Perplexity’s New Browser Wants All Your Data | Tech News of the Week

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Announcer: Welcome to Tech News of the Week with your host, the legendary Blue Meanie. Finally, back from retirement.

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Ned: Welcome to Tech News of the Week. This is our weekly Tech News podcast, where Chris and I get into four interesting articles that caught our attention. Chris, you're going to talk about a truck?

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Chris: Not just a truck.

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Ned: Oh.

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Chris: A new truck. Oh. That comes with less features?

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Ned: Huh? All right.

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Chris: Are you looking for a new electric vehicle but are tired of absolutely everything in the vehicle being computerized? Do you long for the days of your car or truck just being a car or a truck and not a wildly overpriced device doing everything in its power to steal your data and short out in the middle of the highway? Well, if you can wait two years, the Slate truck might just be the vehicle for you. In short, A, I can't tell if the Slate is the name of the manufacturer or the name of the truck, but they only have one truck, so we're sticking with Slate.

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Ned: It's both, I'm pretty sure.

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Chris: Which is dumb. But whatever it's called, it is a two-person, short-bed, battery-powered pickup truck. Two person meaning there are two seats, short bed meaning it is 5 feet long instead of 8 feet long in the back, and pickup truck, it looks like a pickup truck. I think that part's easy.

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Ned: Nailed it.

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Chris: This alone makes it unique in the United States, thanks in no small part to the out-of-date Ascinine regulations and the dickheads who run car manufacturers these days who are obsessed with building 26 person, 400 square foot monstrosities that would be better suited for a monster truck rally than going to the goddamn grocery store.

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Ned: Breathe.

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Chris: The slate is the exact opposite of these, as we said. Small cab, small bed, and basically Basically, no features. And by that, I mean manual windows. Do the youths even know that this is a thing? Manual mirrors. Again, what will they do? No infotainment system. In fact, with the very base model, no speakers at all. The idea with the slate is that you start from complete scratch and customize the ever-loving shit out of it with accessories. The base price is reputed to be $27,500, which is bonkers for a vehicle these days. If the feds keep the EV tax credit around that long, you will legitimately be able to get this thing for like 20 grand. The whole model of an extremely limited base vehicle that you customize from hundreds of add-ons is not new. Toyota did and does this with their Scion line. But I'm pretty sure for an electric vehicle, this is a first. The vehicle starts as a truck, but can actually be, with some of these add-ons I was talking about, modified into a five an SUV. This is a wild concept. They anticipate vehicles on the road by 2027, and I, myself, am super curious to see how it goes.

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Ned: Microsoft needs a patch for their patch to avoid a patch. Yo dog, etc. Remember how we mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Microsoft unceremoniously dropped a folder on every one's system drive called inetpub? The purpose behind putting that IIS-related folder on everyone's system, regardless of whether they had IIS installed, was to prevent an exploit involving the folder. Looks like Microsoft may have made itself more of a headache than just fixing the exploit to begin with. The mitigation was for CVE-2025-21-204, which describes a possible weakness that would allow an attacker to elevate their privileges locally through improper link resolution before file access in the Windows Update stack. That's a lot of words, so let me break it down a little. Basically, the system isn't checking if a file access request is actually a link or shortcut instead of a file. I can pretend to be inetpub, but actually be a simlink to an executable. Through this vulnerability, Windows Update will run it. By placing a real folder there, Microsoft thought they would prevent the simlink creation at the same location. However, security researcher Kevin Beaumont discovered that he could use a non privileged account and the mlink utility to point the the inetpub folder to other paths.

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Ned: When the Windows update runs, it tries to interact with the inetpub folder, promptly freaks out and refuses to install any updates. So while it doesn't grant an attacker escalated privileges, it does indefinitely break Windows update. Microsoft has not yet responded, but maybe they should just fix the windows update code instead of slapping yet another bandaid on windows.

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Chris: Now you're just talking crazy.

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Ned: I know.

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Chris: With new browser, perplexity. Ai aims to be as privacy invading as the Fang companies. Love that for them. Love it. Perplexity. Ai is, well, an AI company. They compete with the likes of ChatGPT, Google, etc, all the names you've heard of. Perplexity aims to be a bit more general purpose than just an LLM, allowing and encouraging users to run web searches and then overlay whatever secret sauce to make those answers more AI-rific. When they started this, they were actually trailblazers. Obviously, these days, They are one in a sea of many. In order to differentiate, Perplexity announced that they are working on their own browser, which they are calling Comet. It's not out yet. The company hopes for a soon-ish release, though, claiming it will be available in May. Comet isn't out, but it's already generating buzz, and it's not the good buzz. On a podcast interview recently, the CEO of Perplexity flat out said that the purpose of this browser was to, quote, get data to better understand you. And why would they want to do that? To sell premium ads, of course. Now, the strategy here is not new. The ads he's talking about are referred to as, quote, hyper personalized ads, which is as repellent as it sounds.

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Chris: Think about that scene where Tom Cruise goes to the mall and is bombarded by things screaming his name in the movie Minority Report. Did I say movie? I meant documentary. The reactions to this browser have been, let's call it mixed. On the one hand, it is refreshing that this dude just went ahead and said the quiet part out loud. This is exactly the reprehensible behavior that made advertising company Google rich, but they lie about it. On the other hand, though, I mean, yuck. Come on. I really do wonder what happens with the youths. What is the next generation going to do when it comes to privacy and protecting personal data? The boomers who currently make up the majority of the paying commercial class and are being targeted by these ads most enthusiastically are clearly in the indignant loss-cause mindset of, take my data, I don't care, I just want the free thing. I deserve it. Is that going to continue with the youths? Inquiring minds want to know. But also, I don't want to talk to any youths. So if somebody has a survey, Completely coincidentally, Perplexity is one of the companies that is very curious to see if Google is going to have to divest Chrome.

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Chris: Perplexity went ahead and said that they would be willing to buy it in an amicus brief they sent to the DOJ as part of the current litigation against Google. Cannot imagine, based on all of this, why Perplexity is looking to buy Chrome.

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Ned: One more reason to ditch Chrome. And If you want to know more about how advertising is delivered to you, check out our main episode this week. Comcast has a sad about broadband. It's not fair that everyone else is better. During Comcast's Q1 2025 earnings call, Mike Cavenagh, the current President of Comcast, noted that Comcast is losing the battle for broadband customers, saying, In this intensely competitive environment, we are not winning in the marketplace. This was in the context of describing how good their broadband and mobile services are. For real, trust us. He went on to posit that the reason they aren't winning customers is twofold, Price and transparency and predictability and the level of ease of doing business with us. That sounds about right to me. In the last quarter, Comcast has lost 183,000 resident broadband customers. Where are they going? He didn't say on the earnings call, but I'd speculate a combination of alternate ISPs, including Verizon, Fios, Starlink, and mobile carriers like T-Mobile. Now that there are actual options, albeit not great ones, people are leaving in droves. I haven't been a Comcast customer for years, but I can still recall the absolute shit show that was calling customer service or trying to figure out my bill.

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Ned: Chris, feel free to rant here for as long as you need to.

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Chris: Why Why did you leave? Why am I alone in this room?

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Ned: Listeners will be happy to know that I have edited out the last 30 minutes. There's a reason that Comcast is ranked 84th in the 2024 Axios-Harris poll for Company Reputation. They have beaten out T-Mu and Metta, but not by a lot. Fixing pricing is probably a good start, but repairing your reputation after years of sucking is going to take more than a couple quarters. Something Kavanaugh owned up to during the call, saying it was going to take several quarters for their changes to see any impact. It's a good thing that the market is patient and kind. All right, that's it. We're done now. Go away. Bye.