hate that that's like the default thing and you can disable it, but still it's just like this whole everything connected to the web all the time is is not good next, it'll be your dishwasher well, I don't care if anyone hacks my dishwasher you say that until it starts running water 24 7 no, but um.
Speaker 1:I think you know it's time to wash that dishes.
Speaker 2:That was my dishwasher mouth opening impression it looked totally good to me.
Speaker 1:I thought you were my dishwasher for a minute, but but no, like um, it just goes to show how useful things like tail scale are. You know, if you need to access your router, like if I ever need to access mine, it will always be through tailscale or, before I use tailscale, it'll be through open vpn. And it's just another good reason why you should use something like pf sense, use an open source firewall, because in my opinion, it's much more secure than these commercial routers, like you know, asus, etc. But yeah.
Speaker 2:Plus like you get pf sense sounds like cetera, yeah. And plus like you get PFSense has like IDS right. So Active Detection and Prevention right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can do all of that on it. It's not easy to set up, but yes.
Speaker 2:And I'm sure a lot of these like home routers have no sort of IPS at all. I mean, I understand it's probably like expensive to do or set up, but I but I mean most a lot of home routers are like nearly 300 now and that's something that's so expensive, yeah and you can get a like an entry-level enterprise.
Speaker 1:They look cool those stuff. Now they've got lots of aerials and they look like a spaceship. Come on like crowns.
Speaker 2:I'm not hating on them, I'm just saying they're expensive and you could spend for the almost the same amount of money. You could get an enterprise router that has ids and ips and that should, in theory, protect you from malicious attempts access.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure, you know these cheaper routers. Well, you know, not even cheaper, like you say, but these, these isp routers, man, you're really just asking for trouble, in my opinion yeah, they're, they're so bad you know, in britain anyway we've got like bt sky and there's kind of major isps.
Speaker 1:They just buy the cheapest routers they can. You know they're not going to put any investment into the router. They give you the router and you rarely ever see any type of firmware updates. Most people don't even know that it's possible to do that for their router. It will be there as long as they have the router on day one. It will be there and it won't ever be updated, unless it's been built in to have auto updates built into the router.
Speaker 2:And the same kind of goes with like modems and gateways, like the ISPs usually have the ability to remotely access those devices and update them or modify them so that like oh hey, you change your DNSns, we're changing back to our dns, like all that kind of stuff. A lot of people don't know that you know normally you can in the united states anyway you can disable it most of the time, like I've heard comcast, um, basically, um, divert dns.
Speaker 1:I'm not sure if that's true, but um, you can change your dns, say on your PC or something, and Comcast will have a rule in their actual firewall of the router to redirect any traffic on port UDP53, and it will still go through their DNS. But you know a good reason to use DNS over HTTPS, so they can't do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the problem, I think too, is we're kind of moving away from routers and we now have these super advanced modems. They're not really even modems, they're just gateways, right, and the gateways can do routing and switching. But it's like a lot of the times, at least in the United States, you're stuck with that and removing it, especially for, you know, I'm somewhat skilled with computers, as you might know. I mean, I've been around for a few years and a lot of the undertaking, even for me, is daunting and there's no way the mass population is going to try and bypass their gateway to prevent things like that. So it's, I don't know. It's only a matter of time before you get locked in and they're just scraping all your DNS stuff. Everyone's going to have to be subscribed to a VPN.
Speaker 1:Yeah, everything's just monetized nowadays, so I'm sure forcing the DNS through, from what I've read about Comcast it happening, it's basically just to collect data and be able to sell it, Sell it yeah. What are you searching?
Speaker 2:So Comcast don't want to give that up, you know. So yeah, I'd always like hearing they're like oh, your data is worthless. And it's like if it's so worthless, why is everyone collecting it and selling it? Now I understand they're collecting and aggregating it and that's how they make money, but it's like, hey, man, you should just give me 10 of those sales just saying, yeah, if, imagine if we aggregated all of the data that like so Plex is selling our data, or everyone's selling our data, if we aggregated all those companies, we would actually make some money back.
Speaker 1:We've actually got a little thing to talk about Plex again doing more shenanigans than you know this episode, but you know we'll leave that till we get to that section.
Speaker 2:Sorry, I'm jumping ahead.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but you know. Going back to the ASUS routers, I guess what users should do, in my opinion disable any WAN access, as I've already said in your router's admin panel. Never expose a web UI to the internet. Always use a VPN if you need to connect into your home network. Update the firmware as soon as possible. Change the password on your router. Update the firmware to the latest one. I'm sure there's patches for this exploit. Now, if you x, if you update before you've been exploited, you should be okay do home routers typically update themselves like?
Speaker 2:can you schedule that on? What, sorry, do home routers typically like have a scheduling process for them to update themselves, or that's a really good question. I haven't used one a long time I couldn't tell you exactly.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I don, I don't know. Yeah, neither do I. I would kind of think no, because if they updated at a certain time it would cut off the internet for the people using it, and that might you know.
Speaker 2:I feel like it's a no, because I mean, every month now it's like oh, you know, this TP-Link home stuff has joined the botnet. That now is you know, ddsing stuff has joined the botnet. That now is you know, uh, ddsing, you know, or part of the dds, or oh my gosh whatever it's part of a bot.
Speaker 1:I know what you mean. I know what you mean, stephanie and now it's asus.
Speaker 2:The next week it'll be cisco and linksys.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be every d-link who still exists somehow but anyway, like you know, talking about security um stephano, yep, it's always good to um have a password manager, but microsoft think don't actually agree that's such a great idea from what I'm hearing about Microsoft Authenticator dropping its password feature. Have you heard about that?
Speaker 2:I have heard about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you know, for the audience out there, if you're using Microsoft Authenticator and you're using it to store passwords, well, I think from July 2025, microsoft removing that feature fully and you're using it to store passwords, well, I think from july 2025, microsoft removing that feature fully and you will probably be warned that stored apps in the password, stored apps in the password stored, stored passwords in the app. You're being warned to export them before they're deleted, because microsoft are just pulling that feature and they're going to delete all of your passwords. But they are saying that you can actually export easily to the Edge browser and all your passwords will automatically go there, surprise, surprise. But if you want to put it anywhere else, well, you have to export it manually. So, thank you, microsoft, but no, thank you, I do not want to be using the Edge browser.
Speaker 2:Not for my password manager anyway. So I actually have Microsoft Authenticator and I had no idea you could use it as a password store.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so I just opened the app just to like check it out, and I clicked on passwords and they have a big banner that clearly says Autofill via Authenticator ends July 2025.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's safe to show this on screen, maybe.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but via authenticator. Ends july 2025. Yeah, yeah, it's safe to show this on screen? Maybe? Yeah, but you know this isn't a feature removal. It's microsoft saying use edge or else. In my opinion, yeah, that's what it feels like it's like the software version of getting locked in a room with clippy and bing together, isn't it so?
Speaker 2:what password manager do you use, if at all?
Speaker 1:I use. I use self-hosted bitwarden oh yeah, that's right I expose it only through tailscale, so it isn't exposed online at all that?
Speaker 1:yeah, that's good so, moving on to kind of ai news, this is quite interesting. I think I'm not sure if you've heard that um united arab emirates have made chat gpt plus free for all of its citizens, did not? You know, obviously they're thinking that it's important for their citizens to have access to a good AI. You know, obviously United Arab Emirates is a you know, a very wealthy country, so they can probably afford to strike up deals like this. But I would never imagine the UK or United States giving all their citizens free chat GPT plus.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, interesting to be hearing about that you know, like it it's actually kind of funny and in a way, and I think this is actually a good move, because think about how bad search engines have become. And I don't know about you, but like, even using chat GPT to just shop online has become remarkably good. And it I don't know like what's going. I guess, like search engines are so focused on trying to make money by serving, you know, like links, specific links or ads or whatever that they've. They've really shot themselves in the foot. And I'm at the point now where I've I basically go straight to chat, gpt, dot com or whatever. That they've really shot themselves in the foot. And I'm at the point now where I basically go straight to chatgptcom or whatever and search for whatever I want, instead of just using Google or DuckDuckGo or whoever. And their little AI assist thing is even worse than just going straight to an AI. Even Copilot's honestly pretty good.
Speaker 1:So do you use the paid version of chat, gpt, or the free version? Right now, just use the free version so what I'm wondering is how long is it going to be before, in between your chat, gpt chats, there will be an inserted ad?
Speaker 2:yeah, I am. I do wonder about that pretty often. Um, I don't know, I don't know, like I'm not too worried about it, like I like they should get paid, I should probably pay for it because at the moment, I'm sure you know, the training data of everyone using ai is far more valuable than any ad revenue yeah, yeah but as soon as, like um, we're not useful for the training data, I'm sure we'll start seeing ads in both the free and the paid versions.
Speaker 2:In my opinion, yeah, basically my attitude right now is kind of wait and see and keep using it until it gets so bad that I have to do something else, kind of like YouTube ads.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so yeah, excellent segue there, stephanie. So there's been a new version of a paid version of YouTube, youtube Premium Lite. So it's a cheaper tier of youtube premium, but it has no downloads, no background play, but it does remove ads. So there is a major caveat. Yeah, with that removing ads, stephanie yeah, some ads, uh.
Speaker 2:So there it's not perfectly clear, in my opinion, just reading, uh, what youtube has put out, it's not perfectly clear what ads are actually being removed. Um, they have genres of youtube, uh, where there will be no ads, like gaming, beauty news, uh, and some more, but they don't specify what more is, uh. But at least the gaming port. I think there's a lot of people that ingest gaming content me specifically, and that's kind of good, and I imagine a lot of young children watch a lot of gaming as well, like Minecraft videos and stuff. So at least they got that one target. But shorts you still have to watch ads on shorts, music videos and also other content.
Speaker 1:Whatever that is. Yeah, the no background play, I think, is like you know. Surely they could let people you know have background play, so if they listen to a podcast or something, you can just minimize the app and it can still continue you know, yeah, they should really have to pay the extra. You know what is it? It's like $7.99 for the Lite. And how much is YouTube Premium, the full one, now $15?.
Speaker 2:The United States is $13.99.
Speaker 1:$13.99, yeah, so consider it about more, although you do get the YouTube Music. I've never used YouTube Music ever, to be honest, neither have I.
Speaker 2:So before, when their music app was separate and you could host your own stuff or access your own stuff through it or however it worked way back in the day, that's when I used it and then, when they sort of started trying to monetize it and I don't know like, do the YouTube thing or the Google thing of destroying it, I stopped using it and I've just never gone back to YouTube music. I've had YouTube premium for a couple of years now, youtube music. I've had YouTube premium for a couple of years now and for me it's been worth it, especially the last couple of years, as I've sort of made less YouTube content and I can also share it with my kid and if you, if your child, is on YouTube, you absolutely have to have ad blocker. I mean it is atrocious the kind of ads that get served.
Speaker 1:I'll tell you, stefano, once I was like this close to making a video on my YouTube channel that was titled these ads are not suitable for my YouTube, because when YouTube started saying you had to verify whether your content is suitable for advertisers, I was quite cross because I'd be watching one of my own videos.
Speaker 1:You know, just you know, you know, after I've uploaded it, checking it seems okay and there'd be adverts like I remember there was one like it was in the kind of winter, I think, just after the Ukraine war had started. So in Europe the price of gas and things like that were very, very expensive. So people were really worrying about, you know, being able to heat their homes in the winter, and elderly people, you know, on their pensions, who don't have a lot of money. Obviously, you know, it's really really hard for them. And there was this advert that had this little kind of heater like this that was meant to kind of plug into the wall and they were trying to make out that it would heat your whole house. And you know, going, oh, these two students at like harvard university found out their dorm room was like too cold and they, so they made this thing and you know, like, um, big oil is trying to suppress it.
Speaker 1:Buy it before it gets banned, yeah, and, and I'm thinking like, okay, youtube, so you can actually check my video, go through it and check that. I haven't got two seconds of some I don't know kylie minogue song. Sorry, that's a bit old. I don't know some kind of music in there, that will get me a copyright strike or something. You can actually check that content every time the video is uploaded, but you can't do the same for adverts, for like scams basically.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, this was about a hundred pounds for this stupid little heater that defies the laws of physics, and I'm thinking. Well, you know, that's why I wanted to make the video and, kind of, I actually collected a whole load of adverts. There was another one as well where they were saying that isps basically will give you a package and then they will throttle it later on and this um plug-in device apparently keeps the floodgates open. What it was, it was just a wi-fi repeater. You know that was worth probably about 10 bucks and they're selling it for like 50. And you know, yeah, it will probably improve the wi-fi in one room for someone. So they they think, oh yeah, it's actually working, but it's totally missold as what it's actually doing yeah, misrepresented yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, and it's something you could probably buy for like $10 off Amazon, the exact same product, yeah, probably better than this one. So anyway, I kind of went off on a bit of a tangent.
Speaker 2:No, I feel like it's justified.
Speaker 1:I always kind of like rant.
Speaker 2:No, like I think you know you feeling crossed is justified. I mean, just looking at ads in general, like oh, here's this video game ad and look how fun it is, but then the game itself is totally not at all the same as the ad. And you know, the scrutiny that we as content creators get is way more like oh, there's blood in my advertisement. Oh, there's blood in your YouTube video. Demontize, banned, but you can have blood and guts and spit and arse in your advertisement and it's just not fair. And it kind of applies to AI too.
Speaker 2:Not to get too far off topic, but companies are allowed to look at our YouTube videos and train their AI for free. Or artists, all the paintings that get uploaded or whatever they upload, they're allowed to use all that for free. But God forbid, if we use two seconds of a popular song on our YouTube video, we get demonetized and drop like a strikeout on our channels or whatever, and it's just like where there's. It's just not. It's absolutely not fair. And YouTube have you done any of those surveys that youtube sends about? Like, hey, tell us what you think about youtube, have you?
Speaker 1:done any of those. I haven't, to be honest dude, they're so pointless.
Speaker 2:You should look at some of the questions they ask, like how do you feel? Uh, how youtube is fair for all content creators and it's like youtube is absolutely not fair for content creators. Like, like, it's a self-feeding loop. The algorithm is a self-feeding loop and just only serves content that YouTube thinks is going to make money, which you know is kind of fair in a way, but like I mean, not fair to us. Right, they're the smaller channels, but like I don't know, man, youtube is nothing but hypocrisy in my opinion, especially with their ads yeah, with the uncast channel.
Speaker 1:We only monetize the channel because we knew we don't really want to have to have have it monetized and have adverts for everyone to watch in it. But if we don't monetize it, the youtube algorithm will just, you know, it just doesn't want to serve the videos because youtube only wants to serve ads. That's really only what what it wants doesn't want to serve the videos because youtube only wants to serve ads. That's really only what what it wants to do. And the video, the actual content creation, is just to make you watch the ad, and you know that's really what youtube is and and honestly I've been I've been really happy with youtube premium.
Speaker 2:Um, I actually have completely forgotten what it's like to watch youtube without a premium account and every time I do I'm always like, oh my gosh, like there's pop ups and the videos ads and they're all over the place. I am glad that YouTube is like at least trying this premium light. We've been begging for a cheaper option for I don't know nearly a decade, but what really scares me is it's like they're like a drug dealer like here try premium light. And then a year from now I'd be like, oh, it's only going up a dollar, you could afford one more dollar. And then next year it's gonna be like, oh, it's only going up another dollar, you could afford another dollar. And then then now youtube premium is going to become even more expensive and premium light's going to be more expensive.
Speaker 1:It's just like, oh, my gosh and gosh and probably, like you know, they'll have a separate one like oh, if you want it on, you know, for your kids, you know you need a YouTube kids premium light.
Speaker 2:Oh, I hope not, because the other one doesn't kind of cover that yeah. And that's actually one thing. That's nice about YouTube premium right now is that I have one account and it also covers my kid, which is awesome.
Speaker 1:You know I'm using YouTube premium, but actually another family member is giving me access to theirs, Although we don't actually live in the same house.
Speaker 2:And we just got demonetized this whole channel. Strike. One strike for Uncashow. Are we allowed to get strikes for this channel? I think because as long as it's on our channels it's okay right.
Speaker 1:Stefano, come on, stop it, man, you've got to behave yourself.
Speaker 2:Me. You're the one over here suggesting terrible things.
Speaker 1:I wasn't suggesting, I was just saying that that's just something that I have done.
Speaker 2:I do think this YouTube premium light may actually be worth it.
Speaker 2:So, you could find out really quickly. You get one month for free. You could try it out. Don't forget to remove your credit card information and start paying for it anyway. But I would say, definitely try it out, because I think YouTube ads have gotten so bad. It's finally, like you know, we talked earlier about like I like to sit and wait with chat GPT, like I gonna pay for it. I probably will at some point, but I don't know when. But I think youtube is definitely 100 at that point where your experience with youtube is absolutely a million times better if you just pay for it, um, and the support that you give to content creators is way better through youtube premium than watching ads. So I mean, just if you're on the fence, just go for it.
Speaker 1:You're going to be happy in the end, I think you know, if I had the choice between Netflix and YouTube premium, I would choose YouTube premium to most because you know it makes me wonder. You know, maybe YouTube make the ad so bad and so annoying in order to force you to that's's.
Speaker 2:I mean they have been doing that because I mean, think about it like, think about the history of youtube ads.
Speaker 2:First it was ad at the beginning, ad at the end, or maybe just ads in the beginning, and then it was uh, now we're going to force ads at the beginning and end.
Speaker 2:You either opt in or out, and then they're like oh, now we're going to have mid-rolled ads and and you can opt out of mid-rolled ads or we're just going to force apply them and choose where they go. And they've gotten so good at ad delivery that now, if you just checkmark mid-rolled ads, whatever programming they have, will find very perfect spots where it knows people are watching and put an ad right at the cliffhanger. So you basically are forced to do I stop watching this video or do I wait for the ad to end to actually find out how the YouTuber resolved an issue or did this thing right. So they've gotten really good at making it annoying. It's like trying to watch Dragon Ball Z back in the day and they're like just about to fight and it's like, oh, advertisement. So you know, I go use SAR TV or whatever you said like to get that original experience. Yeah, that's what they're doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. So, anyway, some gaming updates. Yeah, cyberpunk fans, cyberpunk 2 is coming out. You've only got five years to wait 2030. We should see that apparently better than 10 years but we have got doom. The dark ages was released a couple of weeks ago, I believe, stephanie are you?
Speaker 2:have you played any of the dooms?
Speaker 1:the new ones like 2016 plus, yeah, I played the 2016 one, yeah yeah, did you play the one after that? No, no for shame. How about, how about you?
Speaker 2:I've played all of them except for this one. Um, I've been, uh, I'm still playing oblivion, so I haven't like I don't like to have too many games queued up at the same time. Um, and there's this other game that I'm on the verge of buying that also has dark in the name Age of Darkness, or it's got age and dark, actually Age of Darkness. I'm thinking about picking up to play with some friends. So this, for me, is on the back burner, but it looks amazing. I've watched a lot of people play it and it has like kind of the same sound track as the other games. And I mean, who doesn't like medieval combat with guns? Yeah, in the future Sounds cool. And you get to drive around in a giant mech, and everyone loves mechs, right, yeah?
Speaker 1:And there's another game called Roadcraft, some sort of vehicle simulation in disaster zones video game. That was released a couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah, games like this are always interesting, like there's one in like Russia where you drive through like thick mud and snow and recover vehicles and stuff. I'm not saying that this thing is the same, but like you got to go like make roads, to go repair bridges and things like that, and it's got like your vehicles can get stuck. I think, and I don't know, it seems interesting.
Speaker 1:It's like the farming simulator, which, by the way, looks like a lot more fun than you would assume okay, so moving on, um, we've recently had computex recently and looking through various things that have been released there, there's been some pretty interesting things, seems it seems to be. If you remember last episode, I was ranting about my recent trip to Japan where I saw a CPU cooler that had a screen on it and I thought it was the best thing ever I'd ever seen.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it seems sticking screens on things is getting very, very popular, and at Computex there were lots of all-in-one coolers that had water blocks with animations on them. We will show a few on screen. Now I'm going to try and share my screen so you can see while uh, oh, you got it already.
Speaker 2:Hang on a second. That's an advertisement.
Speaker 1:You tricked us so, yeah, look at that, look at that screen there, stephanie. Yeah, um, yeah, make it a bit bigger. It's kind of curved um and apparently it's motorized and can turn around. So oh, that's cool you know, I'll tell you I'm gonna have to rebuild my server now. Not in a rack mount case, because how am I going to see that in my rack mounted server case?
Speaker 2:hey, um, so there's also one. I think it's called I'm trying to look it up real quick minikube. Yeah, so I think it has four screens on it. Um see, minikube cooler. Yeah, so it's kind of uh, got this, uh, minecraft theme going on to it and the ai cooler has screens all the way around it and I'm trying to pull up I think it may have a screen on the top as well, but anyway, like it looks really cool. And, um, my kids like really into minecraft and I'm we're on the verge of him needing a new computer and so he, since he loves minecraft, this, I think it's called a minecraft, it's a mini node, I think it's called mini node. Uh, it'd be perfect to build him like a minecraft theme uh, computer with that thing minicube, minicube sorry, not mini node. Yeah, it's got. Yeah, it's got screens on all sides, even on like a Minecraft-themed computer with that thing Minikube, minikube Sorry, not Mininode. Yeah, it's got screens on all sides, even on the top, nice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, talking of case and stuff, there's a really cool case that I saw. If I share my screen again, there's another advert for you. Check out that case. There Isn't that weird.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I kind of like nonstandard cases. I can't think of thermal tank, thermal tank, no-transcript, uh, but it's just.
Speaker 1:It's like 500 just for the chassis yeah, check out that look check out that case there that looks like it should be on, kind of like the set of the latest aliens or something, doesn't it? It looks like it's straight out of a sci-fi show it does. I love that though it's just so cool, isn't it? I would really like that see if there's any other photos of it we can see.
Speaker 2:That's it from the side yeah, yeah, no, no, that's awesome. I love that.
Speaker 1:You know audience question would you have that as your next on RAID server? Maybe, if we can fit enough, drives in?
Speaker 2:It seems like it's a very big case. I don't see the option to store any drives in there.
Speaker 1:Maybe around the back somewhere or something, or in that top piece, maybe, I don't know. Maybe.
Speaker 2:I assume it's water cooled, so maybe the radiator is up there.
Speaker 1:Definitely we can make it work, okay, yeah, I mean sure I wouldn't, but sure. So we've had an announcement as well from AMD another graphics card, the 9660 XT, which is only going to be $299. And apparently it's 6% faster than the RTX 5060 Ti. I do like how AMD are copying Nvidia's numbers, kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, so like 9060, 5060.
Speaker 2:They're all synced up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but yeah, it's like a nice little graphics card, quite compact as well. It looks like it's going to be pretty good for 1440p games.
Speaker 2:That's really good, because I don't know what the whole industry has switched off over, uh, if they've switched over 1440p or not, but I think, uh, if you haven't, that's probably about perfect 2560 by 1440 yeah for gaming.
Speaker 1:Whatever you do, just don't get 4k yet, because then you'll never go back so, you know, I've got my rtx 5070 ti and we've got these kind of reports coming in um. This is, you know, back from april, user reports of melted power cables on rtx 5070 and we're wondering if the rtx 50 series are safe. Well, there's actually been a psu um shown at computex this year.
Speaker 2:Um, if I can find that and bring it up, from c sonic, I believe so yeah my 4090 has survived the last couple of years so far I have. I haven't removed the cable, the 12 volt power cable, from it yet to check for damage. It's been running, so I'm just going to assume everything's fine. But I also have my GPU vertically mounted, so that way, you know, there's like no gravity, like if you have it like this right, gravity is always pulling down on it and they're always like oh yeah, I'm going to get it in there perfectly straight and no bends, and like, oh, there's all these like requirements, right, and so I figured, if you do it, vertically, there's pretty much no way to destroy it.
Speaker 1:And another thing that can make things um more likely to have problems with the power cables is these little angular bracket things you can get to redirect the cable in a different way. So a lot of times they're made really poorly and, um you know, that can cause a lot of problems. But this new psu, this seagate psu, basically it detects heat on the actual wires going to the gpu and it will actually monitor that and shut it off if it gets um too hot to prevent.
Speaker 2:Yeah to bauer has a has a great segment about that gpu. I don't know if you've ever watched a bauer on youtube. I haven't. No, a fantastic channel. It goes into pretty good detail about it and explains, explains it really well. Um, it's kind of funny how advanced power supplies are becoming. They used to be just these simple little machines, I guess, and now it's like, oh, they do all these different. We have PFC and checking, I mean there's all sorts of things these days, and it's all because graphics cards are getting worse somehow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just my 5070 Ti. I just can't believe how stupidly big the card is. It's just, yeah, it's just ridiculous. You know, luckily it's in a you know for you rat case and it's, um, you know, not putting any strain on the pcie socket, but you know, for a normal, for a normal tower it. You know, in my opinion it's just ridiculous, it's just yeah, like it's just, we went from waiting to happen.
Speaker 2:You know we went from like one slot size cards um to two slot, because they needed these massive coolers and and at the time it was like, oh, they're so massive now and it was like, okay, fine, it became the new normal and actually, let me, let me grab something from right there so we went from those those one u or not one u sorry, I'm thinking about servers those one slot to two slot, and then we got these behemoths. This is a 50 set, or a gtx 50 70.
Speaker 2:I believe yep gtx 50, 70. Absolutely massive right A GTX 5070, I believe Yep GTX 5070. Absolutely massive right, Three slots.
Speaker 1:What one's that sorry?
Speaker 2:GTX 5070.
Speaker 1:5070, so Pretty old oh 570.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, sorry, 570. I'm used to just saying adding zeros in front of everything.
Speaker 1:now, I was getting confused. I was thinking yeah, 570, 570.
Speaker 2:Add a one and 2 zeros in front of that. So you know, back in, this card was controversial because it was so massive for the time, and then so to think about how not powerful this card actually is. And then you get a Titan right, Titan X and it's 2. And now we have like the new 4,000 series plus, or even 5,000 series.
Speaker 1:that's somehow bigger than this yeah, and I think I've got a card over here. Have I got one of my cards here? Um, I don't know where it is. I had a 3080 somewhere that I thought was quite big, oh no um.
Speaker 2:How does this happen? We're reverting chat. We're reverting.
Speaker 1:You know, here's, um, a 2080 ti. I can't find my 37, my 3080, but the 3080 was much bigger than that and when the 5070 ti came it just made the 3080 just look like it was a young child. Yeah, basically, and um, I was just thinking to myself, can you imagine if the same had happened with cpus? So can you imagine if, like, a cpu is as big as the gpu, kind of thing? No, not at all you know, but with the cpu coolers.
Speaker 2:Air coolers have gotten massive, yeah, especially because, like you know, some of these cpus are like oh, 500 watts, yeah, that's just like idle.
Speaker 1:Yeah and um. Take a look at this, um, stephano. Okay, talking about cpu callers and air callers, well, noctua have now, actually in 2026, they are going to actually release their first actual liquid all-in-one caller oh, this isn't.
Speaker 2:This isn't their pumpless one. I thought they were coming out with a pumpless one have you seen that?
Speaker 1:no, I haven't. No, that's interesting oh yeah, so Computex also.
Speaker 2:Noctua had talked about releasing a pumpless AIO. This has been a thing for years, as far as I'm aware, but it's never really come to market and I think Noctua is going to bring it to market, so it'll be the first one to have a pumpless aio. I'm gonna try it out. Well, it depends actually if it. If it can't cool a 14 700k, then I'm not doing it, but I really want to get one just to like try it out yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's why, with the air coolers, they even started putting screens on the top of air coolers. You know, the head computex is like an air cooler and on the top of the air cooler it's got a screen.
Speaker 2:So and even on the sides of the radiators there's screens now so you can have like little animated things jump across we're slowly going to cyberpunk you're having your dreams come true.
Speaker 1:I think this is the new rgb, isn't it screens on yeah, rgb is so 2019 it is, it's just so. Yesterday man like yeah, um, that's something else I want to show you before we stop talking about computex and it's about noctua again.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're making something quite different oh yeah making a mouse, so a mouse with a fan inside of it. Do you think it will be cheaper than a normal mouse? Because part of it's missing? It does look a bit like a dead skeleton of a mouse or something, doesn't it? Like a kind of decaying skeleton.
Speaker 2:No, I imagine it'll be 10 times more expensive than a normal mouse. Considering mice have basically skyrocketed in prices. I mean, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, once I did pay a ridiculous amount of money for a mouse, and I'm not going to tell you how much it was. It's too embarrassing, okay, okay. So some interesting things in Computex this year, I think.
Speaker 2:Let's see how many of it actually comes to market though. Yeah, they always release interesting things or talk about releasing interesting things, and they usually don't come to market. I'm actually curious now when a gtx 5570 I keep wanting to say 5070 came out 2010 wow so so the gtx 570 came out 2010.
Speaker 1:What's that? 15 years ago? It's crazy. Time flies it, man. I'll tell you I was watching a really interesting video. I'm going to go off on another tangent. I'm really sorry.
Speaker 2:You don't have to apologize to me. It's the whole point of having a show.
Speaker 1:I'm apologizing to the audience. Oh, okay To have to listen to me. Totally go off on a wild tangent, ed. I'm sorry to interrupt. I think the whole reason why they're here is to listen to you. I feel sorry for the audience, anyway. So I saw a super cool video and it was about the theory that the world ended in 1999.
Speaker 2:That sounds familiar.
Speaker 1:Because they're saying the 50s had its distinct style and kind of culture with the kind of hairstyles the 60s did, with all of the colors.
Speaker 1:The 70s, the 80s and the 90s were all really distinct then it kind of got to the year 2000 and we've had, yeah, tech increasing really, really quickly and the tech has changed. How people dress in 2005 and now is pretty much exactly the same. There's no distinct cultural style of anything. And so they were comparing it to the matrix, when in the matrix it says that in 1999 it was the peak of yeah, and it's kind of going about that, and then it was just saying about various things that could have maybe caused things to change, and it was talking about the mandela effect.
Speaker 1:Now I'm going to ask you a question, okay? Um, do you remember when nelson mandela died in the 90s? I feel like I do well he didn't die in the 90s he died in 2013? Yes, but I have distinct memories of him dying in the 90s and apparently hundreds of thousands of people around the world do as well.
Speaker 1:I'm one of those people and it's called the mandela effect. There are other loads of other things, like um c3po he actually has. One of his legs is silver and no one remembers that. And when you actually look at the original footage, his leg on the left-hand side, I believe from the knee down is actually silver, and that's another thing that people never remembered as being a fact. And this video is all about saying how maybe there was some kind of weird event that happened that kind of changed time and reality slightly and made it very similar to how it was, but slightly different. Anyway, I'm not.
Speaker 2:Well, hold on, hold on. I got on about that Before you move on, though, I will. This is one thing I got to say. Is I like about living today is I've now lived long enough that my clothes that I wore back in you know early 2000s are back in style. That my clothes that I wore back in you know, early 2000s are back in style, so like I literally just get to bust out the same shoes I've been wearing for the last 15 years and wear them again today Like nothing's ever changed.
Speaker 1:Anyway, I think I better get things back on topic, really. Okay, fine, and let's talk about some contained open source stuff. So Miniio, which is a container container for what is it?
Speaker 2:Storage Object S3 storage.
Speaker 1:Yeah, object S3 storage. Apparently it had an update recently where about 120,000 lines of code were removed in an update which basically removed key features like user bucket management from the free web interface, and a lot of the web interface was just totally removed from this container. And now, if you want those, it's enterprise only feature with a paid license and the paid licenses I'm sure you'll all be going out and buying one. It's only 24,000 a year for 200 terabytes of storage and, by the way, you need to provide the storage yourself. You don't actually get any storage, that's just to be able to use 200 terabytes of storage and, by the way, you need to provide the storage yourself. You don't actually get any storage, that's just to be able to use 200 terabytes of storage and it's for the privilege 24 000 a year per 200 terabytes.
Speaker 1:So what was um not behind a paywall before? Um in the community edition is now behind a paywall. Personally, I think the companies when they do this are shooting themselves in the foot a little bit, because the community gets to know these containers from using them, the community editions of them, and then they are used in enterprise more when people discover them. I don't think NextCloud would be adopted half so much, but it's people like us who enjoy tinkering with things. We will install things like NextCloud and then maybe kind of suggest having it used in our daytime jobs.
Speaker 2:Okay, hear me out. Maybe it's a problem with expectations. Everybody wants free software, and so, obviously, developing software is expensive, and so, as these tools become more popular, they start being abused by being used in a business environment.
Speaker 1:That's very true.
Speaker 2:And then that's how we end up with this situation occurring over and over and over again. Now, should their pricing model be that expensive for home users? Probably not. But I mean, I think we're kind of become our own victims with the expectation that open source software should be free, and I'm using the royal we here. And I mean people just don't want to pay If they don't have to, they don't want to pay if they don't have to, they don't want to pay for it, including me. There's things I don't want to pay for either, uh, which I've been trying to do better at, and by actually donating money and subscribing to, like open source programs or whatever. But you know it's.
Speaker 2:I think we've become victims to our own circumstances, because think, if I try to think back to the 90s, when it was like, oh, power dvd, you could use the free one to make copies of your cds, and that was it right so, and you could hand out copies of starcraft to your friends. Um, but then, you know, over time they started putting those features behind the paywall and you had to buy the full copy of power dvd 9 in order to get that feature. But you know, you bought it feature, but you bought it. At least, when you bought it it was good for life, at least for all the updates for that version. Anyway, I don't know. I feel like we're just victims to our own expectations. Maybe.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but with things like this MinIO, I think when you've got the community using it, they're kind of testing it out. Bugs are kind of found. It's just going to really kind of get rid of that, you know, for them as a company. I think they should have like done this slightly different, in my opinion, because there was no warning about it. People just found out with the update.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's not cool. That's absolutely not cool, it's a total rug pull.
Speaker 1:It's like oh, you know, here's the update. Oh, by the way, half the user interface has disappeared. You now need a $24,000 license to continue using it how you were before. Yeah, you could still use the old version, but then you've got the problems with no security updates. But apparently it's going to be forked.
Speaker 2:People are talking about forking it and calling it MaxIO instead. Of. I always say I always call it mini io, even though I know it's mini oh or min io, I don't know what it is actually I always, I always say every name, of name of every software incorrectly well, yeah, like branding has actually become kind of difficult. You know like, uh, everything's because of urls, everything is like put together. So you look at the url and you're like, oh, that's all one word well, I I blame the mandela effect.
Speaker 1:I'm sure it used to be called that once yeah, I think you're right.
Speaker 2:I mean, it has been around since 2016, so it's almost old enough yeah, it's like nine years moving.
Speaker 1:Moving on to our favorite topic, stefano. Yeah, our favorite topic, plaques so another victim plaques have done something else. The same thing. I'm going to share something they've done.
Speaker 2:Remember when Plex was free and awesome.
Speaker 1:A lot of people don't realize that Plex is a fork of XBMC in 2008, which also went on to be cody I feel bad.
Speaker 2:Maybe I should have given them, like you know, five or ten dollars, you know, 10 years ago, for using plex, so we wouldn't be in a situation we're in well, I shouldn't say we, because I left plex forever ago yeah, I've actually got a plex lifetime license.
Speaker 1:That I got probably in about 2016 and I've never used it. Oh, really, so I'm their favorite user, I guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Somebody bought a lifetime license and never used it.
Speaker 2:I was so close to finally buying it and then they shot themselves in the foot so long ago and I'm like thank God I didn't buy it when I did.
Speaker 1:So what has happened is users have actually got. Let me share my screen a moment, stefano, so everyone can see this. So, basically, plex users have had this pop up on their Plex accounts recently saying for Plex accounts created before the 20th of March 2025, we require your consent to sell your personal data as described in our privacy policy. Well, selling personal data and privacy doesn't really sound like very much, so their privacy policy doesn't sound very private to me.
Speaker 2:No, Well, they anonymize it so that way they don't know it's specifically you, Ed. I somehow don't believe it.
Speaker 1:But you know, this is just another thing where it's just so obvious that Plex are just collecting every single piece of data about what you do on there. Apparently they're collecting like when do you pause? When do you do this? You know how engaged are you with this and just selling it. And when you're paying for a product. Say, if I was to buy a lifetime Plex subscription now for $250 and then I find they're selling my data, I really wouldn't be very happy.
Speaker 2:Does this only apply to their streaming stuff or also any content you stream to yourself?
Speaker 1:This is just anything basically. So when you sign up for a Plex account, and obviously if you've joined after March the 20th, you've already agreed to this. It's probably on page 20 of the EULA.
Speaker 2:And the text that you have to use a magnifying glass on.
Speaker 1:So you know, because we all read 20 pages of that before we click accept.
Speaker 2:I think on the plus side at least you do have to opt in Like you're not automatically opted in currently.
Speaker 1:You do here, which is really you know, which is you know? I must give Plex their due. You know that is good that you actually get the option to opt in. It doesn't kind of say you've been opted in. If you don't want to, you can opt out. I've got to say full respect to Plex for doing that. But really, do you really need to sell data as well? Come on, most people want Plex for self-hosting, for privacy and not so data can be mined and see what we're doing. I believe Netflix have been boasting recently about how they sell data to advertisers and they can tell how engaged people are with the content and that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:I can go ahead and tell you now that as soon as an ad comes on, I basically pull out my phone and start browsing the internet, or, like I just totally zone out. So every ad that ever plays, I just I basically turn off as a human being and it's like I don't know how effective advertisements are. Apparently they work, because if they didn't, there would be no ads, right yeah but I'm, I don't, I, there's no way that.
Speaker 2:Like. Well, I guess maybe that's not true, because you know the amount of people that I hear singing ad songs and like, oh, do you see that advertisement? It was so funny. I'm like, why are you watching ads like I don't understand.
Speaker 1:The most effective ad is the ad that you don't know you've been affected by yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:But like I don't know, man, like there's so many people that just like love watching ads and I don't understand like. Like if you go to youtube like you can look up like oh, the state farms ad for funny ad or whatever, like you can watch that stuff. I'm like, are ads really that good? I don't think so. I don't know because I literally turn off, but it's such a weird thing to me.
Speaker 1:But yeah, talking as well about you know, we're saying that at least plaques are saying this is opt-in and there is a button to opt out, which is really good. You know, there are kind of some things where you don't even get the option to opt out, like I think we spoke about it.
Speaker 1:You know, in a previous episode, the roku tvs, they had oh, yeah, yeah had an update where it's saying, basically, if you want to continue using your tv and be able to change the source of the hdmi, you have to click agree, and there was no disagree button. So it's like either you click agree or you can't do it, and that basically the what you're agreeing to is you couldn't actually take roku to court. You had to use one of those forced arbitration courts, which basically means that the company runs their own court really and um, and so you know you're being, you know any kind of grievance you have against the company, you're pretty much taking it to the company. And a really interesting example of that was I'm not sure if you ever heard of the story is there was a lady and her husband went to one of the disney theme parks and went into a restaurant there and had a severe allergic reaction to peanuts or something, or or some nut allergy yeah that shouldn't have happened.
Speaker 1:I think she died. Did she die? I think I don't remember I'm pretty sure the lady died, yeah, and so what disney tried to do is their 12 year old daughter had actually signed up for a disney plus trial and in the terms and conditions of signing up and clicking, I agree. In the disney plus trial it's saying you're agreeing with disney to have arbitration rather than be able to go to court. So they tried to use that so the husband couldn't take disney to court for his wife dying in their restaurant.
Speaker 2:Yep, so yep, I'm pretty sure, if I remember, that was the story dr ting chung tang son suffered an allergic reaction after eating at Roglin Road Irish Pub Love Irish pubs, by the way so she had a food allergy, died, and they had a Disney Plus subscription and because of that they tried to withdraw.
Speaker 1:They're so kind, aren't they, these companies? You know it's interesting watching they're. So they're so kind, aren't they, these companies?
Speaker 2:you know it's interesting watching the downfall of of companies, like you know, plex, it's like you know I kind of wonder if they shot themselves in the foot, like who was asking plex to provide tv? I don't, I don't know anyone in our community or I've never seen anyone ever be like you know be great idea if plex provided free tv to us. And and I think because of all that development work and all the additional research and licensing, they've kind of shot themselves in the foot because now they need to earn more money to provide the, that service that, as far as I know, nobody actually wanted. Yeah, and so now they're kind of they're spiraling to try and make up money for those losses or that investment. I guess really, and it's just like, but could all of this have been avoided if they just stuck to what they originally sought out to allow people to?
Speaker 1:stream their own media. I wonder if they had a big injection of cash from some kind of investor and then the investor starts steering the direction of the company more than the actual company itself is usually how it goes and so you know, then they kind of start bringing in the tv stuff and then it kind of spirals from there yeah, I mean, look at vmware, right, like vmware used to be everywhere, like vmware is the greatest, it's the best.
Speaker 2:And then one day they're like, oh, we changed our licensing model. Uh, no more perpetual licenses and basically, if you're not making multiple billions of dollars a year, we don't want you as a customer. Yeah, or even like Jira have you ever heard of Jira? I think it's called Jira.
Speaker 1:I don't think so. No, what's that, Stephanie?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's from this company called Atlassian, so it's like an issue and project tracking software and so J tracking software, and so jira was was really super popular. And then they basically were like oh, you can no longer self-host this software. And it's like, well, hang on a minute, we've have, we bought this license. You know, it's perpetual. We want, we want to self-host it, for whatever reason. And they're like nope, no more. And it's like you know, they, they always start off so great and at some point I don't know if it's because agreed or I don't know what the root cause is I'm sure it's money, it's always money, but at some point they just they're always like make these just decisions that make no sense.
Speaker 1:It's like like I just I don't get it yeah, the people making the decisions are not the people who are in touch with their user base. That's the the problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and again like people should get paid for the work. But there's definitely a point where you start asking, you start doing things that nobody wants, like selling data, Like does Plex really need to sell our data for money? I don't know, man, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Anyway, all I'm going to say to that is check out the recent video on the Uncast show all about Jellyfin If you're interested in an alternative to Plex where they don't sell your data. It's fully open source and you really are in control of your own media server.
Speaker 2:I actually I went to Jellyfin's website cause I was like you know what I should donate to Jellyfin, and they have a link where it says help pay for other expenses. I've been clicking on it but as far as I could tell, it doesn't actually let you do anything because it says they don't ask for donations. You're the volunteer, uh, or intend to help, uh, you can, you can do a like a sponsorship, like digital ocean or jet brains, but I don't think I can actually donate any money oh right at least.
Speaker 2:I mean, I haven't really looked into it. I want to, I feel like I should.
Speaker 1:I am going to check and I'm going to put a link in the description if I can find a way that we can actually donate to the jellyfin project we can't let jellyfin turn into place. No, and I'm donating as soon as I find out. So yeah, that's a great idea, stefano. Anyone else in the audience who wants to donate to Jellyfin as well, join Stefano and I in trying to do so.
Speaker 2:I'm just tired of Lucy Kidd's software. It's a corporate greed.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Stefano, I think that pretty much brings us to the end of what we got to say this month.
Speaker 2:There is so much more that needs to be said, though, ed, but no, I do agree.
Speaker 1:So have a great time for your birthday, which is today, when this goes out next week.
Speaker 2:Almost, but yeah.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, have a great time.
Speaker 2:I'm having a great time.
Speaker 1:And I can't wait to have you back for another live episode um the beginning of july. So let's hope that the um that the first saturday of july isn't the fourth of july.
Speaker 2:So yeah, doing it oh, I didn't even think about that. Yeah, doing it live is is really fun to be able to integrate with the audience. I mean, imagine like dealing with the audience right now about all these like donations and plex and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:Anyway, sorry, yeah, anyway, um, thank you very much for joining us today, stefano. I just can't take you seriously, can I? Yeah, you're putting me off. Anyway, thank you very much everyone for watching and please catch us in the next episode. And please subscribe to the uncast channel, if you haven't already, and do all the normal things like hitting the notification bell, etc. And we'll catch you all in the next episode.
Speaker 2:Peace okay, bye.
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