Transcript

00:00.00 Ned: The most insulting thing about computers is the fact that they do exactly what I asked them to.

00:04.42 Chris: Right? And then it turns out that it’s you That’s wrong. Well really, the question is why would the computer say it like that. That’s just rude.

00:08.76 Ned: But how could that be I am never Wrong. I mean I know I’m a fallible human but you don’t have to be so mean about it. Oh yeah.

00:24.81 Chris: I don’t I don’t I don’t like crying myself to sleep I mean I’m used to it. But.

00:30.26 Ned: I Mean most these yes I mean frequency Breeds complacency I suppose and all that jazz.

00:41.67 Chris: It’s just like the unfathomable darkness and inevitability of the heat death of the universe and plus you have to remind me of typos.

00:50.80 Ned: Um, and why do you have to use the angry red Squiggle no one likes that.

00:54.66 Chris: Um, it is. It is not a friendly squiggle.

00:58.50 Ned: I have noticed that at least with Google docs the grammar is the blue squiggle and the spelling is like the red squiggle. So you know which mistake you’ve made and they are like what would be a less.

01:07.23 Chris: Right? They’re both mean.

01:16.83 Ned: Annoying color like blues. Not so bad and I feel like it’s less opinionated because Grammar is more flexible. You could think I’m wrong. But I’m right spelling less. So.

01:29.23 Chris: That would be a good name for your autobiography. You could think I’m wrong. But I’m right.

01:34.85 Ned: Oh I thought you I thought it was going to be spelling less. So.

01:39.37 Chris: Oh or the angry red squiggle.

01:44.50 Ned: Ah, no, that’s the episode title. It’s not good. It twisted oh hello alleged human and welcome to the chaos Lever podcast. My name is ned and I’m definitely not a rabbit rabbits are small furry Woodland creatures with floppy ears and cute little tails.

01:48.68 Chris: Um.

02:02.20 Ned: I am a silicon based quasiintelligent hyperware autonom. But I mean I my person I’m a human, not a rabbit with me is Chris actually is a rabbit a six foot tall rabbit named Chris hi Chris Harvey

02:19.23 Chris: Harvey that’s that’s my rabbit name among the are among the wood woodland folk. No yeah.

02:21.33 Ned: Is that your middle name Chris Harvey Oswalt is that kind of like a furry name so that’s a different name is what you’re saying.

02:34.97 Chris: I was trying to say it’s a very clean shaven name. But no, you had to double down on your own joke.

02:38.14 Ned: Because my joke is good and yours is Pedestrian O I came with the big words to look out that airy joke always reminds me of night court. Were you one who watched night court as a.

02:49.72 Chris: That. Oh Yes, I was then unfortunately they brought it back which we don’t need to talk about I mean I will say this for it. It’s better than the New Quantum leap.

02:57.94 Ned: And who didn’t I refuse to acknowledge that happened. I Also refuse to acknowledge that. Why do you? Why are they trying to destroy everything that was great about my teenage years. There wasn’t much let me hold on to something.

03:14.83 Chris: Well I mean Pulli is still available So you’re probably going to be okay.

03:23.69 Ned: You do this to hurt me and I know you do because I know that you know my overall feelings on pachouli also known as pine dirt.

03:26.90 Chris: I Don’t know what you could mean sir.

03:36.43 Chris: Is that what it translates into.

03:39.90 Ned: I mean as far as my nose is concerned. Yes I also just have a general association of petuli with dirt bags because the first person I ever met that wore petully heavily was he was a dirt bag. Of the highest variety and he hung out with us sweet teenagers him being at the ripe age of 20 which was weird. You met? No so I think there’s just a strong association between that smell and that guy.

04:09.61 Chris: It’s a little not normal.

04:17.41 Ned: And it doesn’t matter how much time passes that never quite goes away like a lot of smell memories.

04:22.73 Chris: I Guess a better question is what does wireless communication smell like how’s that for a segue rushed it.

04:27.91 Ned: Wow! Great anyway, well done sucker. Well if we’re talking about predatory behavior why by 7 is coming for your children. do I do I have everyone’s attention now. Sweet. Let’s chat. About wi-fi 7 but before we get into that 1 quick thing I want to note to listeners guess what we now have a Youtube channel. It’s under chaos lever should be pretty easy to find so if you want to see our facey faces. Do the talkie-talkie you can do that on Youtube and hey if you’re watching us on Youtube right now. You could stop looking at our facey faces if it’s offputting to you and instead listen to the podcast we like yeah and we know which option is better but hey it’s 2023 and apparently all podcasts need a Youtube channel. So.

05:12.52 Chris: But what we’re trying to say is you’ve got options.

05:25.56 Ned: Wi-fi 7 attentive ah listeners might remember my recent battle with wireless access points at the old homestead while I won that particular protracted battle I am also well aware that the war is far from over and. I’m going to say my only real path to victory is the complete annihilation of the current devices real scorched earth earth policy here and then finding some suitable replacements for them so in the process of looking at potential wireless access point replacements. Because I don’t use a wireless router because I’m not ah, what’s the word I’m looking for. Yeah there’s that yeah, okay, we’ll go with that. Um a barbarian I think is what I was looking for. Ah.

06:07.87 Chris: In the twentieth century.

06:19.66 Ned: So I stumbled across wi-fi 7 the successor to six e so my access points I thought they were running wi-fi 6 but then I actually looked at them and it turns out they’re running wi-fi five. So I am like way behind here. But it does big. The question. Should I upgrade the devices to six c which is available now and a ratified standard or do I wait for wi-fi 7 devices to become more prevalent and slightly more affordable which we’ll get to later and guess what listeners and Chris I’m going to drag you along for the ride. So get in loser. We’re going wifi 7 shopping. Yeah I think that actually makes me the Regina George of this situation. Do you want to be Gretchen wieners.

07:01.92 Chris: Cool. Thanks.

07:11.77 Chris: Probably end up being that by default.

07:17.61 Ned: The other option is being a man to sig for you which is not a bad thing stop trying to make betch happen. Okay, so a little background on the whole Wifi standards thing. Ah, there’s the popular Wifi Naming standard.

07:21.36 Chris: It’s very fetch.

07:32.71 Ned: And then there’s the actual standard that’s managed by the I triple e so if you remember hearing eight zero two dot eleven something something. That’s the actual standard eight zero two dot eleven n is the one a lot of people remember since it introduced the alternative numbering from the wi-fi alliance. And it was called wifi four that was way back in 2008 and since then we’ve had wifi 5 6 six e and now seven based on the Eight two Dot 11 b e standard because it be awesome I know.

08:09.86 Chris: Ah, you figured the numbers would move up I mean couldn’t it be 8 2 dot 12 at some point.

08:11.56 Ned: Ah, why they decided.

08:17.28 Ned: Ah, you would think maybe but that’s not how the standard works 8 um two dot eleven. No no so eight two dot eleven is just the general wireless standard for wireless.

08:19.32 Chris: No arbitrary letters thrown on at the end is the way to go.

08:35.52 Ned: Communications protocols and every time they amend the standard. It basically increments. Alphabetically so if you go back like previous standards were n and then you got into Ac so they basically got all the way through a through z as the first letter. And then just start attacking on a second later so I imagine at some point we’re going to get to like 3 letters as being part of the standard and then the heat death. Yeah or the heat death of the universe which whichever I was thinking about what Android’s going to do when it hits version 27 but that’s a whole other problem that we don’t need to do.

08:59.40 Chris: Something to look forward to.

09:12.25 Ned: s tell 2 um, so the general pattern is that the iri e takes forever to ratify a wi-fi standard multiple years. So once the main pieces of the stand new next generation of the standard are settled on. Vendors start developing hardware to support it because making hardware kind of takes a while. The net result is that hardware products that support the standard are available before the official standard has actually been ratified and everyone’s just okay with that. Um, 8 two 8 two e should be ratified in mid twenty twenty four in case, anyone cares but you can buy wifi 7 devices today. Cool yep, same thing happened with every previous wi-fi standard. So. It’s just it’s the way that they do things.

09:57.39 Chris: Neat. Glad we have the standard.

10:07.63 Ned: So what is new in the wifi 7 standard. How does it compare to the previous generations. Let’s hit the highlights and then we’ll circle back in some more detail. Ah we’ll start with the spectrum support wifi 7 supports the 2.5 ah, 2.45 point four five gigahertz and six gigahertz spectrums so all 3 of those spectrums that’s no different than 66 c had the same spectrums in its support. Ah, but the way that it was supported was a little bit different which we’ll get to it uses forty ninety six q a m or quadrature amplitude modulation. Don’t expect me to say that again or explain what it means it uses larger chunks of the 5 and six gigahertz bandwidth per channel it supports multilink operation across. Multiple spectrum bands. It has lower latency by using multilink operation. It has flexible channel utilization and it has a time sensitive network extension which I didn’t have time to get into. But it’s a really interesting application where you. If. You do have a time sensitive network those are typically wired because they’re time sensitive and this extends that time sensitivity to wireless communications using wi-fi as supposed to some proprietary solution which is important for like manufacturing and other applications. So good for them.

11:41.17 Chris: And in in this use case time sensitive means.

11:43.11 Ned: Yeah, it means that ah it had things have to be going in lockstep with respect to a specific time code so you can’t it can’t be like eventual delivery. It has to be precision delivery.

11:59.84 Chris: Gotcha.

12:02.11 Ned: So there are certain applications where time sensitivity matters. So let’s expand on some of those starting with the spectrum. Ah probably the biggest deal is the way that wifi 7 makes use of available spectrum if we rewind the clock to the original. Wi-fi standards probably before some of you were using wi-fi you had eight zero two Eleven a and b and this is before they named them wi-fi anything those would technically be like wi-fi one and 2 um, but basically 8 two eleven a used 5 gigahertz spectrum and b used the two point four gigahertz spectrum two point four is also used by your wireless phone in your house if you still have one of those microwaves tend to emit. Ah, radiation in that spectrum and a whole bunch of other things. Rc cars also use that spectrum. Um, so there could be a significant amount of interference happening Five Gigahertz is a little less crowded which is nice but it also means because of the fact that each. Standard only supported one of those spectrums a an eight zero two eleven a device couldn’t connect to an eight zero two Eleven b router that’s not great. Well the introduction of 8 o two eleven n which was wi-fi.

13:25.60 Chris: Who doesn’t want 2 routers.

13:35.90 Ned: 3 I think or 4 might have been 4 is wi-fi for that packaged both of those spectrum in the same device while maintaining backwards compatibility with the a b and g standards so that meant if you had an eight zero two Eleven n router you could use any device with it essentially and then the Fcc in the United States started releasing portions of the 6 gigahertz spectrum for unlicensed use and so the wifi alliance wanted to get in on that action. Because higher frequencies tend to allow you to transmit more data because the wave wiggles more to use a technical term precisely. It’s really all you need to know so in theory if you’re using six gigahertz

14:15.26 Chris: Wiggle Wiggle Wiggle Wiggle Wiggle wiggle neat see I understand wi-fi.

14:28.20 Ned: You should be able to push more bits than two point 4 or 5 all other things being equal so that’s kind of where we were at Eight Zero two Eleven n and wi-fi I think wi-fi five was the last standard to not use 6 ix gigahertz wifi 6 added support for 6 gigahertz which is easy to remember six six gihertz yay but it was super limited because the Fcc was very concerned about wifi 6 interfering with other devices that were using that unlicensed band so routers and access points. Were very limited limited in the terms of power they could apply to that signal meaning that it really wouldn’t work unless 2 devices were very close together and line of sight. So if there was like a wall between your device and and the wireless router. It couldn’t use six Gigahertz it’s it’s not great. It turns out that the main use case for it in that case was to have a line of sight between access points and use it for the mesh on the backend for your access points. So your actual device would still be using two point four or five

15:37.58 Chris: Bright.

15:44.89 Ned: And then the access points would be talking to each other using six gigahertz so they would stay out of the other 2 spectrum bands and reserve that for clients. Yeah I mean as long as you have line of sight between access points. It was great and you put them.

15:52.89 Chris: Which actually kind of makes sense in terms of allocation.

16:00.84 Chris: Um, well those mesh devices. What do they cost like twelve bucks each I mean you could have 1 on each doorknob.

16:03.45 Ned: Governor.

16:09.51 Ned: It’s it’s a valid point. Um wi-fi six c relaxed some of those restrictions. There was the introduction of a database of devices using that and so your access point or router could grab that database and. Selectively use the 6 Gigahertz spectrum in tandem with that device listing to make sure it didn’t interfere with anything that was nearby so because that was introduced. The scc was like all right? You can you know turn the power up a bit. And so now client devices could really start using 6 gigahertz but each device was limited to using only one spectrum band at a time. So if my phone is using the five Gigahertz band it can’t also use the 6 or the 2.4 in tandem to send more bits. You could think of that like as link aggregation right? If you’re into wired networking I can’t aggregate all these different bands to just blast data across the wireless until wi-fi 7 yeah, so that introduced the ability for a single client device to.

17:10.58 Chris: We.

17:18.46 Ned: Leverage multiple streams across multiple bands. The multiple streams thing was possible before with Mimo which multi- input multi-output yeah ah, but we could only do it on a single band so I could do mymo.

17:28.12 Chris: Yeah, think so.

17:35.80 Ned: Multiple streams across five Gigahertz but I couldn’t do it across multiple bands 7 was like nope now you can do it across multiple bands which lets you improve the throughput of any given client device. It also means that. Router can dynamically allocate channels across multiple links to a single device. So if my device is using six gigahertz but it moves a little further away and drops off of six gigahertz it can seamlessly transfer to 5 gigahertz or two point 4 without having to reestablish the communication so that just improves how your device functions over time as you move around your house or your office.

18:17.97 Chris: Right? And I take it. You don’t have to reconnect to a different network like you would in an n router. You would have you know network name dash two point four and network name dash 5

18:30.16 Ned: Yes, that’s another thing that goes away is when you look at the available wireless networks you won’t see 2 different networks for the 2 different spectrum bands. You’ll just see a single network and it’s up to your device and the access point to negotiate. Which bands your device can talk on. Ah so that is all about the spectrum now we’ll talk about channels and not like Tv channels. This is yeah.

18:48.78 Chris: Break.

18:59.68 Chris: 57 channels and nothing’s on. Do you remember when 57 was a lot of channels. Those were the days.

19:07.95 Ned: That’s cute remember channels being a thing but forest dreaming. Um, anyway, so here’s a little bit of fun trivia. The 2.4 gigahertz band came with 14 channels. Were spread from the 2.4 to 2.5 range in Twenty Two Megahertz increments now I’m not going to try to do the math here. But basically what it came down to was that each channel overlapped with the adjacent channels and so in general practice. If you’re using 8 o two eleven b or g you really only use channels one six and eleven to avoid overlap and if you weren’t in the us you could also use channel 14 do you remember this.

19:55.45 Chris: You Yeah I mean so that’s one of those fun things that as you’re learning about networking you find in the advanced settings. Oh channels. That’s exciting.

20:06.29 Ned: I’ll pick I’ll pick three which then doesn’t actually help you because now you’re hitting interference from like channel 1 and 6 the same time array most devices today will automatically pick.

20:16.34 Chris: Yay.

20:21.59 Ned: Ah, channel for you and the 2.4 gigahertz range and same thing with five five Gigahertz which is less of a problem. Ah.

20:27.58 Chris: Which incidentally is one of the reasons that the world famous technical support technique of turn it off and turn it on again works for increasing your bandwidth on your wi-fi router because what happens is it selects a new more empty channel.

20:43.41 Ned: Yep, until people do the same thing in adjacent houses and you end up with a like an overloaded channel again. Fortunately 8 to eleven g and n introduced orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. Please don’t ask me to explain that. But what it does is it slim down that portion of the channel that was actually being used to sixteen point Two five Megahertz and that reduced the overlap which increased the number of usable channels. But at the same time. It also added an option to double your channel with to forty Megahertz to get more speed since each device was only getting a single channel. So now you’re back to the same problem at least in the two point four gigahertz and fifty in the five Gigahertz range you had a little more room to work with. There. So I guess what I’m saying is that it’s not just the spectrum band you’re using, but how wide the channel is determines how much data you can push down that channel because five Gigahertz and six gigahertz are higher frequency and they have these wider available channels due to the nature of. Being bigger numbers because that’s how numbers work. Um 8 two Eleven ac a five gigahertz only standard called wifi five used eighty Megahertz channels by default and an optional ah hundred and sixty megahertz channel if you.

22:13.12 Ned: If your device supported it and there was available bandwidth so you I am so good at this. So if you combine that with multiple antennas on the client and the receiver you could get a theoretical throughput of five hundred megabits per link which pretty pretty good.

22:14.46 Chris: That was amazing math that you did on the fly there I was that was very impressive.

22:31.76 Ned: At least we thought it was good at the time before like Netflix and a hundred devices on your home network.

22:38.43 Chris: Ironically, they’re probably all watching Netflix.

22:39.44 Ned: Netflix is on no one’s watching it. But yeah, so how about 6 girt gigahertz and wi-fi 7 so now wi-fi 7 uses 100 and sixty Megahertz size channels by default. With an optional doubling to three hundred and Twenty Megahertz and it supports up to 16 simultaneous streams which get you a theoretical max throughput of forty six point one gigabits per second a little bit now. No one’s going to get that outside of a lab.

23:10.61 Chris: That’s more than 500

23:16.41 Ned: And maybe not even in a lab. It is theoretical but that’s a pretty big jump from wifi 5 s one point one gigabits per second yaoza. Yeah so with these larger channels. There is the increased chance that some portion of any given channel.

23:24.25 Chris: Yeah.

23:35.55 Ned: Is going to encounter interference. Our air is brimming with radio waves after all so that other feature I mentioned the flexible channel utilization it lets wifi 7 keep using a portion of that channel even if other portions are being canceled out or interfered with.

23:52.89 Chris: Yeah.

23:53.73 Ned: That’s kind of neat so it can make better use of what what channels are available to it The last big piece is modulation and this is the part that I barely understand and when I say barely I mean not at all I I Yeah I tried to read some.

24:10.27 Chris: That’s fair.

24:13.80 Ned: Documentation around it and there were constellations phase shifting for your transforms and other things that all honestly sounded suspiciously like they were plucked out of a star trek episode like I’m sure you could invert the polarity or something as well. So. What I can tell you is that wifi 6 and 60 used ten twenty four q a m and wifi seven uses 4096 q I m and that’s like a zillion times more better? Yes, ah.

24:44.88 Chris: At least if not more than that.

24:51.67 Ned: To put it in like simplest terms that I might kind of understand is that modulation is how you pack more information into a signal by altering some aspect of the wave that carries the data so am radio modulates the amplitude to encode information.

25:02.84 Chris: Commit.

25:10.85 Ned: FFm radio uses frequency modulation and q am uses some multidimensional thing brought to us by the q collective. Yeah.

25:21.72 Chris: Yeah I think Q am stands for queues. Awesome modulation. So.

25:26.51 Ned: That sounds accurate I’ll I’ll have to ask Picard and see if he agrees so seriously I was reading the Wikipedia article and once it started showing me limit functions I was like nope I’m out.

25:41.86 Chris: Yeah I get it I tried watching a number of Youtube videos particularly around fourier transformations because there’s a lot of talk about how that one equation and that one function is like basically the only reason technology exists. Because it doesn’t just help wifi it helps like everything. Yeah.

26:01.82 Ned: Yeah, yeah, it does something with Graphics I think and it’s probably used in ai I think it’s used So it’s like Wow Yeah, this is important I think you need to know matrix Algebra and and Calculus which come on.

26:14.77 Chris: Um, ah nobody knows that is 2023 nobody knows calculus anymore.

26:19.49 Ned: Ever. I oh I did once anyway. So let me bottom line what everything I discovered and how this applies to my home networking conundrum so the access points I have today are about 5 years old I’m guessing. And they support eight zero two Eleven ac and eleven n which is wifi 4 and 5 which means the maximum throughput I’m going to get is three gigabits per second if I had just the right client device exactly the right distance from my accent. Access point and Mars was in the house of Jupiter and not in retrograde. You don’t want it.

27:03.49 Chris: I’m almost positive you got that all wrong.

27:06.70 Ned: Okay, so if I move up to wifi six e that would be a boost to a theoretical nine point three gigabits per second of throughput. So tripling what is possible today. out plus I would get a bunch of other features that improve performance and handle client devices better such as support for eight mymo streams at the same time instead of four with wi-fi five so big boost there. But of course as we’ve already discussed. Wifi seven does kind of blow six c out of the water. It’s got 4 times the bandwidth it doubles the mymo streams to 16 so it seems like wi-fi 7 is probably the way to go but that does you know introduce. Some new questions. Can you get wi-fi access points right now. Yes. You can tp link has a mesh system available now but that asks 2 more questions one. How much does it cost and 2 do I have any client devices that could actually use wi-fi 7 so the answer to the first question was super simple I looked up the pricing and there. Mesh access point system called deco b e ninety five. They sell it in a 2 pack and it’s $1200 with 2 access points for comparison the previous generation for 6 a their deco.

28:27.25 Chris: Okay, yaoza.

28:39.61 Ned: X e Seventy five two pack is two hundred and seventy dollars well if I want four x the bandwidth I guess I have to pay four x the cost and this is obviously because this stuff is brand new. They’re the probably.

28:42.70 Chris: Which is different.

28:56.63 Ned: I won’t say that the very first to market but they’re pretty close and the chips are expensive to produce. The cost will go down. There was probably a time where that 62 pack was also like $1200 to answer the second question about client devices. The answer is no.

29:00.18 Chris: Right.

29:15.45 Ned: No I don’t have any devices in my house that can use wifi 7 because almost no one has made them yet. In fact, there’s a pretty good chance that most of the devices in my house and yours couldn’t even use wifi six e so let me run through a few quickly. My phone is a pixel 7 which can use six e so that’s probably the device I use most often hooray my laptop is a surface laptop 4 which can use wifi 6 but not six c so I’d have to upgrade my laptop the main television that everyone watches in the house. Is a Samsung q ninety a which has a wifi 5 capable card because I didn’t opt for the 8 k eight k neo model. It was like double the price of the four k and like you can’t even watch anything in 8 k right now. So basically not only can none of my devices use wi-fi 7 the majority of devices can’t use 60 or in many cases. Even wi-fi six so it would be ridiculous for me to spend $1200 on 2 access points when I could just wait. 6 to twelve months and probably pay half or less as the products hit the market I also don’t plan to refresh my laptop or phone for at least a year and the kids are not getting new tablets for at least the same amount of time and I’m not replacing that tv for much longer than that.

30:50.30 Ned: Because I got it last year so to turn the tables on our listeners should you get wifi 7 now. No no, you shouldn’t buy and if you have to go out and buy access points today.

30:59.86 Chris: Ah.

31:09.20 Ned: And you don’t want to replace them for like the next 5 to 10 years I guess otherwise just what buy the wi-fi 60 access points at a quarter of the price and know that most of your devices won’t even be able to use that yet any thoughts.

31:25.15 Chris: Yeah, that makes sense trying figure out a nonterp Enterprise reason that you would need that much bandwidth.

31:27.94 Ned: You.

31:41.31 Ned: I think it’s pretty unlikely that you would run into a situation in a home network today where you would need more than what six e can deliver when eight k video does eventually.

31:52.48 Chris: Right.

31:59.79 Ned: Hit the house and I’ve got tablets and Tv streaming eight k video then yeah, a b wi-fi 7 actually does make sense. But I’m probably going to need a bigger internet pipe more than I’m going to need faster wi-fi at that point.

32:06.17 Chris: And yeah baby welcome.

32:13.52 Chris: Right? Yeah, the only reason I can think of that it’s it would make a lot of sense is if you had like 27 children

32:24.60 Ned: Yeah I don’t think my work is other. What’s the thing you’re getting into commercial and Enterprise use cases where.

32:25.57 Chris: Or you like owned a hotel. Right? And it’s likely they won’t use this in any type of a production environment yet because the standard is not ratified.

32:40.54 Ned: You sweet summer child like that you believe that.

32:47.19 Chris: I’ve decided Tuesday is optimism day.

32:50.27 Ned: Yay wifi 7 in a commercial context a stadium a hotel something where you’re going to have a lot of people all sucking up wi-fi as much as possible because they want to like live stream twitch afi their tiktoks of the concert. Yeah, you might want to invest in the wifi 7 but I think yeah for anybody who’s just thinking about refittting their access points at home. 6 c’s got everything you need and then some so um, thank you for taking this journey with me you can disembark on the left. Please remember that all your belongings should go with you or they become mine because it’s maritime law speaking of which have you heard about sovereign citizens.

33:34.75 Chris: Okay, we need to move on.

33:38.57 Ned: Ah, if you subscribe to our newsletter I’ll include a link to an awesome almost 2 hour long video that talks about sovereign citizens I thought it was super fun. Lady round.

33:53.42 Chris: Lightning round google still struggling to recover from zone outage in Paris the Google cloud’s Europe west nine a zone suffered a significant amount of damage back in late April while the Goog has been evasive on what the exact situation was terms like water intrusion and fire incident have been thrown around in the press releases french forums discussing the event believed that there was a cooling pump that failed. Leading to a leak of some kind which then ignited a fire in the battery room if you’re keeping score at home. None of those words used in order are good near computers or just like in general electrical fires are. Very dangerous and very dirty. Whatever the specifics were the intrusion incident was severe enough that the zone still has not recovered three weeks later just a reminder that while these kinds of incidents are exceedingly rare.

34:56.85 Ned: Wow.

35:03.44 Chris: They do happen. They happen on-prem and they happen in the cloud. But I mean it’s not a big deal right? All your production workloads are designed to so at least survive a zone failure right? right.

35:18.40 Ned: I hope you bought that outage and insurance insurance. We talked about a couple weeks ago a shocking new attack overpowers servers literally hit makes them read foul forco nah just kidding. Make him read James Joyce ha again I’m being funny. Ah anyway, so 2 researchers researchers from the University Of Birmingham and England have developed an attack which can be used to compromise the software guard extensions. Sgx.

35:41.65 Chris: Ah.

35:55.27 Ned: Feature on an Intel server. The attack uses control of the voltage regulator to modify cryptographic processes since the sgx doesn’t know about the firmware controlling Baseboard components like the voltage regulator. It can’t detect the malicious attack. Fortunately. The attack does require access to the board management controller of the server which is usually attached to a network that is physically segmented from the rest of the data center malicious firmware is injected into the Bmc and used to manipulate the voltage in addition to breaking the sgx encryption. The voltage can also be used to over volt the server permanently bricking it. The duo have titled the attacked the attack pm fault which is not nearly as cool as pm dawn a criminally underrated band from the mid 90 s.

36:48.23 Chris: Microsoft Activision Merger approved by the Eu this has been going on for so long that I forget what we’re even arguing about but whatever it is Redmond’s long corporate merger nightmare could soon. Over the Eu had raised up their hands in defense of consumers fearing that Microsoft would be creating a monopolistic gaming situation Microsoft finally appeased them by promising that everyone everywhere can play call of duty. These are the important problems of our times Microsoft assured users that they will have the right to stream their games with any cloud game streaming device of their choice and play them on any device using any operating system which is a bold claim. I don’t even think steam can do that. But it’s frankly, a claim that could have and should have been made a long time ago time will tell if this will be win for gamers but it appears to be a win for Microsoft now here’s a question to ponder. The eu still hasn’t approved this so. What’s goingnna. What’s gonna what’s gonna happen. There.

38:09.83 Ned: Ah know I enjoyed Brad Smith he said that the the Uk decision was quote probably the darkest day in our 4 decades in Britain which wow dude me. Maybe time take it down match Microsoft signs on to make data center fusion a reality in 10 years of course because fusion is always always a decade away. Microsoft has signed an agreement with helion energy to build a commercial fusion facility in Washington state with an operational plant running by 2028. That’s less than 10 years. Thing about current fusion reactors across the world is not that they can’t produce fusion most of them can and do on a regular basis. It’s that none of them have been able to produce more power than it takes to run the reactor and that’s kind of a problem if you want fusion to be self-sustaining. Microsoft is also a little bit dubious so they’ve agreed to buy power from helion once the plant is producing said power helion is just one of many fusion startups that have received increased attention over the last decade from venture capital if you want a more in-depth look at how helion is approaching fusion.

39:32.79 Ned: Check out the Youtube video from real engineering I’m cautiously optimistic about the state of fusion power and as much as I like to lampoon it. It also seems like it could be an incredible fix for reducing carbon emissions.

39:48.96 Chris: Elon announces new Twitter ceo and it’s not Sheryl Sandberg huh well one of my new year’s predictions takes a turn for the worst. The new Ceo of Twitter has been announced and will be.

39:52.52 Ned: M.

40:06.64 Chris: Nbc Universal’s advertising chief Linda Yacarino now this does make perfect sense because at its core Twitter can only exist from the grace of ad revenue something that Elon’s never-ending antics have destroyed to the tune of something like two thirds loss. Since him taking over now a great philosopher once said that Elon would never approve a Ceo that he didn’t think he could control which is probably why Sheryl Sandberg was never really in the running either that or even she couldn’t imagine working with Elon On A Daily Basis

40:28.16 Ned: Um.

40:45.57 Chris: Both likely Elon never the greatest student of science or business likely has never even heard of jaccarino so he probably thinks he can turn her into his pawn then again, Elon still thinks his vaporware idea of x the everything app is worth talking about.

40:46.97 Ned: Um.

41:03.46 Chris: Or is ever actually going to happen. Something tells me, he’s going to be wrong about both of those things.

41:08.42 Ned: It is not fetch turns out copying other people’s stuff willy nilly might be illegal and isn’t that just plagiarism. There’s a lawsuit in the district court of Northern California against Microsoft github and openai regarding copillot and its open ai codex model the suit alleges that the defendants have violated copyright contract privacy and business laws through the code that in. Was ingested and regurgitated by copilot with absolutely no attribution while many of the initial allegations were thrown out by the judge. 2 of them are still standing. The first is that the codex is in breach of software licensing terms and the second is that the reproduced code. Lacks the proper copyright attribution that’s required by the dmca. This is just the first step and what I am sure will be an extremely long and drawn out legal battle that may even end up in front of the supreme court. Problem of course is that github copillot and all the other Ai projects aren’t exactly waiting to see how things pan out instead choosing to race forward at breakneck speed and deal with the legal fallout later if ever we could say that the horse is truly well and out of the barn.

42:35.52 Ned: And now we’re arguing about what type of hinges were on the open door. Oh I do like a good brush nickel. Yeah, you’re a very classy guy.

42:41.00 Chris: Um I hope they were brushed nickel I like a classy barn.

42:50.76 Ned: Hey, thanks for listening or something I guess you found it worthwhile enough if you made it all the way to the end so congratulations to you friend you cop was something today. Hey did you hear about the frustrated magician he was pulling his hair out. So. So sorry ah you can find me or Chris on Twitter at ned 1313 and at hater 80 respectively or follow the show on Twitter at chaos underscore lever if that’s the kind of thing you’re into for anybody who’s listening Chris got up and walked out.

43:29.52 Ned: Oh show notes are available at chaos lever.com as is the sign up for our newsletter if you like reading things which you shouldn’t podcasts are better in every conceivable way. We’ll be back next week to see what fresh hell is upon us Tata for now baby come back. You can blame it all.

43:48.47 Chris: You ruined it.

43:48.78 Ned: On me now. Hey did you hear what the triangle said about the circle it was pointless.