Google’s Best Feature In Years - WAN Show June 5, 2026

**Linus Sebastian** (0:06)
All right, here we go.
What's up, everybody, and welcome to Taiwan Show. We were here for Computex this week, and of course, the highlights are, well, one of them is from Computex. NVIDIA wants to power your next Windows laptop with their RTX Spark chip. We are gonna be talking about that, because I was going into this thinking, completely DOA, absolute garbage, why do they even bother, and now I have some more complicated thoughts. And in other news, ProtonMail is letting folks send emails from their Gmail addresses, making it maybe easier than ever to de-Googleify your life.

**Luke Lafreniere** (0:56)
AMD extends AM5 longevity through 2029, and also the, honestly, most important news of this entire week with Computex going on is that after 22 years, you can finally download paint.net from the URL paint.net.

**Linus Sebastian** (1:12)
I knew you were gonna like that.

**Luke Lafreniere** (1:13)
It's great.

**Linus Sebastian** (1:17)
Someone's rolling me into it. Are they?
The show is brought to you today by Vessi, SquareSpace, MSI and Zapier, alongside our rep partner Dbrand, our Razer partner Laptop, and our chair partner Razer. I'm gonna pretend I did that on purpose. You're gonna pretend you noticed. All right, let's jump right into our headline topic today, which is, of course, whichever one was the headline topic. Producer Dan, I forget which one we chose.

**Luke Lafreniere** (2:06)
The phone feature, Google phone.

**Linus Sebastian** (2:08)
Oh yeah, we didn't even mention that at the beginning of the show. I wish I could say I was jet lagged right now.
This is probably Google's coolest feature that they have announced for Android, in my opinion, in years. Android is fighting phone scams with a new feature to prove who's calling. They're rolling out fake call detection, which is aimed at scammers who spoof a contact's number and use AI voice cloning to impersonate them. So we've talked about this extensively on The WAN Show. Your mom calls, they sound exactly like your mom, but it's actually a scammer asking you to send emergency money to some Bitcoin wallet or something.
But rather than analyzing the audio to detect a fake voice, what it's actually doing is a cryptographic check between your devices. So when a real contact calls you, their phone will quietly send your phone a real-time confirmation signal over end-to-end encrypted RCS. When a malicious actor spoofs the number, which they can do, Veritasium did a whole video on this, they can't spoof the signal. If that encrypted signal is missing, then you'll get a warning that tells you, hey, this could be a fake call. This could be a scammer. Now, the catch is that both people have to use the phone by Google app and have each other saved in their contacts. They have to be running Android 12 or newer, and they have to have RCS enabled. However, there's a tiny little note in the footer of this press release or article or blog post or whatever it was that I was reading that says, and hey, by the way, this is based on RCS. So we like totally want it to be a cross-platform thing.

**Luke Lafreniere** (4:03)
Could work with other people.

**Linus Sebastian** (4:04)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is so freaking cool.

**Luke Lafreniere** (4:10)
I was going to say, I obviously love the idea of the feature, but the locks down, like this is literally talking about your parents, my mom has an iPhone.

**Linus Sebastian** (4:19)
Exactly.

**Luke Lafreniere** (4:19)
So it's like, but again, RCS based, this could be multi-platform. Hopefully it becomes that, because this is going to be a big problem. Already has been for some people.

**Linus Sebastian** (4:29)
Yeah.

**Luke Lafreniere** (4:29)
I know I, I don't know if I talked about this on WAN Show, and this wouldn't have exactly worked, but I've had an AI voice caller that had me tricked for a while. Have I told you that story? Really?

**Linus Sebastian** (4:39)
No.

**Luke Lafreniere** (4:39)
Okay, so I'll go for it. I got a call from, I thought it was just funny at first, then I picked it up, and while I was on the call, I was Googling it, it's real, but it was like the Firefighter's Curling like, fundraising thing.

**Linus Sebastian** (4:54)
Holy crap, you got like, hyper, brother, dad, could you be, could you have been more targeted than Firefighter's Curling Association?

**Luke Lafreniere** (5:06)
I have to look it up again, but it's like a real thing.

**Linus Sebastian** (5:09)
Honestly though.

**Luke Lafreniere** (5:10)
Curling Association Canada.

**Linus Sebastian** (5:13)
Like, could it have been the, you know, the guild of Luke Lafreniere's family, who play wow, and they could have like, like that might have been slightly more targeted.