Hello?
And we're live.
Welcome to the WAN Show, ladies and gentlemen.
We've got a fantastic show lined up for you today.
I went to visit Valve.
I mean, we went from for years
having no relationship with Valve whatsoever
to all of a sudden I am hanging out at Valve headquarters
getting an early look at what I think
is going to be the hottest computer hardware release
of the year, the Steam Deck.
So I'm going to be giving you guys more of like
behind the scenes.
I'll talk about what it was like
because in that video I had to be laser focused
on making a video.
Yeah.
So we can talk through some of your guys' questions.
I'm sure Luke has some questions.
Did you watch the video?
I did.
You did? Okay, perfect.
Yeah, so we're going to chat Steam Deck.
We've also got, this is a pretty big news item today.
Apple has plans to scan photos on your device
for child abuse material.
What this means for privacy in the future remains to be seen.
What else we got today, Luke?
We have more Blizzard news.
Oh no.
Basically everything's horrible
and it continues to be horrible.
I don't think we've heard anything yet so far
that has like alleviated any issues
with the general situation.
And also don't buy GPU's from Quest.
Okay.
They're on a quest to take your money and run.
Hey, got them.
Let's roll that intro.
Don't give them the quest reward.
Okay?
Jeez.
And the show is brought to you today by Freshbooks,
Ridge Wallet, and Squarespace.
Thanks so much, you guys.
Okay.
What was the headliner?
What did you start with?
Let's talk about the Steam Deck.
Shall we?
Ah, nice.
Let's talk about the Steam Deck.
There is a lot to go over.
So for those of you who missed the video
that went up today,
I suspect most of you watched it,
but here is kind of the speeds and feeds
in a slowed down, a little bit more digestible fashion
because I was going,
I was going a million miles a minute
and I didn't really have a choice
because I had a grand total from walking in the front door
to walking out the front door.
I had about two and a half hours.
So that included more than half an hour
of being inside the building,
but not allowed to touch the Steam Deck yet.
And that included about 20 minutes and change
of packing up my things,
not being allowed to touch the Steam Deck and walking out.
So we were, my big thing going into it
was that this is a piece of hardware
that I'm really excited about.
It's a category of devices that I really love,
portable gaming PCs.
I mean, it's kind of like how way back
when I was in university,
I was super into small form factor gaming PCs.
And this is kind of like,
it's like that, but on roids, right?
The smallest form factor gaming PC,
because it's more than just a handheld console.
It is a full fledged PC.
The fact that it has a USB-C docking connector on it
means that you can power this thing,
thanks to USB power delivery,
off of a device that can run a display,
peripherals, high-speed networking.
The sky is the freaking limit.
It is running a desktop grade Linux operating system.
All Valve has done is they've put a bunch of development
work into their Proton, it's not an emulator.
It's more like a translation layer between DirectX
and well, whether it's Vulcan or OpenGL,
I guess it doesn't really matter to Proton
because both of those are supported on Linux.
So they've put this development work
into this kind of this translation layer.
And then this, basically what is Steam big picture skin
that runs on top of the translation layer
to play your games.
But other than that, it's just Linux.
It's just, it's running freaking Linux.
Unlike what Nintendo allows you to do,
you can say, hey, look,
I actually don't want to play games right now.
And you can do whatever the you want.
That is so cool.
It's just a computer, man.
Like if I was in charge of Valve, which I'm not,
and it's a good thing because this is a terrible catch,
or like a tagline, but I would say,
my marketing for it would be,
it's just a computer, man, Steam Deck.
That's not how they're going to market it.
They're really going to focus on it as a gaming device.
And that's the right thing to do
because you want to get this in the hands of gamers.
You want it to be the same kind of slick,
polished experience, navigating the store,
navigating your game library that you would have
on other handheld consoles.
Not that there are that many of them these days,
but with also the flexibility to go way deeper than that.
I mean, now all of a sudden you've got
the Steam Mod Workshop.
You're not just playing the game
the way it's meant to be played.
You can play it however the heck you want.
I love that.
I mean, play the game how you want.
That's a better tagline.
That's a way more on message tagline.
Also still not good enough,
but I'm coming up with these on the spot.
So give me a break here.
So the basics of the specs.
It's got four Zen 2 CPU cores.
So that actually puts it behind
some other handhelds that are on the market already.
The Aya Neo, for example, has six Zen 2 cores, 12 threads.
The one in the Steam Deck is running at 2.4 to 3.5 gigahertz.
And then the big headline for the Steam Deck
is obviously the RDNA 2 GPU.
So this is a custom piece of silicon
that Valve has clearly made a major commitment
with AMD to have made
that has eight RDNA 2 CUs at one to 1.6 gigahertz.
What that means in practical terms
from our limited time hands-on
is that the Steam Deck compared to previous APUs,
which are using Vega graphics,
it could have as much as 50% more performance
in GPU heavy applications.
Now, I said something
that was a little bit unclear in the video.
I said, I'm one of the first people in the world
to be hands-on with an RDNA 2 APU.
You could make the argument
that the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5,
and for that matter, no, just those ones.
Yeah, you could make the argument
that those are APUs that are RDNA 2,
but I had excluded them
because I didn't consider them similar enough
to the kinds of processors that you would find in a laptop
or in an off-the-shelf handheld.
Because what Valve's built here
is a little bit more off-the-shelf.
It's just kind of ahead of the shelf,
if you understand what I mean.
Unlike the Xbox Series X or the PlayStation 5, for example,
it doesn't use graphics memory.
And that's one of the reasons
that those consoles perform so well
is that when the CPU and GPU
have to share that bandwidth to the system memory,
the faster the memory can go, the better.
So that's why you see these ultra wide memory buses
to this just turbocharged graphics memory.
But in a handheld device like the,
I keep forgetting, I keep wanting to call it a stream deck,
like the Steam Deck, you can't afford the power
that running the GDDR6X memory would cost you
or something crazy like that.
So really it's more akin to what you will be able to get
in an off-the-shelf ultrabook, thin and light laptop
in six to nine months whenever AMD actually releases
their 6000 series APUs with RDNA2 graphics.
It's just that you're getting it earlier
before AMD is ready to ship these APUs with Zen 3.
So that's the point of clarification I wanted to offer there
is that this is an utterly unique product.
It's Zen 2 plus RDNA 2.
So it kind of straddles that generational line
and that's what's allowing Valve to start shipping
these things before AMD is ready to deliver
their 6000 series mobile chips, mobile APUs.
So it has 16 gigs of LPDDR5 memory.
And the timing, it looks right,
given that regular DDR5 is starting to make headlines.
Corsair was talking about the cooling solutions
that they've had to design
for their upcoming DDR5 memory modules.
I'm actually kind of surprised that's not in the doc
for this week.
Luke, do you wanna just throw a note in there
that we should talk about desktop DDR5?
So this is low power DDR5 running at 5.5 million transfers
per second.
So it's in 32-bit quad channels.
So that is significantly more bandwidth
than you would have running just dual channel,
regular low power DDR4 like you would in a modern system.
And it's especially important because again,
the CPU and GPU are sharing that bandwidth.
And it should be noted that this is still way less bandwidth
than even a mid-tier GPU from five years ago,
honestly speaking.
Like let's, here, hold on a second.
Let's run the numbers.
Like what does a 1060, GTX 1060 memory bandwidth?
It's rated for 192 gigabytes per second.
So we're at less than half of that by my napkin math.
Guys, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on that,
but it's not a lot.
But remember too, that this is a GPU
that doesn't have nearly the same kind
of performance characteristics as a 1060.
I'm expecting this to be a very well-balanced system.
And I'm excited for that.
Now let's talk about the screen.
So 1280 by 800.
I feel like I covered this in pretty good depth
during the video, but Luke,
I think this is where you might wanna chime in.
How do you feel about the screen?
Cause I know that not everyone agrees with my take on it.
Not by a long shot.
I think I mostly do actually.
Like in ideal world,
I would want the resolution to be higher,
but there is some amount of performance benefit
from having a smaller resolution screen.
Absolutely.
And not just in terms of like more frames per second,
there's also performance benefit in regards to battery.
So that is kind of nice,
but I think my probably biggest qualm with it
is it not being OLED,
which is I think something that you share.
I do.
I think we're mostly on the same board there.
And you made a really interesting observation in the video
that I didn't think about going into it,
but makes a lot of sense.
For content viewing,
yeah, that's probably not gonna feel that great.
But yeah, for games, I don't think it's too bad.
Obviously I wouldn't want that in a desktop format,
but you can dock it
and then you can have another monitor, right?
In a mobile experience,
that's a compromise that I'm happy to take personally.
Yeah, it's an interesting note
how you talk about the battery improvement
from going for a lower resolution.
So there's a few kind of elements to that.
One of them is that you might make the argument,
well, Luke, come on,
you could just have a 1080p display
and run your games at 720.
We are way past, in my opinion,
and this is gonna be a hot take,
some people are not gonna like this,
but I think we are way past the pixel density threshold
where running at native resolution is necessary.
There, I said it.
At a normal distance, looking at moving content, okay?
So I'm not talking, you know,
fine text while you're sending emails
or word processing or anything like that,
or, you know, anything that requires
pixel perfect precision like photo retouching
or video editing.
I'm talking about consuming content.
I first had this realization when we did our review
of the LG Ultrafine, this must've been about three years
ago at this point.
So that's that 5K monitor that LG released
that only worked in 5K on a Mac,
but you could run on a PC as long as it had Thunderbolt,
if I recall correctly, but it would only run at 4K.
And to my eye, there was no difference.
I couldn't tell the difference between 4K and 5K
at that size if we had two different monitors side by side.
And I couldn't even tell when the 5K monitor
was running 4K.
Now, for those of you who are young,
this concept of making sure that you're always running
your display at native resolution is a relatively new idea.
CRTs had kind of a factory, you know,
optimal suggested resolution,
but because they were just a gun,
like firing at these little, what are they,
at these little, what are they, electrons?
I can't remember what they're firing.
They're firing something at a phosphor coated glass piece.
The dots, the dots that it fired,
you could fire them anywhere.
So you could run them out of spec.
You could say, you know, let's say you bought a CRT
that was 1600 by 1200, 60 Hertz.
Well, you could maybe run that at 1280 by 960
would have been the correct aspect ratio for a CRT.
So 1280 by 960, 75 or 85 Hertz.
So you could decide how you wanted to run the display
and both of them would look equally sharp.
Then along came LCDs.
And if you ran them at anything
other than their native resolution,
they would look like absolute garbage.
But that was more true in the days when monitors
were 19 inches running at 1280 by 1024, right?
Like that is not a lot of pixels.
Here, we're talking about something that is seven inches
running at 1280 by 800.
It is one quarter the size.
And so at a reasonable viewing distance,
I would make the argument that whether you were running
a 720p native panel or a 1080p panel,
you could easily just run your game at 720p
and most people probably wouldn't notice the difference.
In fact, many phone manufacturers already do this
with their 1440p panels.
They'll have them run at 1080p in order to save battery
because it's less work for the GPU to render.
So if someone were to say,
well, Valve should have just put a 1080p display
so I could have the best of both worlds and run it at 720p,
you might be forgetting something.
If it's an emissive, or excuse me, not an emissive display,
if it is a backlit display,
when you increase the pixel density,
so that is of the actual film itself, of the panel,
when you increase the pixel density,
you increase the amount of actual wiring,
like every pixel has to have power and signal, right?
So you increase the actual amount of wiring
that is in that layer
and what you do is you increase the amount
of backlight strength that is needed to shine through it.
So Valve going with, I keep calling it 720p,
even though it's 1280 by 800,
it's 16 by 10 rather than 16 by nine,
but I'm gonna use them interchangeably here, I'm sorry.
So even though Valve went with a 720p,
like an HD panel,
I think it was justified from a power savings perspective
and from an expectation setting perspective.
This thing is not going to be running games at 1080p, 60 FPS.
Not AAA games, especially not new ones.
You would absolutely be able to run older games like that.
You wanna play some Psychonauts on your Steam Deck.
Oh, that would be a great experience.
And 1080p, yeah, it would be sharper.
But I think you could also get a lot of the way there
by super sampling the game anyway, if you really wanted to.
And because it's just a PC, you can do that.
Fine, render the game at 1080p.
Now, obviously that's something we didn't have time
or tools to test.
We weren't even allowed to capture game footage,
but I would make the argument,
I would guess, I would hypothesize
that we'd get a lot of the way there
running at 1280 by 800,
super sampled to 1920 by 1200,
and then rescaled for the display.
I think we'd get a lot of that sharpness back.
Right, unless you're continuing to go through things,
I have a series of questions.
Oh, okay, give me a couple more things.
Let me do a couple more things.
So it's USB-C with DisplayPort 1.4,
40 watt hour battery that they say is gonna give you
two to eight hours of battery life.
And I'm actually compiling some of the really good questions
that I've seen in the comments for that video.
I did read the vast majority of them,
and I'm gonna compile any of the excellent ones
from the stream today,
so that I can make sure that as we plan
our follow-up content on the Steam Deck,
because that will absolutely be coming,
we finally have a responsive rep at Valve
who seems genuinely excited to work with us
to bring you guys this information.
So as we're planning out our future content,
I wanna keep all of this in mind.
So I've already had some good questions
about the screen resolution and Netflix consumption.
So I had said that Netflix looked kind of trashy
when I was viewing it there.
I had blamed it on the resolution of the display.
That might actually be, excuse me,
that might actually be more because I was stuck
with Netflix's crappy 720p bit rate.
Netflix is limited to 720p on Linux.
This is a DRM issue, so I wanted to ask,
Valve, hey, are you guys working on this?
Because I suspect that,
so what we're gonna need to do is we're gonna need
to test higher bit rate content on that display,
which we can easily do, because it's a PC, woo!
To see if the problem is Netflix just delivering
a s***-looking stream to the Steam Deck.
So that's something-
It is often a problem, to be honest,
when people do testing with Netflix,
because there's also like bandwidth things
and like a lot of other stuff that will change.
Like Netflix will detect what bandwidth you have
and give you a different level.
And even if they detect incorrectly,
they'll just give you a lower bandwidth rate.
They're gonna lean on lower, but anyways, yeah.
Will battery thumbsticks or buttons be swappable,
even if it's with difficulty?
That's something that I wanna talk about,
because it's a sustainable thing as well.
I don't wanna see devices thrown in the e-waste bin.
People wanna know if the eMMC model
can be upgraded with an SSD.
Could that perhaps be the best of both worlds?
You have a small boot eMMC essentially,
and then you go in after the fact and upgrade it with an SSD.
Because I believe it's been confirmed by Valve
that the eMMC model will still have the M.2 slot.
So as if it's Linux, I mean,
there's no reason it couldn't have two drives or more.
I mean, there's no reason you couldn't plug in
a USB-C Steam library along with your micro SD Steam library
if loading time sucked.
You know, maybe someone will make like a pack
that kind of clips onto the back of it or something,
and it has like extra battery,
because it's a Type-C port, right?
It could have extra battery, it could have storage in it.
That is a brilliant idea.
Oh crap, someone's gonna do it now
before I set the LTT engineers on it.
How cool of an accessory would that be though?
That'd be sweet.
So it's just got like a C2C kind of pass through,
so you can charge the pack and the Steam Deck.
And then it's got like an expanded library
like you could have,
you could even just have another M.2 slot in it.
So people could put in whatever drive they want
and you could have a gigantic library, yeah.
Steam Deck accessory idea.
You could have like a bundle option
where it comes with the drive.
But yeah, I'd sell the bare bones kit
because you're selling to hard cores anyway, so who cares?
Exactly, right?
Like that's something that's nice
is whenever we do product development,
we know it's gonna go to people who like-
Know what they're doing.
Know what they're doing, yeah, exactly.
No offense to other YouTubers communities.
No offense, I'm sure you guys know what you're doing too
as long as the task is no more complicated
than picking your nose, excuse me.
Sorry, did I say that out loud?
Okay, so yeah, why don't you hit me with some of these,
some of these questions.
Okay, first one is not a question, it's a comment,
but I found it quite funny.
They said we could hear Linus being loud
in the tested.com video.
Okay, I was trying. That's hilarious.
I was trying, we had so little time
and it was a really echoey room.
I was actually, I even saw people comment on the video
that I sounded more quiet than usual.
That was because I was trying-
You can tell you're holding back on it.
I was trying to be respectful
of the other people that were shooting
like five meters away, if that.
So there were four of us in the room
and I was doing my best, but I just,
there was no such thing.
I mean, other people were talking through mine
as well.
I just happened to have my mic close to my mouth.
So we were able to post-process that
and were able to mostly get rid of it.
But we all just had to talk over each other.
We didn't have a choice.
We had an hour and a half hands-on with, like I said,
what I think is the biggest hardware release of the year.
So I did my best. I did my best.
Just an observation that I had was, first of all,
it just, it felt very old school.
You like scrambling through what felt like
a very large hotel suite with a bunch of tools,
trying to get all the information you could.
So that was a fun kind of nostalgia trip watching that.
Yeah, thanks.
Well, it was me and Ed, right?
That is as old school as it gets.
Yeah, and hearing Ed, like,
tour promote stuff from the background was great as well.
Like, yeah, that was actually very cool.
I enjoyed it a lot.
But how many, I know you showed a few,
like you couldn't test the controllers,
you couldn't do capture, that kind of stuff.
How many things and what things were you not able to do,
whether it was time or because they didn't want you to?
Well, one of the things I wasn't able to do due to time was,
I mean, they limited what games we were allowed to show.
And I asked them why, because, you know,
we've run into this before at trade shows, right, Luke?
So I asked them why and they said, you know what, honestly,
we don't think, or we don't know
that there's any legal reason
that we couldn't get away with, you know,
you're an independent media outlet,
whatever game you install on it, you know,
what control do we have over that?
Like, you know, they said they didn't know
that it would actually be a legal problem,
but for them, it was more about the relationship,
managing those relationships.
This is something they disclosed during the meeting,
but it didn't make its way into the video
because it wasn't about the Steam Deck.
But Valve has literally hundreds in this engineering,
I think this is an E, what is it?
I made some notes, you know what?
I don't have them here with me.
It's engineering validation two.
These are EV2 samples and they are considering these,
as far as I can tell, dev kit ready.
Those units arrived literally the day,
two days before we got there
and they loaded a new build on them at almost midnight
before we came in and filmed in the morning.
And like Luke, as a developer, how crazy is that?
That's absolutely psycho.
To put a new software build on something
the night before you show it to-
It could have rolled back, but that's still,
that is insane.
That's cool though, I don't know.
I like those kinds of pushes
when you're doing stuff at midnight before the day.
But anyways, I do have a question.
Oh, I'm not done.
I didn't even answer the question yet.
So what it came down to was respect.
Valve wanted to respect those developers
and give them a chance to get their dev kits,
which were in the basement of the building
we were in apparently, get their dev kits in the mail
and see their game running on the Steam Deck,
give them some time to tune it, to target it, right?
And then show the game running on the Steam Deck
because no developer wants-
They have more chronic controls or whatever.
Yeah, like I don't think about it this way
because I'm a hardware enthusiast.
That's my jam, right?
So I just think of games that I don't play as benchmarks.
You know?
Like to me, if I'm not into them,
it's just how valid of a benchmark is it?
Is it reproducible?
Does it have a built-in tool?
Do people actually care about this?
What does it tell us about this piece of hardware
when we run this game on it?
Does it tell us how good the CPU is?
Does it tell us how good the GPU is?
Does it tell us both?
I just think of games as kind of benchmarks.
So to me, it's like, well, who cares, right?
I'll just run it on it.
And it runs as well as it does.
And all I care about is the relative performance
to other hardware.
But no, okay.
I can see from a game developer's perspective,
if their game is running choppy, they feel bad.
That's not their game being enjoyed properly.
That's not what it's about for them.
That's their art.
And so Valve got specific permission
from every game developer whose game was pre-installed
on those consoles to include it.
And it was very gracious of so many of them
to allow their games to be included.
There were like 30 games on it.
So that's another thing that I didn't get a chance to cover.
I didn't even get to scratch the surface of the games
that were installed on it.
And in fact, the only reason that I focused on
Doom Eternal, CSGO, and Witcher 3
was because I needed CSGO to run my display latency test.
And then Doom Eternal and Witcher 3 were games
that I happened to preload on my A and Neo,
which I really wanted to show side to side.
Cause I had no idea what games were going to be there.
And Valve did not allow me to plug my own Steam library
into the Steam deck because I had games
that the developers had not authorized to be shown.
So that's the whole story behind
why I showed the games that I did.
I had some people upset that I didn't focus enough
on the touch pads.
I had, I had desperate, I had Anno preloaded.
I was like, am I going to be able to install
Uplay on this thing?
Can I run Anno?
Get the touch pads going?
Like I was ready guys, I was ready for it.
I wanted to do it, but I just didn't have enough time.
Those are things that I definitely want to explore
in follow-up content.
One of my questions is specifically about Anno,
but I'm not there yet.
Okay, okay.
I saw, I noticed Witcher 3 as well.
And I actually forgot about that during these notes,
but I saw Doom, I saw Counter-Strike, I saw Transistor.
All of those games are notoriously well-running games.
That's true.
That's true, but Doom Eternal was running at a medium.
So native resolution medium,
I wasn't even making use of more modern features
like dynamic resolution scaling, for example,
that are just, you know,
whether the hardware purists like us like it or not,
those are just going to be part of gaming moving forward,
upscaling, dynamic resolution scaling, things like that.
And so, you know, demanding games,
like a Dirt 5, for example,
that runs on the A and Neo at about 30 FPS at low.
That means that I would expect the Steam Deck
to hit 40 to 45, maybe even a little bit more,
because I suspect that we're memory bandwidth bottlenecked
at that point.
And the Steam Deck should have more muscle to flex
when it comes to heavily,
like GPU memory bottlenecked situations.
I'm really bullish on the performance.
I think that we might have to accept
dynamic resolution scaling.
We might have to accept turning down in-game details,
but I mean, if LowSpecGamer has taught us anything,
it's that until you prove it doesn't run, it'll run.
And there's a lot more hardware in the Steam Deck
than he's often working with.
Like, don't kid yourself.
This is a powerful little machine.
Now, staying on the topic of games,
I have a bunch of hardware questions as well,
but staying on the topics of games,
I know the Steam Controller originally
was super, super cool.
And something that got pushed around a lot
when the Steam Controller came out was Civ,
because you could play games like Civ on your TV,
which was previously not really a thing,
unless you had one of those couch commander setups
that no one owns.
So it wasn't really a thing.
How are the ergonomics in general?
And I have a lot of questions here,
but I'm gonna start with,
did you try just using the touchpads,
because that looked like a thumbs way down position for me.
Did you try just using the touchpads
during a standard period of time?
So the touchpads, in my opinion,
in my opinion, the touchpads are on there
because Valve believes that they enable gaming experiences
that are simply not practical
with a joystick or a D-pad configuration.
Because they're touch sensitive
and you can use them as track pads,
because they've got this advanced haptic feedback
built into them, the touchpads are,
they're there for a reason.
There's games you're not gonna wanna play with a joystick,
like an RTS, for example,
just like on the original Steam Controller.
But in my opinion, the touchpads were second class citizens
when it came to ergonomics.
That was how I felt, even though I have smaller hands,
therefore, compared to someone whose thumbs come over more
to kind of get in here and access something.
For me, it's a relatively small motion,
but it was less comfortable to use the touchpads
than it was to use either the joystick or the D-pad.
Now, related to that question,
both the joystick and the D-pad,
this is something that almost no controllers do well.
Pretty much every controller out there
is primarily a joystick controller
or primarily a D-pad controller.
And also there's that other thing bolted onto it, right?
We've all experienced it.
And there's ones that try to be both.
There's that modular Thrustmaster one, for example,
where you can actually switch the places.
But the thing is, even if you could move them,
physically move them around on the controller,
the reality of it is the contours are designed
for your thumb to hover above,
like where a thumb stick would be,
or to sit flat, like where a D-pad would be.
It's not the same, it's just not the same.
I think the Steam Deck is the closest that I've seen
to something that is perfectly balanced for both.
So whether you wanna play SNES games
and use the D-pad exclusively,
or you want to play PlayStation games, PC games,
games that are more joystick optimized,
you will be, in my opinion, at least 99% comfortable.
Neither of them interferes with the other at all.
Speaking of the triggers and the joysticks
and the D-pad, effectively, all of that stuff,
we know the touch pads are pretty good, okay, whatever,
they're tuning in the haptics, whatever,
but we saw they're pretty good with the Steam controller.
Joysticks, triggers, D-pads, really hard to get right.
What are your comments on those?
Okay, I like the D-pad, it's solid.
You know me, I'm pretty picky about D-pads.
It's not a super-clicky D-pad,
but it manages to not feel mushy.
It really does remind me of just a good,
simple, classic D-pad like you'd have on the SNES,
for example.
The buttons, hard to evaluate because the,
I'm trying to think what the,
the B button is kind of hanging off the edge.
So A, X, and Y all felt pretty good, not super-clicky.
Like, I remember Razer did a controller
a number of years ago, they had these hyper-clicky,
like they felt like a mouse switch under them.
So they're not clicky like that, but they're fine.
I would describe them as fine.
The one that hangs off the edge,
they've got some tuning to do because right now it feels
and sounds markedly different from the other three,
but they're aware of that.
That's something that they're,
that's something that they're working on.
The joysticks felt excellent.
I know one of the big concerns about this product
is joystick drift.
Now, obviously that's something I can't evaluate
in this curated, supervised experience
with these brand new devices, right?
They haven't been worn out yet.
But what I noticed is that the joysticks
are not a mobile style joystick.
So when you look at the profile shots,
where I hold up the Aya Neo and the Steam Deck,
kind of one on top of the other like this,
the Steam Deck is about double the profile.
And part of that is the ergo grips
for the bottoms of your hands.
And part of that is the much higher profile,
more desktop profile joysticks.
So the Aya Neo has more of like a low profile
kind of mobile joystick, not nearly as bad as the,
which one was the 3DS one where you slid the joystick
around 3DS Excel or something like that?
One of those anyway.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Not as bad as that, but very similar.
Sticks or whatever, yeah.
Yeah, very similar to what you'd find
on a Nintendo Switch.
None of them, I think Valve has some tuning to do
in terms of like mixing.
So the acceleration curve on a joystick movement,
I wouldn't mind seeing that adjusted a little bit.
It just, it felt a little bit different to me,
but I also don't have a ton of experience
playing games with a joystick.
So it could just be something that I was imagining.
The hardware though, the hardware felt good.
And I'm pretty confident in the hardware right now.
Cool, okay.
More things.
Ed has an interesting, Ed had an interesting comment
about like hand meat and it touching the touch pad.
I know you said you'd have to try to make that happen.
Oh, not a problem in my opinion.
Really?
Even for like monster hand, like bigger than me hand?
In my opinion, not a problem because it's the angle
that your hand's coming in.
Cause like here, I'm gonna kind of,
I'll change my angle a little bit.
Like you're holding it like this, right?
So the bigger your hands are,
the more you're gonna kind of curl around it,
but that's still gonna leave that gap there.
You're never gonna touch that touch pad.
I don't see that as a potential problem at all.
Okay, okay.
I just wanted to like super clarify on that.
We're getting a little bit in the weeds here now.
Sure.
Do you think, I know Valve with SteamOS
has wanted other manufacturers involved the whole time.
When they made the Steam PC,
a big part of their showcase was other manufacturers.
Somewhere in one of their announcements
about the Steam Deck,
I remember something about them wanting to make this
and then kind of pass it off.
Do you think other hardware manufacturers
are gonna jump on it?
This is very different than the visit down to Valve.
I think other hardware manufacturers
have already jumped on.
They just aren't the big names yet, right?
I mean, yeah, I mean more of the like normie companies.
Like do you think like Asus is gonna make a Asus Deck?
Asus probably has prototypes in their lab
and is probably sitting there
punching themselves in the face
over and over and over and over again
that they let Valve get out ahead of them on this
instead of having hardware sitting there
ready for SteamOS to run on it.
That is my opinion.
I think that they are absolutely mobilizing
a crack team of engineers
to come out and fight this thing head on.
I think that Valve is not making it easy though,
which is interesting.
So Valve, with Steam Machines,
it was very clear that that was a third party ecosystem play.
In fact, I don't believe they even,
they sold one as a first party one, didn't they?
But it was manufactured by someone else
and they were very upfront about it if I recall correctly.
They didn't really want anything to do with it.
And their showcase at like CES
had a huge lineup of different manufacturers.
Exactly.
Valve was all about, we're building an ecosystem.
I don't get that vibe.
I think Valve is kind of feeling kind of jaded
from their last experience going to market
with ecosystem partners.
And they're loaded for bear here.
Like the Steam Deck is priced aggressively.
We've talked about this on the WAN Show before.
And you see people complaining about the pricing,
but compared to what guys?
Compared to what?
Compared to anything that is real and actually exists,
the hardware is extremely aggressively priced
for what it is.
And so while Valve might totally be open
to someone coming in and creating a Steam Deck competitor
and a product that runs SteamOS.
In fact, Aya might ship a SteamOS preloaded device
because it'll save them a Windows license.
Like it's a boon even to Valve's competitors.
At that pricing, it's gonna be really difficult
for anyone to undercut Valve because I get the vibe
that if they're making money, it's razor thin.
And really the play is more support for gaming on Linux,
which gets gaming out from under Microsoft's shackles.
You could kind of think of it.
It frees gaming.
It frees gamers from the Windows ecosystem.
And it also generates revenue for Valve
because on Linux, Steam is gonna be the thing.
Their Proton compatibility layer is gonna be the thing.
To their credit, they've kept it very open though.
Nothing prevents you from running Proton without SteamOS.
There's a couple of clarifications I wanna go through too.
Someone mentioned in full plain chat and yes, absolutely.
You could stream games to the Steam Deck, sorry.
Yeah.
So you could use your own computer.
You could use a different service.
Sure, yup, definitely a thing.
There was another thing that I wanted to clarify,
but I don't remember, but no big deal.
Okay, last of all, what do you think about,
I saw this comment in full plain.
I'm a little disappointed.
I didn't think about it myself,
but what do you think about the viability
of just like scrapping one of these to your back
and plug it in an index?
If I had thought I had time to set up the base stations,
I would have taken my index down
and tried to play Beadsaber on it.
Don't imagine for a second
that you're gonna be playing a game like Half-Life Alyx
at full desktop gaming PC fidelity,
but I don't see any reason why something like a Quest 2
plugged into this thing couldn't work
or really, I mean, any other VR headset.
I don't see any reason why it couldn't play Beadsaber.
Yeah, yeah, awesome, cool.
I think that's it for my round of questions.
Oh, you mentioned that it felt good in your hands.
It does.
Even with the additional weight, it's no problem?
Yeah, it feels good in the hands.
The extra size helps because it's a little less dense
and it's also well balanced.
Like that's sometimes more important
than the actual weight, like what the balance of a device is.
I've reviewed phones before that are exactly the same weight
as another phone, but they're really top-heavy.
So they kind of always feel like they're gonna fall
out of your hand when you're holding them.
It's so important.
And I think they did an excellent job of nailing that down.
Cool.
Okay, well, I guess that's pretty much it
for the Steam Deck, unless you guys,
have you been checking Floatplane Chat,
seeing if they had any other questions and we good?
I have been monitoring for the most part.
I think we're pretty okay.
All right, cool.
Excellent.
Why don't we move on?
People wanna talk about, this is pretty unrelated.
There's been a few different questions
about crossing the border.
Oh yeah, okay.
I mean, that was, oh, and I haven't even talked
about any more behind the scenes at Valve.
Yeah, it was cool.
I think they've got more than one space,
but the space that I was in was, it was super clean.
Everyone there was super nice.
I've never really had the privilege of talking
to anyone at Valve before, other than one bloke
who appeared to be the only developer working
on Steam in-home streaming back when it first started up.
So the ability to have your Steam gaming rig run a game
and then stream it to something else.
This is way before the Steam Deck became a thing
and Valve took it seriously.
They had one person working on it, as far as I could tell.
And I did get in touch with that individual.
We're on Steam, I have him as a Steam friend.
And that was the only way I was ever able to interact
with anyone at Valve.
That's been, oh, and we had a PR rep that replied
to my emails, I think twice.
Once I managed to get my hands on a piece of index hardware
that I otherwise couldn't get, because it was out of stock.
And another time I got some game keys.
So that was, that's it.
That's been the extent of my interaction with Valve.
Most of the Valve products we've covered in the past,
we've just had to buy them.
We've had no kind of advantage whatsoever.
So it was really nice to finally get engaged
with some folks there.
They seem super nice.
They seem super excited about this product
and what it means because it's a lot more
than just Steam Deck.
Like this is gaming on Linux guys.
That's the real play here.
That's what this is about.
This is about the PC not just being a big gray box anymore.
Now it's a sleek little black handheld thing.
And it's not just Windows anymore.
It's not just Intel anymore.
This is all the, this is the ultimate underdog story here
other than Valve.
You know, you got AMD, Linux.
It's exciting.
It's super exciting guys. So yeah, that was really cool.
One of the other things I wasn't allowed to do
was unplug and plug things in a lot.
They were worried that could cause problems.
I wasn't allowed to try out my Thunderbolt 4 dock.
I had thought it was possible that,
I mean, this is a custom SOC.
It has a custom GPU in it.
For all I know, maybe it has USB 4.
And one way to check that would have been to plug in
a Thunderbolt 4 peripheral and see if it works.
So I wasn't able to do that.
What else, what else did I want to do?
I mean, take it apart.
What about the back buttons?
Oh, they feel good. They feel good.
Maybe a little stiff on these ones.
Like if it was for me, but then the flip side of that
is that I'm unlikely to ever use them
because I'm an old dog.
It's hard to learn new tricks.
And so the fact that they're stiff
means I will never accidentally press them.
I was going to say, you generally want those to be stiff.
Yep.
Cause you don't want to accidentally press them
like you said.
I wish the, I wish the triggers were a little deeper.
That's one thing.
Okay. Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Why don't we move on to our next topic for today, guys?
Do you want to talk Blizzard?
I feel like I've talked a lot.
I just got signed out.
Lol.
I'm down.
I'll just be a moment.
No, I'll talk through the Apple news.
Apple has created an incredibly complicated system
to deal with child sexual abuse material.
And it is all done locally on your device
before it is uploaded to Apple's servers.
But what they're going to be doing
is scanning iPhones for child abuse materials.
So Apple published a technical document
that explains how their child safety features
developed in collaboration with child safety experts works
or work.
It covers three areas.
So one is communication safety messages.
So in iOS 15, the Apple have tools to warn children
and their parents when receiving
and sending sexually explicit materials
that is going to create some awkward conversations,
which is probably a good thing for people to be talking
to their kids about sexting and you know, those pictures
and what might ultimately happen to them.
But what it means on the phone
is that this type of content will be blurred
when a child receives it
and the child will be warned about it.
Parents will be notified if the child opens it.
And likewise, if the child sends a sexually explicit photo,
messages will, oh likewise if the child sends
a sexually explicit photo.
Messages will use on-device machine learning
to analyze image attachments.
Okay, so part two of this is detecting
child sexual abuse material on device.
So Apple has chosen to scan for it on the device
rather than on their iCloud servers.
I can see why Apple just wouldn't want it
on their iCloud servers any more than necessary.
And working with the National Center
for Missing and Exploited Children
and other groups of agencies,
they've created an unreadable,
oh, that's a dangerous word to use,
unreadable database of image hashes
to compare your device's images to.
So then before uploading a photo to iCloud Photos,
it is compared against this database locally on the phone.
If there's a match,
the device creates a cryptographic safety voucher
and uploads both to iCloud Photos.
After an undisclosed threshold is exceeded,
Apple will then be able to interpret
the contents of the vouchers,
the uploaded images and the matching CSAM images.
So CSAM is child sexual abuse material,
and these will be manually reviewed, what a job.
And it confirmed, oh, makes my skin crawl.
And if confirmed, the account will be disabled
and a report sent to the National Center
for Missing and Exploited Children.
Users can of course appeal
if they feel they've been mistakenly flagged.
Finally, number three is expanded guidance in Syrian search.
So users can ask how to report CSAM or child exploitation
and will be pointed to resources.
Okay, so this is, this one is, this is loaded, right?
So industry watchers have expressed concern
that the system and its implementation
could be a, well, a proverbial slippery slope.
If Apple is all of a sudden monitoring
what kind of photos you're allowed to have on your phone
or send or receive, what else will they be monitoring?
And okay, while this might not be a problem
in countries with freedom of expression
and freedom of speech laws that protect its citizens,
what will other jurisdictions?
I mean, I would like to think we can all agree
that child pornography is abhorrent and should be illegal,
but there are certainly places on earth
where things that we would consider to be
just basic human rights might be illegal,
especially for certain oppressed groups.
So what is to prevent Apple
from creating these types of systems,
whether it is voluntarily,
as it appears to have been the case here,
or whether it is by force, by law,
unless they want to exit a market.
We've already seen them kowtow to the Chinese
when they set up a data center in China
that holds all Chinese user data.
That data center effectively does not belong to Apple.
And as we all know,
any data center that you have physical access to, you own.
The Chinese government has effectively,
through a proxy, physical access to it.
So what does this mean?
Edward Snowden piped in,
saying Apple is rolling out mass surveillance
to the entire world with this.
Make no mistake.
If they scan for kiddie porn today,
they can scan for anything tomorrow.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, for a company that refused to unlock the phone
of an alleged serial killer,
this is a weird move.
This is an interesting term, yeah.
I'm not saying that,
I'm not even going to try to decide what's worse,
child abuse or killing non-children people.
Like they're both terrible.
They're both unforgivable.
But it just seems to me that to decide, you know,
one of them is not worth trying to police
and one of them is,
it feels like a bit of an arbitrary line
is what I'm kind of trying to say right now.
Yeah.
Yeah, I hear that for sure.
Really? You're not going to say anything?
I don't know what to say, dude.
It's like, you want to hammer down on what I guess
is now called, what is it?
CSAM?
But yeah, Snowden has a point, right?
Like if they scan for this,
someone will scan for anything.
And like by someone,
like you were kind of alluding to,
like it won't even necessarily be Apple.
If the ability's out there,
other people will have it.
It'll happen at some point
and you don't know what data
they're going to be able to be looking for.
And this has nothing,
I know one of the common defenses that people come to here
is like, well, just don't break the law.
And it's like, well,
as I hope the last kind of few years
have made a little bit more obvious,
sometimes it's not exactly that simple.
And sometimes, yeah, I don't know.
Yeah, not a fan personally.
It's difficult.
I think that's it.
I think that I'm just going to have to,
this is going to have to be a line in the sand for me.
If Apple is going to say,
kind of like how they say
they're an environmentally conscious company,
if they're going to say
that they're a privacy conscious company,
this is a step too far in my opinion.
Yeah.
Speaking of a step too far,
Blizzard or do you want to do sponsored spots?
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All right, what are we doing next?
Blizzard.
All right, hit me.
It's long, but I'm gonna try to power through it.
So we've been talking about Blizzard
for the last two weeks, I think.
There's tons of stuff going on.
You guys have probably been following it.
They're getting sued by the,
I almost just said province of California,
the state of California.
But there's been some new stuff going on.
Effective immediately, Blizzard CEO.
I've usually heard him referred to as Blizzard president.
Maybe he's both, I don't know, not anymore.
But Blizzard CEO, J. Allen Brack is no longer CEO.
He's gonna be replaced by a duo team.
He's being replaced by Jen O'Neill and Mike Ybarra
who will co-lead the company.
J. Allen Brack said in response,
I'm confident that Jen O'Neill and Mike Ybarra
will provide the leadership Blizzard needs
to fully utilize, basically he says they're gonna be good.
J. Allen Brack has been a part of Blizzard
for a very long time.
He joined Blizzard in 2005
to work on World of Warcraft as a producer.
And by 2008, he was the production director for WoW.
By 2014, he was executive producer
and vice president of WoW.
And in late 2018, he replaced Mike Morheim
as president of Blizzard Entertainment.
Yeah, I thought he was just president, maybe it's both.
I don't know.
Today, I'm gonna skip over some of the details
about like, yeah, this is on the heels
of what we've been talking about for the last few weeks.
If you're interested, feel free to look it up.
There's a lot of details online.
Yeah, the shareholders are suing Blizzard,
which is an interesting, interesting take.
They're creating a second lawsuit for the company to face.
The lawsuit claims that executives made false
and misleading statements during the SEC filings
and failed to disclose a number of complaints
made to the company's HR department over those years.
It also cites unrest amongst employees
as thousands signed an open letter
condemning Activision Blizzard's initial response,
followed by a walkout involving hundreds of developers.
That being said,
in response to the state of California suing Blizzard,
the stock went, and then has already fully recovered.
So investors don't really actually care all that much.
It seems, yeah.
As long as they continue to make that Warcraft money.
Gotta make that Warcraft money,
which isn't making them as much money as of late,
which is, you know, interesting.
Something that has been constantly stunning me, though,
is, oh, I guess we should bring that part up
that you're reading right there.
Oh, no, I was just, I'm just skimming, go ahead.
Okay, cool.
Something that has constantly stunned me
about this whole situation is that the big dog
or the big rat, the CEO of the parent company,
Activision Blizzard, Bobby Kotick,
he has somehow dodged almost everything so far.
It's been amazing, rather impressive, I would say.
The only thing that he's really been involved in
in this whole process that I've seen online
is him saying that the initial response was tone deaf
and then immediately hiring a union busting firm.
So I was kind of wondering what's going on with Bobby, right?
So I just looked him up.
Just to see if he has anything in the background there.
And this is not his first bout of issues
with sexual harassment, not at all.
We've been digging into Blizzard's past skeletons.
A lot of the news in this harassment suit
is from many years past.
So I think it's okay to look into Bobby's past.
Bobby Kotick and Andrew Gordon,
head of Goldman Sachs Investment Banking Division
in Los Angeles, created a company called Cove Management
as a company to manage a private Gulfstream 3 private jet,
or a, yeah, sure, whatever, that they jointly owned.
And they hired former actress, Cynthia Madvig
as a flight attendant.
Why does that matter?
Well, in 2006, their pilot, Phil Berg,
allegedly began a pattern of sexual harassment
towards Madvig.
She reported this to Gordon, the Goldman Sachs guy,
who completely ignored her complaints.
And then shortly afterwards,
after she had filed these complaints for sexual harassment,
Kotick just fired her.
This began a three year long legal dance
in which Kotick said directly
that he would not be extorted
and that he would ruin the plaintiff and her attorney
and see to it that Ms. Madvig would never work again.
This was in response to his first set of attorneys
advising him to settle for 200K.
After cycling through a few different sets of attorneys,
he ended up doing just that,
settling with Madvig in April, 2008, paying $200,000
plus Madvig's legal fees of $475,000,
in addition to settling in court,
because he tried to underpay them with his attorneys
for over $1.4 million, which is all well and good,
because during the Madvig case,
he stated that he was worth one half billion dollars
and he didn't mind spending some of it on attorney's fees.
But that's okay because he makes well over $30 million
a year just from Activision Blizzard,
has a lot of other side ventures going on.
And in 2016, made somewhere around $200 million
in the form of a one-time bonus.
So who really cares about sexual harassment when you're rich
because you can just pay it off.
Yeah.
I heard you can just grab them by the pussy.
Yeah, yeah, it's easy.
If you got enough money, you just make the problem go away.
Why is that, why, like, what?
I mean, okay, I guess I know the answer
because what I was going to ask was,
why does that work like that?
And the answer is $1.4 million.
Yeah.
Oh no, more than that.
So 1.4 plus 675,000.
So about $2 million is the answer to that question.
And you know what the craziest part of that story is,
is that we're talking about someone that relatively speaking
has a lot of money,
and it's not a lot of money,
but relatively speaking has their own notoriety,
like has a reputation, right?
Like has something to kind of lean on and go,
yeah, you know who I am, you recognize me.
Remember me, I was in that thing.
This guy did something.
If you're a nobody, you know, then what?
How easily are you swept under the rug?
It's terrifying.
Audic has been kind of a treasure trove of amazing quotes.
I wasn't surprised I found those amazing quotes
when I dove down that story too,
because in the past he said some pretty wild things.
He's been really, really open about moving his games
to an annualized structure
so that they can be properly exploited.
Like he said that literally.
When he started taking over Activision Blizzard,
he said, where is it?
Where's this quote?
The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods
folks into Activision about 10 years ago
was to take all of the fun out of making video games.
Kotick did this by creating an employee incentive program
that really rewards profit and nothing else.
He continued his rant by saying he wanted to instill
skepticism, pessimism, and fear in his company
as motivation for making games in the midst of a recession.
He said, we are very good at keeping people focused
on the deep depression.
Epic.
Okay, neat.
Sweet.
Yeah, he's really cool.
He's super cool.
All right, buy more Blizzard games.
But what you shouldn't buy is a GPU from Quest.
KWEST, apparently that's really important
because there is another retailer or something
that has a very similar sounding name.
So it's KWEST.
All right, well, there's a mega thread over on Reddit,
but thousands of users in the r slash graphics card sub
have been discussing an apparent scam website, Quest.
KWEST, again, K-W-E-S-T, that's the bad quest.
Many people, primarily in the United States,
were greeted with many ads at the start of the year,
up until even the last few weeks,
to buy GPUs from a website called KWEST.
At a glance, it looked legitimate
with a reasonably large catalog of technology.
They had a live chat, clean checkout process,
and GPUs were marked up in price,
but not to nearly the same degree as other retailers
and were listed as being in stock or pre-order.
So they clearly went out of their way to make it look good,
but not too good to be true.
Many people have been waiting for order updates
or are actively in the process of disputing charges
with their banks and have been for several months.
A small handful of people have received GPUs
in poorly double-packaged Quest boxes,
but even some of the comments from these users
have noted the sketchy nature of the website.
A majority of people have reported a variety of reasons
that KWEST has provided as to why they haven't been
shipping out orders, from a legal dispute
between the CEO and his wife, to supplier problems,
which apparently means KWEST is unable
to refund customers for the product
because they didn't have it in the first place,
or wait, for the product they didn't have
in the first place, right, but they have the money.
So despite an abundance of evidence
and thousands of people affected,
there hasn't been any press coverage of it,
apparently, up until now.
Luckily, looking up KWEST seems to bring up
the Reddit thread before people even,
before you even see a single mention of the website itself.
Previously, Quest.com was a share your interest
response type website with an old homepage
dated to 2013, then in 2020, it went dark briefly
before apparently becoming a PPE selling company,
which then started selling GPUs.
So if you have any doubt that this company
might in fact not be a scam operation,
the site itself, tech.quest.com,
is now riddled with errors, missing pages,
and factually incorrect information.
The graphics card listings have been completely removed,
and many of their other products have pages
that can't be added to the cart
or are priced well above market rates.
Oh, the supposed Quest Inc. FDA registration is fake.
The phone number referenced on the website is not real.
Some image links are default images of the Shopify theme
or their placeholders, their terms of service
is not a terms of service.
Their privacy policy is non-existent
and the footer links don't resolve aside from the Instagram,
the Facebook links to Shopify's web Facebook.
So guys, watch out.
That was the whole real point of that.
We're just going through.
These guys are bad people.
They are trying to steal your money and run.
Don't give them your money.
You know who you should give your money to?
lttstore.com.
Another fantastic Shopify website.
Yeah, but this one actually like ships you a thing
when you order a thing.
Hold on a second.
I have no idea how my display...
Hey, it worked.
Okay.
Oh, wow.
Oh, interesting.
That's supposed to be purple.
I have my monitor in HDR mode
and it bungs up screen capture apparently.
So now we know that.
Anyway, the point is mouse pads.
They're back.
They're beautiful.
You can get them now in any size you want for $29.99.
That's right.
We've got 90 centimetres, 100 centimetres,
1200 centimetres, all those different widths.
And we've got different depths,
30 centimetres, 40, 50, 60 and 70.
So we've got pretty much everything rocking
and the Floatplane team, by the way,
Luke has done a great job of the variant changes
that they've made to the website.
It's now really easy to shop
for different variants of products.
Yay.
They'll take you right down to a picture
of that particular size, which is super cool.
And very soon,
because I know some people have actually been mentioning it
in regards to the mouse pad,
there will be back in stock notifications,
including for specific variants that is coming.
Pretty sweet.
Great job, Floatplane team.
Yay.
Yay.
So guys go get it.
Before they are gone,
we did restock as many of them as humanly possible,
but yeah.
This screen capture is horrible.
I know, I'm sorry.
There's something for everyone though,
whether you just want something
that's exactly the right size for you,
that you've never been able to find,
or whether you just want the most possible mouse pad
for your dollar.
I'm pretty sure that 1.2 metres by 70 centimetres one
for 29.99 is a good enough deal
that you could just cut it up into multiple mouse pads
if you really wanted to.
You wouldn't have the nicely finished edges anymore,
at least on some of the edges,
but it's a good mouse pad, good price.
It's three and a half millimetres thick,
which is a custom thickness.
I personally think it is a great balance
between responsiveness and comfort.
I don't think there's really much else to say about it.
It's beautiful.
It's beautiful.
All right, what else we got for topics today?
I've been signed out of Google Docs.
Thank you so much, Google, for signing me out.
So Luke, you're on your own.
We've got TPMs are hackable.
We've got, oh, okay.
That's awkward.
Yeah, just a little bit,
because of Windows 11,
just in case people aren't sure why we're saying that.
An organization hired Dolos Group,
a security consultancy,
to investigate the security of their network.
Dolos Group was provided with a new Lenovo computer
pre-configured with the organization's
standard security stack.
The researchers were quickly able to determine
that the laptop was only using the TPM itself
as a security measure for the BitLocker drive encryption
with no PIN or password.
In order to extract the data off the drive standalone though,
they would need to get this key from the TPM.
The TPM was using a serial peripheral interface or SPI
to communicate with the rest of the system.
And in combination with the fact that BitLocker
doesn't use the latest TPM standards
encrypted communications,
Dolos Group realized they may be able to extract said key.
Using a Soleil, whoa, that's a crazy word,
Soleil logic analyzer connected to the CMOS,
they were able to capture all data moving through the chip
and used an open source tool called BitLocker SPI Toolkit
on GitHub to isolate the decryption key.
With the key, the researchers were able to decrypt the drive
and bypass the need to log in entirely on the next boot
by simply replacing Ultimand.exe with command.exe.
Oh boy.
Although this does still require knowledge
of the hardware and software to pull off,
the fact that something like this can be executed
in less than 30 minutes is noteworthy.
Granted, even just, we've always said,
if you have access to the physical hardware,
you have access to everything.
Granted, even just adding a drive encryption password
that needs to be matched up with the decryption key
can greatly, by a lot, greatly improve security
of an encrypted machine.
TPMs do offer functionality beyond strong encryption keys
and are a good idea,
but without actually taking proper measures
in the first place and appropriate caution,
their functionality can just become a minor inconvenience
for an attacker more than anything else.
That reminds me of this old meme that showed a boxing ring
and it had like millions of dollars of security hardware
all perfectly configured.
And then it had like some dude at a keyboard
and it was like basic pepcak, who will win?
Yeah, users not using things properly
can defeat a lot of very well-intentioned
and very well-built security, so.
All righty then, good luck everybody.
Ah, what else we got today?
Man, I guess that's, boy, is that pretty much it?
I mean, we'll probably,
we probably have some super chats
from the second half of the show
when I remembered to click the thing.
So the first one I have here is-
desktop DDR5.
Oh yeah, we can talk about that.
Sure, yeah.
Corsair DDR5, I mean this,
I'm just gonna be reading off of
whatever article I read earlier.
There we go.
Corsair DDR5 modules,
boy, my screen capture really is awful.
DDR5 modules will require better cooling.
So in a nutshell-
Is water cooling RAM finally gonna be cool?
It just might because the big reason
that DDR5 memory is going to require so much cooling,
actually there are a couple of main reasons.
One is that at the speeds that
sort of J-Deck module manufacturers
are going to be building them,
so this is like Micron, Samsung, those guys,
DDR5 might not be appreciably faster than DDR4.
So in order to hit these maximum speeds
that memory makers like,
enthusiast memory makers like Corsair or Muskin
or whoever wanna hit,
they're gonna have to be overclocking the modules.
So we're talking running as high as 1.6 volts,
potentially on these 1.1 volt modules.
So these things could be running toasty.
Also, DDR5 moves the power delivery from the motherboard
onto the memory module itself.
So DDR5 modules could end up being A,
more complex and therefore expensive,
and B, much, much hotter,
especially if they're meant to manage very precisely
these extremely high voltages.
So it could very well be that liquid cooling your memory
for the first time ever
could result in notably better speed and stability
compared to just running your module naked.
Oh, that is high-larious.
I mean, I guess that's pretty much it.
I mean, Corsair is not new to the cooling game,
so I'm sure they're gonna get this all figured out.
And I guess their experience designing power supplies
over the last 10 years is probably coming in handy too.
Now that you can't,
I mean, it used to be, we made fun of Corsair,
oh, and what are they gonna make next?
Well, now all that expertise is coming in handy.
Next, well, now all that expertise is paying off, isn't it?
Now that you have to put a power supply on your memory.
I have an off-topic LTT store question.
Hit me.
Is the mouse pad washable?
Can you, well, every mouse pad to a certain degree
is washable, but can you like machine wash it?
We don't specifically advertise it as such,
but I have personally done it and it was fine.
I would recommend machine washing it cold.
You can also just hand wash it.
One thing to watch out for is don't, like anything dyed,
you don't want to scrub one spot too much
and then not wash the rest of it ever.
So when you wash it, you should wash the whole thing,
but you just wanna set it out to dry,
folded like the face side out
so that when you put it down on your desk,
it won't curl up and then just, yeah, let it dry,
throw it on your desk and you're good to go.
Mine actually was, stayed quite color fast.
Other, yeah, I couldn't tell the difference
between before and after washing.
So it's, yeah, pretty good.
Did you machine wash it cold?
Yep, yep.
Yeah, that's what you did, okay.
And don't put it in the dryer.
So machine wash cold, hang to dry.
I'm not actually endorsing it.
I'm just saying I did it and it was fine.
That's as far as I'm going.
Cool, yeah.
But yeah, it'll be fine.
Right, Superchats.
Hey, thanks Mitchell.
Sandeep says, what do you think about an LTE version
of the Steam Deck?
I think that's pretty cool,
but given that it's a device that doesn't have a keyboard
and the like touch screen and keyboard experience
is not great, the touch pads could change it a little.
But given that this doesn't have a really great way
to input text, I think that that's less relevant to me
than just like running it without a network connection.
I think running it without a network connection is fine.
Not like you couldn't hotspot it.
Felix asks, did Linus get to meet Lord Gaben?
I did not, unfortunately.
Isn't he living like New Zealand or something?
Oh, I don't know.
Troy Cook says, don't forget about
Diablo II Resurrected dollars.
Hey, got him.
Arian says, should I go for an ROG Flow X13
or a MacBook Pro 16 base for Adobe After Effects?
My workflow is really heavy,
much more than the budget 4K machine.
Oh man, it's tough.
I don't know that I would be going for a laptop at all
for a really heavy workload as you describe it.
And it's a really bad time to buy an Intel MacBook.
You know what I'm saying?
Like I just, oof, your timing is terrible.
I don't really like either of those.
For a really heavy, those are Arian's words, Arian.
Arian's words, really heavy Adobe After Effects workload.
I would want something more akin to like a thick boy
that really has ample cooling,
something with as many sodium slots as you can put in it
because you're gonna want more memory.
Sam says, please check out the recently reviewed Comma 3.
Yeah, I actually do wanna check it out.
I don't own a car that supports it right now.
I was thinking of upgrading my minivan
just so that I can use it.
The 2021 Odysseys do support it
and it just feels really stupid to upgrade
from a 2018 Odyssey to a 2021 Odyssey,
but my 2018 does not have support.
Henry Plays asks us to rate the film
Happy Gilmore out of 10, please.
Luke, hit me.
Happy Gilmore, wow, I don't think I've seen that.
Was I at 14?
I barely even remember the plot.
Adam Sandler plays Adam Sandler playing a hockey player
who is not good at hockey.
He becomes a golfer and-
Four.
Four?
I like it because it's also a pun.
Okay, well, that's pretty good.
I'm giving it a big fat nine.
Nine, you like it. Great movie.
I don't really remember it very much.
I haven't watched it as an adult, so it could be terrible,
but I watched it many, many times
as a child and adolescent and I thought it was very funny.
I think I only ever saw it once.
My favorite kind of stupid movie
was Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.
That's a great movie too.
Big fan, big fan.
Yeah, best line-
I watched that a lot.
Best line in Happy Gilmore is the skeezy rival says,
I eat pieces of like you for breakfast.
And Happy's like, you eat pieces of breakfast?
Like, that's disgusting, right?
You know, who would do that?
It's great.
I remember something weird with like an alligator
or something.
Like, I can barely remember the movie, genuinely.
Yeah, that's probably fine.
Moire says, word on LTT store super chats.
Been waiting to pull the trigger on a hundred dollar order
and mystery shirts have already gone out of stock
in the meantime.
Guys, we are, oh man, we are not close.
Yeah, don't wait.
We've got other stuff coming for the LTT store first.
That is on the docket, but not yet.
This is a good super chat, sort of, I don't know, whatever.
Whatever an Anthony chat is.
Anthony chat, I saw a highlighted comment go by
in Twitch chat asking about the anti-glare screen.
A lot of people seemed to think it was less vibrant
or bright than the pure glass.
How did it look in person?
It looked darn close.
I would have to have like a meter to see how close it is,
but it looked quite sharp.
It looked very bright.
I had limited time.
I didn't get to take both of them over to the window,
make sure they were at the same brightness.
So that's the kind of thing you're gonna have to,
if I'd had more time, I would have,
but we're going to have to wait to get the full answer for.
Johnny Reda Henley Jr says, move to PloPlane,
it's the best, I got drunk, JR6955.
All righty then.
Mark asks if I am allergic to red oak.
I am not.
That is confirmed.
Sorry, we didn't, there was a float plane exclusive, Luke,
that had some of the cutting room floor stuff
from Alex's Intel Extreme Tech Upgrade.
And one of them, I think was me testing
to find out if I'm allergic to red oak.
I rubbed it on myself and the answer is no,
but the answer was not in the video.
That was answered in the video comments.
I think Alex replied to someone who asked.
Lars says, hello, I have an LG 49 inch ultra wide monitor,
model 49 WL95C-WE and I dinged the plastic bezel.
I think I found a replacement one.
It says it is a frame assembly, but there are no pictures
and the website seems sketchy at best.
I think this is a classic cool story bro moment.
Yeah.
Lars, you didn't ask a question.
That's a pretty cool story though.
That is probably the part,
which is what I think you're asking,
but the only way to know for sure
would be to message the seller and see if they reply,
which would also be a good exercise
in figuring out if they're sketchy or not.
Forson Pyro says, have you heard about
the Titanfall 2 hackers?
I know that there's some kind of controversy.
I don't know the details.
I haven't read into it.
Parker Jones, oh, go ahead.
It's been plaguing all the Titanfall things,
including Apex to a certain degree.
There's been like weird retaliation war.
It's been pretty messy.
I haven't really bothered included in the doc.
It seems like we're maybe starting to wrap up.
Maybe there was a community fix pushed
that I think actually fixed things
or massively improved things or did something of the sort.
So maybe once everything wraps up,
I'll do like a kind of a here's what happened, but yeah.
Digital Mike says, Luke,
thanks for the tip on Clayton Gate Pizza.
Parker Jones asks, Swacket V2 when?
My V1 has been well-loved and I'm due for a replacement.
The product is finalized.
We are waiting on manufacturing.
Manufacturing is backed up.
It's a mess, man.
Clothing industry is a mess right now.
Orion Graves asks, as a network slash systems engineer,
would you suggest Dell's new XPS 15 2021 version?
I mean, it's a good laptop,
but you're supporting Dell who has been known
for kind of being butt heads lately and stuff.
And now that the frame.work,
which by the way, I have not made a final decision on,
now that the framework laptop exists,
there is something you could buy
to support a more open approach to laptops
as a network slash systems engineer.
But I mean, you will probably be very happy with your XPS 15.
Not as happy as you could be
with a modular self-repairable laptop.
Go down to frame.work.
Samuel asks, hey,
just waiting for the back-to-school laptop guide
to make a purchase.
Will it happen?
Well, we're not calling it a back-to-school laptop guide
because if we called it that and made straight up
recommendations for individual models,
they would all just go out of stock immediately
because that's how things are now.
But we are gonna do a how to buy a laptop guide
and it will include some honorable mentions.
So yes, we are doing it.
We're just not gonna call it that.
Darren asks, do you think Apple will come out
with a Steam Deck Challenger?
Absolutely not.
Apple has for many, many years gone out of their way
to not acknowledge gamers and gaming.
I mean, the lengths that developers had to go to
to get like controllers working on the iPhone.
We were talking with, oh man, what's that?
Rainway, Rainway.
They make like a streaming thing,
getting proper mouse support so you could play mouse games
on the iPhone streaming from a gaming device to it.
It's just, Apple just does not seem to care.
And it's just, I don't know, it's weird.
It's like, what, do they not have any gamers who work there?
Everyone plays video games now.
The year is not 1992.
Video games aren't this weird niche thing
that people nerds play in their mom's basement.
It's just like normal stuff.
I don't get it.
James Ryan asks, with the rise in popularity of Linux,
are you considering a dedicated Linux channel?
It's something that is absolutely on our radar
as something that could be akin
to our dedicated Mac channel.
Maybe it's something that I never host
because I think you guys know
that that's not been my jam over the years.
Although I am considering another switch to Linux adventure
or another switch to adventure, but this time Linux.
I did try it with macOS in the past.
It's also, you said earlier in the show
that you are of a hardware focus
and you can do hardware focused videos.
You have done and could do hardware focused videos
that have Linux involved with it on LTT.
Absolutely.
But if it was focused on the software that is Linux,
it's not entirely your jam.
So I don't think you'd have to be involved.
We did do a how to install it guide recently,
but Anthony was in charge of that from start to finish.
And that was totally fine.
And honestly, I think even if you had the Linux channel,
you could still do that on the main channel.
Absolutely.
Yep. All right.
Lars says, I couldn't fit it in, but yes.
My question is, are a front bezel
and a frame assembly the same thing?
Okay. I still did answer your question
to the best of my ability though, Lars.
You're just going to have to ask them what it is.
SFX works, last super chat,
trying to do research on mineral oil cooling for a server.
Saw your old mineral oil video,
but it's a fish tank for consumers and they got sued.
Will you make another one?
No, it's not practical.
I'm getting sued has nothing to do
with the integrity of the product.
It had to do with patent trolling.
And there is lots of information out there
for mineral mineral cooling for servers.
I'm sure you'll find it.
All right. I think that's it.
Thank you everyone, ladies and gentlemen,
and everything in between for tuning into the WAN Show.
We will see you again next week.
Same bad time, same bad channel.
Bye.
SFX