Hello everyone, and welcome to episode 188 of the Iacast. I'm here with you guys today with some wonderful folks. We've got Marty SoBo back with us. Hey y'all, we've got Michael Babcock.

Who's that?

I don't know. I think he's been on the show quite a few times, you know, and.

We have Damasi Thomas, the known unknown.

Well, welcome everyone. This is going to be a great show today. We're going to have some news and talk about a topic that came up on a Unmute community call. And I thought, you know what, this is something we really haven't talked about much, so I figured we should go ahead and have a discussion. So I guess our first topic of the day is most people don't really know who this person is, but to the tech community, we pretty much all do. And that's the passing away of Kevin Mitnick. Kevin was a hacker in the, I believe, late eighty s and ninety s. Did a lot of social engineering is.

Where he started at. What's that? He did a lot of phone freaking back in the days where they used to call it messing around with phone lines. And he started back in the days where when you connect it to a computer pre Internet over phone lines. So he was very heavily involved in that in the late 80s, going through.

The 90s, social engineering, getting into companies, and they wanted to put him in jail. And then he started working with companies.

Yeah. So he did like, I think two years in prison. I may have the amount of time, but he did some amount of time in prison once he was caught. And when he got out, as you were saying, Michael, he started working with company. He was banned from the Internet for like the first two years after he got out of prison. So he was not allowed to be on the Internet. But he basically turned himself into what we called a day. A white hat hacker.

Correct.

And started working with companies to help them defend against people doing the sorts of things that he was doing in a malicious way. For him, it was more of just curiosity. We probably all, to some extent, have poked at things that maybe we shouldn't have, but it was more curiosity than malicious intent. And he just started helping companies defend against the malicious attacks out there from people that were hacking.

Right.

Super smart guy. One of the books I first actually heard his whole story reading the book Ghost in the Wires, which is a pretty good audiobook.

It is. There's the art of deception. Art of intrusion, I think is one. He's written a lot of books.

He did and died fairly young. When you think about he's 59 when he passed 59, I'm about 18 years away from that, so I'm feeling some kind of way about it. Can I get past 59?

Hopefully, yeah, exactly. So it's, I think, memorable to mention here on the podcast because we wouldn't have a lot of the cybersecurity knowledge and know how without people like him.

Exactly. And honestly, reading his book was kind of instrumental into leading me down the path of learning more about cybersecurity just because it was like, again, you have someone who wasn't trying to steal anything or he's just poking around. Hey, it's kind of like when you walk through a building and you turn a doorknob and hey, this door is actually unlocked. What's in here? Like, you don't go in there with the intent of causing any harm, but you're just curious. And reading Ghost in the Wires for me was an eye opening experience. I knew some people that kind of messed around with the phone systems back in the days, but seeing what he was able to do with this social engineering really kind of elevated me to getting into cybersecurity myself. So very instrumental in my career path.

Marty or Michael, was this ever interesting to you guys? Did y'all read any of his books?

I read Ghost and that was and I'm pretty sure I read some of the art books, the Art of Intrusion, I think I did. I don't remember, but I will have to go check it out again because as Damasi had mentioned, he was a very intelligent man for sure and was very creative in getting solutions to problems that he had encountered.

Yep.

I do want to read his books. I haven't gotten around to Ghost of the Wire yet, but I do want to it's on the list. So definitely got to get around to that.

Yep.

Well, I mean, he will be missed in the tech community. And he was on podcast, he was on Leo Laporte's Screen Savers, back know, the tech TV days and on different interviews throughout the you know, it's one of those personalities that was well known in the so the next major piece. Yep, yep. Rest in peace. So moving on to our next item here, we have some big news that Apple has joined the ranks of WhatsApp, Telegram and others saying that if certain laws are passed in the UK removing end to end encryption in messaging applications, that they will remove FaceTime and Imessage from the UK.

Is this a government thing that they want to remove two factor authentication or what's?

Not two factor authentication. End to end encryption.

Encryption. Gotcha.

Okay, so if I send a message to you or to Damasi on Imessage and WhatsApp and other networks, it's sent by me, encrypted and then unencrypted on your phone or whatever computer.

Right.

So nobody in between can catch it.

Right.

But is this a government thing?

Yes.

So no apps are going to be allowed to have end to end encryption.

Within their government within the UK. They're trying to basically a simple way of putting and I may oversimplify this a little bit, but a simple way of putting it is the UK essentially wants to make it illegal to use encrypted messaging services. Well, let me say that a little differently. They want to make it not necessarily illegal to use encrypted messaging services, but they want a backdoor into those messaging services if they decided they need to see what we're talking about or what some citizens are talking about within the UK. So that's the crux of the issue, is not necessarily that they want it to be illegal, but they want a we're, I don't honestly know. I can pick on a couple of people, let's say Stephen Scott from the Double Tap podcast, for example. He's in the UK. So if they were to pass this law, it wouldn't necessarily outlaw the usage of encrypted messaging services. But if for some reason they were suspicious of Steven, they want Apple Facebook Signal, whomever? The service provider that we're using for messaging, to give them a way to decrypt Stephen's conversations. Which, by side effect, would also decrypt my parts of the conversation as well. Right, so that's what they want. Now, it's virtually impossible to make that work in a way that does not really basically break the encryption for everybody. So it makes it difficult. And what Facebook and Signal, facebook with WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and Signal with the Signal messaging app have said several months ago is if they pass this law enforcing that they need to have a backdoor, they're just going to pull their apps out of the UK. And sounds like now Apple has gotten on board with that as well. And for me, one glaring thing that I feel like should make the UK government pause and really rethink what they're wanting is, well, you haven't listened to the technologies that have said you can't really do this in a way that doesn't basically make the encryption pointless. But when you have Facebook, Signal and Apple all agreeing on a thing and their reaction to it is the same, that to me is enough to make you stop and rethink what you're trying to do.

Right, well, the thing that's interesting is, at least here in the US, I'm not sure about in other countries, but if they're concerned about one particular person or particular persons, they can always come with a wart and access all that information through the carrier and get all that information and be able to look at it. So why don't they just do a similar thing? And that way they have what they want while still having encryption intact for anyone who wants to use any of those services.

So the difference here is, so we do have that and they have that there and they wouldn't be saying that they wouldn't want access to stuff unless they had lawful or had a warrant or their equivalent in the UK. The difference, though, is, and we also have a similar issue here in the US, it's just the Government's not pushing as hard as the UK is right now for to. So if they get a warrant to look at my phone, right, and they can get into my phone, know my help because I'm not giving you my passcode, they have a warrant to do that, or they have a warrant to come search my home, they can search my home, right? They can force me to turn over a know, to unlock a safe or something like that. The problem here, though, is that with a encrypted messaging service, there's nothing for Apple or Facebook or Signal to give the government without decrypting that message, right? That is the problem. So even with a warrant that says, hey, we want to see the Signal conversations that have been had between this UK citizen and that UK citizen, well, Signal doesn't have the ability to give them that information. The only way for the government or anybody to retrieve that data is to gain access to the person's device where the message has been encrypted. And that's what they're wanting is not, we want access to your phone demasi, so that we can look at what's on your phone. It's we want Signal or we want Facebook or we want Apple to be able to give us access to that messaging conversation without having hands on access to your device where those messages have been decrypted. And that's where the technological issues come in, as well as just the general principles of my major problem with this is governments approved that they cannot hold on to data securely. So even if any of these companies that run these encrypted messaging services were willing to give or create a means, because it's not technologically impossible, if they were willing to create the means by which they could decrypt a message when presented with a lawful subpoena or warrant to access the information, well, who holds those keys? And who's going to protect those keys? Right? It would automatically like, let's just say, for example, and they haven't done this, but let's say, for example, Signal was like, well, we will figure out how to make this work so that if you need access to encrypted conversations, we can give that information to you with a subpoena, I would stop using Signal. SOE because I don't trust anyone to be able to hold on to those keys properly.

Well, and not just that, the carriers can't do anything because it's encrypted. Even in the US, carriers cannot do anything about imessage. They cannot turn over imessage content that does not go through the carrier, neither does FaceTime or anything like that, nor does WhatsApp or anything like that. Now, regular SMS text messages, those are all unencrypted, yeah?

So they can hand those over easily. So they could go to Verizon or at and T or two in the UK and say, want this person's text messages.

So, bottom line, if this law passes, everybody in the UK is going to become a green bubble.

Yes. And there will be no more WhatsApp in the UK at that point and there will be no more Signal. And I think that Telegram telegram also said they're going to pull out as well. And that's pretty much the encrypted messaging platforms there. I mean, there are some other services out there, but those are the major ones. And again, I feel like if you have companies that in a lot of ways are at ODS with each other, I mean, we have Facebook and Apple that are at ODS with each other over Apple trying to protect data sharing and app tracking across different apps. And Facebook is upset because it's affecting their ad business. They're still in agreement that their solution to the UK passing this law would be, we're just going to pull our apps out of the UK. They won't be available there. Again, I feel like that should be a sign that, hey, we should maybe stop and reconsider what we're trying to do.

That should be the signal.

If somebody was to purchase an iPhone and this law was to go through, what do they have to do? Have a special operating system where they strip out everything out of no, not at all. Messages. And all it can do is SMS and nothing else?

No, not at say I think the.

Only thing they would do is just say that within this region. Sort of like so app developers, when they release an app to the App Store, for example, can say it's only available in certain regions like the US or Canada or wherever. Right.

But then how would you text message if you owned an iPhone?

So you would still have the messaging app for text messages. So SMS would still work through the Messages app because that is the default messaging app on an iPhone. But they would just disable imessages and disable FaceTime calls within the region of the UK. Sort of like when they roll out a new feature to iOS, right, and it starts out just being available in the US and then eventually it rolls out to other countries similar to that. It's just in this case they will be reversing that and saying, well, now we're going to roll back and pull out FaceTime. So FaceTime would not be available to any person inside of the UK. Imessage would not work as a function within the area of the UK. Text messages would still work, which means you could still send a regular SMS message to someone in the UK from the US. But of course you would be paying whatever the going rates are for sending international text messages at that point, as opposed to an imessage. And for Facebook and Signal, they just make their apps unavailable in the App Stores in those regions, in that region. Interesting.

So it's something to keep in know, we have a WhatsApp group, the I Accessibility community group and there's quite a few people from the UK that are in that group and we would lose all of those folks in our groups if this happened. So it's know something to keep in mind and keep alert about just so that if you do have people that you communicate with, you find alternative means of doing so if this happens.

Very interesting, see what's going to happen there.

Be interesting to see how this all plays out.

Yeah, for sure.

So let's talk about a more positive topic and let's route ourselves away from the bad news. And let's talk about routers.

This guy's got them today.

I thought that one was pretty bad, but I wanted to do it anyway.

It was. But still though, you had it specifically mesh routers.

No, just specifically routers. I think we all use mesh. Right? But there are people that still don't use mesh routers. It's kind of interesting.

Yeah, there are still people that are doing like the old school, just network extenders, which seem very similar to mesh, but are a little different because you're not having that working together of two different devices, more or less. I have a signal, you're going to grab that signal and then boost it out further. But that also has the net effect in the old way of doing it. The way that we used to have to do this before mesh was just trying to extend your network. You do lose some of your WiFi speed that way as well because it's enhancing the signal. So what are you folks using for routers? Which brand are you currently using and what do you like?

Well, I'm using Euro, so I'm using Euro as well.

I have ubiquiti.

What about you, Tomasi, what are you using?

The Ubiquiti unified now. So I recently, very recently in the past two days, just activated my Ubiquity unify setup in the house. Prior to that I was using Ero for a couple of years and before that I was using the Google Wi Fi mesh system.

Now see, that actually is kind of a topic I want to start with. Know we're talking about three Wi Fi systems here. Google wi Fi ero and ubiquiti. And I really want to kind of compare those because I've also used Google Nest wi fi. Don't know why they call it Nest but twice and both times I've used it, I have not been a big fan. So I'm curious to wasi what brought you from Google to.

I moved. So I rearranged my house and moved what was my office room became my son's room and I moved the office to the back of the house. And when I made that move, I could not get any of the so I got the main Google Wi Fi point that was connected directly to the modem to come online, but none of the other access points would even show up. Power on connect. So basically I was like, I can't deal with this. I don't have coverage in the house anymore. So I went on Amazon and bought a two pack of Heroes. Like, screw this.

Yeah. And I kind of had the same thing happen. I had the original Google Wi Fi in the apartment. It worked. And then eventually it just started not being as effective and just stopped working. And we tried another access point and it just did not have the bandwidth that we wanted. This was several years ago. And so I went on to and you know, those worked really well for us. And then whenever we move, those stopped being as effective. So we tried the Google Nest Wi Fi Pro models, thinking that, hey, those would be pretty good. And we had the same problems in a smaller space, and I'm sure they're probably pretty good for a house with not a lot of apartments around, but these were expensive routers and they just did not perform as expected. So I ended up with the Euro six e pros. Marty, is that what you have or what Euros do you have?

That's what I have.

Okay, so you two have the newer model of what I was using. So when I bought my Heroes, and that was kind of my experience with the Google Wi Fi. Like, I would have to reboot know a lot of know. The throughput wasn't spectacular. It was the original Google Wi Fi mesh that I started with. So when I switched over to Eero, at the time that I bought my Heroes, the models, they had just fairly recently released the WiFi Six versions. And there was the hero six plus and the hero six pros So I bought the aero six pros for a couple of reasons. One was an additional Ethernet port on the Six Pros, so I can attach for the back office, I could attach an Ethernet hub because I try to keep my computers wired. And then I also had my printer wired to Ethernet because I've never had good luck with keeping a printer on WiFi. So I had that Etherneted up. You guys have the newer models that were released, I think, maybe a year after I purchased, which are the WiFi Six E Pros, which are the current sort of models that are out right now. Right? And for me, I was overall so to be completely transparent, the only reason I bought Aero is because I needed to do something immediately, because I had been looking at the Google Wi Fi like, I'm going to replace these with something. And I was in the midst of doing research into different systems. I was looking at aero. I knew some people that had Aero. I was looking at the Asus mesh lineup. I had looked at the Netgear Orbi and decided not to go with those for a couple of reasons, mostly because the type of environment that they're good in was kind of overkill, especially for how much they costed. I kind of didn't need that set up, but I was starting to look at Ubiquity gear at that time. And then when I made this house move around, like just moving stuff around in the house and the Google WiFi didn't work, it's like, well, got to go buy the earos because I know they work. They don't give me everything I want. There's some caveats and restrictions, some things I already know I'm not going to be happy about, but at least my Internet will work. And at that point, that's what I needed. So that's what really got me into the Eros, is like emergency purchase. I know this thing works. I don't have to do any more research. Like, at least it's going to get me what I want, and I'm going.

To be curious about the things that they don't do in a minute. But I would like to go to Michael. So you were using Eero and now you've moved to Ubiquiti. So what was it that got you to make the switch?

Doug. I blame Doug. It's all Doug's fault. So, like, all of you guys, I actually started with the Google Nest Wi Fi. And then I went to Eero because Google Nest wasn't big enough for what we were doing, I think is what we or no, never mind. I have a wife who has a purchasing things addiction. And so Eero went on sale for a black early Black Friday sale. And we were having issues with Wi Fi dropping connections, especially for the boys upstairs. And so we picked up don't even it was an older Eero. It wasn't anything new or second generation. It was an older Eero. And we stumbled along with that. And then something happened. I think one of the Eero satellite pieces went out. And so I was talking to Doug and I'm like, hey, so what are you doing for Wi Fi? And he's like, oh, I've switched Ubiquiti. I'm doing all ubiquiti. And then he sent me crosstalk solutions on YouTube. And I've been watching Crosstalk Solutions now since then, and that really made me pull the trigger. And so when we decided to actually purchase a device to upgrade, we went with the Unified Dream router because I wanted to get the Dream machine. But then I realized that the Dream machine didn't actually have Wi Fi built in and I need to purchase some Wi Fi access points. And the Dream machine I'm sorry, the Unified Dream router actually had Wi Fi built in and two poe. By the way, if you don't know what poe is, it is magic power over Ethernet. And it also had two non poe Ethernet ports. So I had four Ethernet ports, and then it gave me the flexibility of using a router as well I'm sorry, using Wi Fi as well. And if I wanted to, I could build on at that point. So right now, we just have a unify dream router running our whole house right this second.

Okay, so what is it that you like about the dream router? Over the eeros.

So it's fully accessible, but Eero is fully accessible as well. What I like about it is I can separate my traffic. And I don't know if you could do this with Eero. I did not have enough patience to go in and do that. But, for example, we have a gaming Wi Fi network. Only the game machines are on that Wi Fi network. They don't have to worry about my dropbox downloads and stuff like that because that traffic is separated out of what I'm doing right now. We are in the process of building an IoT network. I have not built that out yet, but any of my Internet connected devices will be on that network, which means they can't see the machine that I'm running credit cards on. So I don't need to worry about what someone in China is doing with these Internet device connected devices. And if they're sniffing for 16 digit followed by four digits and then three digits. So that security also helps me feel a little bit more comfortable. And I can also control traffic rules. So if someone wants to play a game, for example, then all I have to do is open a port on that specific network to that specific device and I don't have to open the port all over my network which is kind of super nice, I think with.

Ero Plus, which is their paid I think you get a lot of those things. But again, it's a paid thing that you do have to pay for separately.

I didn't want to pay for a subscription.

That was the other thing that is the thing that annoyed me about Eero and some of what you get when you pay for Eero's subscription. I knew about it going in. There were some things that I wasn't aware of until I had the Eeros. It's like, oh, you can't do this unless you pay for Eero Plus. And I'm a longtime network nerd. I am one of those people that in the very early days of WiFi, when I first got Internet and got a WiFi, that I was doing the things where you try to extend your network out so it can cover the backyard, so you can still continue to stream your video or whatever while you're outside. I've done all of that. I've done a lot of network setups over the years. So for me with Eero, and again, my purchasing decision was based off need at the moment, not having this space and time to finish doing research and decide where I wanted to go from the Google WiFi system. But there are some very basic things to me that are very basic networking things that you do not have the ability to do on Aero unless you're willing to give them $10 a month or $99 a year, and it made me angry. I was angry the entire time I had my arrows about this. And one thing is dynamic DNS So being able to point a domain at my internal network for easily accessing, say, Plex by typing in Plex MyDomain.com or something like that, and getting there or anything else I wanted to expose over the public Internet in a secure way, you can't do that on Aero if you're not paying for Eero Pro. I've never in my life now, this was not possible at all with the Google Wi Fi, I should say that. But the Google Wi Fi for me was also a gift. To be fair about that, Michael Babcock sent me his Google Wi Fi, like, Here, try out this mesh. I was like, sure, man. Because at the point I had been using at the time, I was on Xfinity, so I was using their device and I knew I was going to move away from that at some point. So him sending that to me just pushed me on over into using the mesh. So you couldn't do Dynamic DNS with the Google Wi Fi at, you know, somebody gave it to me, so I'm not really super upset about it. And it's also Google and they do weird stuff, so you kind of expect that. But for some of the basic things like Dynamic DNS, not being available on Eero just had me angry the entire time. I know for a lot of people it does not matter and I still would even though it's not for me personally, I still would recommend Ero as a system to a lot of people, because it is a good system and it's reliable and it works. I very rarely had to reboot my arrows or I never had to do the thing I had to do with the Google Wi Fi, which is completely tear the entire network apart and reset everything and start over. I never had to do that with the like, that is one thing I can say, and I still recommend them to people that just want to plug something in and use it. It works. It's perfectly fine for me. It's some of those extra capabilities such as being able to create separate networks. Ero does give you a guest network, so you can have a guest network and then have your internal network, which is fine. But like Michael, I run my business out of my house. So being able to now have bedrock innovations on an entirely separate network that means nothing else outside of what belongs to the business, is being touched by any of the home devices or any of the other users in the home is important to me. I like that ability. And in some cases there are compliance rules that there are things I have not been able to do or companies I have not been able to work with, because I did. Not have that network separation in that way. So that was important for me. And another thing now, Aero does have some nice advantages that I don't have with Ubiquiti. Like, I don't have HomeKit router support with Ubiquiti. That is not a thing that they have rolled out to any of their lineup of products yet that is something that's available with Eero. And what that gives people for anybody listening is if you activate HomeKit router on your Eeros, it is able to tell, first off, if you're using HomeKit, you're not using HomeKit, it doesn't matter. But if you are HomeKit user, as I am, I use all of the Apple Home stuff. Everything has to be HomeKit. For me, turning this on on a router that supports it basically gives you the ability to say for this WiFi plug that is HomeKit compliant, I either hey, everything can talk to it and it can talk to everything. On the network or wall it off in a way so that it's not able to speak to my television or it's not able to speak to the Macs that are on the network. But it does have the ability to or it can't connect to anything outside of the network except for its home base to get its right. So nobody, if somebody were to know demeris like I have a lot of Maris smart Home stuff, nobody can, man in the middle attack me between Maris and their server for me to get updates with HomeKit secure router. Because the only thing that the plugs and the outlets and stuff and the light bulbs can talk to is the marriage server outside of my network, which gives you better security without you having to jump through the manual. Hoops of doing what michael is doing and what I'm about to do, what I started working on today, which is creating an entirely separate IoT network. That is a solution I have to take now versus having that HomeKit router support.

Does the Dream router not have as much of the smart Home stuff as the Eero?

No.

Yeah, so it doesn't support HomeKit router. And there's honestly, last time I looked, not a lot of routers that support it. Eero does, I believe, a couple of other mesh products like the I think the Orbs from Netgear supports it now, but it's not a wide like a lot of HomeKit stuff. Unfortunately, there's not a lot out there that supports it's. Kind of like the HomeKit secure video. There's not a ton of options out there for that. Right? So the unify system that I have set up does not have that capability, but it does give me the ability to make a separate IoT network where that stuff is restricted to what it can talk to. But I can still talk to it across networks using my device so I don't have to go in my phone and switch to the IoT network in order to control a light bulb. I can still do that from my basic home network, but I can restrict the IoT devices from being able to cross over into the home network space and talk to stuff. So if something gets hacked or if a light bulb company gets hacked and things like that, they're still restricted to that internal network. So I don't have to worry about any of that.

So it seems like it's. And correct me guys, if I'm wrong, but it kind of seems like Eero is kind of the know, everything just works. You get what you want, you're going to pay more to have it work. But the unify line from Ubiquity is kind of like the Android where you could do pretty much anything you want if you customize it enough to do so.

I would say that's fairly accurate. The only thing I would add in addition to that is if you just want basic setup, and I do have the same dream router that Michael has for the same reasons that it gave me a wireless access point in the router. So I only had to buy and already had already had another Wi Fi access point to go up in the front of the house that I had bought previously when it was on sale. But setting this up is not very much different than setting up Eero. You have the ability to go beyond the basics that you get with an Eero system. But if you were buying this just because, let's say there was a nice sale on during Prime Day for the unify dream router, you plug it in, you connect it to your modem that actually brings the internet into your house, which is going to be the situation for most of us. You open up the app, you go through setup steps just like you would with Ero, and once you're done with that, you're done if that's all you really want to do. So I had my network, so my dream router arrived Thursday afternoon. I unplugged everything, connected that up, and I had that set up and running Thursday night before I went to Know. The only thing I had to add addition to my network was get that access point connected. And I did that yesterday before we recorded technically working because I wanted everything up and running so I could tell Mike, hey, I got this stuff working in here. But setting up the router was really easy, very much like with Aero and for people who have not used Eero at all. And a lot of these systems are like this. The Google Wi Fi actually was not really a bad setup process if it connected. But you basically download the app, plug in the device, it will find know your phone will find it, you'll connect to it, you put in some basic configuration stuff, what do you want to name your WiFi network, what's your WiFi password? And really at that point, you're done. Like, you have a network set up.

So it does have an app.

Yep. Does have an app.

And you can control it in the web. You're not limited to that app, which.

Is yeah, that's what I was about to say, too. One thing I do like about Ubiquiti that I did not appreciate about Eero and the Google Wi Fi system and some of the other mesh systems I looked at, too, is they are app only. Right. I do like having the app. That's great. And I've been controlling everything and configuring stuff with the app. But I also like the ability to have a web interface because for me, if something goes wrong and again, this is probably because I'm old and I've been messing around with network stuff since 2006. But sometimes if something goes wrong. The only way to get it fixed is to be to directly connect a wire from one computer to the router and then get to the web interface and fix it or reset it. And you don't have that ability with an Eero. You don't have that ability with a Google WiFi.

Now, can you set this up? One of the things that I like on the Eero is I get notified anytime a new device joins my network. Is that something that you get with the Ubiquity?

Yes.

You do have that as an option to turn those on.

That's fantastic.

You don't have to, but you can turn them on. My favorite feature about this, me and Tomasi haven't gotten into it yet because he just finally decided to pull the trigger and I don't know, didn't want.

To get his router in stock, man, without having outrageous prices people wanted to charge on Amazon for reference. I'm sorry, Mike, for cutting you off, but just for people to understand this, this Ubiquity Dream router retails from Ubiquity for 199, it's not an outrageous price for a decent router. I've spent around about the same thing over the years for different routers because it was, one, a very popular product. Two, because of just logistics and things like that, still catching the tail end of things being out of stock and parts not being available. It was out of stock a lot of times on ubiquities website. I would go to Amazon, people wanted 275. Two eightyn. I'm not going to pay nearly $100 more than MSRP for something. So that actually is the thing that held me up from getting this for so long as I was waiting to catch it in stock on Ubiquity's website.

But one cool thing that we can do now that he has a router and it's connected, is he can invite me to remotely manage his network if he would like, and vice versa. And all I have to do is log into my UI account, Ubiquity account, and I would see my network. But I'd also see his network as well. And I can go in there and make changes. If for some reason he wanted to outsource network management to someone else, not saying that he would, but it's also a good backup solution for if something was to happen to me. Not saying that's going to happen, but let's say I passed away. Honestly, and not to be morbid, or.

Let'S say you had COVID and you were on your back for a week and the network was you know, if you shared access with me, I could connect to your network and solve the problem that Mallory's having with the right instead of her trying to drag Michael out of the bed and get his fevered self to fix the network. And he's like, I don't even know what day it is exactly.

So, Marty, with all that you've been hearing, what are your thoughts? Does the dream router sound like something that you might look at upgrading to on your next router or you're good with Euro?

I like eero. It works for my needs. I think, like anything, there's different tools for different people and what their use cases are. If you want something that you want to mess around a lot with and be able to do different things, then the dream router might be the way to go. But if you want something that you can pretty much take out of the box, go through the setup, you're not super techie, then you probably want to stick with the Euro. And they have different features inside them too. Like, for example, some of them have a VPN at the router level, so anyone who was within that router on that network, everyone would be behind the VPN wall. So if you're looking for something like that, that would be something to think about. I just think that there's different tools for everyone for different reasons, whether you want to mess around a lot or whether you just need something to set it up and do the job and kind of be done with it. So I went to Euro because I just want to be able to set it up and be done with it. I don't really care about messing around with it. And I was in a predicament to where I was still on two Apple base stations and they failed, finally, and I needed to do something new right away. And the two that I had were from early 2000s, so I just kind of did the research and Euro seemed to be the solid way to go, easiest way to set up, didn't need to have a lot of it crazy.

You didn't have to go get a networking for Dummies book exactly. Stuff. Exactly, yeah. And I do like ero for that. And again, for a lot of people, that is a benefit. Like I said, and I'll still stand on this into the future, I would still recommend Eero for most people. There are other systems out there. Like I said, I mentioned that I was looking at the Asus stuff before I had to just make a quick purchasing decision. I just went with eero. And I'll tell you one reason that I went with Eero over the Asus system, which had a lot of the functionality I wanted. But looking through forum posts and a couple of reviews, there was a lot of people who were like, yeah, so I've had to reset the whole thing a couple of times since I got it. This latest update seems to have fixed it. But I was like, no, don't have time for that. I do not have time when I'm trying to work or record a podcast to be like, oh, well, the network isn't working. I got to reset the entire thing up from scratch, right? I don't have the patience for that. I don't have the time for that. That's time lost for me. I do want to point out one thing. Ero now does have the ability, and this is more recent, I won't say like maybe within the past year they added this ability. There used to be you will have to be kind of like an Ero consultant and I don't know what was entailed to become one of those. In order for you to be able to connect to someone else's system and configure it or troubleshoot with them, they now have added the ability for you to invite other people to manage your hero. I thought so as well. So that is fairly new. So they did add that and I just wanted to make sure that we got that out there so that we're giving people the impression that you can't do that with Ero. You now can do that with Ero, which is cool. And I also thought about giving my heroes to my mother. Only reason I'm not I'm probably going to sell them is because I would ship them to her in Georgia and they will still be in the box when I got there. Yeah, next year. Next year, right. Like whenever I get back to Georgia, they will still be in that box. And then me being me, I'll be like, Well, Mad, these are kind of like three years old now. We should really look at the and.

You know, I've been a big fan of the pro ones that I've had. They've worked really well. This apartment is very challenging for WiFi just because of the saturation of other networks and that can always play into anything. The two base stations are good enough, but there are still some parts that are kind of dead in places, which makes no sense because it's only 700 sqft. But just the composition of the walls and things like that just is terrible on WiFi. So it really just depends. And even the Google Nest Pro, we had two of those and it was also a six e router and it just did not do it. So it's really all what works best for you. One of the reasons why I switched to Eero originally, even though it's owned by Amazon and there's always privacy and all those concerns, but the reason why I picked Eero was because I had heard that when Apple dismantled their airport team, a lot of the engineers went and created Eero.

Yeah. So the team behind Eero was made up of some Apple engineers originally, even when they still were, you could still purchase a base station apple airport from Apple. Yeah. That is one of the reasons that made me look at Aero very early on in the early days for me in the Wi Fi with Eero now, I started out with a two pack system and I did have to buy a third one to get the coverage in the way that I needed it to work. Honestly, three was a little more than I needed, but there's not like a halfway point. I could have bought a cheaper, like, Aero six non pro version. The only problem and the reason I did not do this and this is one thing to be aware of when you're buying mesh equipment is unless it doesn't make a difference to you, you want to always buy the same model of what you have when you're adding another point. Because let's say, for example, the Eero Six pro support gigabit internet and the regular sixes did not, where if I would have added a six to my network, I am now reduced to whatever the fastest speeds that the Eero Sixes could handle versus what the six pros were capable of doing. Another thing for me is I do like to have stuff wired, and I know I'm antiquated in that way, but I do like to have stuff over ethernet as much as possible. So that was one of the downsides to the Eero system for me is that there was one ethernet port that I had to connect to the modem from At T, which is my current Internet provider is now. And then that left me one additional ethernet port that I could have hardwired one thing into or do what I did, which is when I bought just a dumb ethernet hub that gave me more ethernet ports because I kind of needed that to happen for Eero. In general, though, I still think it is a good system if you just need to plug it in and you don't have any of these concerns. One thing I did notice that was a little odd to me is I plugged in the dream router and it's sitting literally in the exact same place that the main Aero base station was sitting for me and connected to the At T modem. I had better coverage out of this one router from Unify than I had with the original two Aero setup that I started with. Wow, like essentially everything in my house. And I sort of fully expected that when I hooked up the dream router, the Google Nest Hub that's in the kitchen was not going to have a good signal. Oh no, it was working just fine and I was able to see those details. That's another thing that I kind of like about the unify system. The statistics and network traffic and all of that stuff is a lot more accessible. Again, a lot of people don't care about this stuff, but me, if I'm trying to figure out why kids aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing, I can now go look and be like, oh, well, it's because you have been using a lot of Disney Plus, so let's block Disney Plus for a little bit. Right? So you guys do your homework.

Yeah, and you could do that now on the Eero Plus, which is pretty.

Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of stuff. And again, that's another thing for me, like, I didn't want to pay for the Aero Plus service. There's a lot more you can do with profiles and scheduling and parental controls and there's a lot that you get with that. It's just for me, I'm used to that stuff being it will be sort of like going out and buying a this is going to be a very bad analogy and I really shouldn't do it, but I'm going to do it anyway. It's like going out and you've been using the iPhone for the past ten years, and then you go out and you buy a blind shell. Right. There are some things you just cannot do with a blind shell because it's not designed to do that. Makes sense. If you know that going into that purchase and you still make the purchase, then you should be fine with it.

Right.

For me, with Eero versus what I was used to prior to that, when buying a router at all, there are just some things that you had to pay for that I'm used to just being built into a system. Again. I'm subscription. Fatigue, man. That's really what it is, just subscription fatigue.

And if you already have one password and malware bytes and other stuff, all those come with Era Plus. And if you already have those, then there's no point.

That's not a good carrot to dangle for me. Right. Yeah. Either I already have this service or I don't need that service in that case. But it's not to say the Eero Plus is a bad deal. I think for a lot of people, it is amazing. Now, auto updates on Eero is great. You also have that with the unify stuff. Ubiquiti does have a lineup that I don't know enough about, and I didn't choose to buy it because it's more a I would say direct comparison or direct competitor to Aero and other mesh systems called Amplify. And I'm mentioning it only because we have a pretty big listening audience to the IACAs, and if anybody has any experience with that, I would love to hear about it, because that is more of a direct competitor product from Ubiquity to Aero, where you basically plug it in, configure it with your app, and you're done. Right? You're not going to get a lot of this stuff that I wanted with the Unify line. That's why I chose Unify over Amplify, because there's just stuff that I wanted that wasn't there. But I do think going forward, for most homes, mesh is definitely the way to go, and you always have the ability to add on. I mean, like I said, I started with a two pack because that was kind of on sale when I made my purchase. And I grabbed those two up and I added another one when there was a ridiculous sale on for Eero Pro at the time, it was like, 100. And no, I think I may have paid $98 for it on sale when it was normally like, 198 or something. And that's how I added my third point. But that is one of the features that I do like about mesh in general, is you can always add on to your network when you need to. So if you move to a bigger space or if you notice that there are kind of dead spots here, I'm not getting coverage in some areas that I would want it in. Maybe financially, you make a purchasing decision when you start out, but you're not stuck with that because you just add another access point and hey, you've extended your network, which is not the way the old router systems used to work. Like, do I buy the Netgear nighthawk 8600 or 66? 66 is on sale, but it doesn't have as much coverage as the 8600. I'm just making up numbers for people listening. But you used to have to make that purchasing decision when you bought it, and sometimes you would overreach just to make sure you had enough. And with mesh, you don't have to make those sort of decisions.

Yeah. So I hate to have to cut a short, but today is Taylor ARN's birthday.

Happy birthday, Taylor.

Yeah.

Happy birthday, Taylor.

So we're going to go out for her birthday. We have a reservation, but I wanted to see if you guys had any final thoughts before we go ahead and wrap up.

Fancy. He made reservations. This guy was planning It's only the.

Cheesecake Factory, but it gets really busy.

No. Smart man. Smart man. Smart. Am not. What did Michael say before we started recording? I'm not judging, I'm just sharing my opinion that that was a very smart thing to do to make a reservation. Very smart of you. Yeah.

Nobody wants to sit around for an hour and a half, 2 hours waiting for a table.

Waiting to get a table, exactly.

Especially on somebody's like that.

You don't want a birthday experience to be terrible. So I guess for me, any final thoughts? Are mesh systems are good. Do your research. If you're looking to buy into something new and get what like Marty said, get what meets your needs, don't buy something because it does a whole bunch of fancy stuff that you're never going to do. Just don't buy it. Buy what works for you. But I think mesh is the way to go for the majority of people at this point. And on the encryption front, if you live in the UK, do whatever it is you can do there. If this is of any importance to you, to have your communications be encrypted. I honestly feel like breaking encryption for the sake of law enforcement. To have access is not going to be the benefit that they try to make it out to be to capturing criminals. It is just going to harm those of us who really don't necessarily have anything to hide, but also don't want all of my conversations to just be publicly available to anybody either. So I do believe in the right to privacy. Okay.

Any other final thoughts?

Nope. Nope.

You're getting close to your reservation. We better wrap this up.

Michael wasn't supposed to be a mic drop.

Well, this has been a great episode. This all came from a person that was asking about routers on a Unmute Community call, I believe, last week or the week before. So I wanted to have this conversation so people could be better informed as to what routers are good. And I think we've determined you or the Unify Dream router. But I would probably stay clear of the Google nest. Everybody here has had bad luck with those.

Yeah, I think I would steer clear of those for sure. If you're looking for something, if you have a ranch style house, like a very flat, long laid out, I've heard a lot of people that have had very good success with the Orbee lineup of stuff in that space from Netgear. So I've heard very good things about those from people's homes, opinions I trust on such matters, including the great Alison Sheridan from no Silicast. Great.

So with all those recommendations in hand, we're going to go ahead and wrap this thing up, but as we typically do. Damasi, do you have a pick for this week and where can people find you online?

Yep, I do have a pick. I'm going to pick the Ubiquity Unified Dream router as my pick this week because very, very happy with it. I've not been as pleased with a device purchase as much as I have for something that is so basic and necessary inside the home. So that's my pick. You can find me online. I'm Damasi Damashe at Unmute Community on Mastodon. And if you need a technology consultant in the It space, I'm at Bedrockinnovations.com.

All right, Marty, what is your pick for this week and where can people find you?

My pick for the week is an app called Pedometer Plus. Plus, and it is a good pick.

Counter.

It's been recently redesigned, actually, in this year. The developer is awesome. He does a ton of apps. He always puts a ton of great features in, makes them accessible, works with voiceover, all of that good stuff. The new pedometer. Plus plus has widgets. It works on your watch, it works on your phone. It's just a great app. So if you're looking for something to track steps, do your workouts, all those kinds of things, it's a great app and it's not even that expensive, so I would check that out. If you want to follow me on Macedon, you can find me at marty at Unmute Community.

Great pick. I've been using that app for at least ten years.

Yeah, me too. Michael, what about you? What's your pick and where can people find you online?

I need to go redownload that app, and my pick is something you maybe can get. watchOS Ten. I am super impressed with watchOS ten. Very nice that you hit the side button now and it opens your freaking control panel. Control center. It's about damn time.

You can find what I did last night. I guess that was bad.

Yeah. I'm now finally running beta on my watch. It took long enough. You can find me on Mastodon payone payown at Unmute Community. And if you need voiceover work or you are interested in someone to edit your podcast, visit payone media.

Fantastic. And going back to watchOS Ten, mark Garmin actually posted on Twitter that he thinks it's a waste of the button to put Control Center there. And I'm like, no, that is actually really a good change. I love it.

So we're going to have to come back and do another show and talk about beta features and things that are coming, because I have thoughts and I'm more on the side of German with his opinion than I am.

This will be a good discussion.

Well, I think a lot of people really like the dock because you can put the apps you use the most right in there, and that button is a quick way to access that dock. And so it sounds like they're just eliminating the dock altogether.

It's still there. Press the crown twice.

Yeah, we'll talk about that.

We will bring this back for Michael Doyz's pick, right?

Yes. So my pick is actually something I was going to pick a TV show, but I'll leave that for next time because I haven't started it yet. But season one was great, and season two just started last week, but I won't reveal that until next week. Suspense.

Stay tuned.

Yeah. So my pick is a SanDisk Hard Drive or SSD that I purchased on Prime Day, and it's still on sale, so hurry up and go get it. If you have not $800 hard drive going for 269, it's a SanDisk four terabyte Extreme Pro. It runs at 2GB a second. Transfer it's. Insanely fast. If you're doing YouTube or other podcast content and you need a way to back up your stuff, get it off your hard drive, it's fantastic. It runs very fast. I mean, 200 gigs copied over there in just about two to three minutes. It was insanely fast. Great drive. Great sale on that drive. So even MKBHD was like, Why is this still on sale? So I found it and bought it on Prime Day, and it was 73% off. Now it's 70, so the sale, I think, is slipping. So really nice small pocket size drive. So check that out. If you want to find me online, I'mike Doey's on Twitter, mike Doey's at Techopolis. Social unmastodon. You can email me at mikedoeys icloud.com. And by next week, I might even have some more app news for you folks. A new app or an old app is becoming new again. So good.

Stay tuned.

Yeah, we got all kinds of good news and hopefully we won't be as rushed next time. But it's Taylor's birthday, so we will go have fun and tell Taylor happy birthday on Twitter. Or if you see her around know, let her know. And yeah, it's been a great podcast. Thank you all for being here. It's been great. As you know, if you guys have any feedback for us, send us an email at [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you and we will see you all next time. Bye, everyone.

Happy birthday, Taylor.

Happy birthday, Taylor.

Thank you for tuning in to the Iacast. We hope you enjoyed the show and found the conversation to be insightful and informative. If you have any feedback or comments, we'd love to hear from you. Please send us an email at [email protected]. You can also follow us on Twitter at iacast network to stay informed about new episodes and other updates. Don't forget to check out more great podcasts on the Iacast Network, iacast Net. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon. It.