TWiT 987 transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Twit this week in tech. We have a nice panel today. Paris Martineau is slumming from. This week in Google Also here, Larry Magid from ConnectSafelyorg and our favorite submariner, nuclear expert and SSD whiz, Alan Malventano. We'll talk about social media and its impact on the young, Microsoft's continuing problems with their exchange server and the White House's conference for social media creators. Why weren't we invited All that and a lot more coming up next on TWIT Podcasts you love From people. You trust this is TWIT.

This is TWIT. It's time for twit. This week in tech the show, we cover the week's tech news, of which there's precious little. Fortunately, we have an excellent panel who can fill the next two hours of your life. Paris martineau has a lot of expertise with that. On this week in google, our wednesday show, she also writes for the information and uh and is a very, always a very welcome member of our team.

0:01:29 - Paris Martineau
You started on twit and then we brought you to twig I was about to say every time I'm here, it's full circle yeah, yeah.

0:01:37 - Leo Laporte
We thought, oh, she's so good, we should put her on a much worse show and uh, it's not worse.

0:01:44 - Paris Martineau
I know it's different, it's little twit yeah it's silly twit, I don't know. I'd say the average age is probably higher oh gosh.

0:01:55 - Leo Laporte
Well, some people do call it this weekend grandpa's. Um, we're both twice your age, but we, we struggle. We do our best. Anyway, it's great to have you, paris. I have brought younger people on for you this time, but not much. Alan Malvatano is also here. We know Alan from back in the day. This week in Computer Hardware we had Ryan Shroud on last week In fact. We were hoping to get you both on, but the schedules didn't work out, unfortunately. Currently Alan is working at Phison, which I'm trying to remember. Was that a spinoff? No, you went, you were at Intel and then they spun off Soligen, solidine, solidine, and you were there for a while and now you're at Phison. But it's all the same stuff. It's NAND technology, right?

0:02:43 - Allyn Malventano
It's just making the SSDs go vroom.

0:02:44 - Leo Laporte
That's it. That's his job. Uh used to make submarines go vroom, now he makes ssds go vroom. It's great to have you, alan, and a longtime friend also of the network, larry maggid uh, who is, uh, for many, many years been on our shows. He's also a cbs radio correspondent and the president of connect safelyorg, which is all about keeping kids safe online. I've been getting in a lot of fights lately, larry. Oh, because vivek murty, the um surgeon general, the united states of america proposed that we put warning labels on social media for kids, and this was following jonathan hate'st's book about the kids being abandoned to social media, not being properly parented and blaming essentially social media for a mental health crisis among young people. And I don't think I buy that. But wait a minute, you're an expert in all this think I buy that.

0:03:46 - Larry Magid
But but wait a minute. You're an expert in all this. This is well. If you go to the front page of connect safelyorg and you look at the top right column, you will see my post, which says why surgeon general social media warning label is a bad idea. Oh, you're on the right side of this one go, I'm on, I'm on the same side, you are. Now I, I have to admit I'm not a hundred percent on the side of hey, it's just honky dory and nothing to worry about no, no, no, no, absolutely not but I do think that the warning labels about it for a number of reasons.

One is, you know, warning fatigue. Uh, I was over at the at the fox studio in the green room a couple weeks ago and there was a cancer warning label on the coffee machine. Yeah, now I mean, come on, at what point do you just tune this?

0:04:25 - Leo Laporte
was that a california prop 65 warning or were they just?

0:04:29 - Larry Magid
something or other. Yeah, every building you go in and it doesn't say it says cancer. Doesn't say whether there's a plastic cup here that might conceivably give you cancer if you eat it, or a pool of radioactive material in the basement yeah, you can't distinguish it?

yeah, that's a proportionality, um, but that's one aspect. But the other is look, we put warning labels on cigarettes. Now there is no safe use of tobacco. So that makes sense to me. We put warning labels on alcohol because it's known that alcohol but even the alcohol it'll say, you know it can cause birth issues. If you're pregnant, children should avoid it. But I like in social media, in this column, kind of like ice cream and I've used the analogy of chocolate, that's a much better analogy.

You know ice cream if you eat too much of it, it'll kill you.

If you're allergic to it, it's going to harm you. If you have diabetes or something, it might be absolutely counter-indicated. But if you have a little ice cream now and then, within moderation, you're going to enjoy it and it's you know, it's going to make you feel good and, unlike ice cream, actually social media can help you. I mean it can. It can cure some loneliness issues. It can put you in touch with like minded people. If you're LGBTQ and live in the middle of nowhere and you can't possibly find somebody to talk to about your orientation, you can go online and find people you know. You know the drill, leo. And so I think it was a.

It was a misguided step pandering to the paranoia that is going on right now. It's very fashionable to be anti-tech, anti-social media, and I think it's not very thoughtful. And, finally, I think it detracts from the real issue, which is how do we protect ourselves? How do we regulate tech in sensible ways and get them to stop some of the inappropriate activities? How do we educate people to use technology properly? What is the role of parents? What is the role of communities? There's a lot of things we could be talking about. I don't think warning labels are really the solution.

0:06:23 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and in fact sometimes something like that makes you feel good and you can go oh, job done, we've protected our children, let's move on Right. When in fact you haven't really handled any of the real issues that are causing anxiety, you know.

0:06:38 - Larry Magid
I think you know tobacco and smoking is down, which is good, but I don't think it was the warning labels that did it. I mean, warning labels were on there for many, many years before we started seeing a decline in smoking. It had to do with things like mandatory anti-smoking rules and buildings. There are other things that that actually worked.

0:06:54 - Leo Laporte
That helped, although you could argue that it's all helped right. Banning cigarette ads on television started it, yeah, putting the warning, lay the surgeon general's warning labels on tobacco, but you're right, I mean every effect in other countries.

0:07:11 - Paris Martineau
In Canada.

0:07:12 - Leo Laporte
The warning labels are graphic and horrible. Right, you've seen them.

0:07:15 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, they're haunting. They're haunting, but I don't know if they're effective, I'd say it seems like the biggest decline in smoking has been attributed to the rise of vapes and other nicotine delivery methods.

I don't really know what the one-to-one equivalent for social media use is like that, but I think that your point is ultimately correct that putting the warning label on there for kids or other users who could be at risk really isn't going to move the needle much here. It's going to be a wide variety of things that would actually have some sort of effect on a population level.

0:07:58 - Larry Magid
And unlike tobacco, again there is a safe and appropriate use of social media. There are many people who use social media in a beneficial way and we need to distinguish between the negative things people do on social media and the positive things. I mean it's like cars Should we ban cars because people die in car accidents, or should we make cars safer, make drivers more educated, have better enforcement of traffic rules? I mean, there are things you can do, because cars are an example of something that has both positive usage as well as danger, and there are many things like that in life. Almost everything I can think of had some danger.

0:08:31 - Leo Laporte
There was actually this is from Connect Safely, from the I thought very good column from Nathan Davies. Here he refers to a European study that found during the COVID pandemic, bullying went down because kids weren't in school and spent more time online. Sure, there's cyberbullying, but in fact actual bullying went down. We should put a warning label on schools I mean, they're dangerous too, but everything has some element of danger and I think to focus on what really is causing anxiety with a younger generation and to attempt to do something about it.

0:09:12 - Larry Magid
Well, you know, when we started Connect Safely back in around 2004, we were reacting in part to this TV show called the Catcher Predator.

0:09:19 - Leo Laporte
Stranger danger.

0:09:21 - Larry Magid
And if you're going to warn people, warn them about clergy, teachers, relatives, relatives I would say parents even. Don't let your kid go home and don't let them go to school, Don't let them go to the doctor's office.

0:09:34 - Leo Laporte
You grew up in a generation that wasn't allowed out to play and I'll include my kids in this because we were taught that there was such danger out there in the world that they call it stranger danger. And uh, there were predators everywhere, and so you couldn't let your kids out to play. Did did your parent, your parents? I was allowed out to play.

0:09:56 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, they were pretty chill yeah but, no, it's an entire movement and I I think it's kind of gotten only more extreme within the last decade or two with the rise of helicopter parenting and the rise of a whole suite of technological tools to effectively surveil every aspect of your child's life.

And I mean, I'm not a parent myself, so I'm not going to pretend to have any particular insight to this. I'm not going to pretend to have any particular insight to this, but there's something to be said about maybe letting kids live a little bit. I was recently kind of looking into the whole industry of phones designed just for children.

At first I thought this was maybe going to be like a dumb phone that just lets you call. A dumb phone that just lets you call, but no, instead it is like a smartphone, but it sends your parent uh like an overview of every single thing your child does.

That's horrible and like, sends alerts if there could be anything sexual being exchanged in text messages or instagram, dms or like any sort of potential. You can essentially put alerts for anything you want to uh be notified about your child's activity online, which I understand to an extent because parents want to protect their kids, but it is also a level of surveillance and involvement that I think is unprecedented in american life.

0:11:18 - Leo Laporte
We go back like before uh smartphones there is, I have to say and I'm sure you cover this, larry, and I personally have experienced this a real danger, especially for young boys online with something called sextortion. Absolutely, and you know this is there is a danger. There's a danger at the local mall, there's a danger at your church. Unfortunately, there's always a danger, but it's important that parents be aware of it. Putting a warning, slapping a warning label on social media is not as good as saying here's some of the dangers. Tell us about sextortion, how does that?

0:11:52 - Larry Magid
work. Yeah, we have a. We have a, a parent's guide to sextortion, a teen guide on the site. Uh, and basically sextortion is when, uh, typically you're a boy, a teenage boy or perhaps preteen, you get a outreach from a person you think is probably a girl, assuming they assume you're straight. Uh, she I'm putting she in quotes offers to send you a picture of her and a nude or whatever in exchange for you sending one of yourself.

So it's a tantalizing offer, as I remember, as a teenage boy, yes, your teenage boy, retaliate the offer and um, it turns out that that girl is a criminal and probably somewhere in West Derry I can't what part of Africa, but there's one or two countries where this is very prevalent and it's a scam, obviously, and they the reason they call it sextortion is because it's an extortion attempt that person or that syndicate, that criminal syndicate, will ask you for money. That person or that syndicate, that criminal syndicate, will ask you for money and if you don't give the money, they will threaten to distribute that photo to your family and friends and elsewhere. And there's many reasons why a you should be very, very, very careful before you exchange nudes with somebody you aren't, you don't know. And two, if it does happen to you, uh, not pay the money, because it's a may not stop them.

And B one of the things we try to explain in our guide is it's unfortunate if this happens to you. It's potentially very, very unfortunate, but you will get through it. I mean, if you are a parent and this happens to your kids, what you need to do is be supportive and assure them that they will survive this. They will get through this. There will be a point in their life when they'll look back at it and they may not laugh about it, but they certainly will.

0:13:32 - Leo Laporte
You know their life will go on and because the kids, what the kids and, and sadly, some kids have actually taken their own lives.

Because they're so terrified that their parents will find out and that their school will find out, when it's all fake anyway, and as long as kids feel like they can go to their parents. The case that happened to me was a good friend whose teenage son was sextorted, but his son felt safe to tell his dad, and his dad was sophisticated enough to know. Oh, I know what's going on and you know there wasn't a punishment, and so the kid's fine and just graduated from high school. I'm very proud to say he's a really sweet kid. But it could have gone the other way. That's why when the surgeon said, well, just put warning labels on social media and then you're done with it, no, there's a real education that needs to happen.

Yes, there are risks. Of course there are risks and, as you said, there's a real education that needs to happen. Yes, there are risks, of course there are risks and, as you said, there's also very great benefit if you turn off social media. There are a lot of kids who have nobody to talk to about their sexuality, about their life, their. This is the thing we don't, as elders, sometimes don't get is. This is a new generation and they communicate online. This is their, this is their mall.

This is their hangout their phone, their phone their radio, their television, their everything, yeah I mean, I'm sure you know, when we were kids, parents didn't like us being on the phone all the time I.

0:14:57 - Larry Magid
I had this party line thing in la. Somehow we figured out you could make a call to a certain number and all these kids from all over la were talking to each other on the phone I'm my being one of them and one day I got on a bus, went all the way across town and met some of these girls that I yikes. I don't know who was more disappointed when we finally met them or me. There was a lot of anticipation.

0:15:18 - Leo Laporte
Wow, isn't that a wild story larry maggot, you were a wild boy, wild child, child, wild child. Anyway, I thought I'd ask you because we haven't had you on since that whole brouhaha and I've gotten a lot of email from people saying no, I teach kids. They're really suffering out there. And I'm not saying kids aren't suffering, I'm not saying there's not anxiety, but there's a lot of reasons for it. We went through three years of them taking classes at home, I of them taking classes at home. I mean that was disaster for a lot of kids. We, you know, I think there are probably a lot of young people who say is there a future with climate change? What's it going?

0:15:58 - Larry Magid
to be like when I'm your age, if I'm your age, if I ever get there.

0:16:00 - Leo Laporte
There are a lot of things to worry about, a lot of reasons for anxiety and just say well, you know, it's technology is the problem, although I have to say I was at the barbershop yesterday and which Ferris will vouch for I desperately needed Looks nice and one of the barbers, I guess, had child care duty. His two kids, maybe four and six, were there while dad was working. His two kids, maybe four and six, were there while dad was working. They both had iPads and they were just there playing games for the whole time, the whole hour. I was there, I imagine, all day. That's an economic problem as much as anything else. You know he has to work Probably mom is working too and you know there's no head start, there's no program for the kids.

0:16:47 - Paris Martineau
That's an economic issue as much as I'm gonna botch the details on this because I I've read it sometime in the last couple of weeks, but there have been actually a number of studies that, uh, bear out exactly what you just said. That a main one part of the reason I looked into this. I think it's very interesting that there is no consensus in the scientific community as to whether or not social media is bad or good for kids, because of all the reasons we just talked about.

Because it's incredibly complicated, a convoluted topic, and it's mixed increased screen time and social media use that ends up being more detrimental to lower income children than higher income children, because of all the reasons you'd probably imagine, and I do think that that's an aspect of this that we need to consider, and I think it's an aspect of it that isn't being considered in sort of blanket statements or bans.

0:17:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you know what needs a warning symbol Poverty. Let's put a warning label on poverty.

0:17:53 - Larry Magid
I gave a talk in a very low-income area which also happened to have a lot of street crime, and the parents there basically said to me look, I'm much happier with my kids sitting at home on social media than I am going out on the street street. Because they were worried about the street Rightfully so, in that particular neighborhood.

0:18:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so I guess the bottom line is a complex issue. It's very easy to go to a restaurant and see an entire family sitting around the table on their phones and saying you see, you see, this is the problem. But it's more complex than that. But it's more complex than that. There are, of course, you know we all need to spend more time with each other and less time on the screen. I'll go for that, but it's not as simple as saying you know, ban social media.

0:18:38 - Larry Magid
And the other thing that everybody should understand is that correlation is not the same thing as causation. So just because an increase in mental illness since the iPhone was invented in 2007 doesn't mean the iPhone and the Android phone and everything about it are at fault. I mean, there are lots of things. As you pointed out, Leo, there are many factors that we need to look at in addition to technology.

0:19:02 - Leo Laporte
Technology is one of them, but there are a lot of other factors.

That's what Candace Ogers has been saying. Technology is one of them, but there are a lot of other factors. That's what Candace Ogers has been saying. And of course, she wrote the piece in Nature that debunks Jonathan Haidt's book and is a foremost expert in this field and studies the impact of child rearing on kids, so has a little something to say about it. And she says, yeah, it's a complex issue and correlation does not equal causation, and I think that's enough said, enough said. And, alan, because you have no children and you've never been a child, you had nothing to say about that I have raised children who are no longer in the house have you.

I didn't know that.

0:19:40 - Allyn Malventano
Oh okay, never mind while I was in the Navy.

0:19:44 - Leo Laporte
Oh nice, and you were traveling around a lot.

0:19:46 - Larry Magid
Are you talking about the enlisted personnel or are you actually real?

0:19:50 - Allyn Malventano
quick. I made it to senior, enlisted and then stuck at that level for like the second half.

0:19:58 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a little break. Come back with more. It's a great panel and we do have some news Not a lot. This is always July and August always are a little difficult. On tech news, we will have a Samsung event next week.

0:20:10 - Paris Martineau
All the tech execs are off on their vacations.

0:20:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they don't want to do anything. The hackers even the hackers take a break during the dog days of summer, so there isn't really a lot.

0:20:20 - Paris Martineau
Hey, hackers need PTO too Sure.

0:20:24 - Leo Laporte
Absolutely, absolutely we lot. Hey, hackers need pto too sure absolutely, absolutely.

0:20:26 - Larry Magid
Uh, we've also got the black hat conference, which I don't know.

0:20:29 - Leo Laporte
It's an august that's an august in vegas perfect time, right?

nothing better if you don't get hacked to death, you'll ride just walking on the street I think the next podcast, uh convention, the podcast movement is washington dc in august and I said, yeah, no pass. You know that washington dc is a swamp right, it was actually literally built on. Is Washington DC in August? And I said, yeah, no pass. You know that Washington DC is a swamp right, it was actually literally built on a swamp. August is not the time to go to Washington DC, but I thought Trump drained it, oh yeah.

0:20:56 - Larry Magid
Oh, that's right, the swamp was drained.

0:20:57 - Leo Laporte
Never mind Forget, I said anything. Actually, the podcast movement almost always has its events at the worst time of year you know Dallas in August and I think it's because the hotels are cheaper.

0:21:12 - Larry Magid
To be honest, with you it's easier to get Well, given the economics of podcasting.

0:21:16 - Leo Laporte
That's really what I think you're seeing here. Yeah, exactly, we'll have more with our great panel Larry Magid is here, alan Malventano and, of course, paris Martineau. You're watching this Week in Tech, our show today, brought to you by Panoptica, cisco's cloud application security solution. Panoptica provides end-to-end lifecycle protection for cloud-native application environments. Panoptica empowers organizations to safeguard their APIs, serverless functions, containers and Kubernetes environments. Panoptica ensures comprehensive cloud security compliance and monitoring, and it does it at scale, offering deep visibility, contextual risk assessments and actionable remediation insights for all your cloud assets. You're going to love Panoptica. It's powered by graph-based technology.

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Are you ready to learn more? Visit panopticaapp. You'll find out everything you need. Actually, we're looking at it right now. It's a really, really interesting product. P-a-n-o-p-t-i-c-a panopticaapp panoptica. Thank you so much for your support for this week in tech. Uh, interesting, uh, security news for you here, alan malventano apple has been asked by russia to block 25 vpn apps and uh, and actually this happened in china before. I mean, this is the problem with being a multinational. Why would russia? Why would? Why would russia want to block VPN services?

0:24:06 - Allyn Malventano
From I'm assuming this is for their own citizens.

0:24:09 - Leo Laporte
From their own citizens, of course.

0:24:13 - Allyn Malventano
You know we wouldn't want the population to have the idea of what's actually going on in the world. It's just like one step away from North Korea, no problem.

0:24:23 - Leo Laporte
Reuters says demand for VPN services soared in Russia after Putin ordered troops into Ukraine in 2022. And immediately after that, by the way, authorities restricted access to Western social media. Not all of it, but most of it. Roskomnadzor, which is a name Steve Gibson loves to pronounce, that's the Russian state's communication watchdog. Their FCC, Roskomnadzor, reported on Thursday that 25 VPN apps have been removed from the Apple App Store in Russia 25. What's so?

0:25:00 - Allyn Malventano
funny is yeah, number one. Apple complied right. Yep, number two. The really funny part of that or I should say ironic part of that is you can bet your bottom dollar that government is using VPNs aplenty, yeah, and as well as many government actors doing the things that the Russian hacker community does.

0:25:20 - Leo Laporte
I was in China about 10 years ago and at that time you could still use a VPNpn. I think I'd express vpn or something like it on my laptop, and the rationale what I was told by our guides was you know, the government understands that the elites will know how to use and will have access to vpns. We they're not trying to protect the elites from the outside world. It's the peasants, it's the mass of people that they don't want communicating. But this has been a big change now because, of course, iphones in both China and Russia are owned by the elites.

0:26:02 - Allyn Malventano
So I think this is very much of a change in how this is viewed that they need to keep the elites as ignorant as they have for a long time kept everybody else well, I mean, I would imagine that iphones have if you probably looked at some chart over time of just like any other technology, right, I would imagine that, yeah, years back it was probably just the elites, but you can, I would think that more and more of the general populace it's so expensive though, right, or maybe, maybe, um I know.

But think about it. You get older ones, you know. You get a used one a couple years old, like you know, same as anything else, right? So I would imagine it's in the hands of more. It's probably not limited to just the elites at this point yeah over there with any smartphones in general in general.

0:26:46 - Larry Magid
Right, yeah, I saw smartphones in it in very, very poor parts of africa mostly android, though I imagine oh yeah well, mostly android, yeah, and I don't know where. I'm not sure what's happening on the play store side of things, whether google's gotten a similar order you're right.

0:27:01 - Allyn Malventano
I mean, they might have won for apple first, and then, oh I to try to convince Google.

0:27:04 - Leo Laporte
The irony is you can buy Apple's Vision Pro in Russia Not legitimately, but a former official Apple reseller sells them. They are the equivalent of $6,300, almost 50% more than they cost in the US. Almost 50% more than they cost in the US. Apple says, no, we don't sell them, but apparently people can get them and there's a market for it. Right? Apple has departed supposedly departed the Russian market. Yeah, sort of.

Sort of it's hard if you're an international company, you have to follow the laws of the countries that you're in right. That's why google, famously uh, left china because they didn't want to comply I was in uh moscow in 2012 and I visited the google office.

0:28:01 - Larry Magid
they had a huge office in Red Square, a beautiful office, and at that point we're doing well in China.

0:28:08 - Leo Laporte
I don't know how they're doing now in Russia. It's hard to abandon these countries because for Apple, China is a huge, important part of its revenue. Oh yeah, Right.

0:28:17 - Larry Magid
Not to mention where the phones are manufactured.

0:28:19 - Leo Laporte
I believe Right you think let's see, I'm still looking for news. I'm looking for news, I am.

0:28:29 - Allyn Malventano
There was another Russian hacking story in here.

0:28:31 - Leo Laporte
All right, russian hacking. Let's stay with Russia. Which one was that?

0:28:38 - Allyn Malventano
Microsoft tells Texas agencies they were exposed to a Russian hack.

0:28:41 - Leo Laporte
Oh, look, I am stunned by Microsoft's kind of indifference to their security issues. They had massive problems with the Exchange server which they kind of ignored for months. I don't know if this is related, but Microsoft has told a dozen state agencies and public universities in Texas that Russian state-sponsored hackers accessed emails between Microsoft and the software and the Texas agencies the Texas Department of Transportation, the Texas Workforce Commission, texas Department of Motor Vehicles, texas General Land Office and the State Securities Board. Now I'm thinking that this is because Microsoft's email was breached, because they say emails between Microsoft and these Texas agencies. So maybe it's not a huge issues. You know, it's not like they got into the DMV and got everything.

0:29:44 - Allyn Malventano
But still I'm not exactly. I'm not exactly sure what that correspondence would be, but it is weird because back when I was in that, you know, in the cybersecurity community as part of my day job, the Russian stuff was always like folks just trying to get money Right.

0:30:02 - Leo Laporte
Back then. Now I think it's governmental, isn't it? It's more governmental, yeah, yeah, I think it's governmental, it's more governmental, yeah, yeah yeah, now it's all.

0:30:07 - Allyn Malventano
Now it's all government and politics back. It all seems to like they don't care about the money at all anymore. Yeah, from my perspective.

0:30:15 - Leo Laporte
Well, and it's just immediately shifted what seems to have happened in russia is there's state-sponsored hacking, which is political, and espionage, and then they countenance a lot of hacking groups that mostly do ransomware. Almost all of them come out of russia and they're not being they're not being, uh, in any way thwarted by the russian police. They're they're turning a blind eye to it. We're going to pause here for just a moment because larry has lost his video. Who and and doesn't know it? There he is.

0:30:48 - Larry Magid
There we go. Sorry about that. I think I turned it off during the break and forgot to turn it back on.

0:30:55 - Leo Laporte
Larry has turned a blind eye towards ransomware in Russia as well, apparently, really.

0:31:01 - Larry Magid
Yeah, well, not that much to look at. You know, I look much better on radio anyway, so I have a face for radio too. Larry, I know all about it, all about it. So I have a pet peeve to share. Yes, and this is not news to anybody, but I bought a GE refrigerator about a year ago and it's great refrigerator. And the uh, I just got the. The filter light came on to replace the filter and it turns out there's a chip in the filter, right. So when I went on Amazon and looked for compatible filters, they started at about $19. But the one with the chip in it is from GE and that starts at about $60. Oh God, and why isn't there a law? I mean, what reason could you possibly have a chip in a water filter? I could understand, maybe in a printer, but in a water filter?

0:31:48 - Leo Laporte
You wouldn't want to use a non-genuine.

0:31:52 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, you wouldn't want to use a part that would deprive GE of revenue.

0:31:58 - Larry Magid
And.

0:31:58 - Paris Martineau
GE's lobbyists would never want a law to be passed like that.

0:32:03 - Leo Laporte
Larry, I have the same refrigerator and I know exactly what you're talking about. You have to buy these expensive water filters, I mean and there are.

0:32:10 - Larry Magid
There are hacks. I'm reading on reddit. There are hacks. I can. Of course there are you know, but do I really want to hack my refrigerator?

0:32:16 - Paris Martineau
yeah, how often do you go through a water filter on this?

0:32:19 - Larry Magid
well, now that's another issue. I, I, the machine says it's expired. Right, but according to reddit, that expiration is bull as well, because it's the chip telling me what is that? How does it know it's expired? You know they need the revenue, right, it's time for them to it's time for more revenue someone figured out how to make a refrigerator a subscription product.

0:32:42 - Paris Martineau
Exactly, they got a big bonus. Exactly, there's nothing.

0:32:45 - Allyn Malventano
The real kicker Go ahead. The real kicker to that is, some folks install whole house water filtration, like I did.

0:32:51 - Leo Laporte
Right, you don't need a water filter on your fridge.

0:32:55 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, that filter is never getting caught Right. You know what they do sell.

0:32:59 - Leo Laporte
And I had the same thing, and I think I had in GE a dummy that goes in the water filter slot and never wears out. So look for that. Larry Did it filter.

0:33:10 - Larry Magid
No it doesn't filter, it just passes the water through. Yeah, and of course Palo Alto has pretty clean water.

0:33:15 - Leo Laporte
You don't need a water filter, not sure you?

0:33:16 - Allyn Malventano
need a filter.

0:33:16 - Larry Magid
Yeah, but it just really annoyed me to think.

0:33:28 - Leo Laporte
And I did order one because after all, god forbid, I should feed my family unfiltered water for days. Gg does need the money, that's for sure. No, probably no. Of course, this has been a long uh standing uh practice in printers, right, with ink, right, exactly, inkjet cartridges, right. What's interesting, uh is, there is, there was a backlash, at least in printers, and you may remember Epson because Canon and all the others Canon was bad, but was it Lexmark? All the companies that were putting they said you know, the printer's cheap, but we're going to charge you through the nose for the ink and you've got to use ours. Epson's response was well, we're going to make tanks right, that that, that you just fill the tank. And so there was a backlash to it, and I think epson did quite well with their tanks, and I had one of those and the tanks were very cheap, right, and they were just fine.

0:34:17 - Larry Magid
It was as good a printer as most inkjet printers are and of course they charge more for the printer. That was. That was that they have to because they don't have that additional revenue every few weeks from the inkjet cartridges.

0:34:29 - Leo Laporte
I think that that's to me that's a good sign. It shows that consumers, if they become aware and they're careful, you can with your dollar at least with your dollar vote, you can convince companies. There's a better way. Epson, I think, is very happy with those tanks and I notice that the other companies are starting to adopt tanks as well. Yes so maybe there's hope, maybe if all the people buy that's the problem A refrigerator is something you don't buy all that often.

0:35:00 - Larry Magid
Right, no, but it's a good point. It's like one of the things that annoyed me with cars now is that you know they typically have some subscriptions. And your point Paris is interesting because so many things these days Remember we used to buy software. Now you pay an annual fee and over a 10-year period you're going to pay what? At least $1,000 for your Microsoft Office subscription yeah, which is a lot for a piece of software Great for.

Microsoft Great for them and for a software product. It's so mature that there's actually no reason why most people need an update an upgrade. They may need security updates, but I'm perfectly happy with the version of Microsoft Office I had five years ago.

0:35:40 - Leo Laporte
It still works. You know, the way we use word processors in 2005 is very different from the way we use oh no, it isn't. Not at all. Not in the least.

0:35:51 - Paris Martineau
Still typing things in there. As long as we're piling on, they do have AI.

0:35:54 - Larry Magid
They do have AI, for what that's worth.

0:35:56 - Allyn Malventano
There is an article in the notes about that.

0:35:58 - Paris Martineau
Now Clippy can do generative AI or whatever.

0:36:00 - Larry Magid
Clippy can tell me how to write. As long as we're piling on Microsoft.

0:36:04 - Leo Laporte
we might as well bring up what Microsoft's head of AI said the other day. Let me see if I can find the article here. This is from Windows Central and they're quoting Mustafa Suleiman. He was speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival. He was speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival and he said when asked about AI training itself on content from the web, he said with respect to content that's already on the open web, the social contract of the content since the 90s has been that it's fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That's been freeware, if you like. That's been the understanding what he is the head of Microsoft's AI and basically says hey, if it's on the open web, it's fair game. What?

0:37:00 - Larry Magid
do you think For a company that makes its entire living on copyrighted content?

0:37:04 - Leo Laporte
I I know, isn't that, isn't that hysterical?

0:37:07 - Allyn Malventano
I mean you can listen, you can go to microsoft and you can download the windows iso so I mean yeah, I guess it's. Yeah, sure, windows is fair game now.

0:37:14 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it is, yeah, come to think of it yeah, it's downloadable, yeah yeah open ai is uh is uh has been sued and, of course, microsoft, a big partner, open ai uh by uS publishers and the New York Times, all of whom saying you can't eat our content for free. I have mixed feelings about that. We were talking about this earlier. I asked the tech guys. It is the case. I don't think that you want an AI that's only trained on you know Charles Dickens right you want an AI to be trained on everything it can get its hands on.

You know public Charles Dickens right you want an AI to be trained on everything it can get its hands on.

0:37:52 - Paris Martineau
And it's not like they're copying.

0:37:52 - Larry Magid
Yeah, but that doesn't mean that private companies have a right to everyone else's copyrighted content just because it would make their product better, on the other hand, you know, where does fair use play into this and what is, for example, if you were to ask me a question like I don't know who won an election and I'm taking the politics and the misinformation I would say what time is the super bowl.

0:38:19 - Leo Laporte
That's a much safer. What time is okay? How do I?

0:38:22 - Larry Magid
okay, what time is the super bowl? I don don't have a direct line to the NFL that's telling me what time the Super Bowl is. I know what time it is because I read it in the newspaper. I know it from some third-party source. Is that not fair use? I mean, it's a fact, the dissemination of general information simply because some copyright source happened to report on it. I mean it's the New York Times. Yes, their articles are and should be copyrighted. I used to write for the New York Times, but if they're news stories, the information in those articles came from some other place. The New York Times did hopefully didn't invent the facts that they're reporting on. So why shouldn't you and I have a right to repeat those facts? And is chat GTP any different than you and I in that regard if it's simply repeating those facts that it happened to pick up in a New York Times article? By the way, there is a website.

0:39:19 - Leo Laporte
There is a website whattimeisthesuperbowlnet. Okay, when did they get that?

0:39:25 - Larry Magid
information from.

0:39:27 - Leo Laporte
In case you want to really know. But the reason I mention it is this was like one of the top SEO topics of last January because that is a very, very common search and every website in the world, including the big ones, are desperate to get that traffic to that page because they have ads on there and it makes some money.

0:39:47 - Paris Martineau
go ahead, paris, I cut you off a little bit oh, I was just saying we have this debate on this week in google all the time and I feel like it kind of boils down to yes, the information saying like a new york times article, uh, isn't solely owned by the New York Times. If it reports that other news outlets will, people will talk about it and share that it doesn't just exist within the pages of the New York Times. But I think and maybe it's a semantic difference or maybe it's a real difference what is going on when that is integrated into a large language model like chat, gpt is the text of that article is being used to train that large language model and I think that's in some ways a bit different than someone you know rewriting a story for their web page. It is going to train a model that is the primary product of a for-profit or nonprofit within a for-profit, if you're talking about opening iChat GPT entity, and that feels a little bit ickier to me.

0:40:57 - Larry Magid
And this goes back to the whole debate between News Corp and Google News and other entities, other publishers, who simply objected to linking to stories with a little snippet. I mean, there's a whole industry of lawyers protesting, things that I rely on every day as part of my online searching and news acquisitions and, yes, I do subscribe to many not all, of course, but a number of paid publications, but I love Google News and I hate the fact that— I just asked ChatGPT4O what time the Super Bowl was, and it gave me the time for the—.

0:41:34 - Leo Laporte
Well, it said for the last Super Bowl and it says typically the exact kickoff time is around, typically around 630. So it's really hedging the answer here and when. In fact, he probably could know exactly what time it was, on february 11th 2024, since it's gone, but uh, so don't ask ai that kind of thing, I you know. I think suleiman is not wrong, but I think he's also saying something that is definitely going to raise the hackles of everybody who hears it. People are going to say, well, no, you can't. But but if you publish it on the internet, unless it's behind a paywall, you're allowing everybody to read it and interpret it well.

0:42:17 - Paris Martineau
And now all of these same people are saying if it's behind a paywall, it's actually fine for us to scrape it as well, so long as we have a login or your robot stock text exclusion for scraping, and I think that that's a little ridiculous so does it file violate copyright?

0:42:34 - Leo Laporte
larry, if I uh, I can read it. That doesn't violate its copyright. I if I copied it. But? But news stories are copied all the time, as je Jeff Jarvis is always saying, on Twig I mean anything that happens. There's 12 different news stories about it, all regurgitating the same basic information.

0:42:54 - Larry Magid
You can't copyright a fact. You can't copyright the condition of how that fact is described Exactly. Go to chat gtp and I ask you know who is leo laporte? It's going to tell me who leo laporte is based on. Whatever you know I imagine wikipedia, your own website, um, articles written about you, etc. But presumably the words, the way it phrases, it will be unique, right, and so how is that different than if somebody asked me who is leo laporte? I I don't have an intrinsic way of knowing. I know who leo report is because I've read about him and in my case, I have to know You're regurgitating all that same information essentially, of course I am Every time I write an article, I mean, unless I saw it with my own eyes.

0:43:34 - Leo Laporte
So what makes it different when an AI does it?

0:43:37 - Paris Martineau
Well, do we think that an AI should have the same intrinsic rights as a human being? I don't think we should. I think that it's a slippery slope.

0:43:48 - Larry Magid
You probably don't think, corporations have First Amendment rights.

0:43:52 - Paris Martineau
I mean.

0:43:53 - Larry Magid
I'm joking.

0:43:54 - Paris Martineau
Probably not.

0:43:59 - Allyn Malventano
The thing that gets me about it is that out of certain AIs, you'll get a confident answer about a thing that it's completely wrong on, and so I mean, yeah, they know nothing, Just like humans, just like humans.

0:44:12 - Leo Laporte
I never stop to ask directions because I don't trust them.

0:44:16 - Allyn Malventano
But the thing is the AI, because I know because of my day job now we also do AI things and so I've had to study up on how the technology all works. And an inference engine, an AI inference engine. It knows what the confidence actually is, but do they tell you no. So in other words, there are numerical values associated with what the inference like, what next words the inference is pulling and how confident it was to get to the response that you got. And that stuff has not surfaced and I kind of wish it was, because that would be very helpful. Right, like, yeah.

0:44:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I agree. Why doesn't have a percentage 38 percent confidence or 20? That's interesting. Right, Right. They should all do that Like why? Why don't they do that yeah?

0:45:04 - Paris Martineau
Well, I'd assume it's because in many cases it does not know whether or not it's accurate, because it is in many ways just stringing words together and doesn't know the actual meaning.

0:45:18 - Larry Magid
I mean, you know it's a lot more accurate than most people think it is. Now I'm not saying it's not wrong. A lot of times I was very pleased when chat GTP gave me an Emmy. Unfortunately I have actually gotten one, but I but but you know it made an inference that maybe I had one. But but you know, more or less I I'm surprised at how accurate it actually is, meant most of the time it's a little bit like my full self driving my Tesla. You know, most of the time it gets me safely to where I'm going. It's the once in a while it's wrong by wrong you mean?

0:45:51 - Allyn Malventano
you mean a drunk teenager?

0:45:52 - Larry Magid
all of a sudden, Exactly no, but with ChatGPT and of course we at Connect Safely, we wrote the parents guide for ChatGPT and in all disclosure, openai is one of our supporters, as is Google, as is some other companies in this field, but most of the time in my experience, it gets it kind of right.

0:46:13 - Leo Laporte
Yes, I agree, it's mostly right.

0:46:16 - Larry Magid
I guess what I'm saying is and Paris, back to your point about you know, should corporations profit from it? That's an important question, but I don't want to lose it. I mean I, I can't, I don't want to go back to, you know, back all the way to 2023, when I didn't have this technology because I've come to depend on it. I mean I, I and I'm not talking about professionally, as a consumer, as a health consumer, the traveler I find it incredibly useful in my life and so.

0:46:43 - Leo Laporte
So Google has always uh and and open AI, and Apple, uh and Microsoft have always said we will honor uh a website's request to block it Uh, usually, I think, using robots, uh dot text you can.

You can say to in your robots text, which is normally used to block spiders, uh web search engines from crawling your site, which is normally used to block spiders web search engines from crawling your site. You can also say no AI, but Cloudflare has said that it in fact many, many bots do not honor that robotstxt. So they have actually announced a new product available to everybody who uses Cloudflare even the free Cloudflare to block AI bots. And the way they do it is they think they can detect when a crawler is an AI or not. So they have a mode that will automatically detect AI bot activity. Ais apparently don't read the same way you and I do and block it. When looking at the number of requests made to Cloudflare sites they write, we see that Bytespider, amazon Bot, claude Bot and GPT Bot are the top four AI crawlers owned respectively by TikTok, that's Bytespider, amazon Claude is uh, is anthropic and GPT bot is is, of course, uh, chat, gpt, open AI Uh.

0:48:12 - Paris Martineau
Wired had a really interesting investigation a couple of weeks ago. Uh, that kind of involved both their investigation and one carried out by a uh developer that suggested that perplexity is um oh yeah, stealing stuff the results that it does, by completely ignoring the robots exclusion protocol, to surreptitiously scrape areas of websites yes, I saw that story.

0:48:36 - Leo Laporte
I thought that was very interesting and you know we love perplexity. Do you love perplexity? I seem to think you do I mean, I don't particularly use any of these oh, you don't services that often I feel like we you and I, or maybe it was jeff we seem to talk about perplexity he loves. Yeah, we have.

0:48:55 - Paris Martineau
Okay, yes, I mean I don't have any strong feelings either way towards it. I just I use the internet in such a maniacal way sometimes that using a third-party chat or search bot is counterproductive to me.

0:49:09 - Allyn Malventano
I need to open 300 tabs.

I think there's a way forward. Oh yeah, I feel you on 300 tabs. Trust me, I think there's a way forward. There's something missing. If you try to compare this we've compared this with like news, like what news organizations do, and you'll have somebody will break a story, story like New York Times will break a story, and then you'll have 10 other you know major news sites. But the thing is they're citing the New York Times as their source. Right, right Now, it is technically possible to train like ChatGPT. If they wanted to, they should. They could provide the top two or three highest influences If, when they did the training of their model, they could have some extra metadata that would you could sort of backwards track OK, where were the highest influences for this particular response? Where did they come from? Right, it is technically possible. I don't know if they could technically do it right now, but like it is a thing that could be.

0:50:01 - Leo Laporte
Perplexity does do that Perplexity does this that's what's interesting about perplexity, so here I just searched for the health benefits of dark chocolate and these are links at the top above its analysis, to sources and then within the analysis they will have, you see, these little footnotes. They will have little footnotes to each point. So that's kind of what you're talking about, right is where did you get this from?

0:50:28 - Larry Magid
yes, yeah, and as a user, I really, and that's that's how I want. Basically, if I'm going to act on anything I learn, on, on, on ai, I'm going to want verification, I'm going to want to see something written by a person or an organization that I could trust that says you know what it is that I'm going to, I'm going to act on, and so to me, that solves a lot of the problem. If you have right, but.

0:50:50 - Leo Laporte
But not only does it but here's what elizabeth lepato says in the verge perplexities, grand theft, ai, more like perfidy. Perplexity, she says, a perplexity which, by the way, is at this point trying to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, is trying to create a search competitor. But it's not creating a search engine, it's creating an answer engine, and that is true. When you just saw the perplexity search results, I gave you sure you could follow a link but honestly, all the information you wanted was right there on that page. She says perplexity is basically a rent seeking middleman on high quality sources. This is that same art, same link. Tax argument we've seen on Google the Google thing that happened.

0:51:39 - Allyn Malventano
The Google thing that happened years ago, even before it was AI driven.

0:51:41 - Leo Laporte
The Google thing. That happened years ago even before it was AI driven.

0:51:44 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, right, when Google was giving you part of the parsed out content of one of the sources as part of the top of the search results, right, it wasn't AI interpreted yet back then. This was years ago, right. But yeah, there were court cases about that and they were going in front of what was it? Weren't there even congressional inquiries on it? And you know they had to answer for that action as well.

0:52:07 - Leo Laporte
I think this comes from that move fast and break things philosophy that Silicon Valley has had for years now, which is it is far better to apologize than to ask for permission. So just go ahead and do it, and if we get in trouble we'll work it out later.

0:52:25 - Allyn Malventano
We'll figure it out later. We'll figure it out. I do wish more ai. If all of the ai things was doing what perplexity looks like it's doing, if they were doing it from the very beginning, I think this conversation would be very different today and there wouldn't have been so much opposition. Right? Because when you have so many different ai things out there making images or you know, giving you things like that, with zero references, zero citations, nothing, it just came from that thing like magic. Everybody's going to take offense to that if they're a generator of that content that was used, right.

0:52:58 - Leo Laporte
Well, I don't know. Paris, you're a generator of that content.

0:53:02 - Paris Martineau
The question I always have about these large language models and generative output machines is what is the end game, assuming something like perplexity becomes successful? Let's say, in their wildest dreams everything works. Everybody uses perplexity instead of Google search. They are looking for answers like what we just showed, instead of kind of combing through all these links In five, 10 years. What is going to happen? Because if you have a world where all of it is just you have users coming to your site to look at your content and not going away to where the content is coming from, no one is going to be creating content to feed into that machine. It seems just incredibly short-sighted and that and this is also a business model that, as of right now, I don't think has any like they're not making money it?

0:54:01 - Leo Laporte
no, they're not. That's why they're trying to raise money. But you're right In the long run, if you cannibalize all your sources, there won't be any sources left. And then what do you do?

0:54:13 - Allyn Malventano
Then you trust the AI to train itself and then you end up with Terminator All right, let's take a little break.

0:54:20 - Leo Laporte
You're listening to this Week in Tech, paris Martineau from the Information, who is often plagiarized but never equaled. That could be your slogan, if you want to that could be.

0:54:32 - Paris Martineau
I'll try it out.

0:54:33 - Leo Laporte
Alan Malventano from Phison. He's an SSD technology expert. He's the guy I go to when I want to know how SSDs work. Longtime editor at PC Perspective, host of this Week in Computer Hardware. Great to have you and Larry Magid from ConnectSafelyorg. We're talking about the week's news in tech and we'll have more in just a bit.

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0:58:07 - Paris Martineau
You're doing such a bad job of selling this episode I know you opened it and have repeated two or three times there's nothing going on, there's nothing happening.

0:58:17 - Leo Laporte
All right, there is a. There is something that I wanted to ask alan about. This happened last week. We talked a little bit about it last week, but, alan, you're from the intelligence community, you've worked as an NSA contractor, which is what Edward Snowden was. I'm just curious what you think about Julian Assange.

As you probably know, he pled out. He pled guilty, he won count of espionage in court last week, and the five years that he served hiding out in a UK jail are now it. He's released. I think he's going back to Australia. He did have to plead guilty to espionage, while denying that he ever engaged in espionage. As you know, and I think probably everybody remembers as you know, and I think probably everybody remembers, he, among other things, enticed Chelsea Manning to release video footage of a drone strike on civilians, which he then published on WikiLeaks. He got in trouble, though, I think partly because of that, but also partly because he got the Russian hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee, those on WikiLeak and it is believed that in both cases he he enticed the espionage. So there, that's catching you up to the, the latest Right Story, but now he's free. What do you think?

0:59:45 - Allyn Malventano
I mean they. They did a plea agreement, so it seems like the government side is satisfied, yeah.

0:59:51 - Leo Laporte
You know this is a lot of journalists said he is being a journalist, he was doing the right thing as a journalist and the government's punishing him because he published things that were embarrassing to the government, chiefly the Chelsea Manning documents.

1:00:08 - Allyn Malventano
I mean not not to try to defend one way or the other, but if it's confidential stuff, it supposed to go online now.

1:00:15 - Leo Laporte
Granted, the government shouldn't be doing things manning went to jail, but remember obama commuted her sentence right, right, but but yeah, I mean journalists are not, I don't know.

1:00:26 - Allyn Malventano
My take on that is the line should be hey, if it's confidential information, that you shouldn't release it all right but you're not old enough to remember.

1:00:35 - Benito Gonzalez
But but I know, larry and I are old enough to remember the pentagon papers, right.

1:00:39 - Allyn Malventano
Well, yeah, interest right, and and that's my my other side to that argument, though, is that the government needs to be doing better. Yeah, so that those things don't happen in the first place, right? I?

1:00:53 - Leo Laporte
agree.

1:00:54 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, yeah, I mean you know, for the work I was doing I was trusted with secrets that yeah, bad things would happen if those secrets got out Right. And they weren't necessarily that the government was doing anything bad or good, it was just like the fact of whatever these items are, if they're released to the public that will do harm.

1:01:14 - Leo Laporte
Should Edward Snowden be offered a plea?

1:01:16 - Allyn Malventano
deal. I'm kind of surprised he wasn't.

1:01:22 - Leo Laporte
It seemed to me that he did everything he could to bring the matter to the attention of his higher-ups. They didn't care that the NSA was spying on American citizens, so they ignored him, and that's why he released the information and, by the way, attempted to release the information in a way that was fairly responsible.

1:01:45 - Allyn Malventano
Well, the issue with Snowden was that it wasn't that the spying was occurring, it's that there's this gray area of okay, you have to have a system in place that can collect some sort of you know things going across a wire right Now. Technically, you can consider that that is spying. However, the NSA has a system that's you know before. Snowden's revelations was that that system has an awful lot of checks and balances on it, to where, if anybody wants access to any of that information to be able to query it, then they have to have warrants, all those sorts of things that you need in place. The only difference is that the information is technically there but still inaccessible to. You can't just willy-nilly search the thing.

Now, what Snowden's revelations were was that oh wait, there's this effective backdoor in the system where, if you happen to work in IT, you're off to the side of all of those checks and balances within the system. Right, I wasn't working in IT when I was there. I was on the other side of it and any query I did, or anybody under me, I had to audit them. There were all these audits and everything.

1:02:52 - Leo Laporte
To keep the information of American citizens out of the data flow. Basically.

1:02:58 - Allyn Malventano
Correct To keep it inaccessible Because the NSA's charter is not to spy on citizens, but to collect information overseas. But of course it's all mixed up. Yes, it's all mixed up. The catch is that sometimes you have a foreign person on one side of the wire and you have a domestic person on the other side of the wire. There's no. The technology is not good enough to be able to only filter it one way like that. It doesn't go that way.

1:03:26 - Leo Laporte
It's interesting, the NSA did have lots of checks and balances, but he was able to show that they weren't fully effective.

1:03:34 - Allyn Malventano
Right, honestly, but he was able to show that they weren't fully effective, right, right and honestly, me in his position would have probably gone through the same steps. I don't know if I would have gone all the way to his ultimate step that he took, but I would have certainly been raising flags and hey, this is not proper. And there are systems in place within the military and within the NSA to make those sorts of reports.

1:03:52 - Leo Laporte
He claims he did all of that and it was ignored. Right. Yeah. How about Assange? Assange is not quite as clear cut because he claims to be a journalist and yet there's some evidence that he had a Russian cutout Guccifer and knew it was a Russian espionage job on the DNC emails and that didn't. That didn't bother him that. He helped Chelsea Manning exfiltrate that information. He helped her understand how to get around a skiff things like that, right.

1:04:24 - Allyn Malventano
That's going beyond, what a journalist will do.

1:04:27 - Leo Laporte
That's right, larry. You can't, as, as a journalist, if, if you, if Daniel Ellsberg comes to you and says here are the Pentagon papers, the Washington Post, new York Times, and if you've seen the movies, you know they agonized over this but ultimately released it, but they did not suborn you know anybody they did not offer money to. Daniel Ellsberg and say here, give me that information.

1:04:50 - Larry Magid
It was given to them. If somebody came to me with hacked information and I believed it, I believe I would. If somebody came to me with hacked information and I I believed it, I I believe I would have the right to publish that information, but I could not hack or pay them or in any way, as you say, suborn the actual hacking act. But to simply reset, you know, regurgitate the information. I believe it's not against the law.

1:05:11 - Paris Martineau
I, in my this is something I deal with a lot whenever I'm working with sources, obviously not usually with hacked information but, it's something we have to have a discussion with the information, with our lawyers and editors all the time is you can't induce people to break their NDAs or confidentiality agreements. You can't say, hey, I'd love for you to share company documents with me on X, y and Z. You have to, you know, say like, hey, is there any sort of like supporting evidence to this? I'd love to see some.

And if you're like, oh, do you want a specific document and you can't really say yes, give me that and break your NDA.

1:05:52 - Larry Magid
It has to happen to you really say, yes, give me that and break your nda. It has to happen to you, right? If it came to you and said hey, I, I'm under nda with google and you, you should know that they're about to do xyz, could you then publish that information that?

1:06:04 - Paris Martineau
that's what you said.

1:06:05 - Leo Laporte
Yes, yeah, I mean, I would probably and would you go to jail to protect the identity of that person?

1:06:12 - Paris Martineau
I would go to the jail, I would go to jail to protect the identity of that person. I would go to jail to protect the identity of my sources. Yeah, Good. That's a bargain I make as a journalist Right.

1:06:20 - Allyn Malventano
There's a good analogy to this. That just happened a day or two ago Gamers Nexus. Anybody following that story? No, what's that? I don't know if it made it in the show notes or not, but just off the top of my head, gamers Nexus got a tip from one of their viewers and it was someone with a unique enough name where they Googled their own name and they had done an RMA with Zotac for some product and their name popped up and it was like all of their PII about that RMA was right on some site related with Zotac.

And then Gamers Nexus, like Steve, started Googling around just like OK, well, let's see, is there just other information out there? And starts uncovering lots and lots of things. However, journalistic Integrity as well, right, made attempts behind the scenes to correct it and, you know, made sure to not even report on it until a majority of the content had already been taken down, right? So there's, you know, there's like a right way to go about doing that. Now, the flip side to that we were just talking about was he obviously didn't help them like hack into anything like that's where you cross the line, right? Yeah, yeah, that was an interesting story, though that Interesting.

1:07:28 - Leo Laporte
They're doing. It's interesting because they have been in the past, you know, well known for reviews, youtube and so forth, but it looks like they're doing more investigative stuff. They just had a story on Asus and the lousy job Asus was doing with customer support. That's, I think, kind of interesting. This is a new thing for them.

1:07:49 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, they had a couple of stories I don't remember which one it was that sort of put them on the map for this. But Steve's pretty good at being a very strong advocate for the customer, for the consumer, if there's anything consumer-related, and even in his regular reviews he's always very, very adamant about consumer perspective. Sort of the same thing we used to do back in the day at PCPurr. The same sort of thing. Try to keep that mindset. Steve's probably even better than I was, you know, back then, at doing that particular thing. It's definitely one of his superpowers and yeah, so I think because of that he's sort of become this where people will go to right If they have, they see something weird. That's like a consumer, ah, interesting.

1:08:35 - Leo Laporte
So he gets tips as a result.

1:08:37 - Allyn Malventano
The tip. Yeah, the tips end up going to him, because he's one of the biggest lightning rods for that sort of thing.

1:08:42 - Leo Laporte
now, right, yeah, so do you think he handled? That properly, absolutely.

1:08:47 - Larry Magid
Yeah.

1:08:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

1:08:50 - Larry Magid
I remember one time I was at the San Jose airport and there was a technology executive sitting behind me talking very loud on his cell phone, giving me all sorts of information that I should not have had access to confidential information and, as it turned out, I wasn't particularly interested in it. But I did turn around to him and say just so, you know, I'm a technology journalist and I now know who you are. What you had to say Wow, you might not consider not talking so loud, um, but I'm I. I thought about it, you know, because I think I would have been very.

1:09:21 - Leo Laporte
That's the sort of thing I literally dream about, but you, unlike Larry, would have written up a story.

1:09:28 - Larry Magid
I mean, if it was good it wasn't that interesting, but it was confidential yeah, it wasn't that interesting.

1:09:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but it was confidential. Yeah, wow, um, here's some good news. Well, actually it's not good news. Here's some bad news. Nasa, nasa and spacex have misjudged the risks from re-entering space junk okay, this is not surprising to me.

1:09:52 - Paris Martineau
Whenever we're talking about a bunch of junk floating around the earth, I'm like that seems bad. It's literally called space junk. Who thought that was going to be good?

1:10:00 - Leo Laporte
well, ideally, you would de-orbit them in such a way that they land in a remote part of the pacific ocean. In fact, there is an area that is commonly where this stuff lands, but it's it's not a it's not a perfect system in march, being a fish living in the space junk part of the pacific ocean sorry continue in march a fragment from a battery pack.

Jettisons from the space station punched a hole in the roof of a florida home. In may, a 90 pound chunk of a spacex dragon fell on the property of a glamping resort in North Carolina. At the same time, a homeowner in a nearby town found a smaller piece of material that also appeared from the same Dragon mission. In April, another 90-pound piece of debris from Dragon landed on a farm in Saskatchewan. It could kill somebody. It could. The good news is the Earth is a big place and there's a lot of ocean, but apparently there is less attention being paid than maybe there ought to be.

Here's the piece of the. This is not small the piece of the Dragon spacecraft charred and burned from its reentry, found in a field in Australia in 2022. Yes, that's kind of a big chunk there. Yeah, so safety this is the poll quote from Stephen Clark's article in Ars Technica. Safety tends not to be on the front burner until it really needs to be on the front burner.

1:11:33 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, safety gets burned up whenever it's re-entering the atmosphere marlin is going I'm junk flying from the sky, yeah marlin, a sword, who is has an interesting job.

1:11:45 - Leo Laporte
He's the executive director of aerospace's center for orbital and re-entry debris studies. It happens enough that there's a center for it. You know that's a sign. The biggest immediate need now is just to do some more work to really understand this whole process and be in a position to be ready to accommodate new materials, new operational approaches as they happen more quickly. Clearly that's the direction spaceflight is going. We launched.

1:12:13 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, maybe we should just build a uh big cover that blots out the sky, so we're all protected from space. Couldn't it be, like you know?

1:12:20 - Larry Magid
waste management. They send trucks around my neighborhood to pick up the garbage. Couldn't elon fly them around?

1:12:26 - Leo Laporte
I think the chinese actually have built a space junk garbage collector right exactly that goes around and and picks up this stuff.

1:12:38 - Benito Gonzalez
I don't know what it does with it after it collects it, though there's another thing to that, actually is that, um, there's enough space junk out there that it starts to make space. Uh, going to space dangerous as well.

1:12:48 - Leo Laporte
That's right. That's, I think, what the chinese are trying to collect it and keep it out of the way of their satellites We've launched. In the first half of 2024, the United States alone has launched 80 man-made objects into orbit.

1:13:04 - Paris Martineau
That's a lot.

1:13:05 - Leo Laporte
And what goes up must come down.

1:13:07 - Paris Martineau
We have a lot of space junk and things in space. There's a lot of space junk and you're thinking about how little time we've been putting stuff in space in comparison to human existence, like it's concerning that this is already becoming a problem this early in the in the space experiment uh, here's the uh, here's the chart.

1:13:27 - Leo Laporte
Orbital launches in the first half of 2024 from space stats online. We've launched 80. China's launched 29 satellites, russia eight, japan three, india two, iran two and North Korea one. That's 125 in the first six months of this year. 125 orbital launches. That's 125 things that eventually will have to come down. Now, most of the time I think they burn up yeah, they burn, but as Now, most of the time I think they burn up yeah, they burn, but, as you know, not all the time.

1:14:00 - Paris Martineau
What happened to that Tesla Elon Musk put in space?

1:14:02 - Leo Laporte
Oh they set that out. That's gone, that's in a big orbit.

1:14:06 - Allyn Malventano
Where did it go? It gets close to Mars.

1:14:12 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, what's going to happen to it? I don't like that.

1:14:15 - Paris Martineau
I don't like that. I don't like the idea that there's a Tesla close to Mars.

1:14:18 - Allyn Malventano
It's not supposed to land on Mars.

1:14:20 - Paris Martineau
I don't know. Listen, I feel like that's going to come back to haunt us. Just a loose Tesla out there in the great unknown, come on.

1:14:28 - Allyn Malventano
The alien's got to have something to drive.

1:14:31 - Leo Laporte
I wonder if SpaceX has a map of some kind showing where the tesla is. There a super?

1:14:39 - Allyn Malventano
you can. You can look up what the orbit is. It's, uh, it's in the trackers, it's in the like celestial object trackers it's been five years.

1:14:48 - Leo Laporte
Um, here's a story from uh last year. Uh, it's been, let's see, five years. So it's now six years since the cherry-colored sports car was launched into space At the time it had completed about.

1:15:05 - Paris Martineau
You can go to whereisroadstercom to figure this out, oh my. God, of course you can.

1:15:11 - Leo Laporte
Oh my God, oh, it is in orbit, though. You're right, it's going to come back eventually. Current location is 89 million miles from the Earth, moving away at a speed of 32,000 miles per hour. Whoa, pretty quick, it's a fast Tesla. Pretty quick, it's moving away.

1:15:30 - Larry Magid
In this picture it's actually flying around all by itself. It's not encapsulated in anything. No, no picture. It's actually flying around all by itself.

1:15:34 - Paris Martineau
It's not encapsulated in anything no, no, it's just no, it's just a loose tesla I wonder if that's full self-driving uh, it's self-driving, all right it had a uh, of course, elon's sense of humor.

1:15:49 - Leo Laporte
It had a battery playing david bowie Space Oddity over and over and over again to the spaceman in the Tesla If the battery is still working 636,000 times and that's in one ear, and then in the other ear is their life on Mars 857,000 times. Fuel economy 25,640.2 miles per gallon.

1:16:17 - Larry Magid
Wow, can he include that in the stats, like when he averages out his people? This is a great website, this is so wonder he claims my car has more range than it really has.

1:16:33 - Leo Laporte
Where is roadstercom? And here is the look. You can actually the location plot.

1:16:40 - Allyn Malventano
There it is, you're right, yeah, it's an animation, it is it is an, it is an orbit um yeah, yeah, in orbit around mars, around the sun that's in between both. I mean, yeah, it's like, it's like its own planet, its own orbit.

1:16:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it crosses Mars.

1:16:56 - Larry Magid
I wonder what temperature it is at this point.

1:16:58 - Leo Laporte
Well, let me see if they say that they have any information about its current. Well, it's very cold, I believe.

1:17:05 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I'm going to guess very cold, very cold Because Teslas do have you know.

1:17:11 - Larry Magid
you can get the Tesla app and see the temperature of your car.

1:17:17 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, like 400 degrees it is.

1:17:20 - Leo Laporte
It's close to the sun 4.2 orbits around the sun, so it is in fact orbiting more slowly.

1:17:26 - Larry Magid
Could you put so that the orbit actually generates power to keep the battery going?

1:17:29 - Leo Laporte
No Solar panel. Yeah, but you could have panels sure. Yeah, yeah, there's could have panels sure.

1:17:34 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, yeah, there's no friction in space, so a space station gets its power.

1:17:39 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's take a break. I bet when you tuned in today you didn't think you'd learn about where the spaceman was the Mars man. But thank you, paris, for reminding me about all that Our show today brought to you by NetSuite. The less your business spends on operations, multiple systems and delivering your product or service well, the more margin you have, the more money you get to keep In order to reduce costs and headaches, smart businesses are graduating to NetSuite by Oracle. Netsuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory and HR into one platform and one source of truth. With NetSuite, you reduce IT costs because NetSuite lives in the cloud, with no hardware required. It can be accessed from anywhere. You cut the cost of maintaining multiple systems because you have one unified business management suite, and you improve efficiencies by bringing all your major business processes under one roof, into one platform, slashing manual tasks and errors. No wonder over 37,000 companies have already made the move. Do the math See how you'll profit with NetSuite.

By popular demand, netsuite has extended its one-of-a-kind flexible financing program For a few more weeks. Head to netsuitecom slash twit. That's NetSuite N-E-T-S-U-I-T-E dot com slash twit. We thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. Netsuitecom slash twit. Uh all, right, enough about space junk, let's see. Oh, good news, if yours are you a social media creator, you may get invited to the white house to meet with.

1:19:30 - Paris Martineau
Technically, we're being social media. Yes, why are?

1:19:33 - Leo Laporte
we not getting invited. They're going to have a conference for social creators. Uh, it is the very first white house creator economy conference next month. Um, the inaugural white house creator economy conference will emphasize the administration's commitment to creators and their votes, and to reinforce the economic and cultural value they represent with their votes. The Office of Digital Strategy there is such a thing, the Office of Digital Strategy has made work with digital creators one of our top priorities, said its director, christian Tom, and we are excited to engage with creators on how these topics impact their lives and how they can help inform policy decisions and remind everybody that President Biden isn't that old.

1:20:20 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I think this is just a strange choice to come on the heels of an administration that has moved to ban TikTok has moved to potentially advance bills like COSA and other kind of anti-social media and technology bans. It's very interesting to me that they're doing this. I mean, I guess it's also a one-day conference, so it's probably ultimately meaningless.

1:20:46 - Larry Magid
It is one of many contradictions.

1:20:48 - Leo Laporte
I mean remember Biden actually buys ads on TikTok yeah, it's very strange and there are people who will be boycotting uh the event for that very, uh, reason. Um, you know who's going to get invited to this? It's the idea is it's it's a pr, right, and it's a perfect kind of pr because they're implying that you know, you people are so important. We're going to fill you in on our foreign policy because you, you need to know when, really, it's just please say nice things about us. Please, we beg, we beg of you. Um Biden needs all the help he can get right now. Yeah, at this point, uh, reaching out to the youngs probably a good idea. It is now one year since threads was launched. Have you used threads? Uh, anniversary was wednesday. Uh, threads was, of course, meta's attempt to capitalize on, uh, the demise of twitter. By the way, a demise has been greatly exaggerated. X seems to be surviving.

1:21:56 - Larry Magid
Yeah Hath, it crashed and burned, like many thought it would yeah.

1:22:01 - Leo Laporte
We are, by the way, on X right now.

1:22:02 - Paris Martineau
I mean I always said it was absolutely silly. The people who I think the week that. Elon fired most of Twitter's engineers, but everybody was like, oh, the site's going to go down in days. That's not really how things work yeah, yeah, uh.

1:22:18 - Leo Laporte
Well, I'm proud to say we are now streaming on x. In fact, if you go there, we're, we're right at the top, so you can, you can watch us on x. We have decided to start streaming everywhere we possibly can and thanks to a website called restream, which it makes it very easy. We're on youtube, we are on twitch, we're on x, we're on kick, we're on discord, I don't remember where else. We are. Lots of places facebook, somebody was somebody, and I see us a, a chat interface. That's all of the chat from all of those places mushed into one. I saw somebody on facebook saying I thought you were dead, so that was. That was gratifying that's great leo you're still around.

1:23:02 - Paris Martineau
Huh, yes, yes, I'm still here well, they probably saw that uh ai generated funeral you made for yourself fooled them, didn't I?

1:23:11 - Leo Laporte
uh, where was I? Oh yes, threads, larry. I don't think I've ever asked you. Are you a Threads?

1:23:18 - Larry Magid
user. Yeah, I use it. I don't use it a lot, but I use it. I have a number of friends. I think Jeff Jarvis is there.

1:23:26 - Leo Laporte
Walt Mossberg is there. Jeff is everywhere, though, right yeah.

1:23:29 - Paris Martineau
Jeff just copies and pastes everything.

1:23:30 - Leo Laporte
He has one tweet he puts everywhere.

1:23:32 - Larry Magid
And I think I just configured my Facebook feed to automatically show up on threads. I haven't checked to see if that's happening. Can you do that? I believe I did it. I believe we can do it. How modern of you I know. Well, that's the problem is that at some point, the gerontologists who study Facebook are the only people who use Facebook. I'm hoping I can start getting young people in their 60s and 70s to read my content by moving over to Thread. Wow.

1:24:03 - Paris Martineau
Real whippersnappers. Yeah really?

1:24:05 - Larry Magid
No, I don't know. I mean, I like Threads. I think that it is an opportunity to, it's an alternative to X. But like you, leo, I haven't abandoned X. I mean, I don't use it as much personally as I used to, but Connect Safely uses it because there are still many people who can access our content there. And you know we're very unhappy about what some of the things Elon has done, including kicking me off of the safety advisory board, actually abolishing the safety advisory board.

1:24:33 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you were on the safety advisory board, that's right. Oh yeah, I was on it. In fact, what?

1:24:36 - Larry Magid
really got me mad is I was on the verge of making a public resignation and then he ended the board before I had a chance to resign. That's so rude of him. It kind of went out of my sails but yeah, no, you can't quit. You fired. Exactly exactly that's what he did to me. But you know, we're still there and and the thing about you know people say it's a cesspool and the thing about all social media is whether it's a cesspool kind of depends on where you are and who your social graph is follow yeah, who you follow.

I don't see I, for whatever reason. I guess I do follow elon and so I see his posts and then even if you don't follow him, you'll see his posts even if I yeah, probably so. But other than Elon and the people who comment on Elon, if I go down that far, I don't see that much crap on X, because I don't follow crazy people who say crazy things.

1:25:27 - Leo Laporte
But one thing though that Threads has done, which is, I think, kind of interesting. X is filled with politics it's at least, at least on my feed, and again it's very much who you follow, but it's almost all politics. Threads has decided not to do that, not to allow it, so they pretty much block political news, and so it's a very different experience. The reason it's in the news, besides the fact that it's its first anniversary. Mark Zuckerberg says that X has 175 million active users after one year. Now that's still a fraction of the total number on Twitter. You disagree?

1:26:07 - Paris Martineau
And I also think that's kind of an interesting number because we don't exactly know what that means. They say 175 million active. I think is it monthly users Monthly active users Monthly active users.

I'm curious this is something I've talked a lot about with the Informations Meta Reporter and we've had a hard time getting to the bottom of it exactly. Does meta count as a threads active user? Does it count? For instance, if you scroll through your instagram feed, you'll see threads embedded in your instagram feed and sometimes I know I accidentally click a button you're a user and you're a user so I'm.

Am I a user? Would I be a user? I know? Um, a couple of weeks ago I got a pop-up ad on instagram that was hard to x out of, even for me a person with nimble hands. That said automatically share all of your instagram posts and stories to threads. Wow, are those people users?

1:27:03 - Larry Magid
yeah, that's what I put on enabled the same thing on facebook users.

1:27:06 - Paris Martineau
I think it's interesting that it is that small of a figure comparatively to the users on Facebook and Instagram, which are in the billions, and that figure is also probably juiced a bit.

1:27:20 - Leo Laporte
I noticed the first thing I see when I open Instagram Threads just got a makeover. You can now customize your open threads at the very, very top of it. So yeah, they're definitely using Instagram to promote Threads and, in fact, if you do create a Th account, it will be your Instagram sign on, right?

1:27:39 - Paris Martineau
It's also interesting. The Washington Post Taylor Lorenz, had an interesting story on threads a couple of days ago about how threads has really struggled to win over content creators, in part because it kind of has no identity. Um, part of what I think makes twitter a useful platform is you can use it to follow real-time like news events or like real-time, uh, just events generally, whether it's like the, like a super bowl game or something happening at entertainment. Threads makes that a bit more difficult. Both they ban politics, as we talked about before, but it's interesting in this article that Taylor wrote, she kind of digs into what Facebook has shared about Threads so far. Meta issued a report in the past week outlining the most popular tags in the platform over the last year and it had more than 50 million tags. This is from the Washington Post. More than 50 million tags have been created since the platform's inception, but the five most popular were related to generic lifestyle topics Photography, books, gym workouts, art and TTPD the tag for Taylor Swift's Tortured Poet Department.

1:29:00 - Leo Laporte
Thank you for explaining that. I had no idea what TTPD was Okay.

1:29:05 - Paris Martineau
And it's just. I mean that kind of suggests. To me those are incredibly basic terms. It suggests that it's more you know.

1:29:12 - Leo Laporte
It's what people think about it.

1:29:15 - Paris Martineau
But that's good, isn't good. But I mean, if you look at the top tags on a platform like tiktok or twitter, over a year it's going to reference specific cultural moments or moments in news or things that are happening. That is kind of those basic words like books or gym workouts. That is kind of the most basic form of content possible. It just suggests that this platform hasn't really found a niche yet, which I think could be why so many people are finding it hard to kind of take to yeah.

1:29:48 - Larry Magid
When you say that Threads bans politics, I'm looking at the feed of somebody called politics girl who is talking about politics, and so it's not completely banned from threads. I mean, is it? Is it links to political?

1:30:00 - Leo Laporte
stories, or that's actually a good question. Um, this is adam. This is a quote from adam of politics on threads so it doesn't get surfaced. Uh, mosseri said threads is not going to do anything to encourage politics and hard news, so I guess that's in the algorithmic feed is it is, isn't it?

1:30:26 - Paris Martineau
yes, threads. So threads is, I believe, unless they've made a change.

1:30:30 - Leo Laporte
If I do my following, it's not following yeah yeah, this person is somebody I follow, yeah, yeah.

1:30:35 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.

1:30:35 - Larry Magid
Yeah.

1:30:36 - Paris Martineau
Like threads by default. Like Instagram, is an algorithmic feed Right and you can change it to be by following, which I assume will take it. Chronological of how people are going to use a platform like threads is you're scrolling through your equivalent of a for you feed, which has posts from people you follow, but then also posts from people you don't, and the posts that are surfaced to the average user are not going to include politics or links to hard news content which is kind of what the difference is here.

And that setting also applies to instagram, which has made a lot of people quite mad online that you will no longer like. You'll be able to see a post about politics if it's by that politics girl that you follow, but if it's from someone else, even if it's going viral, it'll never come across your feed.

1:31:29 - Larry Magid
Which is funny because I remember when they made a big deal about how they were going to surface a lot of political information, they wanted to create a dialogue kind of a town hall community square, and I guess that didn't work out too well for them.

1:31:42 - Paris Martineau
It did not you know it's funny.

1:31:47 - Leo Laporte
I maybe have just lost the taste for social media. None of it seems like. It just seems like it's that it's designed to annoy me.

1:31:56 - Larry Magid
I'll give you an example, during the during the debate you know that awful debate I early on said oh my God, is it just me or is it Biden blowing it? And that's how you know if you go to meta threads it kind of validated my own sense that this was a disaster. I went, I think I went to X, I went somewhere and I started seeing.

1:32:14 - Leo Laporte
But that's the herd mind Is that really what you wanted?

1:32:19 - Larry Magid
It kind of was, because I thought I might have been going crazy. I wasn't sure For a moment. There I wanted it. Now people are just jumping on the bandwagon, but it was helpful momentarily to know that it wasn't just me.

1:32:32 - Leo Laporte
One thing I have noticed is x has become more and more like tiktok. Instagram has become more and more like tiktok. Everybody's trying to become a short video platform. Uh, I I haven't used threads enough to know if it's, if it's following down that that path as well I think it's mostly text it's still mostly text.

1:32:51 - Paris Martineau
The video aspect would be an instagram which is attached to threads. Right and how about blue sky? That's the mostly textual.

1:32:54 - Leo Laporte
The video aspect would be in instagram, which is attached to threads. Right, and how about blue sky? That's the? Uh, that's the other twitter wannabe. Is that? Is that still around? Is that it's funny? I just really have lost interest in all of this blue sky is still around.

1:33:10 - Paris Martineau
I think they only somewhat recently rolled out like an in-app video player actually look at this.

1:33:16 - Leo Laporte
I mean, this is all images and video now, so I think that they very much everybody all kind of looks the same now I mean I think the.

1:33:25 - Paris Martineau
Thing that is interesting about blue sky is you can write in the settings part of your feed or on a separate menu, change what your for you page shows you and that's how the algorithm recommends it oh yeah, they have different lists, want fewer videos things like that. You have control over how it is recommended, which is something I wish I had on twitter's for you page right right.

Well, thanks to going to all three of these, I've learned that something's happened in france, I don't know what yeah, there was a that snap election uh macron uh poll, that was supposed to move the country farther to the right, but I think the left ends up it didn't happen snagging a narrow victory oh, really, oh, that's something.

1:34:09 - Leo Laporte
See social media. It is good for something, don't know what. How about this one? We were talking about the AI and the dangers of AI. There's a danger to AI that we talk about, but really is quite stunning. Google, which had an ambition of reaching net zero by the year 2030, which had an ambition of reaching net zero by the year 2030, has now admitted in their annual report, their environmental report on Tuesday, that the amount of energy that's being used by AI now has caused their greenhouse emissions to jump by almost half Wow Since 2019. Nearly 50% over five years, and they say it's AI. Almost half since 2019, 50, nearly 50% over five years, and they say it's AI. It's all the, all the energy being used generating these LLMs, creating these LLMs and then answering queries.

1:35:07 - Larry Magid
So have I. You know I, my house is entirely LEDs, my car is electric. I have no gas heater. Am I undoing all of that good stuff just by spending too much time on AI? My house is entirely LEDs, my car is electric. I have no gas heater. Am I undoing all of that good stuff just by spending too much time on AI? Yeah, I mean. I'm curious what per I mean. I'd like to know every time I pretty much know if I turn on a light for an hour, how much energy it uses. I would like to know how much energy my searching is using.

1:35:32 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's a larger question, which is can individuals make a dent in all? This or is it? Is it really going to be up to companies like google to to solve this energy crisis, this pollution crisis? Google says we're still going to hit our 20 30 zero emissions goal, but in the meantime, our energy use is going to go up well, should there be a price?

1:36:01 - Larry Magid
I mean, I don't get on airplanes just to cruise around. I get there because I want to go, but I, I have to admit, I'll spend hours on chat, gpt, just, you know, satisfying my curiosity about things that I really don't.

1:36:11 - Leo Laporte
you never ask that about your google searches either, which also used a significant amount of energy. But I think not as much though I mean the estimated energy consumption of a Google search query is 0.0003 kilowatt hours.

1:36:25 - Paris Martineau
Oh okay, chat OpenAI told the New Yorker that ChatGPT uses more than half of a million kilowatt hours of energy or of electricity, daily. Wow. I don't know, even when that was.

1:36:40 - Allyn Malventano
A lot of that's going towards the training Right, making the model in the first place.

1:36:44 - Leo Laporte
But training never stops, right, alan? I mean, they're going to have to continue to train, it's not like oh, we got all the models, Now we can just use them.

1:36:54 - Allyn Malventano
No, because they keep making.

1:36:55 - Larry Magid
They keep making larger and larger models right. It begs the question, though, of what is our individual responsibility? I mean, should we be thinking every time we do a search on one of these uh ai bots about what environmental impact we're having, or should we just not worry about that and leave that up to the googles and the open ais of the world to solve?

1:37:12 - Paris Martineau
mean, if you're thinking of it purely in terms of overall impact. I think that it would be much more effective to have these sort of restrictions on corporations or from a system level, rather than zeroing in on the individual. It kind of feels like the greenhouse gas debate. All the time it's like why do I think we were talking about this on this week in google this week? It's like why, why can I not find a, a straw anywhere in brooklyn?

1:37:40 - Leo Laporte
but yet, however many uh kilowatts of energy are going to chat gpt every single day let me, uh, let me reassure you, uh, larry, with the words of bill energy-hungry AI systems are no cause for anxiety.

1:37:59 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, don't worry about it. Don't worry, he's not going to be impacted by any of the climate change stuff he wants to build nuclear power plants in my neighborhood though?

1:38:06 - Larry Magid
Yes, he does.

1:38:07 - Leo Laporte
Speaking last week in London, bill Gates he was talking at his company Breakthrough Energy Summit urged people not to go overboard, larry, on anxieties about the copious amounts of electricity that would be required to run new AI systems and why he says Well, ai will accelerate a more than 6% reduction. So he says.

1:38:33 - Paris Martineau
It'll all eventually work out the problem.

1:38:37 - Leo Laporte
We should keep building your houses on stilts and you know sweating whenever you go outside because of the increased uh heat ai will be a help rather than a hindrance when it comes to achieving climate goals, um, because it's going to help us solve the problem yeah, we can't get congress to listen to the humans, do you? Think they're going to listen to the ai yeah gates is all over these uh he's, he's put billions into these tiny uh nuclear plants. Right, right, right, yeah, one near you.

Well, not that I know of, but it wouldn't surprise me. I think right now it's an experimental in Wyoming, the TerraPower in Kemmerer, wyoming. This is from Gates Notes we just broke ground on America's first next-gen nuclear facility. Hello, says Bill Gates from Cammermer, wyoming. The idea is that this is a natrium plant and it doesn't use as I remember it doesn't use water for cooling. It's a new way of creating emissions-free energy using nuclear power, but done very differently. So natrium yeah, let me see if I can find. Next generation of power is here the natrium reactor and energy storage system. It uses sodium. It's a sodium fast reactor, molten salt instead of water, I guess.

1:40:23 - Allyn Malventano
I know a thing or two about these things, Leo, although I didn't.

1:40:25 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you are a nuclear engineer. Do you know about Natrium? I forgot. We have an actual nuclear engineer here.

1:40:33 - Allyn Malventano
Well, the Navy's nuclear reactors are all water moderated.

1:40:40 - Leo Laporte
As were all the traditional nuclear power plants. So you generate electricity because you have rods of fissionable material that you create a chain reaction, but you've got to keep the chain reaction from spinning. I remember this from a game on the Atari. You've got to keep the chain reaction from spinning I remember this from a game on the Atari that I used to play a lot Keep it from spinning out of control by putting something in between the rods.

1:41:03 - Allyn Malventano
I guess, well, no, the rods are the thing that actually stops it.

1:41:05 - Leo Laporte
Oh, the rods are slowing it down.

1:41:07 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, the fuel cells have the fuel and then the rods actually get in the way.

1:41:10 - Leo Laporte
That's right you scram. When you scram, you're dropping the rods in right Remember.

1:41:14 - Allyn Malventano
Wasn't that like a twit title from like a hundred quits ago? The rods go down.

1:41:22 - Larry Magid
Are you using?

1:41:23 - Allyn Malventano
salt water or fresh water to cool the reactors.

1:41:24 - Larry Magid
Oh, it has to be fresh water.

1:41:26 - Allyn Malventano
You'll corrode the heck out of everything. Yes, so you actually have to carry water on board. You can't use the water that you're floating in Well. We can make pure water because we have a steam plant. We can just boil off water and then make pure water.

1:41:39 - Leo Laporte
We should explain that you were the nuclear officer on a United States Navy submarine.

1:41:44 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, I was a reactor operator, so it was like Homer Simpson, but on a submarine basically, I hope, better than Homer.

1:41:52 - Leo Laporte
So natrium reactors are not natrium sounds like a brand name, it's not a chemical. Uh, they're not pressurized like existing plants and use sodium instead of water as a coolant. Uh, the reactor operates at temperatures greater than 350 degrees celsius. Wow, that's, that's hot, but that's below the boiling point of sodium. So, right, I guess that's why that's. That's the key. That's the key, because water of sodium. So I guess that's why you use it.

1:42:14 - Allyn Malventano
That's the key. That's the key because water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water bad, but it's actually. It's actually one of the safer ways to do it up until the recent technologies, meaning with sodium because the water is not just a thing that cools it, but it's also the thing that does what's called moderation, which is, if you don't slow the neutrons down from the previous fission, then it can't continue to make more fission, right? So if you take the reactor and you remove the water, well, now you just remove the thing that let the fission keep happening. Ah, right, so it's sort of self, you know, regulating in that respect, within, within reason. There's still ways that bad things can happen, obviously, but you know it is sort of like a negative feedback loop to try to keep itself safe and stable try to keep itself safe and stable.

1:43:15 - Leo Laporte
Um, here's some good news. If you want to learn more about this, archiveorg actually has chris crawford's scram game, the game that I played on atari that teaches you in a very kind of rough way how nuclear power plants work.

1:43:29 - Larry Magid
That's kind of cool video games rock the mind. Look at this at this.

1:43:33 - Leo Laporte
Leo was educated how I learned everything I know, but Chris is going to have to write a new one with the Natrium. Look at that. Wow, I've like never seen this game, oh, it's a really fun game. Waiting for NRC license, okay. And then you are the power plant, you are the Homer Simpson and you have to keep the pressure appropriate and the boiling. Look at that and maximize. Does this look familiar to you? Oh yeah.

1:44:01 - Allyn Malventano
Actually, I'm like picking out even though it's 8-bit graphics, I'm kind of picking out what the stuff is. Yeah, oh man, that sound is horrible though.

1:44:08 - Leo Laporte
You've heard this before. Yeah this is 8-bit Atari sound, but it sounds like it's like that.

Yeah yeah, anyway, the other thing that Nutrim does that's kind of cool is it separates, decouples the energy and nuclear islands so that the teams, the non-nuclear project teams, are not actually like the steam turbines and the salt tanks, are out of the nuclear control area. So that's kind of this is interesting. I imagine you don't have the same fears of nuclear power that we unwashed civilians do. I mean, we think of things like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, fukushima, and say, oh, that's not safe.

1:44:48 - Allyn Malventano
Listen, the first week of my training in the Navy was about all of those other catastrophes, yeah, right, well, the ones that had happened up until that point at least, right, um, and yeah, there's plenty of lessons learned. But it really is about you have to have good procedures, you have to have trained people that know what they're doing. That was actually one of the big things for Chernobyl, right, there were a lot of errors, um, so, yeah, as long as you have good procedures in place and good you know and you follow those and you you do all of the appropriate things to keep the training up and everything, then, yes, it can be safe. Um, this, what uh gates's project is working on, though, that's sodium, which is I mean, that's just another version, another like iteration on a sodium. You know, sodium cooled power plant.

The trick with sodium is that if you let it go up all the way, it's not liquid anymore, which is kind of a problem, right, kind of hard to get that to flow through a pipe, obviously. But yeah, I do like the idea of having the two plants separated enough by enough distance that you can just have, okay, the reactor thing is going on in this one building and everything else is going on in a completely different place, off to the side, and the sodium also lets it run at a much higher temperature safely, because, again, it's not boiling and there's not a fear of that. The thing can literally be at zero pressure. It's just very hot, right, right that the thing can literally be at zero pressure. It's just very hot, right, right. Um, so that that's one of the thermodynamics things is that the hotter you can get the you know, the coolant, whatever the cooling medium is, the more efficient the generation of power is. On the other end, the higher the difference in temperature, the more efficient you can make the system I.

1:46:32 - Leo Laporte
I've also, of course, been taught that nuclear waste is a problem because it's going to last hundreds of thousands of years, maybe millions of years, but it sounds like we have ways to manage that as well.

1:46:47 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, you can find. I forget where the site is, but it's even on. Like Google images you can look up where all of the prior submarine or Navy nuclear reactor cores are. There's a site it's in plain view of satellites, takes up not that much land and they just wrap up the core.

1:47:04 - Leo Laporte
You're talking about Hanford, or?

1:47:06 - Allyn Malventano
That might be it. It's been a while since I've had to look it up. Oh no, I know what it is.

1:47:10 - Leo Laporte
This is the New Mexico tunnels in the old salt mines.

1:47:15 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, no, no, no, no. This one's above ground.

1:47:17 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's above ground Okay.

1:47:19 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, yeah, this one's above ground.

1:47:20 - Leo Laporte
It's not, it's a lot smaller amount than than one thinks of the of the really dangerous material.

1:47:28 - Allyn Malventano
Oh yeah, a submarine can go 20 years on a human being worth of mass of uranium, right, right, you know it's like a little over 100 pounds worth. You know it is, it is. It takes up a little more volume because it's in a thing that's meant to contain itself.

1:47:45 - Leo Laporte
And you know, keep everything given you know probably more than certainly than I do, and most of us do, about nuclear power generation, are you in favor of expanding our nuclear footprint?

1:47:57 - Allyn Malventano
The thing that I see is holding it back the most is just the sheer cost of building modern, safe power plants, right, which is why Gates is trying to tackle this problem in this way, right, right, in this way, right, right, uh, we would have had a lot more nuclear power plants now, uh, if not for cost and regulation and other things that have been sort of ramping up.

So there needs to be a safe way to do it and there needs to be a cost effective way to do it that makes sense. Um, you know. So I mean, I get it. I'm I'm kind of just neutral on the nuclear power thing because I see it as just another way to do it, right. But I also see all the utility and usefulness and solar and all the other things Right. But yes, at the end of the day, you do need a higher density of power generation in large cities. You're not necessarily going to have, you know, a very dense metro area and be able to power it with just solar on roofs. It's just not going to be enough.

1:48:57 - Larry Magid
Well, we also need a little. I mean, there has to be a public education process that we actually trust, so that politicians and the public in general are comfortable with it. Because right now I think there is still a huge amount of fear of nuclear power, some of which is justified. You know, those of us and I I'll admit I was part of the campaign for safe energy in 1980 and it helped or argue against the proliferation of nuclear power at the time. But I think we all have to have an open mind. Yeah, If it can't be done safely, then go for it.

1:49:34 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, I'm not there yet there are. I mean, yes, education is key. I mean, heck, there are even I don't want to call them horror stories because it was on a much smaller scale, but the initial like the government or the military's initial foray into nuclear power involved one of their first reactor plants that they ever made. That nobody here may have heard of, or maybe even nobody listening to this podcast right now. They were trying to do an army, I think, field reactor. They wanted a little reactor you could deploy out in the field to make your power Sure, and the way that, the way that you move to the control rods was literally standing over the core that was in the ground and grabbing the rod and pulling it up.

Private, come over here I got a job for you Private, come over here.

1:50:19 - Leo Laporte
I got a job for you Well.

1:50:20 - Larry Magid
I have a related question Is Trump completely off his rocker when he talks about the dangers of electric boats and ships, or is there some danger that they could electrocute people or fish in the vicinity if something went wrong?

1:50:34 - Paris Martineau
Okay, we're also talking about the guy whose primary concern with windmills?

1:50:37 - Larry Magid
No, no, I know that, but I actually did a little research on it and there are some articles on the Internet.

1:50:44 - Leo Laporte
So if you had a shark, 10 feet away from you, but you're on a boat that's sinking with an electric battery. Would you choose the shark? Is what we're asking, alan.

1:50:55 - Allyn Malventano
Listen, having been on a submarine, if there was flooding and sinking of the submarine in a way that it's not intended to sink because submarines are supposed to sink normally but if it was because of water coming in, electrocution is the least of my work. Okay, okay. I think, in order to get electrocuted.

1:51:14 - Leo Laporte
Pretty much all boats have batteries. I mean that's true.

1:51:18 - Paris Martineau
So I mean you got to Boats are sinking all the time, and they sink all the time.

1:51:23 - Allyn Malventano
Submarines have a very large battery. It's DC voltage. Yes, if you were in the battery compartment and seawater came in then okay, sure you might get shocked by that, but it's not going to start killing the fish around you, it's just, it's a windmill.

1:51:38 - Larry Magid
I just want to make sure Now. I know windmills are safe and electric boats are safe too. I just wanted to be sure about that. Electric boats are safe.

1:51:44 - Benito Gonzalez
But hold on, let me finish this Army nuclear reactor story.

1:51:47 - Leo Laporte
All boats have batteries. All boats have batteries, okay so this Army nuclear reactor story.

1:51:53 - Allyn Malventano
There was an accident and it involved impaling the operator in the ceiling with the control rod. The rod went because he pulled it up way too fast. We don't. We still to this day don't know what the reason was. There were like rumors the guy broke up with his girlfriend or there was something going on and the guy wanted to off himself and so he just went, grabbed the control rod, pulled up, the water in the reactor flashed to steam because the power went up so fast and it turned into a steam kettle instantly wow impaled him in the.

1:52:25 - Leo Laporte
That sounds a very unpleasant way to go uh, I would imagine.

1:52:30 - Allyn Malventano
So, yes, and then, and then the other. There was two other operators and I think they, they both just like chernobyl you. Later they got a radiation spike and they did not last either. Right, oh dear. Yeah, I think it was NL-1 or something. It's like what it's called. I mean, it's not hard to find, it's just like Google, like Army reactor, wow, you know, as you might imagine, the Army does not run nuclear reactors, probably because of that story. Jeez, jeez.

1:53:03 - Leo Laporte
Jeez Louise, it's pretty crazy.

1:53:05 - Allyn Malventano
That's crazy. That was story number one that I learned at like Naval Nuclear Power School. That was like first day. You would think they would want to hide that information, but maybe no, no, and actually that's what's so impressive about the way that I saw that the Navy operated their nuclear programs is that it is all about education and transparency, and you have to know all of the bad things that can happen so that you don't do them yourself. Don't do that, right? Yes?

1:53:37 - Leo Laporte
And whatever you do, don't do that private, Don't do that. Greg Helton in our YouTube chat says Scram the term comes from the Chicago University reactor under the football stadium in the very earliest days of nuclear power. It stands for Super Critical Reactor Axeman. Is that true, alan?

1:53:57 - Allyn Malventano
Well, it's either super, I've heard it both ways the other way is Safety control rod ax man Okay, which, yes, there was literally like a rope going over a pulley Guy with an ax Drop the rods Wow. Exactly.

1:54:10 - Leo Laporte
That's a scram. Wow, that's a scram. All right, wow. Thank you, greg. Yeah, that's great. Let us, oh, now we. By the way, somebody has posted the story from America's only fatal reactor accident in Idaho 61 years ago SL1, there it is. There it is, wow. A Navy CB and then two Army specialists Yep, sl1. And then two Army specialists Yep.

1:54:41 - Allyn Malventano
SL1. And if you?

1:54:46 - Leo Laporte
scroll down a little bit. There's a picture of what it looks like in the floor with the control rod. I'm not sure we want to belabor this one.

1:54:52 - Allyn Malventano
Look, I promised you some good news and I will have it. No, it's not a picture of the guy, it's just a picture of what it looked like to operate that particular thing.

1:54:59 - Leo Laporte
Oh, there's the rods Wow.

1:55:01 - Allyn Malventano
Which just scares the heck out of me, that you could just, yeah here, you could, just don't pull too fast.

1:55:07 - Leo Laporte
It's just ridiculous, holy cow. Now, those boots he's wearing, are those carefully made protective? They look like rubber tape. They look like garbage bags tied with twine. They look like rubber tape.

1:55:19 - Allyn Malventano
They look like garbage bags tied with twine yeah yeah, it's for contamination in case something did get on the floor that you don't track it. Yeah, okay, yeah, just crazy, did you have to?

1:55:31 - Leo Laporte
wear those. We've come a long way.

1:55:32 - Allyn Malventano
On the submarine. If we pretended there was a spill of contaminated, no, no, a spill of contaminated primary coolant, no, a spill of contaminated like primary coolant. Okay, then we would have to put well, it was fancier than that. It was, you know, better outfit than what. Is that from the 450s or something?

1:55:50 - Leo Laporte
It really looks a little makeshift, to be honest, but okay.

1:55:55 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, they were kind of winging it back then.

1:55:56 - Leo Laporte
They were winging it. We've learned a lot since then. All right, we have some good news coming up. We have a great panel. It's been a lot of fun. Thank you, alan, for being here. You're our expert in naval intelligence and scramming Jack of all trades. Jack of all trades and, of course, ssds at Fison. Larry Magid from ConnectSafelyorg and Paris Martineau from the Information Our show today brought to you by 1Password.

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We go from pulling reactor rods by hand to the good news that a judge has blocked Mississippi's age verification law. We're talking about the dangers of social media. Number of states I think almost 20, are planning in some way or another to require that there is age verification before you can use social media. Well, a federal judge has, I think, fortunately blocked a Mississippi law that would have required age verification for all and parental consent for teens in order to make accounts on many social media sites. The law was set to take effect on Monday. It was designed to protect kids from sexually explicit content. At least, that's the ostensible reason. But platforms like Facebook or YouTube would have to use some technique to verify users' ages, and the problem is there's no good way to do that. Yep.

1:59:16 - Larry Magid
You agree? Larry.

Yeah, I spent a whole year. Admittedly it was a long time ago, but I was on this panel that was run by 49 state attorneys general from around the country and out of Harvard's Berkman Center, and we spent a year studying age verification and at the time, concluded that the only way to verify the age of a minor was to access documents that we didn't have access to, like social security records, school records and other confidential data. So the age-old question of privacy versus quote safety got in there. You can easily verify the age of an adult. You and I, leo, have credit.

Even if we weren't public figures, there's information about us that can verify who we are and how old we are. That's not true with young people, so it's very difficult to do. There are some interesting technologies. There's a company in the UK that claims it can verify the age through eye scans and get a relatively accurate. They call it age assurance. But that technology is far from proven and the problem is it gets into privacy questions. I mean, do we want to have to present a verified ID every time we log into a website that may not be appropriate for children? And then what do we do if let's say the site is appropriate, let's say for 16-year-olds but not 14-year-olds. It is almost impossible. Let's say for 16 year olds but not 14 year olds. It is almost impossible. Again, with the legally accessible information we talk about all the time, we've yet to come up with a way that does it in a way that protects the privacy of the individuals.

And then you get into the other thing we were talking about earlier, which is should we do it? I mean, I do agree that pornography is inappropriate for certainly young children, but a lot of these age verification processes would deny children, or I should say teenagers, access to social media, which is speech, my sexuality, and my parents didn't happen to want to approve that. I would be very upset about any age verification or parental control regimen because it would interfere with my ability to explore my sexuality or my religion or my politics or anything else that I might want to do independent of my parents, assuming that the parents were even in a position to consider whether to give permission. Perhaps they don't have the literacy skills, perhaps they're on drugs, I don't know. There's a lot of reasons, a lot of kids whose parents are not in a position to make those informed decisions. So at the moment we are opposed to these forms of age verification. I'm pleased the judge ruled as they did, but I do think it's something we have to continue to explore.

2:02:19 - Leo Laporte
The judge said that it burdens adults' First Amendment rights to do this Absolutely. They also said that the Mississippi attorney general had failed to show so. The group opposing this bill was Net Choice, which is a trade group, primarily Google, I think Facebook's met as part of it. They. Net choice said, you know, giving parents more information about how to supervise their kids online should be sufficient. The court said the attorney general failed to show that it would be insufficient. Um, the attorney general said we will continue to fight for this common sense law because our children's mental health, physical security and innocence should not take a backseat to big tech profits. And this is exactly why I was and I know you too, larry were so upset with the surgeon general's suggestion that we should have a warning label on social media. Right?

2:03:15 - Larry Magid
And, by the way, it's why Connect Safely just hired a policy director. And, by the way, it's why ConnectSafe, we just hired a policy director. Good, we're actually going to be going to Sacramento and other state capitals and weighing in on some of these bills in an attempt to get rational thought instead of reactive thought, into protecting kids.

2:03:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, anyway, so far none of this has happened as far as I know, but there are more states attempting it and, of course, if it's appealed to the Supreme Court, who knows, who knows?

2:03:45 - Allyn Malventano
I would like to point out that in the state of Mississippi, there is no minimum age to own or possess a rifle or shotgun.

2:03:53 - Larry Magid
And they're not dangerous. They're perfectly safe. Nobody's ever been harmed by a rifle or a shotgun.

2:04:00 - Leo Laporte
Should I query what the age of consent is in Mississippi? Probably probably best left left alone.

2:04:09 - Allyn Malventano
You can get married, but no social media. Yeah, exactly.

2:04:11 - Larry Magid
Whether they're first cousin or a second cousin, all right.

2:04:18 - Leo Laporte
I think we could probably say that this show has completed its mission in the words of sound so confident. George W Bush mission accomplished.

2:04:32 - Paris Martineau
I am right when he said that and that's why we're right when we're saying this you see it's all right.

2:04:39 - Leo Laporte
That is Paris Martineau. You're going to see a lot more of her every Wednesday on this week in Geriatrics, where she and her grandpa get together.

2:04:47 - Larry Magid
I'm there every Wednesday. Oh, you should have me as a guest then. If you have a geriatric, yeah, come on.

2:04:53 - Paris Martineau
We need more people to push the average age up.

2:04:56 - Leo Laporte
Benito and I are working hard Paris to get some young people on that show.

2:05:03 - Paris Martineau
No, I really like the segment we have every other week where you guys talk about some show from like the 1840s or something like that Green Acres On Jeopardy the other day. Oh, already I saw on Jeopardy the other day. That's the sort of content you're going to be getting on this week in Google.

2:05:25 - Leo Laporte
Somebody used the theme, the Green Acres theme, which we've talked about on the show, and Ava Gabor's I Get Allergic Smelling Hay as a sample in some modern pop song that you young people would like.

2:05:42 - Paris Martineau
Oh, very fun Nice.

2:05:43 - Leo Laporte
But I forgot the name I wish I had, Because then I could sound hip Vic.

2:05:56 - Paris Martineau
No, let me see Groove is in the heart beatzy collins and q-tip. Wait, that's from the 90s. Oh, never mind, that's new to you. I'm really proud of you. That's huge.

2:06:15 - Leo Laporte
That's real I should have known it was on jeopardy, then it wouldn't be something really modern, it would be some old song.

2:06:24 - Paris Martineau
I love the line of Paris. We're going to get some new hip fresh blood on this. I saw on Jeopardy last week about this new song the kids are listening to from 35 years ago.

2:06:41 - Allyn Malventano
What's that scene with the? You know our man. The actor's name is escaping me. Hey kids.

2:06:47 - Paris Martineau
Hey kids, how do you do? Fellow kids?

2:06:51 - Allyn Malventano
How do you do? Fellow young kids?

2:06:53 - Leo Laporte
Well, we're going to rename it this Week in Golden Girls. How about that? How would you like?

2:06:57 - Benito Gonzalez
that that's great. Well, just to ask an update for that on Twig, we're having actually Molly White this week.

2:07:01 - Leo Laporte
Molly White, you've heard of her. Hey, young person, that's two. Yeah.

2:07:06 - Paris Martineau
That's two of us.

2:07:07 - Leo Laporte
And Jeff's not going to be there, so the average age will be cut in half.

2:07:11 - Paris Martineau
It's going to be the lowest it's ever been.

2:07:14 - Leo Laporte
That's great, benito, you've got Molly White. Fantastic. Jeff has the week off Wednesday. This week in Google the wonderful Molly White and Paris Martin Jeff is taking a typesetting class.

2:07:26 - Larry Magid
A typesetting class.

2:07:27 - Leo Laporte
Because that's what one does when you reach 68.

2:07:32 - Allyn Malventano
I want to learn how to set type. Might be making a comeback. Might be.

2:07:38 - Leo Laporte
I'm so sorry, Paris. That's all I can say. I don't want to be this old. It's not my idea.

2:07:45 - Paris Martineau
Listen, it's delightful.

2:07:47 - Leo Laporte
As my wife often says, it beats the alternative right, Larry. Magid you are a fantastic addition to our crew, always president and CEO of ConnectSafelyorg. At Larry Magid, plug something.

2:08:02 - Larry Magid
Well, you know, we've been talking about keeping kids safe online and on connect safely. There are parent guides to all the things that young and views like Tik Tok and Instagram.

2:08:14 - Leo Laporte
See, this is what I mean. This is the education parents need to do a to do the job, instead of some surgeon general's warning right.

2:08:23 - Larry Magid
Yeah, tech for tots. You know little kids, so we work really hard to try to educate people. We don't hide. You mentioned the research about the article by Nathan Davies we just passed it what the research says yeah.

So we try to be research-based and we try to give sound advice, and it's fairly simple. The other thing I want to plug is our go a little bit further Our podcast. Are we Doing Tech Right? I'm really enjoying it, I'm hosting that and we get some really interesting things. And the question we ask is, for example, when we interviewed VidSurf and Leonard Kleinrock the two of the founders of the Internet.

If vid surf and leonard kleinrock, the two of the founders of the internet, if you had to do it again, what would you do differently? And then you'll see up there the interview with uh name namly. They are the national association of media literacy education to find out what's happening in terms of disinformation and media literacy. Uh, we do this every other week. Uh, it drops on wednesdays and you can get it wherever your podcasts are. You get them at called. Are we Doing Tech Right?

2:09:23 - Leo Laporte
And the answer is sometimes, but education is so important. I really love the beat that you've chosen. It's really, really important and I hope more parents will check it out. Connectsafelyorg. And then you know people who watch our shows are technically literate. And then you know people watch our shows are technically literate. Share this with your less technically literate friends who are also parents, because they need to know this as well, and maybe share the podcast with them too. Are we doing tech right? Thank you, larry. Thank you. Our favorite submariner, nuclear tech.

You're the only one intelligence officer, nsa contractor, uh memory guru, hardware expert, alan malventano, and look at his backdrop me down like this is your life over here this is good. Look at the backdrop. Is your life right there? Look at that, it's a fantastic back.

2:10:18 - Allyn Malventano
Isn't that great, it's rich with stuff, with lore?

2:10:24 - Leo Laporte
Is this your man cave, Alan? I've never asked you.

2:10:27 - Allyn Malventano
This is the main office in the house. My wife's desk is right over there.

2:10:30 - Leo Laporte
Oh nice. So she has to put up with this crap too, huh. Well, you know Does she have her own shelves with her own stuff.

2:10:38 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, she's got some stuff over there, she's got some tchotchkes over there Good. That's nice.

2:10:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's nice. Must be hell to dust it, but I'm sure that that's your job, right?

2:10:47 - Allyn Malventano
Oh, we do that as infrequently as possible.

2:10:51 - Larry Magid
He had a nuclear dust bunny at the end.

2:10:53 - Leo Laporte
Yes, there ought to be some touchless duster. Why don't you?

2:10:58 - Allyn Malventano
invent that I wish Somebody needs to do that Could have built off nuclear rods and steam.

2:11:04 - Leo Laporte
I think it's called a vacuum cleaner.

2:11:05 - Larry Magid
Oh, that.

2:11:08 - Allyn Malventano
Oh yeah.

2:11:10 - Leo Laporte
Alan Fison. Anything to plug what's up?

2:11:14 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, I mean we're working on stuff.

2:11:17 - Leo Laporte
We have a Piscari line of ssds that we're launching now, do you sell the individuals, or are they rebranded by other people, or how does that work?

2:11:28 - Allyn Malventano
yeah, historically, fison has mostly just been they make the controller and they distribute the controller to a bunch of other companies and the sort of behind the scenes and then for some, some, for some folks you know, they're putting their label on the entire SSD that we make. So we do go all the way up to the point of assembling an entire SSD. We just, historically, have not put our own label on it, right, it's usually through resellers, through other, you know, other other brands. Recently we're trying to actually put our own name on some of the products as well. So we have, you know that we're still doing the other thing too, but you know it'd be nice to have our own name on something.

2:12:05 - Leo Laporte
It's Pascari P-A-S-C-A-R-I, pascari, pascari.

2:12:09 - Allyn Malventano
Yep, okay, and we're doing some AI stuff. We talked about it a little bit last show of it. Oh yeah, what's up with that? Yeah, so it's mainly trying to bring. You're going to have folks, you know, actually like all of us, on the well, maybe not so much Paris, maybe this could be the way to get Paris to use this, to use AI a little is.

There are use cases where folks do not want the information to leave their premise. They want to do AI things but for whatever reasons legal, medical they're not allowed to just have that information in the cloud. So how do you take advantage of the AI stuff but do it locally and you can just download models. Most of the companies like Google and Meta and everybody, are releasing their models publicly and you can download them. And if you have enough hardware, you can actually run inference. You can chat with a model that you download. It won't be as large as what ChatGPT has, but it is something that you can do. Where we come in is we allow a process called fine tuning, which is where you take a general purpose LLM and you add your own knowledge into it. So, for example, I could take all of my writing that I did for PC Perl all my reviews and I can fine tune a general purpose model and I can make it an expert on testing SSDs, for example, and then I can chat with that and ask it.

2:13:45 - Larry Magid
Can you filter out the bad information or simply just have your information come up on top, or how do you?

2:13:52 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, you're. Basically it's a form of the training process. So when Meta or Google are initially making the model from scratch and they're just putting all of this information into it to try to give it a general purpose, you know intent, that's the thing that takes a whole bunch of compute. This fine-tuning process is a subset of that, but it is fairly resource-intensive and it's not something you can do easily in your own house unless you have a rack full of GPUs, usually in your own house, unless you have a rack full of GPUs usually. So where we come in is we enable, you know, we make SSDs that are pretty quick and we add that SSD layer as an ability to have more graphics memory than you actually have effectively, and then that gives you enough space to be able to do the fine-tuning process with, you know, with a lot less GPUs. So again, that fine tuning process is just you're taking the general language model, which would be very difficult to just create from scratch on your own. You just can't do that in a house, in your own home, but you can start, you can use that as a starting point, nudge it. You're sort of shifting the vectors in the way of what you are fine tuning with the data that you are providing. It's almost like the analogy is well actually, here I'll go one step better.

We've seen announcements from Microsoft and you know, about a copilot for Windows and it's going to be able to go through your Word documents locally and like, reference them and whatnot.

That's not fine tuning, that's a thing called RAG, which is where it's sort of referencing that information. It's still a general purpose AI, but it's just quickly reading up whenever you ask it something. It'll go through all your Word documents really fast and see if it can find the answer right. Fine-tuning is almost like you're looking at it ahead of time. You're kind of learning about the information and then you have a better understanding of it, and so it's more like then, when you ask it, that sort of whatever the prompt is that you provide, whatever the question is, it's almost as if it's coming off the top of its head, as opposed to having to, you know, pull it out of a book, right? So there is utility to doing that fine-tuning process and our purpose with our product is to try to get that into the hands of you know more local, like small businesses, universities, places that have some reason to be able to do that sort of process but not rely on the cloud. They do not want that info to leave. Yeah.

2:16:23 - Leo Laporte
So generally enterprise as opposed to home use.

2:16:28 - Allyn Malventano
No, no, I mean, we can scale up to enterprise, but our focus is on the smaller end, because enterprises they're going to have a rack full of GPUs in the first place. They already spent millions of dollars. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They bought a whole bunch of hardware. This is to be able to do it with a lot less hardware. The trade-off is time. So if you're willing to let it go for a day or two for, like, a pretty large model, fine tune, you can get the same result that you could. You know, yes, the enterprise could do that in an hour, but if you're willing to wait, you can do it for a tenth of the price, nice.

2:16:58 - Leo Laporte
Well, I wish you luck. I think it sounds like interesting stuff.

2:17:03 - Allyn Malventano
It's interesting. I was worried it was gimmicky when I first came on board, but then when I studied up on it I was like, oh okay, there's an actual purpose for this. It's not like what we saw at Computex, where everybody was trying to slap AI on all the things.

2:17:17 - Leo Laporte
It's like peanut butter.

2:17:20 - Allyn Malventano
Everything's better. This is an AI power supply, right it's like oh, what does it do for AI? Well, you can plug it into an AI computer, right?

2:17:28 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I will say, the one way I do use AI in my day-to-day life is I and I think I've talked about this either on this show or speaking Google before I use Mac Whisper on this show or speaking google before I use mac whisper which runs, um, yeah, open ai is like whisper transcription llm locally on my machine to transcribe like sensitive interviews, so I feel like local, uh, adoption of these models is really interesting right, not to mention, I think, good for the environment instead of those big uses.

2:18:03 - Larry Magid
And what I'm looking for is AI models that I can trust. I mean, I want a model where I don't have to constantly be on guard for hallucinations, right and that might be essentially a local area network approach, so to speak, of a database that a company puts together or a research institution puts together or some consortium of credible sources. That's all the junk.

2:18:26 - Allyn Malventano
Your best bet is actually a combination of both. You would start with a general model, so you're not doing all that work. You would do a fine-tuning process, so you're teaching about your specialty, the thing you actually want to reference, want to use it for, and then you can also do that RAG thing that I talked about on top of that, which is where now the thing already knows about your information but in addition, when you ask it something, it can reference the information on the fly and actually give you the reference and it can say, yes, here's the answer. And, by the way, it's on page 27 of this thing that you wrote.

2:19:04 - Larry Magid
But if, for example, if I had who won the 2020 election, there are going to be millions of sites that are going to say donald trump won it. I want to. I want it to be smart enough to just filter those out.

2:19:10 - Leo Laporte
So you know know that that if you have, you tried the new uh, claude sonnet claude is the ai from um anthropic and they focus, focus very much on safety as opposed to Google. In fact, the folks at Anthropic left Google because they were concerned about safety and I think, they're trying to do that.

They now have some RAG solutions as well, but Cloud 3.5, give me an example of some sort of information. I have it, I've subscribed to it. Oh, it says I'm using limited free plan. I'm not logged in. I thought I was. I paid for it and I have to say I'm very impressed with it. I have now, I think, four or five $20 a month subscriptions to AIs. One of these days I'm going to have to settle down and settle on one of them. Yeah, here it is. This is my paid one on my phone. What do you want to know? Cancel one of your oh gosh, give me a question.

What are the? Top ten stories in tech news over the last week what are the top 10 stories in tech over the last week? Yeah, because then we could have. I could have just done this instead of the show, right?

2:20:32 - Paris Martineau
yeah, that doesn't have enough information doesn't.

2:20:34 - Leo Laporte
As an ai assistant, I don't have real-time access to current news events. My knowledge knowledge was last updated in April. Oh, screw you.

2:20:42 - Larry Magid
But you know what?

2:20:43 - Leo Laporte
That's the answer you wanted, right? Really, Larry, you wanted it to say hey, I don't know, instead of making something up.

2:20:51 - Larry Magid
Ask it which is better, Mac or Windows.

2:20:53 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you're really asking for trouble. Hey, which is better, mac or Windows? Oh boy, that depends, of course. Yeah, mac or Windows, that would be interesting.

2:21:04 - Allyn Malventano
That depends, of course yeah, that depends, yeah, but you know I would give that answer too.

2:21:08 - Leo Laporte
Actually this is pretty good, you know. It says Macs are known for sleek design, user-friendly interface, generally more secure against malware. Integrates well with other Apple devices. Yes, preferred for creative work, often more expensive. Windows offers more hardware choices and price points. Greater software compatibility, more customizable, dominant in business environments, generally less expensive. Those are actually completely accurate assessments. I would say that's actually fairly good.

2:21:36 - Larry Magid
Why do?

2:21:38 - Paris Martineau
we need tech journalists Great question.

2:21:41 - Leo Laporte
Hey, why do we need tech journalists? Great question, hey, why do we need tech?

2:21:45 - Paris Martineau
journalists. Or do we need tech?

2:21:48 - Leo Laporte
journalists oh, no, See here's 10 reasons we need tech journalists. Look at that. Number one information dissemination, analysis and context watchdogs, consumer advocacies, trend identification, bridging the gap. This is, you know, what Claude has consistently impressed me. I have to say it's not quite so. Chat GPT is kind of ingratiating a little bit. You know, it's trying to make me like it. Claude is pretty good. I've been very impressed Anyway.

2:22:27 - Larry Magid
Oh, that's why I told me, I had an Emmy Should.

2:22:31 - Benito Gonzalez
I ask it who you are? Yeah, I like you. No, I like you.

2:22:35 - Leo Laporte
You must have an Emmy. You look like you have an Emmy, right, who is Larry Magid? Uh-oh, oh boy. Uh-oh, uh-oh.

2:22:47 - Allyn Malventano
This is not good.

2:22:48 - Larry Magid
What good does it not know me oh?

2:22:50 - Allyn Malventano
no, look at it, it knows you, it's going.

2:22:53 - Leo Laporte
Prominent technology journalist and Internet safety advocate. He's been writing and speaking about technologies since the early 80s, contributed to major news outlets including CBS News, san Jose Mercury News and Forbes, well known for his work on online safety for particularly children and teenagers. Co-founded ConnectSafelyorg, authored several books, including the mini manual for a free internet oh God, that's a long time ago. Megan has hosted radio programs, policy work, education, a doctorate in education from UMass. Is that true? It's true, actually, nice. Umass. Which UMass? Umass? Amherst, amherst, the best UMass. Given the nature of this query about a specific individual, I should note, while I strive for accuracy, there's possibility that some details may not be perfectly up-to-date or complete.

2:23:40 - Larry Magid
That's a relief.

2:23:41 - Leo Laporte
Just a disclaimer. It didn't get anything wrong, though, right.

2:23:45 - Larry Magid
And it didn't say you won an Emmy. The only thing. It's actually a mini-manual for a free university that I wrote in 1970-something, but that's close enough, it's amazing that it found it. Yeah, it's amazing. Some of that stuff's not in Wikipedia, so I'm not sure where it got lost.

2:23:57 - Leo Laporte
That's the real test, right.

2:23:58 - Larry Magid
I know that's what's amazing. I know All right.

2:24:02 - Allyn Malventano
Go ahead. I've been playing because of the work I've been doing. I've been playing around with like okay, how small of a model can you get away with running, and like is it, where does it fall off? And I was playing with the chat version. So that means it's quantized down to fewer bits per parameter when you do a chat version because it's supposed to fit on more hardware. And it was the llama 3. It was the new llama 3 model, but only the 8 billion ones, the smallest version, and it was quantized. So it was like almost the worst case scenario. But the newest model that's out, uh, and I asked it, like who am I? And it tried to tell me I was like the uh founder and editor-in-chief of a nan tech.

You know, I was like I'll take Well you know I was like I'll take it, but you know it's interesting.

2:24:43 - Larry Magid
There's a famous Larry Magid in the music industry in Philadelphia and sometimes it says that we are the same person. You know that we are known for our technology work and our music leadership, which is certainly not true. At least, I'm not a music guru.

2:24:57 - Allyn Malventano
Right, I guess Alan was close enough to a Nand that it just sort of crossed the streams and okay, fine, I guess I own. You know where's my, where's my paycheck?

2:25:04 - Leo Laporte
really we have, uh, in the uh youtube chat, a guy named greg helton, who apparently was also a nuclear tech in the 70s wait, yeah, and he says my question for ai is let's ask it why didn't mary the first, bloody mary, eliminate her heir to the throne, her half sister elizabeth the first, who is a church of england?

2:25:28 - Allyn Malventano
so I don't know what the answer is, but I'll ask it that's the kind of thing an ai would give you surprising answers to, like he's really obscure. You know, when you pull from crazy you like yeah yeah, I, I don't remember the question anymore.

2:25:42 - Leo Laporte
Let's, let's try again. Uh, I like that. That was the problem that was the problem.

2:25:47 - Larry Magid
I don't like the question anymore you're getting too old, leo.

2:25:51 - Leo Laporte
Why didn't bloody mary eliminate elizabeth? The first question mark is that sufficient? I don't know. Let's see. There are several reasons why Mary I of England, commonly known as Bloody Mary, did not eliminate her abscissor. Succession concerns lack of concrete evidence, political consequences. I think, Greg, this is a pretty good answer. Look at this. Look at this. Eight points. But herein lies the problem. None of us know the actual, actual answer, so we don't know. If this is right, though, you gotta ask a question that you know the answer to, then what's the point?

2:26:28 - Allyn Malventano
you know. You know what's hold on. You know what's next. You know what's next. I can already see this coming a meta crawler for all the ais oh, that's a good idea.

2:26:38 - Leo Laporte
It's an AI AI Like dog pile for search.

2:26:40 - Allyn Malventano
It's going to be dog pile for AIs.

2:26:42 - Leo Laporte
You're going to have to query check.

2:26:45 - Larry Magid
The answer to your question is why you'd ask it a question. You know the answer because I do it all the time. It's to tickle your memory of things that you might forget. There you go. So, for example, if I'm doing an article about something, there's so much I know, and then there were things. Oh yeah, I knew that, but I didn't think about it. Yeah, this isn't worth finding out for, though I'm sorry.

2:27:04 - Leo Laporte
I think this is pretty good. I mean, if I were writing a Elizabethan historic document, a docudrama, I might use these as the as the reasons you would use that succession concerns you know, despite that, succession concerns. You know, despite the religious differences, actually consult an expert who needs an expert? I got claude. I paid 20 bucks a month for it. I gotta use it for something. All right, that's true. Let us uh, let us say, let us adjourn until uh, wednesday do adjourn I, paris, you gotta come back.

Wednesday we're gonna have Molly White. That's going to be a lot of fun. The creator of Web 3.0 is going just great. Another wonderful website. Molly is always a hoot. She is fantastic. We will see you then. Thank you, paris, martineau, alan and Larry. I hope to see you again soon on our show. We appreciate it oh yeah, we'd love it. While there is still a studio, this is better coffee for a walk and record the show.

There you go we could do it on the, on the road, exactly, uh, we do this show, uh, uh, every uh, sunday afternoon 2 to 5 PM Pacific, that's five to eight Eastern, 2100 UTC. As we've seen, you can not only watch it now on YouTube, uh, youtubecom slash twit, slash live, but on discord, uh, if you're a club twit member. Uh, more about that in a moment. Uh, but also on Twitch, on X, on kick, wherever, wherever you can find streaming video, linkedin, really Facebook and LinkedIn Amazing, we're everywhere. And if you're just watching us for the first time, I thank you. I do hope that you will watch again. Remember, you don't have to watch live.

We make on-demand versions of our shows available on the website twittv. There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to the video of the show, so you can watch there or subscribe to Twit and your favorite podcast player. This show's been going on for we're in our 20th year now, so if your podcast player cannot find Twit, well, I got to wonder what kind of podcast player are you using? If you're a club member, you get ad free versions of this show plus all sorts of extras, and it's only seven bucks a month. Really helps us out, because the financial end has gotten a little tight. It's one of the reasons we're closing the studio. Ad support has dwindled, audiences have shrunk, there's a lot more competition, but we want to keep doing what we do. We really think it's important, and if you think so too, twittv slash club twit. We really appreciate it. We'd love to have you in the club. That's. That's it for this episode of this week in technology. Thank you for being here. We'll see you next time, and for now, another twit is in the case you're amazing.

2:29:50 - Allyn Malventano
Doing the twit all right. Doing the twit, baby. Doing the twit all right.