Tech News Weekly 372 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Tech News Weekly. I'm Mikah Sargent and I am joined by my pal, Dan Moren. We kick things off by talking about the sale of indie e-books, then hackers hijacking WordPress sites and what you need to know why. Everyone is talking about DeepSeek and my interview with Eric Migicovsky about bringing back the Pebble smartwatch. Stay tuned for this episode of Tech News Weekly.

This is Tech News Weekly, episode 372, with Dan Moren and me, Mikah Sargent, recorded Thursday, January 30th 2025: Return of the Pebble Smartwatch. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where, every week, we talk to and about the people making and breaking the tech news. I am your host, Mikah Sargent, and I am joined across this vast and ever-changing landscape that is the internet by someone who you might not expect, because it is the final Thursday of the month and we don't typically have someone scheduled for this Thursday, but we do today. It's Dan Moren. Hello, Dan.

0:01:24 - Dan Moren
Nobody expects me, Mikah, I'm the unexpectable that's what they call me the unexpectable.

0:01:31 - Mikah Sargent
I like it. I like it. Hello, unexpectable Dan, thank you for being here today. We've got some stories of the week before we get to an interview at the end of the show that I am excited about. But I'm very excited because you are uniquely qualified for.

0:01:55 - Dan Moren
Oh boy, you can tell. Could you go back in time and tell one of my high school teachers about this? I'd love for them to know I'm uniquely qualified for basically anything.

0:02:03 - Mikah Sargent
I'd love for them to know I'm uniquely qualified for basically anything you are uniquely qualified for being able to look at how tech and writing comes together. And that is your story of the week and the first story of the week we are discussing today. Tell us what's going on with e-books and kind of your initial thoughts about things.

0:02:32 - Dan Moren
Sure, yeah. Earlier this week, an organization called bookshop.org announced they would now be selling e-books. Now, if you're not familiar with bookshop.org, here's the sort of top level idea. This is essentially a site that acts as a middleman between your local independent bookstore and you. So if you want to buy a book up to this point a paperback book, for example, or hardcover book and you're like, well, I would love to buy it from my local independent bookstore, but maybe they don't have an online store, bookshop.org interest the pictures there and say, okay, look, we'll basically act as the front end marketplace for your local independent bookstore. You buy the book through us and we will give the profits the full profits 30% to the local independent bookstore of your choice, which is a great deal.

I mean, it's good for bookstores that may not have the time or money or energy to basically set up their own online marketplaces, and it just makes it a lot easier for consumers to support local independent bookstores instead of buying by default through Amazon or Barnes, Noble or one of the big chains. So this week, Bookshoporg announced that they will be adding eBooks to their roster, which again sounds well and good. I mean, you probably can't go into your local independent bookstore and say I'd like to buy an eBook, please.

0:03:36 - Mikah Sargent
It's not really a thing that you can do. A flash drive yeah exactly.

0:03:39 - Dan Moren
I don't know what they do. All right, we'veped some bits off the page and here you go. Now. This came with some caveats to it. I mean, I think this idea is great. Opening that up to independent bookstores is fantastic. And bookshop.org I will say I have not done any specific work with them, but many of the books that I've written are listed through there, because it's basically a store like Amazon or Kobo or Barnes Noble.

However, there are some challenges here, right, and what I find interesting about it is all these obstacles are put in place basically by bigger companies, whether they be publishers or big tech companies. So, for example, one of the problems is as always, as so often is common, these eBooks are protected by DRM, digital rights management. Now, pretty much any book you buy anywhere Amazon, apple Books, barnes and Noble, whatever is protected by some sort of DRM scheme. This has been the way with digital media for a very long time. You can go back to 20 years, basically to MP3s and Napster and all of that, to see music industry talking about putting on DRM on all their music. Obviously, video files you buy now, or music files you buy now from big stores like the Apple stores or Amazon or whatever, are all protected with DRM. Streaming stuff's all protected with DRM, et cetera, et cetera.

Now there's some frustrations here, right? Because this means that, for example, if bookshop.org you want to be able to buy an e-book from them and read it, you're going to have to use their app, which is available on iOS and Android. So great, you know all the modern phones, ipads, etc. But you know, if you want to move that to an e-reader, you're going to have a problem because there's not really a good way to do that for DRM protected titles. Now Bookshop has said basically, you know, android based e-reader devices may be able to, you know, install our app and read on there, but you know your mileage is going to vary. It doesn't sound like they've tested it so much that they say well, technically those are Android devices, they can install an Android app. They also say that they're planning on working with Kobo and adding some integration for that at some point further in the future.

But you know, obviously Kindle's the big player there and you're unlikely to be able to load these ebooks onto your kindle without jumping through some hoops, which is to say, circumventing the drm, which is a thing that you can definitely do if you know where to look. I mean, those resources are out there. The technology exists. A lot of this drm has been cracked, as it always is, but it means jumping through a bunch of hoops. It means, you know, doing some technological work you may or may not want to do, and it's just time consuming and annoying, and so that's sort of.

One of the big things is that the publishers impose this right. Publishers are putting DRM on all their eBooks because they are concerned about piracy, nevermind the fact that all these books are pirated anyways, because the DRM gets cracked and these things get uploaded. It's not really stopping anything. Drm gets cracked and these things get uploaded. It's not really stopping anything. What it does do is crack down on perfectly legal uses of things like hey, Mikah, I want to loan you this book I read. Well, you're all the way across the country from me. I can't exactly mail you a copy.

I could, but at that point is it cheaper than you going out and buying a copy, but if I had an ebook, I wanted to loan you. There's really no way to do that. And I get it. This is a fundamental problem with digital media period right, because when I loan you a copy, you have a perfect copy of it right In the physical realm. Obviously, we're limited by the fact that there is one book that I am loaning you and then you are returning to me. Maybe, yeah, maybe, maybe, if I trust you.

Some places have circumvented this right. Amazon and Apple both allow some degree of purchase sharing between you and other people in your household, but that's usually a limited number of people and sometimes it's also dependent on the licensing of that media. So this is problem one. Problem two, which I think is, you know, perhaps just as insidious some way, but can be laid more at the feet of some more limited number of companies, is bookshop.org. On their FAQ, they basically are asked, they have a bunch of questions and one of them is can I buy books through your app Now?

0:07:35 - Mikah Sargent
if you are somebody who follows any of these things you know?

0:07:38 - Dan Moren
the answer is probably no and yes, indeed, it is no. Why? Because if you want to sell your books through the iOS app or through a Google app, both Apple and Google want to take 30%. Now, if you might remember, earlier in this conversation I mentioned to you that when you bought a paper book through bookshop.org, they gave the profits to the independent bookstore and that number was also 30%. So if you need to give 30% to Apple or Google and you still want to give 30% to the bookstore to sort of say, okay, you're buying from your local independent bookstore and they should get the profit, you're going to have some math problems here.

You got only a few options. One, you raise the price to build in more room for profit. Two, you just forego that chunk of profit, which is a good way to put yourself out of business. Or three, you do what they're doing and the answer is we don't sell books through the app. You've got to buy them through the web and then load them up in your book app of choice. This is nothing new, right? If you want to buy a Kindle book right now, you got to go to amazoncom, buy a Kindle book, then open your Kindle app and get it in there. It's just a hoop to jump through, but this has been going on for a super long time because the platform owners want to get their cut, and while I don't begrudge Apple and Amazon and Spotify battling it out as to who gets the lion's share of that money, it does feel a little more galling when you're dealing with an independent, local bookstore, not exactly a business known for being flush with cash.

Moreover, if you're an independent local bookstore selling eBooks a thing that Apple also does and they are charging you a 30% cut for that, which they are definitely not charging themselves, then you start to have more concerns about wow, isn't there a word for that? Perhaps Something about being against competition? I don't know, I'll have to figure that out. Then you start to have more concerns about wow, isn't there a word for that? Perhaps Something about being against competition? I don't know, I'll have to figure that out. Anyway, that's a bit, again, another sort of thing that I think will be a bit of an impediment to them.

Now, I wish them well. I think it's a good setup, and the idea of being able to support your local independent bookstore with eBooks is a great one, but the fact is that the power is still in the hands of both these big companies, whether they be publishers or big tech companies, and that's hurting both the independents and it's hurting end users as well, because the people who just want to read books and download them and read them on their eReader or wherever can't do that from the source of their choice. They're locked into these platform ecosystems all too often. So I think it's an unfortunate state of affairs, and I don't know that it's likely to change anytime soon, but it is a bit disheartening at times.

0:10:10 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I was kind of curious. The part that didn't make as much sense to me is so, obviously, with the way that it is right now, before this announcement, the bookshop.org option to buy a book and say this is my local bookstore, and then the bookstore gets a cut and that, in my mind, makes more sense for everybody involved because it's a physical thing that is getting. So is this just bookshop.org kind of doing this ebook thing out of the goodness of its heart when it comes to these local because what, where? Why do they involve the local bookstores? Yeah, at all, as opposed to just selling these ebooks themselves?

0:10:54 - Dan Moren
I mean, I think the? The answer is I believe, and I will I will double check this to be sure but I think they are a nonprofit. I mean, they are bookshop.org, right, not bookshopcom, and I think they're essentially. You know, they do this in a couple of ways, like, for example, when you do that ebook and you, or when you do buy a book through them, either they give the proceeds to the independent bookstore of your choice. You can also opt to not support, like basically, I haven't picked a bookstore, I just want to buy it through them. You can do that and then they will basically set aside a percentage smaller than full profit to a pool that they have that's shared among all their partnered bookshops. So they still do make some money off the sales and that, I presume, goes to fund just the overhead of this thing.

Right, but the kind of mission that they had and that they were founded with is this idea of kind of mission that they had and that they were founded with, is this idea of we want to basically help support local independent bookstores and connect them directly with customers, which is something that just wasn't really an option before. So that is the basically what they're doing, for the large part is to essentially be like we're sort of acting as a middleman, yes, but in order to help support these local bookstores, we take a little bit for our overhead. We kick most of it back. You can look on their website. They talk about where their profits go. Most of it goes to these independent bookstores. But, yeah, I think it's just sort of an attempt to challenge the hegemony that you've got from companies like Amazon, which are just overwhelmingly powerful in this space.

0:12:31 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, absolutely, and it shapes, I'm sure, the way that all. It's not just the bookstores, it's the authors, it's the public, everybody is shaped by the way that Amazon does what it does. And having this small but collective group is is, I don't know. I, I'm, I'm always going to root for the underdog in that way for sure. Um, so it's, it's a cool place to go, bookshop.org, to kind of opt for your local bookshop and be able to support them while you're already buying. You know, if you're going to buy a book, try doing it through this.

0:13:14 - Dan Moren
Yeah, and I mean always good. If you have a local bookstore and you like to buy physical books, that's a great option as well. But you know, sometimes you don't have one, or sometimes you've moved and you want to support a bookshop where you used to live or something like that. So I think there's a lot of reasons you might want to be able to do that.

0:13:30 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that's a cool idea too. I hadn't considered that, that you know, maybe there was one you used to frequent and you haven't been there in a while and you want to help support them, so very, very cool. All right, we are going to take a quick break before we come back with the next story of the week. This time it's a bit of a PSA regarding some WordPress sites

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All righty back from the break, and that means it is time to talk about the piece that I promised. This is a TechCrunch piece from Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchieri. For those of you who have been long-time Tech News Weekly viewers or listeners, you'll recognize the name. Lorenzo has been on the show a number of times and he wrote a piece just yesterday, as we record this, about hackers hijacking WordPress sites and using these hijacking attempts to get people to install malware, and so this is kind of just a little PSA. So what they did is, well, some researchers were working to discover some malware that they started to see pop up slash side, and they used some clever techniques to kind of scour the web and use some reverse DNS lookup stuff to determine the different sites that were hijacked. And what's happening is Seaside says that there have been more than 10,000 websites they've discovered that are responsible for actually, you know, having this hijacking take place that results in the prompting of malware downloads. So let's talk about what this actually looks like.

If you were to visit, you visit one of these sites, these WordPress sites, on your Windows PC or your Mac, then when you go there, this is in Chrome, specifically on the Chrome browser, it displays instead of the site. So I'm going to www.thisisafakesite.com because I don't want to name another one. This is a fake sitecom, because I don't want to name another one. Um, then it will, uh, start to load that page, and then it switches over and shows a fake Chrome browser update page, and so it makes it look like you need to update your Chrome browser. You go through the process of updating your Chrome browser and it results in you downloading and installing this update. If you do so, then you download this malicious file. That is indeed malware, and again, it will serve whichever version you need, depending on whether you're running macOS or you're running Windows. And so when you download this, it results in the installation of Amos, which is Amos, atomic Stealer, that's for macOS, and SockGulish, which is S-O-C-G-H-O-L-I-S-H, which is after Windows users.

Now these tools are what do they call them? They're called info stealers or something along those lines. Basically, it's malware that crawls throughout your system and looks for as much information as possible, pulls that and uses it to gather cryptocurrency, wallet numbers and passwords, usernames, etc. Etc. Etc.

And I think the big thing to understand here is that, according to this piece from TechCrunch, this specific macOS malware is one that has been created as a malware, as a service kind of tool. So what that means is there are developers who have created this malware and instead of being the hackers, so to speak, themselves, meaning that they create a piece of software and then they work to get it installed on a machine so that they can gain access to that information. No, they just make it available for purchase and then someone gets it and does the work of installing it on a machine so they can get whatever they want from it. It's like a marketplace of malware, and this is a very common one for macOS. Now, one good thing about this is that when it comes to and the piece mostly focused on the macOS side of things, I'm kind of curious about how exactly it looks and what exactly it does on the Windows side.

But on the macOS side, there are a lot of hurdles involved, and anyone who's ever installed third-party software that is trusted on macOS will be Third-party software that is trusted that requires some special permissions will be familiar with the hoops one must Through which one must jump, wow in order to install that software.

So you can imagine, because I have to every time.

It's rare these days, but I have to write it down or like get my little, you know, print out a little piece of paper that has the steps, and I'm imagining a person who doesn't, because this is mostly targeting people who don't necessarily realize what they're doing, but you have to.

You got to, like run a special startup mode and do these different things to gain. So it's pretty involved, and that means that a lot of people probably aren't going to do it correctly, which means that it's less likely that it'll be installed, but it can still happen, particularly if someone you know is good at following instructions. So this is more of a PSA, I think, for people out there who listen to this show, who have family and friends who you know use the Chrome browser. Tell them about this, that this is going on because WordPress is part of the sort of foundational framework of the internet, in the sense that a lot of different sites and particular publications make use of WordPress as their site engine. So something to keep in mind. You know, I remember, Dan, a time where you could almost just say I'm running macOS, I don't have anything to worry about.

And those days have gone.

0:23:42 - Dan Moren
Yeah, long gone. I mean, you know, a big part of it is the fact that the underpinnings of Mac OS are based in, you know, unix, netbsd, and so therefore there's more knowledge both of what the platform entails as well as sort of more. You know broadly applicable technologies that can be used to exploit that. But some of it is just that it's become a more and more popular platform over the past two decades, and so it's more worthwhile for the people developing this malware to target it, because they get a better return on their investment. So I still think, in general, it feels as though malware is less of a problem on the Mac than it is on Windows. I have never run malware or anti-malware or anti-spamware whatever you know programs on my Mac, on any of my Macs, in the last several decades, and that has not changed as a result of this. But yeah, it's not to say it doesn't exist, just that it's. You know the scale of the problem is different.

0:24:45 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely. Yeah, I don't know anyone who has, and I certainly haven't installed or you know, come across any knock on wood malware on my machines. But it's machines, but it's. You still hear those stories of people you know, they call up their, they call up the family member that knows what they're doing when it comes to tech and they're like, yeah, my computer has a virus, the, you know, my internet told me that my computer has a virus and I went ahead and did the scan and they're like, wait, you did the scan. What do you mean? You did the scan. Well, they popped up and they said download this and then it'll scan. And you're going no, no, no, like how far have you gone?

No, it's too late, burn that computer Exactly, throw that thing away, salt it, et. So yeah, I for people again who listen to the show it's just a good bit of knowledge to have and share with others that hey, uh, here is exactly how you install a chrome update. If you're ever presented with any other way to install a chrome update, do not do that thing. And if you get a prompt that says there's an update, ignore the prompt, cancel the prompt, do whatever and go to this page to do the actual update. That is good advice across, in fact, all software as much as possible. I will. If I see something pop up and say, oh, I've got an update, I'm going to go back to the source and make sure that I'm getting it that way, so that I know what it is that I'm after.

0:26:29 - Dan Moren
I will say I did make me go to my blog. My personal website is hosted on WordPress, so of course I immediately went over there it's like oh, make sure everything's up to date. Make sure all my plugins are up to date.

0:26:46 - Mikah Sargent
Everything looks fine. That's a good point too. Yes, if you are running a WordPress site, go and make sure everything's working as it should be and that you have clicked the multiple update check for update buttons that you need to, so that you are not responsible for anybody getting hacked through this. By the way, it was Info Stealer, is the term. All right, it is time. That sounds like a villain in, like the Incredibles or something. Let's take another quick break before we come back with our final story of the week.

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All righty, we are back from the break and it is time for our final story of the week. You probably have heard a lot about DeepSeek over the past couple of days a few days now and I thought it'd be a good idea. We thought it'd be a good idea to kind of talk about what DeepSeek is and why it's kind of got everyone's attention. I want to point everybody to an article over on the Verge. I'd invited the authors to join me on the show. They were unavailable Kylie Robison and Elizabeth Lopato, who probably Lopato but they wrote a piece for the Verge that is explaining why everybody's freaking out about DeepSeek.

So DeepSeek is, of course, an AI company, I should say out of China, that has two AI models that are kind of in the public eye. When the company released its first model, there was some level of attention being paid to it around Christmas time, and then the big change happened when it released its second model, wherein the company claimed that it was able to create this model and do what some of the premier American AI companies have been able to do without spending as much money. And that's caught everybody I wouldn't say by surprise, necessarily, except for the market, which it seemed to catch by surprise at which point we saw a huge dip in the market for some of these companies. So let's kind of talk a little bit about what's going on here. Basically, up to this point, we have had sort of this official understanding right of the way that these AI models need to work and need to be created, where you have kind of a great grouping of information and you train your AI model against that grouping of information and then you further refine it by looking at inputs and outputs to say this is good, this is bad, this is good, this is bad, and kind of going down from there until you finally have this model that is capable of spitting out responses that are expected. Then we saw the AI companies kind of take what used to be almost part of the training side of things and add it to the model available to us as consumers or developers or what have you, where, after it's been trained, now we're still spitting out multiple responses and kind of choosing the best one from that group.

That's the reasoning model. So for OpenAI, that's GPT, is it 0101? It's the one after, and this model is again kind of behind the scenes After everything has happened it looks at multiple outputs and then kind of makes the best one available to you based on its training. So that all requires, according to these companies, a whole heck of a lot of data and a whole heck of a lot of processing power, which means a whole heck of a lot of money, hundreds of millions of dollars, to train these models. That's what Anthropic says. That's what OpenAI says.

Well, we find this model that comes out of China, from DeepSeek, that is able to DeepSeek, that is able to, according to the company, create this reasoning model, that has been able to do so at a scale that is like 90, some percent less than what we've seen up to this point and do so with sanctions in place. That would suggest that the company is not able to use the most advanced chips that are available. Well, what does that mean? It means that the company that makes the most advanced chips available for this kind of NVIDIA is not seen as valuable as it once was, which results in a huge loss of money for NVIDIA's valuation and, or you know, current value and kind of some shuffling around with the major tech companies, except for Meta and Apple taking a hit due to this deep-seek model.

But there's one more aspect of this that's involved, which is that we don't necessarily know what is truth, what is fiction, and how these AI models were trained exactly and what was done to train them. Because we do know that DeepSeek purchased quite a few of NVIDIA's chips before the US started putting in place the sanctions that made it not as easily possible for a company to get these chips and at least in some part used those as part of the training process. On top of that, there is suggestion that DeepSeek made use of some of the reasoning models, that deep seek made use of some of the reasoning models the leading reasoning models in the U? S from anthropic and from open AI to help train its final or its, its current R one model and, basically, you know, using what was already made available to help further it along.

And this is my last thing before we kind of can break into this, because there's one more layer to this, which is that it turns out many of the AI companies do that that that's part of the process is you build on what you have, or you build on what's open source, or you build on, you know, what's already there to help further along your models. So much so that a lot of the models that are being, you know, bandied about are, in part, trained on data that has been created by AI in the first place, that there's not enough data that is actually created by human beings in the world that's made available to them, so they have to generate a bunch of data that is resembling human data to be able to further train their models. It's a justice. That's a house of cards. It is a house of cards, and at least a couple of cards got pulled from somewhere.

0:36:44 - Dan Moren
A house of canards.

0:36:46 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah exactly.

0:36:47 - Dan Moren
It's too far. This is a fascinating story, I think, for a few reasons. One I particularly love OpenAI getting bent out of shape about DeepSeek using their IP without their consideration which is a thing that OpenAI has been doing for years to train its models, taking everybody else's data to do this. So you know, live by the sword, die by the sword. I guess I feel like you know. The biggest question around this is is this the end of the AI bubble? And my guess is no. I don't think it's probably entirely going away because of this, but I think this may dent the enthusiasm, because it does point out that there are potential options that don't require, you know, a. There's no secret sauce, right. A lot of these models are built on the same fundamentals and therefore open ADIs models might be good, but it doesn't mean that they're uncatchable or that they have stuff that nobody else can replicate, because a lot of this underlying technology is kind of understood broadly at a theoretical level, so some of it may be more dependent on, say, what access to hardware you have, or specific tweaks might change certain things and make certain models slightly better at some things and slightly better at other things.

I've heard that from a lot of friends who use all these various models and say, like well, I sometimes use this one for this purpose or I use this one for this purpose because it's better at that. You know, I think at the end of the day, there's going to be a lot of like, well, this one's a little better here and this one's a little better here, but a lot of them are kind of comparable and once that happens, it's essentially commoditized, and once it's commoditized, there's not as much excitement about it because it's a commodity. So, you know, I I think this is sort of the first dent into the ai bubble. Uh, I'm kind of curious to see, uh, what happens from here.

There was also a news, uh, this week about alibaba hadaba had designed an AI model that they said was better than DeepSeek. So there's a lot happening in this sort of realm right now and, I think, a lot of questions about exactly what these things do. Plus all of that's on top of all the issues with AI in general that people have been wrestling with, whether it's use of IP without consideration, whether it's environmental impact, whether it's utility and accuracy right, all of those things are still sort of sitting out there as issues with these things, but maybe now that there's a bit of a crack in terms of how good and how efficient these models are, some of those things other factors will carry more weight in the criticism.

0:39:26 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, yeah, I like that it. I mean, competition is important and it really does drive forth progress, in particular, when it comes to, I think, if a company gets to, you know we're so far ahead of everything else and you know we're untouchable. That is not going to. The space race did not, land did not. We didn't achieve success in the space race because we were just like, ah, we've got this. It was like, oh no, we have to be first, we've got to beat it as a race, and so I think that, in the same way, yeah, you almost don't want to see anyone pull so far ahead, because then you get things like you know, one company deciding they can charge way, way, way, way, way more, and that everybody just has to play ball, and we know how that all works out in the end.

0:40:27 - Dan Moren
So, yeah, that's how you end up with Monopoly? Yeah, I think for sure. So, yeah, the competition is good. I'm not going to cry a river for OpenAI, worrying about their model getting used.

0:40:38 - Mikah Sargent
Sorry, that's you know you made that bed yourself.

0:40:43 - Dan Moren
Okay, sorry, uh, but yeah it's. It's going to be interesting to see, after all the hype around AI over the last year, it's going to be really interesting to see what the next year brings. I think it's going to be potentially profoundly different absolutely.

0:40:57 - Mikah Sargent
We shall see, Dan. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join me today to talk about these great stories of the week. If people would like to keep up with what you're doing and buy your books, where should they go to do so?

0:41:12 - Dan Moren
Well, you can find everything that I do over on my website, which, yes, is a WordPress blog, but I assure you that there's no malware on it dmorincom. I also write over at sixcolorscom and you can hear me every week with Mikah on the Clockwise Podcast over at relayfm. Check it out. Thank you so much. We'll see you soon. Thanks, guys.

0:41:34 - Mikah Sargent
Bye-bye. All right, we're going to take another quick break before we head into my interview this week with Pebble creator, extraordinaire Eric Majakovsky, who joined me earlier today on some exciting news. We'll get to that.

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All right, it's time for the movie magic of checking out this interview I had earlier this morning. Ah, nostalgia, gotta love it. I spent this morning actually digging around through my boxes because I did just recently move, trying to find the device I know is hiding out somewhere my Pebble and that is because there's some great news to talk about when it comes to Pebble. Joining us today to talk about that great news is Eric Migicovsky. Welcome back, eric. How are you?

0:43:52 - Eric Migicovsky
Thank you, it's good to be back. Yeah, there's a blast from the past this week.

0:43:59 - Mikah Sargent
Although I hear for you it's not quite a blast from the past, because you've been using your Pebble for a while. I want to talk about that. That's awesome. It's right there on your wrist. So let's kick things off. Though, if somebody were not familiar with Pebble and what we're talking about here, maybe we should start there, although, again, I have a feeling that this crowd either has owned one or has heard about it.

0:44:24 - Eric Migicovsky
It's funny. It's been so long that there are people who they were alive when Pebble came out, but they weren't part of the tech ecosystem and community, and I've been talking to them. It's kind of fun. They're like what's Pebble? What is that? I'm like how old are you? And you know I'm high school.

You know there was something special about pebble that brought it to you know, a really wide audience, and I'm kind of excited that, eight years later, uh, a new generation might hear about it. So, for for those who haven't um had the pleasure, pebble is um and was one of the first smart watches. Um, I think we didn't. I don't know if we coined the term, but I started working on smart watches in 2008, originally making one for blackberry another blast from the past. So the first watch that I um made worked with blackberry, and then, in 2012, we announced pebble, and pebble was the first watch that really went viral. People heard about it. What made Pebble special, though, is and I guess we could chat about this more also, coincidentally, the reason why I think it's time to bring it back.

So what made Pebble a Pebble was its e-paper screen, which is a low-power, always-on, daylight-readable reflective screen rather than emissive which pushes light out of it. It's ePaper long battery life lasts for a week, plus Fairly simple feature set Like we didn't try to boil the ocean and do everything that your phone could do Focused on things like notifications, telling time you know who would expect your watch to be really good at telling time. Music control we had physical buttons, but we have physical buttons on the watch so you could press the button to play, pause, skip tracks. You don't have to look at the touchscreen and hit the right tiny little icon. And it was hackable. Anyone who wanted could write a watch face or build an app or pebble, and that was it basically, like there's. You know a lot more that people did with it, but that was right. Core of what pebble is.

0:46:45 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and I think that's what ended up being the delight for many people you talk about in your blog post kind of the surprise of all those watch faces that were available for that are available for Pebble, that were not for the Apple Watch. So we should not continue to kind of beat around the bush here. What's the new news? Because I think people will be very excited about this.

0:47:12 - Eric Migicovsky
Yeah, so the big news this week is that Google open sourced Pebble OS. So in 2016, pebble sold its IP to Fitbit, fitbit got bought by Google, and so you know there's always a bigger fish world in tech. Pebble now is under Google. They weren't doing anything with it, and so about a year ago, I asked very politely if they could open source the Pebble OS code base. Now this is the software that runs on the watch itself and they said yes, wow, you know they didn't have to, and I'm incredibly thankful that they did, and on Monday they published a GitHub repo that has the entire source code for Pebble's operating system.

This was unavailable before. There was no way to build software for Pebble's operating system. This was unavailable before. There was no way to build software for Pebble, or kind of compile and run the Pebble operating system. It still works perfectly. That's the crazy part. Like this watch is eight years old, nine years old. It hasn't had an update in eight years, wow, and it still works great. I think that's a testament to the quality of engineering work and product design that the Pebble team put in, you know, between 2012 and 2016. In that, it still works. Like what other gadgets do you have from 10 years ago that you could turn on connect to a phone Right Like you can't. The first generation Apple Watch doesn't even work anymore.

0:48:47 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that was one of the things that really stood out to me. The folks at iFixit helped with making sure that if your battery had gone bad in your Pebble, that you could get a replacement for that. And it's funny the Pebble because I do still have mine, because I think it's just a testament to that time, and also it was for me that moment of excitement of not only a Kickstarter project being a success and being part of that, but also it actually shipping. So all of that is built into this totem. That is the Pebble smartwatch for me.

0:49:27 - Eric Migicovsky
Smartwatch for me and in my opinion, like I think we've lost a little bit of that gadget awe and optimism that maybe we had in spades 10 plus years ago. Like there was an era of gadget blogging that I loved, like the Gizmodo and gadget. You know where I was, I was a bit younger and I, you know, I just loved reading about gadgets. There was something special to me about a gadget because it's like a gadget that just doesn't take itself too seriously, it's not trying to change the world, it's just there, it exists and maybe it helps you smile a little bit during the day. It doesn't have to be more than that and I think we doubled down on that at Pebble. We made it quirky and fun. The OS had these little flares like when you were charging the watch, a coffee cup. The icon was a coffee cup that would fill up to the brim until and there'd be a little bit of steam rising off the top of the cup.

0:50:19 - Mikah Sargent
That was fun, surprise and delight, right, yeah? So I want to talk about what's been going on between the time that Pebble was acquired by Fitbit, which was then acquired by Google, and now, because there were some people out there who figured out how to make it work. Can you talk about the open source?

0:50:47 - Eric Migicovsky
Yeah so community.

I took. I took a break, starting in 2016. I'd spent nine years working on smart watches and I was like this is, this is good, we built. We built something nice. You know a bit code, do something else. I went to work at Y Combinator for a bit to code. Do something else. I went to work at Y Combinator for a bit.

Luckily for me and for the entire Pebble community, an open source group of hackers called the Rebel Alliance, the R-E-B-B-L-E took it upon themselves to reverse engineer the web services that Pebble had the app store and offer that as free software to the community, and so for the last eight years, this group, the Rebel Alliance, has been hosting hackathons, sponsoring contests to build new Pebble apps and basically keeping the community kind of fresh and enthusiastic. You can see on their Discord there's thousands of people that are chatting about Pebble, and one thing that I love is you can still go to the Pebble subreddit r slash Pebble, and every week there's like someone posting about or actually every day probably, there's people posting about Pebble and sharing their favorite watch faces or even new apps. Like eight years later, after there are no more watches being built, people were still writing new apps for Pebble, which is pretty special.

0:52:18 - Mikah Sargent
Now, how far, how many iterations of Pebble did the company make before Pebble was acquired by Fitbit?

0:52:28 - Eric Migicovsky
I couldn't remember if it was two or three there was Pebble, the OG Pebble, as we called it in 2012. Pebble Steel in 2014. Pebble Time in 2015. And then Pebble 2 in 2016.

0:52:47 - Mikah Sargent
Got it. So there were four total, yes, generations. Yeah, pebble Steel was one that escaped my memory. So now we're talking about, with Pebble's operating system being open sourced and with the, I think, still robust and excited community that exists there, is it time to bring back Pebble? Are we going to have new hardware? That's kind of wild. That's kind of exciting.

0:53:18 - Eric Migicovsky
So I have a problem I'm running out of Pebbles. Luckily, I mean. Obviously, having worked at Pebble, I had a big stash and so over the last 10 years I've been kind of pebbles. I've luckily, I mean, I obviously haven't worked at Pebble. I had a big stash and so over the last 10 years I've been kind of working my way through.

But you know, even great hardware doesn't last forever. Right, I'll be at. It's lasted extraordinarily long. Um, you can replace the batteries, like you mentioned. I fix it has a bunch of tutorials on how to do it. You go on YouTube and there's like how to replace the Pebble buttons, how to replace the Pebble, everything. It's cool.

But you know, I used to tell people that you could buy a Pebble on eBay, but the prices are either skyrocketing like hundreds of dollars or there's just none available anymore. So what's going to happen? I decided to start making new Pebble watch hardware, hardware that will run Pebble OS. I'm going to do it a little bit differently this time. So, whereas last time we did it as kind of a prototypical startup, you know, we raised money, built out a big team, had up to a hundred plus people working at Pebble.

It taught me a lot about how to build a sustainable operation and this time around, I think the number one goal is how do we build this in a sustainable manner? And I mean that sustainable in that we will continue building hardware long into the future and continue being able to support the operating system and, you know, update it and publish new features and that kind of thing. So we're starting small. We're not going to try to do too much all at once. We're going to build, you know, a watch and get it out there and see what people think, and then, if it's successful and we earn enough money, we'll reinvest that in maybe more watches. We'll kind of cross that bridge when we get to it. But the name of the game is sustainability. So it's going to be a small company, no venture backing and just building kind of in public and taking, like taking it one step at a time in and of itself.

0:55:47 - Mikah Sargent
To me it's giving an underdog vibe in a good way. I mean that in like a you know, you cheer, you're cheering it on, you're saying you know what, what can you do in that very small, sustainable way? But you would know better than I when it comes to, I guess it's the mixture of hardware and not going venture backing. That is interesting. Do you feel like it's because of your knowledge up to this point of the things that you made? Even read about the the. I think it was a relative of yours who was asking you for help hacking a BlackBerry to display things on the ceiling.

0:56:20 - Eric Migicovsky
Like you, clearly have some, some electrical engineering knowledge there, so I think the essence of this is I wrote a blog post 10 years after the first Kickstarter, kind of reminiscing and looking back and kind of analyzing some of the story.

I think what I recognized is that I am I think I'm more of an inventor than an entrepreneur. Okay, I love creating products and I love using those products, and I very greedily want this product to exist, and so my plan is to, like, make sure that the elements that are needed to keep building these type of products exist and that doesn't necessitate selling tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of watches. Like. We can build, like I said, a sustainable company without having to make it big. If it's big, great, but it doesn't have to be, and I think most of the premise of a traditional startup is that the definition of a startup, based on PG's, paul Graham's work, is startup is a company that's designed to grow quickly, and I think this is not a startup. It's a company designed to build great products, get them out into the world and if growth happens, great. But it's not a prerequisite.

0:57:51 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, sounds very much like a passion project, I think. Lastly, I'd ask anything you can share for the people who are curious. You had a little bit of an FAQ that we'll, of course, link to, but are we imagining a watch that is, you know, three times the size of the current one? What are we expecting when it comes to this?

0:58:18 - Eric Migicovsky
Expect literally a pebble, expect whatever the last pebble you had expect. That this is also recognizing. I think I've recognized that products and software can be done. You can finish something. It doesn't have to continually change and add new features and da-da-da, you can be done something. I'm not saying that Pebble is done, in that there's literally never going to be a change, ever again, but I'm still using the same watch with the same software that was there eight years ago. It's better than the alternative, which is wild to me, that no one in the last eight years has built something that's remotely comparable or usable to the set of features that I'm looking for out of a smart lock. And plenty of people in the last couple days have talked to me and said, oh, is it gonna have this feature? Is gonna have that feature, is gonna be like this? I'm like no, it'd be like a pebble. There's plenty of other options like. There's just no options for the people that want this exact set of features. And that's all we're saying.

0:59:32 - Mikah Sargent
Nice. Well, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join me today on the show, for getting us excited about the return of Pebble and, of course, the open sourced code that you, you know, went and said, hey look, is it possible you could make this available? And that's pretty cool too. So, all of that work coming together, I know that there are many people out there who are listening to the show who, like I said, probably own Pebbles uh, Pebble or Pebbles and are looking forward to seeing what's next. So thank you again, uh, for your time and, um, if people want to stay up to date with everything, um, is there a place that they should go to follow you? Or, yeah, tell us.

1:00:19 - Eric Migicovsky
Uh, check out um repebblecom. Sign up for the wait list. Um, we'll be sharing a lot more information about new stuff, how you can help. If you want to be part of the community and help on the software side as well, join the fun. Awesome, thanks so much, thank you.

1:00:39 - Mikah Sargent
All right. Thank you so much again, eric, for joining us, and thank all of you for being here for this episode of Tech News Weekly. Of course, our show publishes every Thursday right here twit.tv/tnw. That is where you can go to subscribe to the audio and video versions of the show. And now is the time where I remind you to please join Club Twit at twit.tv/clubtwit for just seven dollars a month, although we are running a free trial two weeks to check it out.

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