DOJ Takes Aim at Google’s Monopoly | Tech News of the Week

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Announcer: Welcome to Tech News of the Week with your host, the Ghost of Last Night's Excess.

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Ned: Welcome to Tech News the Week. This is our weekly tech news podcast where Chris and I talk about four interesting things that caught our attention in the past week. Just a brief bit of housekeeping. Before we get into the stories, I have two things. One, there will be no main show this week. We are taking off for Thanksgiving. There will be an episode, but it's going to be an oldie. A goodie but. Well, maybe a goodie. I don't know. I don't know what you like, but it'd be one that we like and you'll have to listen to it so there. Or talk to your family. We know. The other thing is that we are running our audience survey right now, so if you go to chaoslever.com survey you can take the audience survey and hopefully leave some amazing feedback about how awesome we are. Chris, you ready to get into some stories?

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Chris: Absolutely not.

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Ned: Good, because I'm going first Department of Justice Calls for Google's Breakup it's not you. Eh? Actually, it is you. On November 20th, the US Department of Justice filed a proposed judgment regarding Google's status in the world of antitrust. A fitting choice of words as many people have increasingly become antitrust regarding Google, the introductory paragraph of the final judgment pulls no punches. Quote for more than a decade, Google has unlawfully maintained its monopolies in general search services and search text advertising through a web of anti competitive practices. End quote. Ouch. It does not get nicer. To remedy this issue, the DOJ is recommending a roadmap that includes preventing exclusionary agreements with third parties, the divestiture of the Chrome browser, preventing self preferencing on Android and YouTube, and allowing third parties access to Google's index at quote marginal cost. The judgment makes frequent reference to the United States versus Microsoft case, a case that in 1994 forced Microsoft to make significant changes to their integration strategy and certainly chasten them for years to come. While not as significant as the AT and t breakup of 1984, being forced to sell off Chrome and open up their index is no small change.

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Ned: As of October 2024, Chrome had 65% of the browser market, with Safari trailing at 18% and Edge at 5 Firefox, I want to talk about it. Those who remember the Microsoft case from 94 also recalled that an appeals court wound back many of the judgments and Microsoft ended up settling out of court with the doj. With a new and completely unpredictable administration moving in this January, it remains to be seen what level of appetite the new DOJ AG has for enforcement.

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Chris: OS X and iOS have active exploits, so you know, update immediately, if not sooner. At the end of last month, Apple released OS X and iOS updates 18.1, which brought us all Apple Intelligence.

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Ned: Yay.

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Chris: There it is. Apparently what they also brought us was a big old boatload of security vulnerabilities that have active exploits in the wild now. No, I'm not talking about AI stealing your pii. I'm talking about the kind of exploit that you didn't sign up for, the hacker kind. The list of things getting fixed in this 18 rapid release is kind of long and includes such bangers as WebKit, Safari, JavaScript, allowing processing of malicious web content that may lead to arbitrary code execution on intel based systems, along with similar ones along the same lines that showed up on the OSS for iPhones, iPads, and even the Vision Pro. Like wow. Oh. To add insult to injury, the bug was found by the Google Threat Analysis Group. That's got to hurt just a little. I mean, you've got to wonder if the goog gives out like a bonus for that. Probably just like a sand in the eye $25 coupon or something. Anyway, at the time of writing, these bugs were so new that they didn't even have a score yet, but it's safe to guess that that score is going to be bad updates that fix these issues.

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Chris: Actually, it's not just 18.1. It goes as far back as Sequoia, which is 15.X if you're keeping score at home. So yeah, whatever you got, you're going to want to get it patched asap.

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Ned: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory welcomes computers big and small. The LLNL have officially unveiled their latest supercomputer cluster, named El Capitan for the craggy rock formation in Yosemite National Park. The beast of parallel computing boasts a verified 1.742 exaflops, or 1.742 quintillion calculations per second, 22 times faster than the previous record holder at LLNL. It was built using HPE and AMD hardware, and it has taken the supercomputing mantle of fastest computing system ever measured. Honestly, we're poised to do a full blown episode on supercomputers very soon, so I won't bog things down here with all the hardware details, but the numbers are frankly ridiculous. 11,000 compute nodes with 5.4 petabytes of total memory and the computer power equivalent to a million modern smartphones running at full tilt On a slightly smaller scale, Oxide Computers and LLNL have announced that they will be integrating the Oxide rackscale computing into their client facing environment. Oxide is known for their open source chops down to the custom firmware running on their servers and switches and their non standard form factor that enables super dense computing clusters. Their hypervisor was developed in house and supports all kinds of partitioning that are reminiscent of old school mainframes.

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Ned: I personally find Oxide to be a fascinating case of doing things the right way and I'm excited to see they're gaining traction at such a high profile client. Who knows, maybe in another 10 years it will be an Oxide platform powering the newest supercomputer I think they should call it. Bob.

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Chris: At long last, after decades of waiting, Microsoft has invented a thin client. I know. Do you want your users to have a computer but not actually have like an operating system on it?

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Ned: I just give them rocks.

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Chris: Do you want a single image to be shared and all people have to do is log in and start working from that ephemeral shared image? Maybe a VDI target or the like?

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Ned: Hmm.

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Chris: Well, as long as we completely ignore literally decades of machines that do the exact same thing. Cheaper, faster, more efficiently and with more power. Microsoft has the first and only device for you. Released at Ignite. The machine, creatively named Windows 365 link, allows connection to Windows 365 via a link to Azure. And by link I mean Internet connection.

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Ned: Yep.

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Chris: By Azure, I mean Azure.

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Ned: Yeah.

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Chris: Quote. As cloud adoption has been growing, we're starting to receive asks from customers for a Windows 365 endpoint that is secure, simple to manage, and gets them directly to Windows 365, said Jaleen Ringer, product leader for Windows Cloud Endpoints. Without like a hint of evidence to.

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Ned: Support that assertion, people are saying.

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Chris: Now admittedly there are use cases for thin client. I mean the Windows 365 link, which is the only product in this market space. But this falls to me squarely in the category of already solved problem. The Windows link has 8 gigs of RAM, dual monitor support, an Intel CPU of undisclosed. What's the word? Family, origin, lifecycle. Shut up. All for the low, low price of $349. Now, it's cheaper than many competitors, sure, but it is still tied to the Windows 365 ecosystem, which means a list price for the subscription to Windows 365 of at least $31 per month. Just right on top of there. Just plopped right up, right up on there.

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Ned: Yep.

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Chris: Now funnily enough, I'm getting less skeptical as I go because there are definitely other ways to do this and have been for years. But enterprises like to keep their vendor count low. There's a one throat to choke license and hardware on the same info. Oh, my God. This is going to sell like gangbusters, isn't it?

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Ned: No. There's a reason why every year is the year of vdi. Chris. That's it. We're done. Go away now.

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Chris: Bye.