5 Burst results for "John Brodkin"
SGGQA Podcast – SomeGadgetGuy
"john brodkin" Discussed on SGGQA Podcast – SomeGadgetGuy
"And I woke up this morning and it was just like Facebook's getting hacked, blue sky is stumbling and Twitter blue just looks like it's a complete bust. This morning completely flipped into social media is melting down all around us. Excuse me. So that's what we're going to talk about. Why don't we jump through some news here real quick? And we can make it through this news block. Even with that extended rambling, it's only 9 15 in the a.m., so I have done okay for housekeeping. Housekeeping is usually a 30 minute affair. So I'm feeling pretty good. All right, I wanted to start this off just because there's a certain. Reputation for software engineers in Silicon Valley. And even today, I feel like there's a very common entrepreneurial quasi libertarian thread that goes through a bunch of techies. So you know a company that employs a significant number of software engineers has screwed up major in how they're presenting employee perks versus CEO compensation if there is ire from libertarian leaning entrepreneurial leaning software engineers. So this story coming by way of ars technica, my bro crush John brodkin wrote this up. Googlers angry about CEOs $226 million pay after cuts and perks in 12,000 layoffs. Sundar Pichai compared to lord farquaad, as employee share memes about CEO pay. Quote from this was also reported by CNBC, but quote from the article in the week since Pichai's annual compensation was made public internal Google platforms have filled with conversations and memes, slamming the CEO for taking a pay bump while slashing costs elsewhere. CNBC reported yesterday, CNBC's report said internal memes shared by employees also criticized Google owner alphabet's recent authorization of a 70 $1 billion stock repurchase program. The same amount as last year. The year where Google made more money than it had ever made in the company's history. And still somehow I think in the last quarter managed to miss expectations. But I digress. Pichai is the CEO of both alphabet and Google. Dave burns. They're all libertarians until the bank with all their money fails. And copycats, I would be angry too. Hold on, let me get this out of the way and let me get out of screen share here. You've missed up. So here's the deal. When a company makes a ton of money and they don't really invest it back into the company, I feel the employees have sort of, they have earned. Some of their frustrations and to hear that Google is again doing a 70 billion dollar stock buyback. While Sundar Pichai gets a compensation bump after all of the I take full response. You remember Cassandra Pichai came out and he's like, I take full responsibility. And my taking responsibility means 12,000 people lose their jobs. But me, I know that our direction completely missed the scope of eventually we would return to work in a way that the global pandemic would not be affecting. But it's me. Sundar Pichai. I take responsibility. And you're losing your jobs or sacrifice that I'm willing to make. Because that's the quote from lord farquaad from the Shrek films. So yeah, yeah, not a great look. Again, it's really difficult because you've got to compartmentalize. I've been so excited to sort of revisit the pixel 7 pro on the heels of the Google IO and the pixel 7 a and maybe getting some idea of what the pixel 8 is going to bring. I'm super stoked about what the Google hardware team is doing, but man, I really haven't had a lot of confidence or a lot of faith in the executive leadership at Google, the people at the top of alphabet, I don't think they've been utilizing resources well. I think they've been playing corporate games with, I mean, a stock buyback. A $70 billion stock buyback is a dumb look right now. Because you can't have this both ways. You can't go out to your shareholders and say like, well, last quarter, we made more money than we've ever made in the company's history, but now we've all got a really tight in our belts and we're going to tighten our belts by spending $70 billion. On playing games with stocks. Instead of we're investing in our talent and looking at a long-term road map that's going to bring us the next era or the next phase of profitability, they're playing this game. And that to me is, is tragically hilarious. It's a comedy that you have to laugh to keep from crying. Brian glaze. I take full responsibility in keeping
SGGQA Podcast – SomeGadgetGuy
"john brodkin" Discussed on SGGQA Podcast – SomeGadgetGuy
"Something cool together. Oh, Jeff just spreading the love, man. Well, I appreciate it. Thank you so much. You all are making me blush here, seriously. So we got Simon says, no, we have the television. We've got people were very upset about you eth. I don't even know how you're supposed to pronounce it. I've done videos with that company and I'm still like, you know, yufei. And I just try to say it as quickly as I possibly can just to kind of get over it. So. Well, this is another just sort of awkward UV. I'm going to trust Jeff. I believe it's UV. So we'll go with that. Imagine if the UV thing happened, oh wait, wait, wait, we're in. Imagine we just broke level three on the hype train. Train. Simon says no says, imagine if the UV thing happened yet again with another company with the outrage be there. Well, Simon, you're reading my brain here because I feel we are at 95% of the way to finishing level for on this hype train. You're blowing my mind here. This is like the craziest hike train. I think I've ever seen doing the Twitch. We're never gonna get to this story because you guys are blowing my mind right now. Wow, okay. So I'm way off. Right in this hive train has jumped me off the tracks of my podcast. There you go. And now I'm up in it. I can't believe. Okay, so Muppet ish is gifted tier one subs to point blank 8 Goran zhao botnik farhan and talks with TJ and concept creator came right back with tier one subs to arch PG F 12 a Daniel James brewer. Paul the tea guy, Paul, I love tea. R JO 1440. Three. I think we just we just killed level 5 too. So that just finished out level 5 of this live train. Holy cow. Thank you all so much. Short story incredibly long. Tesla car spying on you. And it's not horribly dissimilar to security cameras that send unencrypted photos up to some sort of central server. I've got a story here from ars technica, of course, from my man crush John brodkin. Tesla workers shared images from car cameras, including, quote, scenes of intimacy, ex staffers tell Reuters about internal image sharing we could see their kids. So apparently the cameras that kind of monitor the traffic in a Tesla and can kind of see what's going on inside the car and around the car. Here's the quote from one of the other employees. Some of the recordings caught Tesla customers and embarrassing situations, one X employee describes a video of a man approaching a vehicle completely naked. Also shared, crashes and road rage incidents. One crash video in 2021 showed a Tesla driving at high speed in a residential area hitting a child riding a bike, according to another ex employee, the child flew in one direction, the bike in another. Video spread around a Tesla office in San Mateo, California, via private one on one chats, quote like wild fire. So it's unclear whether or not this kind of personal information through Tesla cars has actually stopped. So Reuters has the initial scoop on it. Ours technica, jaundice, such a great job of kind of condensing all of the stories and links and stuff so you can read all the way through it. I'm linking to the ars technica article on this Jeff naked pause clutches pearls. Yes, okay, so the naked thing is definitely problematic. I feel, I feel like it's not so much that they saw a naked man. I feel it's that an image of a naked man was sent from the car to Tesla data centers and then people working for Tesla were able to find that image of said naked man. And then they took that image of said naked man. And then they shared it to other people in the Tesla organization. So if you do anything around a Tesla car, we now have to assume. And there is no expectation of privacy or security for any of the actions, the video or audio that that car can capture. I'm not trying to minimize the outrage. I feel like it was deserved. I was so disappointed in the response from UV cameras when those security cameras were caught, not encrypting video or stills from their cameras up to their servers. That's bad. And now there's like this little animation whenever you log into your UV camera. I still have the doorbell. I just was too lazy to take it down. I know I should be a little bit more security conscious. But now when you go into your UV app and you open the camera, it does this like unlocking mechanism animation and you're like, yeah, okay, we get it, you got caught. But yeah, for a car. That is as Internet connected as a Tesla. That's a very bad look for the organization and for the company. So yeah, Jeff. You know what, dude, that's probably just good advice. He says, Tesla is a bit problematic with that personal data. So no getting freaky in the back seat of a Tesla, those employees are watching. Oh yeah, they are. Oh yeah. So, wow. That one's, that one's heavy. And that story broke four days ago. I feel the Internet's outrage over. You fee was legit. I feel we did not see the same level of frustration or outrage for this story getting broken by Reuters. Is seeing Tesla kind of spying on people's on people's personal information and stuff. So we just wrapped the hype train got, man, 20 5 subs. You guys are crazy. Oh my gosh. We've got what looks appears to be some kind of strange bird like creature for the for the emote on this hype train. So thank you so much. Let's see if it'll actually pop up. No, it just says choo choo hype cheer. So unfortunately, restream won't let me post that one out there right now, but.
SGGQA Podcast – SomeGadgetGuy
"john brodkin" Discussed on SGGQA Podcast – SomeGadgetGuy
"Into this article. But again, my man crushed John brodkin. Over at ars technica. Absolutely one of my favorite tech reporters of the day. Judge finds Google destroyed evidence and repeatedly gave false info to court. Google is in trouble for auto deleting chats needed as evidence in the Epic Games case. Quote, after substantial briefing by both sides and in evidentiary hearing that featured witness testimony and other evidence, the court concludes that sanctions are warranted. U.S. district judge James Donato wrote. Later in the ruling, he wrote that evidence shows that Google intended to subvert the discovery process, and that chat evidence was lost with the intent to prevent its use in litigation and with the intent to deprive another party of the information use in the litigation. I wanted to try and get down. And so then we get to the end of this article, how to punish Google not yet decided. Google finally agreed on February 7 to turn the history setting to on for all 383 employees subject to a legal hold, at least temporarily. Donato has not yet decided how Google should be sanctioned saying the determination of an appropriate non monetary sanction requires further proceeding. In their motion for sanctions, Epic Games and other plaintiffs ask the court to issue adverse inference jury instructions to remedy Google's spoliation of Google chats or alternatively to issue a curative jury instruction. We've got to, I gotta drink a quick sip of coffee hole in my throats about to wig out. It's frustrating because I wouldn't necessarily put myself as being some huge fan of epic. But what did I say previously, epic has enough of a bankroll has enough money has enough. Has enough funds. I'm fuzzy and on words today. They have the resources to actually take Apple and Google to court, and they can force the disclosure of a ton of information. A company like Google actively trying to subvert the process of discovery, that's a real bad look. That to me is dangerous territory for, especially for information brokers, being able to craft a narrative around their products, advertise at a scale that no one else can match. Push out information, they can punitively harm their opponents through legal action. And then when they're in the legal process, they are not earnest participants. And this is what's frustrating is I look at an organization like alphabet. And I have no fondness for alphabet as a giant amoeba blob of smaller industries. We do need actions that can look at the entire structure of a mega tech corporation and say, hey, you know what, like ad sales or one thing and video streaming as a platform is another thing, and hardware divisions are another thing, where I absolutely adore what the team on the pixel hardware team are doing, they're in a bubble in Google that is not reflective of the whole rest of the organization. And where do you draw that line? This is not a person. Who withheld information and sought to mislead the discussion in a court of law. We're participants are under oath. We treat corporations like people, but Google can't be thrown in prison. Google is going to be able to point to a lawyer and say, well, they miss represented and they didn't do their due diligence in our case and maybe that should be a mistrial and we'll have to go through another trial with a lawyer who isn't going to be disbarred. They can throw an individual under the bus. But Google did not did not perjure themselves. Right? So now we've got to figure what is an appropriate punishment for the organization, how do you even wrap your brain around that? And especially when they're saying like an appropriate non monetary sanction, what do you do to Google that's going to get any of their attention that's non monetary? That doesn't make any sense at all. We're going to punish Google on something that really, really grossly misrepresented their court case and again, is probably a business practice under this that has netted them billions of dollars and anti competitive business practices. But we're also going to tag them with something that it's not a fine. Like anyone's going to care. It's not going to cost them a penny, but they're really going to learn their lesson this time, I promise. We're getting to the point where we have shielded the executives and in hero, also part of the legal team from any type of direct consequences of their actions. Google will face consequences, but the people in charge of Google's policy are sort of buffered from that. And unfortunately, I think we do need to get to a place where bankers tech execs, investment brokers, like all these people that can do significant harm in the market, are individually facing some kind of dilemma. If they are caught and they have to face the consequences of doing bad things and it's not just the corporation, then maybe they'll be less inclined to do those bad things. Right now, it doesn't seem like anything that we're doing is really raining in the scope of how these corporations and these organizations can operate. Again, they keep getting caught and they keep getting caught doing things like this. And then they're not really appropriately showcased. They're not really appropriately punished for those actions. So Ron Guido says replies we should break Google up. And that's really interesting that you brought that up, Ron, because my very next article going into screen share here, Senate bill seeks to break up Google and meta ad businesses. Matt Ron, you are on the pulse buddy. You knew exactly where I was going. I have very little confidence that anything is anything serious is going to come from this, but John fingers, another fantastic reporter when it comes to dealing with tech and tech politics. I'm sorry, John fingers over it and gadget has written this one up and I would highly recommend just giving it a quick read because he links appropriately to the types of articles. It's not a long story. But here I want to get this just kind of intro paragraph. The U.S. government might not lean solely on lawsuits to limit online ad monopolies. A bipartisan group of senators has introduced the America act advertising middlemen in dangering rigorous Internet competition accountability. Yes, it's overwrought. With the intention of breaking up the ad businesses
SGGQA Podcast – SomeGadgetGuy
"john brodkin" Discussed on SGGQA Podcast – SomeGadgetGuy
"Users have always had access to. When LG stands, like me, were praising the incredible battery life of the LG V 60, and YouTube influencers were telling you, oh, it's not that much difference, and samsungs are better. And now you appreciate having substantially better performance per watt and noticeably longer battery life. You could have had that years ago. I need you to hear this, you have been sold a lie. All right, so. The way here. Let me get this out of the way there. Yeah, otaku. I missed the battery life for my V 60 as well, man. Yeah, the V 60. And I loved the V 60 because I could show like, I could show battery life, it was like, yeah, I got 11 hours of screen on time. And four hours of that was powering two screens at the same time. And we're just now clawing our way back to how good the V 60 was. My V 60 is years old now and I can pull it out and I can charge it up and it'll last me two days on a charge. And that's with really heavy use. It was like my main fallback phone in between reviews. It's sad that now. It was like, oh, the S 23 ultra's battery life is so amazing. And it's great. It's really good. With very low level use, you can get like three days out of this phone. If that was if that was something you valued, then you missed out on phones like the V 60. Then that would have been a perk you would have liked. But again, we had a whole bunch of tech reviewers just like lockstep. Oh no, LG's not as good as Samsung. So you need a better phone that spends more on marketing and makes me more money on my YouTube videos. Oh, wait. So yeah, performance testing, that post is on the Patreon. I went through all of my bar graphs talking about video rendering, batch photo processing, podcast mixing. And there's some interesting results. Remember, Samsung is making these huge claims about Snapdragon for Samsung being this significant performance advantage. And then also there's a part I don't do a ton of game benchmarking these days. But just looking at a couple of the games that I like to run that I actually like to play and I like to test. There's something really frustrating about other reviewers only using games like Genshin Impact. I think it really grossly misrepresents the phones that are broadly better at gaming, but you're looking at this one PC port, which is not well up optimized for Android. So it's yet another kind of plea that if you see your phone and you see this and it's not running this one game well, that doesn't tell you anything about the other games it might perform better at. And that actually is kind of a big plug for Samsung there. In the article, it's really frustrating that the note 23 is kind of a lightning rod. And it prepared me for something that didn't really represent what the note 23 could do. When you see these reviewers, like, oh, and it's the worst performance per watt in Android for Genshin Impact. And you're like, yeah, that actually is probably accurate. But if you get a note 23 and you play other games, that story might change. And I'm not going to put out those performance numbers public 'cause I don't need to embolden the Samsung knights. That's a my bias. Whenever I have something nice to say again about Samsung, it's behind a paywall. I got to take a drink of coffee here. That one messed me. Up. All right, so how about we get all of the stories that we're going to be talking about, the housekeeping, the news blog, the gadget blog, anything that we link to, all of those links will be in this week's show notes on some gadget guide dot com. We've got a bonkers news block to get through. And even with that detour, I managed to get housekeeping done in under a half hour, so we should jump on that. First of all, we're going to tag just a quick little bit of FCC news because this breaks my heart. I could not be more upset about this. Coming by way of ars technica and my newsman crush John brodkin. Biden FCC nominee withdraws blaming cable lobby and unlimited dark money. Gigi stone gives up amid opposition from Republicans and Democrat Joe Manchin. Gigi son would have been the best addition to the FCC we could have asked for. She is, she was counsel under Tom Wheeler. She is one of the most outspoken and knowledgeable individuals on topics like net neutrality and broadband distribution. I am devastated. That this entire political apparatus, this shenanigans have resulted in her stepping down from this appointment, personal attacks, again, misogynistic and homophobic attacks, just the worst of the worst instincts in political discourse, all aimed at her, and our FCC is still split. It should be a 5 member commission. We should have the ability to vote on policy. And right now it's in a deadlock, so it's now just a partisan deadlock, which does not represent what the American people voted for. The American people voted for a democratic president and that president should be allowed to appoint members to this chair. And that hasn't happened. And again, it's just every single time we get in this position, we let the conservatives stonewall and then when the conservatives are power, they get to a point whoever they want. And this one matters. This is how we fund broadband. A couple weeks back. We were talking about how carriers and ISPs were faking their coverage maps. Well, when they don't detail the appropriate coverage, they can block other companies from getting funds to better distribute broadband data to underserved communities. It's a really gross business tactic that the FCC should be able to regulate. But currently, the FCC is kind of tied up in this, well, we can't really do anything because every vote is a perfect split down these stupid partisan lines. So if we want to hold cable companies, ISPs, carriers to account, when they do bad things with our broadband infrastructure, we need a regulatory agency that is able to regulate this market. GG zone would have been the absolute best member to add to this to this commission. And we should all be very upset that this is the way it's played out. I was really hoping that eventually maybe through a year of this nonsense that we'd be able to kind of sneak this through, but the amount of money that cable companies could dedicate towards influencing conservative politicians and Joe Manchin completely wrecked what we were able to accomplish there. So it's really, it's really bad. This is like, how do I know about this? This is categorically not the way sort of a public infrastructure and regulatory agency should work. And again, I can point back to the Trump administration in the years of damage that Egypt pie. Has wrought to the FCC. So moving right along. That one was a bummer. How about for something really silly? Anyone want to tackle a silly story? I think we should. Let me pull this up here. The WWE is in talks with state gambling regulators to legalize betting on scripted match results. So this story comes by way of CNBC, Alex Sherman, WWE is working with the accounting firm EY. To secure scripted match results in hopes it will convince regulators, there's no chance of results leaking to the public, said the people who asked not to be named because the discussions are private. Accounting firms PWC and EY also known as Ernst and young have historically worked with award shows, including the Academy Awards in the Emmys to keep results a secret. Betting on the Academy Awards is
SGGQA Podcast – SomeGadgetGuy
"john brodkin" Discussed on SGGQA Podcast – SomeGadgetGuy
"I know I wasn't going to dig into all of these, but farhan and own Scott, they're having a conversation about just other toxic communities. From farhan, I saw that from an ETA Prime Video. It's a shame to see what happens since ether SX two is a great PS two emulator. That's another one that I kind of backed away from in talking about gaming stuff. The sole developer delivers this incredible PlayStation 2 emulator for Android devices and is just savaged by the Android community and then he decides to just leave. We're killing what we think we love. We're destroying the passion and joy in tech. And I'm adding myself to that. I mean, maybe I need to do more in trying to downplay the abuse. No, no, no. Maybe I need to do more in highlighting the abuse to make that undesirable. Maybe we need to encourage others to speak out more. Maybe if you see a comment on a YouTube video, it's okay if you say, hey, that wasn't cool. And it doesn't have to be a thing after that. You can mute them or block them or whatever you need to do, but just any token resistance to horrible bullying misogynistic and hateful commentary on the Internet. That's not what we stand for, right? So I don't know. I don't know. Anyway, Netflix. Boy, howdy is Netflix in rough shape? I did. I was snarky to Netflix on Twitter. Was it yesterday morning or this morning? I auto publish blog posts and stuff. And I re shared my Netflix editorial talking about their pricing. And I did kind of put in a dig, but it's the reality. And again, I have to sort of speak my truth. The reality of where we're at with Netflix is we drop down to the single screen plan, 720p, I fire it up for the very first time after finally transitioned to 720p and I immediately get the nag screen from Netflix. But wouldn't this look so much better at full HD 1080p? I went, no, Netflix. Play Stranger Things. And I rewatched Stranger Things in 720p on my really mediocre office TV. And it looked fine. So man, am I happy to not spend more on Netflix right now? So this one is a tactic that I've been super defensive on Netflix's behalf. Because I feel this is entirely punitive to a specific kind of business model and is not fair. So I am on Netflix's side for this one. But this is a story from ars technica. Of course, written up by my eternal man crush John brodkin, who I really should start maybe reaching out to and public and seeing, I'd love to just kind of pick his brain for like a podcast chat. I digress. Netflix fights attempt to make streaming firms pay for ISP network upgrades. So this is a proposed tax in the EU where they would charge companies that stream and account for more Internet traffic, they would charge them more. So that that way they could pay for other network, enhancements and network. Network improvements. From the Netflix co CEO Greg Peters, spoke out against European proposal to make streaming providers and other online firms pay for ISP network upgrades, quote some of our ISP partners have proposed taxing, entertainment companies to subsidize their network infrastructure. The tax would have an adverse effect reducing investment in content, hurting the creative community hurting the attractiveness of higher priced broadband packages and ultimately hurting consumers. So we saw this throughout the early days of Netflix streaming here in the United States. This was really at the peak of our national interest in net neutrality. And we saw regularly, hey, if I'm watching Netflix on Verizon, man, the quality sucks and it's constantly buffering, but I paid for this amazing Verizon plan and when I hide that Netflix traffic through a VPN, well, boy, I don't have any issues. And it all just seemed specifically targeted and punitive just to Netflix's business model because they were basically fighting cable at that point. Cable TV packages were still at their peak. This is the very, very beginnings of the cord cutting movement, and even YouTube suffered some of that as well. Netflix was ordered a cease and desist when their buffering screen would indicate that the ISP was not fulfilling their bandwidth. And so Verizon said, well, no, you can't tell the customers where the bottleneck really is. If you tell the customers that it's the ISPs fault that they're buffering and not your catalog having issues, we're going to take you to court. And if you remember, this was right around the time that Verizon successfully sued the United States government to dismantle the open Internet order, the Ohio, the very first flavor, which was super weak, the very first flavor of net neutrality that we really tried to institute through the FCC. Hey folks, are you getting bored of the current collection of tech and geek commentary on the Internet?