On this week’s The Drill Down podcast, Microsoft Surface Event 2018 – new products from Microsoft, a Facebook breach exposes 50M users, Amazon hopes to raise minimum wage, bold California tech laws, endless possibilities … and much, much more.

Google Home is a little device that plugs into the wall and responds to your voice. It can play recorded music or the radio through services like Google Play Music and TuneIn, and it can respond to questions based on the knowledge Google has amassed throughout the 21st century. If you’ve got the correct hardware at home, like a Nest Thermostat, Samsung’s Smartthings, or Philips hue, Google Home can allow you to control some of your home’s functions with your voice.

We’ve had some time to get to know the Google Home and there are a LOT of things to like about it. Its voice recognition is robust and its audio is impressive for being a little tiny speaker. At the same time, when one looks at Google Home through the lens of a smarthome, AI, product, one quickly realizes that the device is not quite where the demonstrations were during the 2016 Google IO developers conference, nor is it a device that delivers on the promise of its advertisements.

This week we’re joined by Greg Davies, host of Blendover & Heavy Metal Historian podcasts (and of course the TARDISBlend podcast hosted here at Geeks of Doom) as we discuss escalating developments in the Ashley Madison hack, Twitter cuts off deleted political tweets, Facebook launches its own virtual assistant, YouTube takes on Twitch, ILM‘s experimental lab… and much much more.

This week, Charter buys Time Warner Cable, the secret plan to hijack our smartphones, the NSA ends bulk collection of phone records, the IRS is hacked, and Pac-Man turns 35 … and much much more.

This week, Netflix & Apple are taking over TV, Facebook changes the rules, Windows will be free — even to pirates, and Nintendo‘s coming to Apple … and much much more.