Snapchat put a face filter on itself (The 3:59, Ep. 324)

[MUSIC] Welcome to The 3:59. I'm Roger Cheng. I'm Alfred Ng. Snapchat unveiled its redesign, promising a more personalized experience. Broke up the social and the media aspects of the service by adding a Friends section for your social circles, and updating its Discover section for the media part. Yeah, it seems like this is a bit of a band aid. I mean, that they promised a big redesign. What do you think? I mean, I don't think it's a band aid. I think it was a big problem for people who were trying to jump on Snapchat. And I think their biggest issue was growth, right? Absolutely. They [CROSSTALK] as many users as they could. And I think a big barrier for that was, a lot of people don't get how Snapchat works. Right. And they don't get their layout or anything like that. I don't know if these changes are really going to make things a lot easier for people jumping into it. I mean, they're still starting, when you launch the app, it still starts with the camera, which is a bit disorienting for new users. Yeah. They say there's going to be a more explicit friends section. Yeah. And a more explicit discover section. I don't know if that's gonna be enough, though. I think it will. I think the core of Snapchat, why it got so popular to begin with, was people wanted to share stuff with their friends, and then all this discover stuff kinda crept in. I hated it, I thought it was really annoying. But the problem here is that it feels like for existing Snapchat users, this might be a better experience, but is it enough to get people who are, You haven't really heard that Snapchat, or just trying to figure out what Snapchat is. Is it going to make it easier for them? That, not som much. I don't think it will. I think they're changing things for their menu interface, but not so much on how to use the app or anything like that. They also talked about for 2018, the goals make the discover platform easier for partners to Share the content, as well as make money, so to try to get more partners to jump onto it. But again I don't know if that really addresses the core problem of attracting new users who aren't familiar with snap chat. All right next up Apple had a pretty big vulnerability come up with the The latest MAC OS High Sierra protects the details. So this is even a technical vulnerability. If you went into your login and typed in root as the user name and just kept pressing you know.. So enter. Without a password, you are given system admin access to the accounts. From there, you could change all the passwords on key chain, you could access file vault, you could change the passwords for the other accounts or you could log in on that as well. Apple put out a statement yesterday basically saying, yeah, we're working on this and we're working on a patch for this, so definitely update your laptops if you have a macOS High Sierra. So there is a fix though, right? You could basically set a password for the root account. Yeah, some of the workarounds that they've had, the simplest one is just setting a password for the root account. Which it doesn't have currently by default. That's a big omission. You could also make a root username, and [LAUGH] then make a password for that, which [LAUGH] It makes it look overly complicated. No, yeah, it's just one of those things that really should have been there by default. And it's such a glaring error on Apple's behalf. It's ridiculous that it took this long for them to even find out about it. Seems like I need to update my tech turkeys again. All right, lastly, did you see the Avengers: Infinity War trailer? Yeah, it's pretty much what I did all morning instead of working. [LAUGH] Good to hear, as your boss. Yeah! Let's geek out over it. There are so many different characters. So many different combinations of characters. I think that is what excites me the most about this. The fact that you get these existing franchises and you kind of just mash them all up. You're getting Different interactions, like with Falcon and Black Panther. It's really cool to finally see it all coming together. From the first Iron Man movie, where in the trailers, after the credits when Samuel L. Jackson shows up and stuff, for all of that to lead up to this, it's weird. It's weird that this is only like 6 months away. I know. It was kind of surreal. This has been a culmination of like more than a decade of film-making. I do have a one note though. I did have a chance to watch the footage at comic con and it is different. They actually showed a lot more in terms of the battle between Thanos and the Avengers and Thanos was clearly kicking their butts. This kind of hits out of the trailer but yea, I'm excited. Super stoked for this. All right, for more on these stories, check us out on CNet. I'm Roger Chang. I'm Alfred Ing. Thanks for listening.