Are you getting bored with your Apple Watch face? (The 3:59, Ep. 406)

[MUSIC] Welcome to the 359. I'm Roger Cheng. I'm Alfred Ing. Are you an Apple watch fan? Do you like watch faces? Scott [UNKNOWN] has a nice commentary on why Apple needs to create a watch face store. And I have to admit, I've got an Apple watch. And while the watch faces here are nice, they're fairly limited. And it boggles the mind that it has been a couple years now and Apple still hasn't. Let third party developers come in and create their own watch faces. So I've never had an Apple Watch. So when I read Scott's commentary, I just thought wait that's really weird, they' don't that. That just seems like something I'd want. Something you'd assume, right?>> And yeah it's available on Android. A lot of the fashion brands have created. Their own smartwatches using Android. Typically focus on the customization of watch faces. Making watch faces sort of front and center. It's really the only way to customize this timepiece. Yet Apple keeps it fairly limited. That's really annoying. I really don't know why they would do something like that. Is it so that they can keep it like within their own like ecosystem or something? My guess is they wanted to create a consistent experience. Mm-hm. In the watch face because it's got. Access to complications or options for what kind of notifications you get, Apple wanted to kind of keep everything locked down, which I mean, that's kind of their bread and butter, right? Everything's locked down, but they have quality control and quality assurance on that stuff. Right, but, yeah, they basically don't want their watch face to sort of have a whole bunch of ugly watch faces. So there's really word that the latest version of watchOS 4 might support third-party watch faces. And then there's WWDC, which is less than two weeks from now, where we might get to see more from watchOS 5. That's weird, that they wouldn't want you to have ugly watch faces. I mean, I paid for this watch. If I want it to be ugly, let me [CROSSTALK] it ugly. There you go, I want the right to have an ugly watch face. So we want to talk about Mark Zuckerberg, who is later on, really just the half an hour, is heading or he'll be meeting with the EU to discuss Once again, Cambridge Analytica, the whole data breach scandal and really answering more questions from the EU Parliament. This whole saga has been very interesting considering that he turned down the UK Parliament- Yes. And then he originally wanted to turn down the EU Parliament and then through some conversations later he basically said yes I'm going. And then this meeting was also supposed to be behind closed doors, and then they, like, talked about it again, and it was, like, okay, we're going to live stream this now. It really shows that these pressures are mounting for Facebook and Zuckerberg. Absolutely, and I think the EU in particular I think they're gonna be a little bit more savvy than our US counterparts. I mean they have followed this issue a lot more closely. I think the questions are gonna be more pointed. I think that Zuck is not gonna be able to get off as easily as he did in the us. I have a feeling that the hearing in the EU parliament we have much more focus on the GDPR considering that that does come from the EU they'll be more focused on that and privacy issues. I don't think it'll be as politically charged as the one in Congress was where they're asking about like you know censorship of Right.>> political views or anything like that.>> No, I think the folks in EU will be definitely more laser-focused on privacy as the main issue. Lastly, Alfred, your story about Intel, Microsoft disclosing yet another flaw. Run through, what is this new thing we have to worry about? So do you remember Spectre and Meltdown from January? I do, cuz those names are awesome. Yeah, so that was a security flaw that had to do with Intel chips going all the way back to Like the last two decades, and not just Intel chips, basically any chip. This affected iOS devices and basically anything. So it affected Intel, AMD and [UNKNOWN] chips. And the idea was that there was a security flaw that let an attacker access parts of your CPU that shouldn't be accessed for security reasons. So they discovered a new variant back in February but they announced it yesterday when they had the patches available for it. Okay. And this was discovered by Microsoft and Google Zero team and it basically uses the same concept but it's a different variant that accesses a different part of your CPUs memory. So That patches for it are available now, but they do excpect another slowdown of about 2% to 8% with that. Yay, awesome. [MUSIC] All right, well that's all the time we have. For more on these stories, check us out on Cnet. I'm Roger Cheng. And Alfred Ng. Thanks for listening. [MUSIC]