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welcome to the show everybody so nice to
have you here my name is
robbie and joining me today jeff weston
yo i'm back he's back how are you doing
my friend
i am good it's been three weeks feels
like it's been forever isn't that unreal
time flies i know well you know we're
out for the first week while you do
production
and then henry was in last week and now
i'm back and so it's like
all right i got catching up to do three
weeks what have you been up to
oh my goodness i've been doing so much
uh very busy with work and
and all the tech side stuff there but
we've done a massive overhaul at our
church
interestingly enough we're getting we've
got a new sound board
we've replaced all of our projectors
with uh 75 inch tvs so we've been
running
hdmi and ethernet 75-inch tvs instead of
projectors
yeah nice so you don't have to worry as
much now about
things like overhead lights interfering
with the projection
correct okay yeah so yeah that's been
a chore and a half yeah yeah uh other
than that
how are you involved just for the sake
of the viewers i know but you know how
what's your involvement as far as
i stand around and tell them what
they're doing wrong you delegate no i
uh so at the church i i kind of like
head up our av
um so for the last uh oh gosh six months
we've been
you know thanks to covid we've been
modernizing what we do and it's no
longer just recording
oh okay so you're taking that time while
you can't have a congregation in
well we've been back in the building
since july really yeah
wow yeah but it must be like a
restricted number of people can be
yeah we're limited to 30 building
capacity
uh so it's limited number but because of
that we we have to do more
online streaming so we've been
modernizing we've we've upgraded to the
4k
we've gotten new computers nice now
we're updating all of our tech inside
and it's like
there's a lot going on how's the
internet uh the internet is still very
very
uh choppy at best yeah uh we're out in
the middle of a cornfield and so
you've got lte and that's it that's it
unless you want
uh i think two meg starlink
down do you want starlight st you know
what starlink would give us good are you
on the list
i'm not only starlink.com jeff i should
get on the list
just pop your name in there and when
elon comes across it he'll
he'll send you an email i'll just i'll
just tweet him just be like
yeah i'm sure you'll get his attention
hook the cornfield
[Laughter]
no seriously people can you can sign up
on starlink.com
for um the beta right and
as it works its way to different regions
you're going to get a notification and
the ability to
to sign up see we should do that wait we
had
just like basic dsl which is not fast
no uh i think we were one meg up five
megs down
not really good day no and you can't
that's what they say
it's capable of up to not but you're
looking 360 kilobits
yeah i like i turned on the internet and
i almost heard that like
it was it was bad so now we've got lte
um and it's costing us significantly
more and we're getting on a
good day 50 down 25 up
which is pretty decent but because it's
lte
it's not as reliable for whatever reason
yeah
and it probably our internet probably
drops off three four times a day
and there's nothing worse than a
dropping off in the middle of a service
you have like a tower or something set
up or
you're just using the inbuilt antenna
the built-in antenna they
recommended a tower and it was on our
list of things to do and then
snow hit and i'm like i'm not going on
the roof at the old studio studio d
uh we had to use lte for the same reason
no internet in the area
that was a real oversight when we moved
in there
but so what i did to improve the
performance was i got a modem
um that had the capability of having an
external antenna
yes has that and it has a bnc connector
and so i ran a 50-foot bnc cable to
the foyer where i set up a piece of pvc
pipe
yeah with a yagi antenna pointed
at the tower now i was fortunate because
the tower was
in line of sight from our front window
now in in your case you might have to
actually extend is it yeah i think it is
at least from our
makes a difference man if you use an
external antenna that's directional and
that you can point
because it's line of sight right you're
going to get the better signal if you've
got line of sight if you're
using the built-in antenna you're going
through walls you're going through
everything to get there and it's up and
down and the speed is kind of
inconsistent depending on
you know where you're standing and that
kind of you know how cell phone
technology is right so so
grab one of those they're not expensive
yeah it's like 75 bucks
yeah you get the and then you get the
mounting kit and you mount it uh you can
you can get a
like a metal brace that can bolt on to
the the side of the building
i'll just take it right to the top of
the steeple oh that would be brilliant
yeah that would look beautiful you got a
cross and a yagi antenna
hallelujah good internet signal coming
from that
so maybe i'll go to starlink it's gonna
be the same
kind of thing yeah yeah there's all
kinds of things you can do and also
lte signal boosters yes um you can put
those in line
of the antenna as well and that's gonna
increase the performance
quite a bit and again these are all
really little affordable easy
easy technologies yep there's just time
yeah yeah i've been playing around with
my 3d printer
i it was running when i came in it is
running still we can't hear it because
it's in another room i love
studio e uh but you mentioned when you
came in what was it the first thing that
you said
it was so quiet so quiet the under 3v2
is like you hear the fan just like uh
like a
like a like a server fan like it's a
little louder than your home
computer but but you haven't heard my
home computer
oh dear it's right yeah but uh so
yeah it's it's running really really
quiet but i'm printing stuff i'm
printing some of my own inventions
and things that i've come up with but
the other thing i've been doing jeff
that
has really proven to be another one of
those things that's making me go wow
this was a really good purchase
is christmas gifts christmas never
thought of it in my life what would you
3d print as a christmas gift
i can't say it because the kids might be
watching okay fair okay so
give me an example i'll show you in
january okay i'll just say
so there are some products that i can
buy online
yep and i've got one particular product
in mind that one
pardon me one of my children wanted and
it's 40 plus tax on
amazon right okay so 40 bucks i mean big
deal and
typically i would just order it but i
thought um
i'm gonna check and i went on
thingiverse and i found the
almost exact same thing in an stl file
i downloaded it and i printed it
and it cost 60 cents
and it is fabulous it's like it looks
like
a purchased product and i've printed
i've been printing
like just anything i can think of i'm
saying to my wife now i'm saying becca
anything you can think of that i could
possibly 3d print as christmas gifts
and it's not to be it's like it's not to
be cheap it's to
be like we can make it ourselves well
sure exactly they want it
i can print it right how fantastic is
my kids keep telling me dad will a 3d
printer print us lego blocks that we
break and i'm like
i have oh my goodness dude there is a
service that just
just went through the dmca takedown
really but it's still available on
github
because somebody forked it and it's
still there
and it is mind-blowing you ask about
lego bricks yeah and
i'm not endorsing patent infringement or
anything like that but lego is
notoriously
like the patent that you know it's like
how long is this thing going to go on
for right
you can in this service so it used to be
a website service now you have to
download the program and run it it's
like a python script
okay but in your browser you can
select not just lego pieces and it has
all of the lego pieces 3d printable you
can actually select
lego kits so you print the full kit
so you can say okay i want to print the
millennium falcon lego kit for example
so you select it and it gives you all
the stl
files that you're going to need and
tells you the quantity of each part that
you're going to need to print
see that's cool on like i mean who
who saw a dmca takedown coming well
right yeah
like that as soon as i saw this service
i'm like that
this guy is asking for trouble
absolutely big time i mean
oh my goodness that's risky now does it
go back to some of the retro lego pieces
you know i haven't dug into it that far
jeff because there are some lego like we
have
uh some lego kits that are probably
older than me
yeah and the pieces have broken oh sure
but every single piece you can you can
find it buy those pieces anymore
right because like they're specific to
that set at the time yeah it's like
oh i mean they've got this one spaceship
and i've
been trying to find this one piece i've
looked online like
different selling auction sites
everything
got a lego they're like this little
people we don't provide that piece and
i'm like
oh jeff so i'll just say yes they are
available
you can 3d print lego bricks
i'm not going to say that i have right
but i have and they
are fully compatible that's awesome
and it works fantastic i mean 3d
printing
you're not doing that to infringe you're
not doing that to sell
you're not manufacturing the same kit
that they're selling at the toy store
it's just like like you say replacing a
piece uh
in my case i wanted to print something
that is not possible like it's not
something you can buy
um and i'll show it to you behind the
scenes after the show and you'll be like
oh yeah
oh yeah this is cool this is cool so
what would you 3d print
so many cool things so many cool things
hey um whether you're into 3d printing
or
linux or raspberry pi other single board
computers
whatever kind of tech you're into and
even tech news we do a lot of that
around here as well
becca's been doing a fantastic job
heading out to the newsroom we've got
crypto corner where we talk about
cryptocurrency and our crypto
correspondent uh
robert koenig joins us every single week
to talk about
the latest trends in cryptocurrency and
what's happening and today we're going
to be learning about uh about the bull
run that's happening right now with
bitcoin because the price is going up
and up and up
and i looked at my portfolio and i'm
it's doing a little better than it was a
week ago yeah
so we have all this content that is
you know here and being offered free of
charge and we do this
as a labor of love we'll call it but we
we absolutely love being here every week
and providing this great content for you
all we ask is hey please if you enjoy
the content subscribe
on youtube click the like on this video
and let us know that you enjoy
what we're doing and also click the bell
so that you get the notifications
whenever we are live
whenever we post new videos did you i
did that's great it's working
it is working awesome youtube works this
week that's fantastic
it was funny last week um so for those
of you who
watch live you know um but
youtube actually had an outage yeah last
wednesday night pretty significant too
yeah it was it was a global outage but
it was a weird one
where anyone who was watching a video it
would stream
fine but if they refreshed or left the
page or went to another video
all of a sudden they were getting errors
and and so it was a pretty bad problem
affected a lot of people think about how
many people stream videos on youtube but
we were broadcasting
live at that time we looked at the
trends
afterwards uh the the downtime report
and youtube's downtime was literally a
spike
at the very time that we were
broadcasting
not before and not after literally it's
as if
as soon as i pressed go youtube went
down
so really what we could say is just cat5
so popular we broke youtube
i would love to be able to say that jeff
i really want to get
that plaque so hey we need more
subscribers
uh make sure you subscribe to us on
youtube okay but it was just
like of all the times for it to go down
it can't go down at three o'clock in the
morning
on a saturday when you know i'm nowhere
near youtube but
no it had to happen during the live
broadcast
yeah so that was something else
all right this week we are going to be
looking at the raspberry pi 400 it's a
new kit
from the raspberry pi foundation really
excited about this little guy
uh and we're going to be looking at um
putting
we're going to put ubuntu 20.10 on there
because as you may remember
ubuntu canonical are now officially
supporting the raspberry pi as a
platform
for ubuntu that's so that is a very huge
deal
that means it's going to be getting
support from canonical on a raspberry pi
it's no longer just a community thing or
you know a hacky thing to try to get
ubuntu running on a on a single board
computer no
they are actually supporting it we're
going to give it a try tonight to see
how it operates so
we've got to take a really quick break
when we come back i'm going to get into
this box
stick around
[Music]
bye
we've all heard of the raspberry pi it's
a single board computer
and about a well a little more than a
year ago they released the raspberry pi
4 and the raspberry pi 4 is kind of a
revolutionary addition to
to the lineup because up until the
raspberry pi 4
raspberry pi was a great tinkering board
it was something that's a lot of fun for
makers and tinkerers and
and you know people that just want to
get their hands wet as far as setting up
i still have my retro gaming on it hey
there you go retropie does
very very well yeah but with the
raspberry pi 4 of course it brought
it into more of a hey this is almost as
good
as a you know entry level desktop
computer
on a single board computer so with that
set
if you can use a single board computer
in place of a desktop computer
what's next right so you could do that
and i want to you know i want to be
brutally honest with you i mean it's a
single board computer still through and
through
absolutely but we're talking like it
might have four or eight gigs of ram
which is really good for a single board
computer makes for a decent
like office processor that's exactly
right yeah like if you're just using it
to to get online
do your facebook and do your social
media phenomenal
watch the occasional video online it's
good for that too
as long as you've got the right setup
but i think that's where people get hung
up with these
types of boards is that they're not
built for multimedia
or at least they're not well support
there's not a great deal of support for
multimedia
yet correct you talk about retro gaming
and retro gaming does really really well
because it's based on technology from 10
15 years ago that's right
so does very well on a raspberry pi but
it hasn't caught up to
things like like you're not going to get
really good performing
video although that said the raspberry
pi 4 does have some really incredible
specifications including
dual 4k 60p video output
micro hdmi granted right so you know
that's
i mean it even does well with photo
graphics
like i've got on my raspberry pi
there you go and it works great for that
as long as you don't exceed the amount
of ram so a raspberry pi the earlier
gens that had only one gig of ram
you may have trouble if you open a 30
gig file
right like you're not going to be doing
video editing in 4k that's for sure but
yeah doing some jpeg work or
something like that why not
absolutely so now the natural evolution
of that kind of desktop idea
taking a raspberry pi single board
computer and turning it into a desktop
has evolved into what's called the
raspberry pi 400.
so it is a raspberry pi 4 at its heart
it's been you know they've rearranged
the board in order to make it fit within
this chassis right
and you know it takes me back to
the kind of mid-80s
um i guess when i had a vic-20 which was
a keyboard
computer and that's right and like that
was one of my first computers
and you know you think about the amiga
the commodores and those things that we
grew up with
are kind of you know people have wanted
there have been projects where people
can 3d print their own
raspberry pi keyboard case and things
like that but now it's official
it's sleek it's incredible
it's a little bit um gimmicky in a way
but yeah if you look at that i think so
i think so we're going to kind of figure
that out together tonight
if you're into that like really sleek
form factor it is literally a keyboard
is the computer if you don't mind the
fact that it's got some cables coming
out of it
and uh and you got to set a monitor up
then you're going to do just fine with
this
but it's not like the raspberry pi that
you'll stick on the back of a tv and it
just operates
hidden away this is gonna be on your
desk
do you remember the desk in your garage
that you were turning into a computer i
remember that
this is like that but small this is a
lot sleeker
that doesn't so i had taken a big old
oak desk and uh
converted it into a full atx computer
yeah back in the day i was so jealous of
that desk that was pretty cool when we
used to do lan parties and stuff unreal
tournament desk
good times but let's get into the box i
want to take a look at this and see
what we have with the raspberry pi 400.
first thing we're going to see is
the raspberry pi 400 so that is a
single board computer with four gigs of
ram
ready to go built in to the keyboard
it's just like the raspberry pi keyboard
now i've got the ansi edition so us
keyboard layout
let's take a look at the back here we've
got full size gpio
wow labeled with pins 1 and 40. we've
got microsd
dual hdmi output usb c for the power
dual usb 3 and a usb 2
and ethernet gigabit and a kensington
lock
so and yes that and that is uh gigabit
ethernet
yeah you need a kensington lock on your
raspberry pi come on
just another cable to have uh all right
it also this is the kit
of course so it comes with some extra
things to get you up and going
comes with the official raspberry pi
mouse there it is that's cool
yeah i mean it looks like a pretty
generic cheap mouse
i wish i wish it was wireless to be
honest with you i think that would have
been a lot
better for them to do that but hey i
agree it came with it
we got the power supply usbc
and that of course is 5.1
volts 3 amps and that's gonna power this
bad boy
we've got a sd card to micro sd adapter
i guess the sd card yeah that it's
actually in
the raspberry pi 400 okay
so presumably that is ready to boot
further in the box ah we've got a micro
hdmi to hdmi cable i
love that so we don't have a bunch of
dongles and adapters hanging out the
back of it
it is just a nice little sleek cable
and it came with this beginner's guide
as well which is you know
15 book right there
included which has got tons of projects
for the kids if you want to get into
some stem stuff
some fun projects to get you up and
going and and doing some maker tech
this is a a pretty incredible addition
really i mean you'd
typically want to buy that separately so
nice that it came with it anyways yeah
there you go so love the keyboard layout
it does not feel like a
a bad keyboard at all i mean if they're
pretty low profile keys
you're not like looking at a mechanical
keyboard it's more like a
kind of like a laptop keyboard or
something like that yeah they're not
clunky which is nice
yeah the cooling on the bottom there is
quite significant there's a really large
heatsink in there that's keeping the
thing cool so they've overclocked it to
1.8 gigahertz out of the box
oh cool uh which is lovely and as you
can see
just sleek form factor
so it's even smaller than my vic-20 but
super
super powerful and i it's not
it's not that thick either which is no
that's what i mean like sleek form
factor
just great i would have thought because
i mean you used to the raspberry pi
you know it sits up that high i thought
it was going to be a much bigger
keyboard but
no they've really they've really shrunk
it down that's nice
yeah yeah um just like a raspberry pi 4
you've got bluetooth 5 you've got your
wi-fi gigabit ethernet i'm going to be
using it on wi-fi today
and it just fires right up and ready to
go so should we do that
absolutely let's fire it up
well here we are raspberry pi os came
pre-installed
at first boot i had to just kind of go
through the initial setup process which
just got its updates and things like
i'm going to connect to my you know i
can connect to wi-fi wi-fi is working
out of the box
everything just kind of works just like
a raspberry pi what does it come with i
mean
you've got everything that comes on a
raspberry pi os
games noise
minecraft pie boing bunner
so what's the performance like oh there
we go
oh that was quick oh oh
that was quick you are not good at that
not very good at that um that's okay so
i mean performance wise
it's a raspberry pi 4. it performs
really great it's uh
it's all running from this little
keyboard so what do i have i've got the
uh mouse cable i've got power and i've
got hdmi output going to the tv
and that's all there is to it so the sd
card that came in it
again came pre-installed with this
operating system ready to go overclocked
to 1.8 gigahertz
i would rather have seen them put in
better sd cards
truthfully um so i actually i grabbed
myself a kingston
endurance card i think because raspberry
pies are known to eat
microsd cards for dinner i want
something that's going to be a little
more you know long life better for this
kind of thing
so i'm going to shut this down because
i'm probably not going to want to
personally run raspberry pi os
on here i want to run ubuntu because now
ubuntu
is officially supported on the raspberry
pi 4
this being a raspberry pi 4 at its heart
it should run pretty well we got 4 gigs
of ram and
i've already pre-installed ubuntu 12.10
from ubuntu.com
it's now officially downloadable as an
image file
from their website if you click on
downloads you're going to see under
iot raspberry pi is the first in the
list
so we're gonna shut her down take a
quick break when we come back we'll be
booted into ubuntu 20.10
welcome back so we are booted into
ubuntu 20.10
on the raspberry pi 400. so this
keyboard
is all that i need in order to be up and
running with a full computer
and here we go out of the box it's got
firefox
and let's bring it up i have you know
i've tested a few things just to see
how things work i've connected it to the
tv at home just to see
you know are the videos going to work
and things like that let's make sure
that i have
internet because i should have yeah i've
already got i've already set up my wi-fi
which is
configurable just like on ubuntu you
just go to your wi-fi settings here
and select your network and there you go
enter your password and you're in
let's jump onto youtube because i mean
the the question that always comes up is
immediately
how does it handle multimedia we know
it's got your office suite we've got
libreoffice writer
libreoffice the suite already
pre-installed with ubuntu
so if i click on that
there we go libreoffice writer just like
you would expect so
i mean that's never a question is office
going to work yeah
it's going to work out of the box but
what about things like youtube so
let's go to linuxtechshow.com which is
going to reroute to our linux tech show
channel on youtube make sure you give us
a subscribe
and here we go let's click on becca's
news from last week
and everything seems to load pretty well
the ads work
so that's good now i'm monetizing this
so this is fantastic
video will play after ad this is great
tv so if you got an
ad while you're watching this and now
you're watching me watch an ad
we basically just doubled our
monetization this week so that's been
fantastic uh okay so there's becca in a
youtube video
let's bring it up full screen and see
how that performs because that's
usually problematic on these kinds of
setups but as you can see
out of the box in firefox it's working
fantastic
frame rate seems okay um
i mean i i don't know how to gauge that
beyond what i see and it looks fine
yeah so youtube works the other thing
that i wanted to know is
was plex going to work so and i don't
know if i'm going to have access to it
from here because as i mentioned
i was able to access it from my home tv
and i'll just say out of the box plex
did not work so it said
that there was some kind of error or
something missing and i got into some
forums and i
and i started looking through and
somebody suggested
oh just install the vlc package
and i'm like just like everyone else in
the thread there
how does that impact plex because
vlc is a video player but it has nothing
at all to do with plex well it turns out
so i just did an apt install plex or
pardon me
vlc and uh having installed vlc it
brought in all these codecs and
everything else that come with vlc
and plex worked at that point so
everything worked absolutely flawlessly
so now we're able to watch things
and in fact i was able to decode h.265
video on plex oh nice which was
fantastic because even my
my computer that's connected to the tv
at home has a great deal of trouble with
h.265
h.265 is very resource intensive i
prefer to keep my media at h.264 so just
keep in mind
if you're looking for the best
performance on this you're probably
going to want to stick with h.264 but
it did play h.265 i'd
probably go with ethernet though because
as you know wi-fi with h.265 is probably
going to have some hiccups
that works great the one thing that i
have not yet got to work jeff and
and community is netflix because
the version of firefox that comes with
this does not
support drm on and netflix requires that
so
there are packages and you get into the
forums on the raspberry pi
because remember this is a raspberry pi
4 right so lots of people have already
put work into it and there are
installers which i haven't tried yet but
the forum threads say that hey you can
install this script
and it will it will get you up and
running with a version of chrome that is
built for drm so then you can use things
like netflix which require that so
everything works pretty good out of the
box
pretty nice right yeah um so
as far as i'm concerned you know is this
a gaming system no is this a
multimedia system no not really um
but i'll say we use um an android box
at home for our tv and i disconnected
that and plugged this in
in its place and this was performing
better
than our one-year-old box yeah so for
multimedia even
it was doing a better job than the
android box and i think that
the the family can really appreciate it
a little more because
uh the form like the kind of the the way
that it
the i guess the desktop paradigm is more
like a computer than an android tv
so you're actually using an interface
that where you're bringing up a browser
and you're
able to install applications and linux
software and things like that so
it is a really robust system works great
um i mean that's
that's really all there is to it right
like does it work yeah
it is a raspberry pi 4 though so if i
was going to use this as a set top box i
would just go with a raspberry pi 4
right overclock it to 1.8 gigahertz to
match the speed of this
um and and that's not really a selling
point remember that overclocking can be
done anyways
so whether you have a raspberry pi 4 at
1.5 gigahertz
or a raspberry pi 400 at 1.8
it looks like a selling feature on paper
but it's just a setting in the operating
system
so you can take that raspberry pi 4 and
bump it up to 1.8 as well so
pretty clever marketing i must say
because those who don't understand
how overclocking works will think this
is faster well it's not
it's the exact same soc so
all right let's jump back over so i mean
all in all i'm pretty impressed with it
i like it as i mentioned it's a little
bit on the gimmicky side but i'm
old school and i like that kind of a
gimmick well
i mean for for me like i'm looking at
that and i'm going
that would make especially with this
you know manual yeah that would make a
great christmas gift
for the kids because like our especially
with you know one of my boys who really
wants to get into programming
savannah's been doing that for a couple
years going back to that uh the ciggy
that she had
uh from smart girls this is a robot yeah
um
so i mean something like that that would
be cool you know buy them a monitor and
a
you know the raspberry pi just connect
it to the tv well yeah you can do that
and that's the nice thing too is that it
because of the form factor you can just
disconnect it and put it away when
you're not using it
pull it out put it on the on the tv
whatever you want to do yeah so yeah i
think it's it's definitely got its place
yes um is it for you that's really you
know it's a case-by-case thing so
uh but i've taken a look at it i like it
um i think it's
it's actually making a really nice kiosk
here at the studio i think
we may just keep it set up um pretty
fantastic so check it out is the
raspberry pi 400 i'll post links below
for you
and uh follow those um and i'll uh
that will probably kick back a little
bit to help the show but
otherwise just you know grab yourself
one in time for christmas if you think
it'd make a great gift
we've got to head over to the news room
becca standing by here's what's coming
up in the category 5 dot tv newsroom
microsoft is warning users to opt for
mfa that doesn't use
sms or voice to authenticate apple has
revealed its first mac computers powered
by chips of its own design
alphabet plans to beam internet
wirelessly using lights
ubuntu has fixed a handful of bugs that
standard users could use to become
root and google is dropping the photos
free storage stick around the full
details and this week's crypto corner
are coming up
this is the category 5.tv newsroom
covering the week's top tech stories
with a slight linux bias
from the newsroom i'm becca ferguson
microsoft is urging users to abandon
telephone-based multi-factor
authentication solutions like
one-time code sent via sms and voice
calls
the warning comes from alex weiner
director of identity security at
microsoft
for the past year weinert has been
advocating on microsoft microsoft's
behalf
urging users to embrace and enable mfa
for their online accounts
citing internal microsoft statistics
weinart said in a blog post last year
that users who enabled multi-factor
authentication
ended up blocking around 99.9 percent of
automated attacks against their
microsoft accounts
but in a follow-up blog post last
thursday weinert says that if users have
to choose between
multiple mfa solutions they should stay
away from telephone based mfa
the microsoft exec cites several known
security issues not with mfa
but with the state of the telephone
networks today
weinart says that both sms and voice
calls are transmitted in clear text
and can be easily intercepted by
determined attackers
using readily available techniques and
tools
sms-based one-time codes are also
fishable via open source tools like
madishka cred sniper or evils jinx
there's another issue with sms-based
multi-factor authentication that we
talked about back on episode 570
when an atnt kiosk employee was
responsible
for a sim swap that resulted in 240
million dollars
in bitcoin being stolen from a customer
phone network employees can be tricked
into transferring phone numbers to a
threat actors sim card
allowing attackers to receive mfa
one-time codes on behalf of their
victims
on top of these phone networks are also
exposed to changing regulations
down times and performance issues all of
which impact the availability of the mfa
mechanism overall
which in turn prevents users from
authenticating on their account in
moments of urgency
weinart says that all of these factors
combined demonstrate that sms
and call-based mfa is the least secure
of the mfa methods available today
an excellent solution is to switch to an
app-based authenticator
or for the absolute best security
security available
you should go with hardware security
keys which weinheart ranked as the best
mfa solution
in a blog post he published last year
multi-factor
authentication is huge on lots of
subscription websites
but i've found lately you know in my
line of work
because i'm setting up a ton of accounts
everywhere
so many of them will not allow some of
those
higher-end security options it's
basically an email or cell phone
through that sms text and some of them
they only allow the sms
so i mean i love the idea but until the
industry changes
how do you fill that gap yeah i think
it's important to note that
sms is still safer than no
multi-factor authentication yeah so
maybe it's a
case where like i think about payoneer
for example who just this past year
introduced mfa and it's the same kind of
thing it's
sms-based or email-based even yeah
um even connectwise uses email-based
and while that is a little better i
guess email
it's not great no not great at all
especially with the amount of emails
accounts that are hacked
absolutely and it goes to show i mean
from a security perspective
um you think about okay well if my email
gets hacked
now they actually have access to your
multi-factor authentication as well if
you're using
email-based multi-factor authentication
but sim card swaps are very very
frightening in that it can be done
very very easily absolutely i mean if an
att
kiosk worker can make a mistake and
believe
that you are who you say you are maybe
you've got fake id maybe you
sort of like you just you just got to be
convincing it's social engineering at
its best right there oh
walking up to the kiosk and saying yeah
i'm jeff weston
me i'm not jeff weston he is if i said
i'm jeff weston i needed
i've lost my phone i needed to activate
it on my new phone
and they fall for it then guess what
now i've got all your sms what if the
person who works at the kiosk was a
malicious party
what if the person who works there who
has the authority and ability
to sim swap on accident through social
engineering
what if they were the bad guy now all of
a sudden that takes a whole new spin
doesn't it because
you know what kind of credentials do i
need to get hired at a mall kiosk
so is no offense to anyone who works in
a mall of course i don't mean that
i mean like it's not like you have
probably gone through
an unbelievable amount of security
checks and you know that kind of stuff
so right that's what i mean what
i know of some people that instead of
using their cell phone
they'll download like uh an app that
gives them a cell phone
you mentioned the magic jack app yeah
like you can get magic jack and stuff
like that
so would that be a suitable alternative
that way it's not
going through your sim it's actually
through data
as long as it's a trusted source do you
have multi-factor authentication on your
magicjack app well but you'd use your
cell phone
so you like yeah you'd use the number
that you have like i could download the
magicjack app get us
get a number and then i could plunk that
into all my services saying this is my
number
but can't i then compromise your number
i don't know that's why i'm not that's
awesome i imagine so
an alternative that bypasses the sim
product
problem in a way but it's still going
sms so it's still plain text so somebody
with enough knowledge and enough
um who knows how you're doing things i
mean every viewer
because you mentioned the magic jack app
and and i bring it up again but because
you mentioned it on the air every viewer
knows that that's what you're using
right so now you know any viewer that
has that kind of
knowledge could easily enough
you know if if they get a hold of your
magicjack number then they can
start doing a brute force on the
password because your magicjack account
doesn't have two-factor authentication
on the website
right all right i'm just gonna have to
go it's rotary phone authentication
still better than nothing still better
than nothing wow
apple has unveiled the first mac
computers powered by its own
m1 chip in june the company announced it
would transition away from the intel
processors it had used since 2006.
apple said the advantages of using the
m1 chip included better battery life
instant wake from sleep mode and the
ability to run ios
apps it added it had optimized all of
its own map apps but now needs to
convince other developers to do likewise
the new computers include new versions
of the 13-inch macbook air
which no longer requires a fan to keep
its processor cool
the 13-inch macbook pro als will also
receive the new processor
and apple says it can now play video for
20 hours on a single charge
twice as long as before the mac mini
will also receive the m1
it did not unveil new versions of its
imac or mac pro computers
suggesting apple might be waiting for
more advanced versions of the chip with
more memory
and greater graphics processing
capabilities to use
in those the new macs are available
they run the new mac os big sur
operating system
an alphabet backed wireless network in
kenya plans to use
light beams to provide internet service
up to 20 kilometers away
the technology will deliver wireless
internet over light beams that can cover
distances of
up to 20 kilometers alphabet's project
taro which was unveiled in 2017
under the name the fsoc project
conducted a series of pilots in kenya
last year and is now partnering with a
telecom company
to deliver internet access in remote
parts of africa
kenya will get the technology first with
other countries in sub-saharan africa to
follow
similar to fiber optic cables tara's
technology uses light to transmit data
but without the cables the technology
requires line-of-sight connections so
alphabet deploys the terminals high up
on towers
poles or rooftops tara uses light to
transmit information at speeds as high
as 20 gigabits per second
as a very narrow invisible beam the
concept grew out of project loon which
had developed a balloon-based network to
cover remote areas
alphabet explains the loon team needed
to figure out a way to create a data
link between balloons and we're
and we're flying over 100 kilometers oh
sorry that were flying
over 100 kilometers apart and thus
investigated the use of free space
optical communications technology to
establish high throughput links
between balloons after using those links
to send data between balloons in the
stratosphere
loon engineers wondered if they could
apply some of that science to solve
connectivity problems down a little
closer to earth and project tara was
born
tara's links will begin rolling out
across liquid telecoms networks in kenya
first
and will provide help provide high-speed
connectivity in places where it's
challenging to lay fiber cables
or where deploying fiber might be too
costly or dangerous
standard users can use
to become root and google is dropping
the photo's
free storage becca has these stories
coming up plus robert is here with the
crypto corner
don't go anywhere
[Applause]
welcome back to the world of cryptos and
welcome back to the crypto corner
today we're going to take a journey back
in history and why because
things are looking pretty good at the
moment in regards to pricing
uh and cryptocurrencies if we look
into uh what the market is currently
doing by the time i'm recording this
year bitcoin is at 17
520 went up by 14 in seven days
but as you can see most coins are
behaving quite
uh quite positively let's say it that
way
and so that you don't take any wrong
decision because there are a lot of
people
having an opinion out there and also if
you look into the pressure this is going
telegraph
um bitcoin up 375 percent since peter
schiff accidentally called the exact
bottom leadership is somebody
that is a gold buck he hates bitcoin but
he loves his gold
so he's an old guy um uh
the reasons why bitcoin hit uh 17 000
dollars
uh somebody predicts here novogratz mike
novogratz predicted 65 000
the price of bitcoin then we had some
bankers
citigroup predicting the price will be
at uh
316 000. we've got here a bitcoin
analyst has four reasons why btc
price will hit 22 000 next so
you'll be hearing that from many other
sources too
and that's why i would like to take you
back in history but i said
this is not going to be financial advice
yeah just to be clear on this year
so it's just to show you what happened
in the past and why because i've been
living through this you already four
times
so let's go back this is coin gekko
and i look i clicked on the bitcoin
prize and went back
to 2018 december 2018
and as you can see this is the bull
market we lived
through the last time yeah so it went up
from
around eight hundred six hundred dollars
to twenty thousand dollars all-time high
was at that time around
the 19665 dollars
and if we look into the numbers so this
is the number so this is going market
cap
um they did a historical snapshot 10th
of december 2017.
bitcoin went up in seven days 34
most of the other coins as you can see
are in red so they went down
so there was no correlation at that time
that significant between
when the bull market stop really starts
between bitcoin and the other clients
so bitcoin was at 15 000 and ethereum at
440.
iota somebody at that coin is probably
not even under the 20 top 20 any longer
is it was it four dollars one week later
only one week later seven days later
bitcoin was close to its
all-time high 19 000. ethereum almost
doubled
in that week um iota went a little bit
dance eight percent but you see
others like cardano went up 360 percent
litecoin 110 percent in one week
yeah so this thing when things go really
really crazy
a week later bitcoin went already down
so it was
nineteen thousand the all-time high and
now we're sixteen thousand four hundred
so this is on the seventh of january
but other coins like here ethereum
continued going up
yeah so not even close to its all-time
high
i think at all time i was one thousand
four hundred for ethereum
cardano one dollar so um yeah other
coins were still growing significantly
while
bitcoin was going down because people
were thinking hmm
bitcoin is going down so let's invas
invest in those old coins and make a lot
of money that way
so you have to be really really careful
on where you're investing what you do
to do your research be very calm in what
you're doing
and uh what i find encouraging at the
moment is that this bull market that
we're currently living through
i mean as you saw after the bull market
will come a true retracement and in
cryptocurrencies that will be around 20
to 30 percent
you can't expect that but what i find
encouraging
is if you look at google trends so
people that are searching
for the word bitcoin for example on a
global basis
in 2018 that was 100 percent equivalent
to 100 percent
at the moment we're only at 11 10 11
so not a lot of people outside of our
little industry are talking about
cryptocurrencies
just imagine this thing goes out in the
press and everybody starts talking to
you about bitcoin yeah so if your aunt
emma comes to you and asks you about
this weird stuff called bitcoin or your
cab driver tells you
that the best thing to invest in is
bitcoin
then you know that we're getting near
top but
this is just a guess i'm not an expert
this is what happened in 2017 looking at
the at the data on how that was
last time so that's um
that's the journey that i wanted to show
you so that you uh
take the right decision um so stay calm
when these things happen don't
uh don't over stretch yourself
and just listen to the market very
carefully i mean this is the third time
as i mentioned
that i'm running through this year the
first two times were identical
you had these these crocodile teeth
where it went up by
50 and down by 20 percent in in in a
week
and then we had um and i i also both
times i was not able to read the top
market so i
miscalculated that one too as i guess
most of the people
anyway that's it from me please leave us
a like it helps us
um to spread the word and as always i
thank you very much for watching it's
um i'm really looking forward to see you
next week again so thank you and until
then
bye-bye thanks robert no word yet if
turtle coin has gone to the moon
i still have my turtle yeah you're one
turtle coin
no i've thought geez i think like 500
000 or something yeah wow
that's worth about three dollars now hey
you know what five hundred thousand of
them
slow and steady wins the race i learned
that turtle in the hair
speaking of altcoins yeah a lot
like it's amazing what's going on but uh
just want to remind you that we're not
actually providing financial advice
we're just sharing
what's happening in the cryptocurrency
market and having a lot of fun while we
do it
um always remember cryptocurrency is
ever changing as we're seeing here
uh on the show with those trends it's up
it's down and it's always changing
and it's always volatile so only invest
what you can afford to lose
now back to becca thank you ravi
standard users could use to become root
ubuntu developers have fixed a series of
vulnerabilities that made it easy for
standard users to gain coveted
root privileges kevin backhouse a
researcher at github wrote in a post
published last tuesday
with a few simple commands in the
terminal and a few mouse clicks
a standard user can create an
administrator account for themselves
the first series of commands triggered a
denial of service bug in demons used to
manage user accounts on the computer
when done correctly ubuntu would restart
and open a window that allowed the user
to create a new account
that had root privileges this is the
setup screen that you would normally see
when you're installing ubuntu for the
first time
it means that junior is able to create a
new user account for himself
and this time it's going to be an
administrator account
all done so now he just has to wait a
few more seconds
and he's in here he's going to quickly
open a terminal again so that he can run
id to show that the new account
called indiana is an administrator
account
so there you can see that indiana is in
the pseudo group which means that he's
an administrator
the second bug involved in the hack
resided in the gnome display manager
which among other things manages user
sessions and the login screen
the display manager also triggers the
initial setup of the os when it detects
no users currently exist
since it verifies whether an account
exists or not by asking
accounts damon if that demon is locked
up it will think there are no accounts
the vulnerabilities could be triggered
only when someone had access to
and a valid account on a vulnerable
machine
it worked only on desktop versions of
maintainers of the open source ubuntu os
patched the bugs
last week google photos will soon count
against your overall google account
storage space
which will mean fees if you exceed 15
gigabytes
google's popular photo service is used
by over a billion people
with 28 billion new photos and videos
uploaded
uploaded to the surface every week and
until now it is offered free storage for
your photos but google says it will stop
offering the free storage model within
google photos on june 1st
2021 instead google says any new photos
and videos you upload will count toward
the free 15 gigabytes of storage that
comes with
every google account or for those of us
who require
more space additional storage may be
purchased
presumably this means google photos will
become part of the standard google
account storage billing model
which gives each user 15 gigabytes free
for drive
gmail and other services so going
forward your photos will also take up
storage within the limits of that
there is some good news though the
change is not retroactive
this means photos already in the free
google photos storage will remain
free so no fears of your google bill
suddenly including the terabyte of
photos you posted of your cat while in
quarantine
but moving forward all photos you add
will count against your overall google
accounts limits
and therefore could affect your monthly
fees
and now for a little google favoritism
users of google's pixel lineup of
smartphones are completely
exempt from the change and will continue
to receive
the service free of charge big thanks to
roy w
nash and our community of viewers for
submitting stories to us this week
thanks for watching the category 5 tv
newsroom
don't forget to like and subscribe for
all your tech news with a slight linux
bias
and if you appreciate what we do become
a patron at patreon.com
category5 from the category 5 tv
newsroom i'm becca ferguson
well we're almost out of time but one
final thing to talk about just a real
quick tip for you
okay a new feature in google assistant
on your android phone
is blowing my mind and has already
proved itself
to be very very useful see i don't use
my google assistant
neither do i i'm interested to see what
this is i don't use it normally however
we've all got it on our android phone
and this feature is available to you now
similar features are available in apps
and have been
has been available for quite some time
however they've really nailed it
as far as the quality and the ability to
use this service
it's called what's that song
what's this song oh so it's like was it
shazam
years ago yeah but this really
really works so should we try it sure
what's this song
it can be that bad
so you can hum it
oh my goodness
and it actually works and i've used it
i've held it up to my computer speaker
when there was a video playing
and and i it just had like a really cool
backing track or something
and it gave me the song so where does it
pull the repository of information from
google i'm wondering
could you train google to recognize the
cat5 theme song
oh well let's work on that i think you
should
it it works really really well all you
have to do is just ask assistant
what's this song you can play something
to the microphone from a speaker
you can hum it you can hold it up to a
radio
whatever it takes um somebody on
on twitter was saying i can't remember
who sings such and such a song
and so i sang it into it just the hook
yep and really really miserably and it
sure enough gave me the uh
the original singer and gives you the
the cover art and everything
wow how amazing is that and
i wasn't even good enough to breach
copyright there
but yet google recognized what the song
was
right yes it did how cool is that very
very very useful
especially when you hear a song on the
radio in the dj because djs are the
worst jeff
you ever noticed that djs never tell you
the name of the song i always said the
name of the song hey
i was listening and all right a psa
no i always mention the song never i i
always did
because it drove me nuts to not know the
song yes but now
the dj is out of a job because i can
just ask
google assistant how cool
that is officially all the time that we
have this week folks it's been great
having you here thank you
for joining us a reminder that you can
support us on patreon at patreon.com
category5 great way to support the
content that we create we give it away
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but if you've got means to support that
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it means the world to us and it allows
us it gives us
the resources that we need in order to
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and stronger every week so we appreciate
and thank you very much for your support
have a great week everybody see ya bye
do
you