This Week in Google Episode 654 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. 

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for TWiG This Week in Google Stacey Higginbotham's here. We're gonna learn her secret author name today. So as Jeff Jarvis, we'll talk about Google. Their second biggest acquisition of all time, a security firm that actually is in the news today. Twitter is announced a new tour onion service just for viewers in the Ukraine in Russia. So they can still see what's going on in the world. And they found Edward Shackleton's boat, the endurance deep beneath the ocean in the Antarctica. We've got some pictures. It's all coming up next on TWiG.

... (00:00:40):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte (00:00:44):
This is TWiG. This Week in Google episode, 654 recorded Wednesday, March 9th, 2022. Did we do the ad? This episode of This Week in Google is brought to you by streak. Whether you're tracking sales, fundraising, hiring, or doing support streak is a CRM that will help you stay on top of all your processes directly inside Gmail. Get 20% off your first year of their pro plan. The most popular option by going to streak.com/to and by code academy. Join over 50 million people learning to code with code academy and see where coding can take. You get 15% off your code academy pro membership. When you go to code academy.com and use the promo code TWiG And by cash flying cash flies, giving a way a complimentary detailed analysis of your current CDN bill and usage trends. See if you are overpaying 20% or more, learn more@twi.cash line.com. It's time for TWiG this week in Google or on Google or of Google. The show we talk about everything Google. So maybe this week, but Google TWI, Stacey Higginbotham is here. It's great to see you Stacey from, I know Stacey on iot.com and the fabulous IOT podcast. They just had their corporate retreat.

Jeff Jarvis (00:02:20):
They had a team building next Stacey's

Leo Laporte (00:02:23):
Desert. Did you tell Kevin Casey fell back and said, Kevin catch me? Exactly. Exactly. Did you tell Kevin catch me? Yeah, no. You better boy. Icebreaker way

Stacey Higginbotham (00:02:36):
Than a Kevin.

Leo Laporte (00:02:37):
Hi, my name is Kevin and my favorite ice cream. Favorite is char Also with a, is the Leonard tower professor for journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark New graduate school of journalism at the city, university of New York. Mr. Jeff free Jarvis. Hello, Jeff. Hello? Hello? Hello. Do you, do you ever get called Jeffrey?

Jeff Jarvis (00:03:01):
Only by my mother when she was

Leo Laporte (00:03:02):
Alive Jeffrey,

Jeff Jarvis (00:03:04):
She was enraged at me, really because our wedding invitation, when, when she saw I would print it out, I didn't, I did Jeff.

Leo Laporte (00:03:12):
Oh, wow. How

Jeff Jarvis (00:03:13):
Could I do that? Wow. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:03:15):
She was not very formal.

Jeff Jarvis (00:03:16):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:03:17):
Yeah. And Stacey, did you stay delicious? I can bought them on your wedding. 

Stacey Higginbotham (00:03:23):
Stay, stay delicious. Stay

Leo Laporte (00:03:24):
Delicious. No. Okay.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:03:27):
That was not, although I'll throw this out to everybody. Yeah. Ideas accepted two weeks from today is my husbands and I are 20th anniversary.

Leo Laporte (00:03:37):
Oh, that's a big one.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:03:38):
I, if feels like that, but I just looked up. I was like, oh crap. He's like, it's in four days. What do we do? And I was like, no, no, it's much later. But yeah, if anyone has any ideas, I don't even know what to do for 20

Leo Laporte (00:03:49):
Years. Oh, that's a huge anniversary.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:03:51):
That's that's kind of a long

Leo Laporte (00:03:52):
Time. I think you have to go to Paris as I remember,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:03:54):
We're going in July, so, oh, that's what he says. You are

Leo Laporte (00:03:57):
Perfect.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:03:58):
So I'm like, okay, we're

Leo Laporte (00:03:59):
Perfect.

Jeff Jarvis (00:04:01):
And yeah, that counts. That counts.

Leo Laporte (00:04:02):
We're going, we're going to Sitka Sitka, Alaska in July.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:04:07):
Oh, that'll be fun, Jason.

Jeff Jarvis (00:04:09):
Yeah. Yeah. It's already coming. That's

Leo Laporte (00:04:10):
The cruise. I know.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:04:12):
Oh, I forgot about the TWI cruise.

Leo Laporte (00:04:14):
Yeah. So did everybody,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:04:16):
When, oh, when is it? When is it?

Leo Laporte (00:04:18):
It's July see exceed through the 23rd cruise do TV. Although I don't, I think it might be sold out. I don't know, but check, if you want go. It's not too late. It'll be Lisa, my wife and I and Paul Thra and his wife and will be probably, and then there's a few other windows, people who are going who've jumped on as well. So it as gonna be a fun, fun event, the TWI cruise to Alaska, if I'll tell you what, if it goes well, which is so far has gone very well. We'll do another one and and you can go, you guys can go cruise to

Jeff Jarvis (00:04:53):
If I may be so, so nosy as to ask.

Leo Laporte (00:04:56):
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:04:56):
Is this an excuse to get a free trip to Alaska for yourself? Or do you actually make some money at on it?

Leo Laporte (00:05:01):
No, that's a very good question. I, this I have done I used to do cruises for insight cruises, which was geek cruises at the time. And I did about 10 of them. And at the time I was doing 'em cuz they were free cruises, but then I realized it's, it's free a name only you really have to work hard. And at this point, yeah. We can afford to pay for our cruises. So it's really more, I think it's more a team building exercise for our TWI friends community. I think we make 50 bucks ahead or something in some ridiculous, so ridiculous amount. So there's, there will be some money in there, but not, not a huge amount. Not much. Yeah. Yeah. They give you,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:05:46):
But it's nice to see two cabins

Leo Laporte (00:05:47):
Audience. Yeah. Mostly it's the, honestly, that's the real reason to do it. Just to hang out with

Jeff Jarvis (00:05:51):
Well plus, and, and you're hanging out, you don't have to do programming. You

Leo Laporte (00:05:54):
Just, oh, we have to, some be here is programming. We have to, to do some, we have cocktail parties. We have E we have several events we have to do. Yeah. But we wanna do more. We're actually doing more than they're required to do. So yeah,

Jeff Jarvis (00:06:06):
What I mean is you don't have to lecture or

Leo Laporte (00:06:07):
Something. Yeah. We have, you have one lecture. Oh really? Yeah. Topic me the thing I know the most about.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:06:17):
Oh, a dear.

Leo Laporte (00:06:19):
No. it's you know, I don't know. There's yeah. I think there's one there's like a meet and greet there's there's some events. Yeah. And I, one of which Paul and I will take to a stage and swap war stories or something. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:06:32):
Do you go salmon fishing or anything?

Leo Laporte (00:06:35):
You could, if you want, there's lots of versions. There's I'm actually now debating whether I should really go mush, Huskies on a glacier, but that is an option.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:06:45):
I hear that. That's super fun. A friend of mine has

Leo Laporte (00:06:47):
Done that really fun. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, good. Maybe we'll do that. Maybe we'll do that.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:06:53):
Right. Well, if I'm back from Paris, So curious, I'm happy to like wave y'all goodbye. See,

Leo Laporte (00:06:58):
That's your, that's your, that's your 20th anniversary. You're going to Paris. Goodbye. Doesn't have to be at the same day. That's Page. Yeah. That's perfect. Okay. That's very romantic.

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:07):
And I ever tell you, like

Stacey Higginbotham (00:07:08):
I'm going to work. Does that count? I'm giving a speech on low power, white area networks.

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:13):
You got a good deal. Yeah, that's fine.

Leo Laporte (00:07:14):
How do they say that in French?

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:16):
It's so romantic.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:07:19):
I'm like petites. I don't know.

Leo Laporte (00:07:23):
Oh,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:07:24):
I think they call those LPWAN in French.

Leo Laporte (00:07:27):
LPWAN I do wanna warn you that they, they, they call wifi Wey. Yeah. So get ready for that.

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:33):
And they call V or Putin

Leo Laporte (00:07:36):
Putin, which I love speaking of it's. I feel guilty about even talking about vacations and cruises and trips to Paris. Yeah. With a horrific war of aggression going on in Ukraine. And of course for the last, whatever it's been now, two weeks, that's all we've been talking about on these shows even because there's a huge, you know, tech angle to all of this I don't know how much I want we wanna spend, but as you know, Google has pulled out of the market its app store out of the market, but there are Russian apps stores and you take a wild guess what? The number one app is in the Russian app door. It's VPNs like, wow. They just took off, just took off in the last couple of days, which I think is sort of encouraging. I mean that we're seeing half a million downloads of VPNs in this past week alone. And I think that means that they want to get real news. They don't want the 

Jeff Jarvis (00:08:39):
Yeah, the Julie I, who is my favorite commentator on this, I think she's just utterly brilliant and she's Russian and American. And she talks about how the, the only way you can get any information now is by setting up the VPN. And that's only gonna be a certain, very small elites doing it, but that's it, that's the only way

Leo Laporte (00:08:57):
I was listening this morning to the puck news podcast. That's where she is now@puck.news. And she was on the podcast. She was practically in tears. She was just devastated.

Jeff Jarvis (00:09:07):
Yeah. It's been, it's been,

Leo Laporte (00:09:09):
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:09:09):
Really affects her. Yeah. She has friends. It also just for the, the state of Russia for Ukraine, obviously, but also for Russia, people are leaving. I've been reading the Helsinki Soma thanks to Google translate and there are train loads of Russians getting the heck out trying to figure out where to go, their credit cards. I, Julia reported this, the credit cards supposedly pulled out. They still work in Russia. The problem is they don't work outside of Russia. So the people who are getting the hell out, can't use their credit cards now.

Leo Laporte (00:09:42):
Yeah. And you can't go to an ATM. 

Jeff Jarvis (00:09:45):
No. In fact, one of the places they said, I saw somebody did a an hour long video about how to leave and it was in Russia. And I didn't know, but whoever summarized, it said that if you, you can still use the Chinese credit card clearances. So in some cities, if you go to Chinese restaurants,

Leo Laporte (00:10:03):
Oh

Jeff Jarvis (00:10:04):
Lord. So you use that for their customers and you can eat.

Leo Laporte (00:10:07):
We talked, Cory doctoral was on Twitter on on Sunday we talked a little a little bit about why kicking rush off the internet. A very bad idea. Yes. Ukraine asked I can to suspend Russian internet domains. Really? Yeah,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:10:24):
Yeah. But I can, was never gonna do that. I mean, they, that's actually a, a relatively common ask. Andrea and I were talking about that. Not relatively common, but com countries do ask this for various conflicts or governments will ask, I can to take their country offline as a, as a form of punishment or censorship. I mean, there's, there's all kinds of, it is not that uncommon

Leo Laporte (00:10:50):
As a point mother boards quote from Frederick Jennings, a cybersecurity lawyer from Brooklyn said asking I can to remove di you TLDs or take action against Russian internet traffic is like asking Rand MCAL to remove Russia from the map, probably ethically defensible, but practically absurd and counterproductive. And I can't said, look, this is not, we are, we are non-government. And the last thing we want to get do is get political, because of course it was Russia that was pushing to get the us commerce department out of I can and other internet activities, because they felt like it was you know, America being too involved. So this would just give them another more leverage into that. So I can yeah. Was very clear that no, no, no, we that's not how it works. That's the right

Jeff Jarvis (00:11:37):
Decision.

Leo Laporte (00:11:37):
Yes. it it's also, and this is one thing that concerns me about, about a lot of the sanctions. It would have side effects, harmful side effects that wouldn't in really hurt Putin, but might hurt the Russian people might hurt the world. Economy might hurt other things. It's very challenging to think of what sanctions you can do that would, that would be persuasive to a mad man and not really hurt the people of Russia. 

Jeff Jarvis (00:12:11):
But you also want political. Sure. The other thing that Julia says is that Moscow has long been anti Putin. He's surrounded by the people who don't like him, but the entirety of the restaurant, Russia is very pro Putin pro-war,

Leo Laporte (00:12:22):
But what are they gonna do? Rise up against him. They may, at some point they may not be happy. Yeah. But I mean, is that your strategy? That's how we're gonna deal with Putin. I, I, I don't know. You actually have a good article. You wrote a buzz machine. What is our moral line in Ukraine?

Jeff Jarvis (00:12:41):
This was, and, and, and, and I had no position here. I was trying to just think through the the implications of the, of the tough decisions. We're obviously not gonna do a no fly zone, but no,

Leo Laporte (00:12:51):
And, and that's the simple thing to figure out, but cuz how do you enforce a new, no fly zone? Well, you're gonna shoot Russian planes outta the sky. That's how you enforce it. That seems like a bad idea at this point. That's an active war. 

Jeff Jarvis (00:13:06):
Right. But you know, in a way, so if we say that he can, if we, he can do anything up to using a Nu, then that gives him license to do lots of horrible things. So absolutely. Is there a different line if he used chemical weapons, would we do it? He's using his thermal Barrack weapons. We're not, we're letting them do it. So, so in a sense, this line in the sand gives him license to use any other weapon, the same as the NA line. If he attacked Finland tomorrow, are we now saying we do anything the same as we didn't for Ukraine? Yeah. So we've given him license to do, do everything that point

Leo Laporte (00:13:41):
There's also, that's a secondary issue, which is that China's watching very carefully because of course they'd like to invade Taiwan and and, and calculating, I would imagine with great precision, what would be the consequence to them of doing that and watching and see what the west does. So there's more than just controlling Putin. Yep. Yep. 

Jeff Jarvis (00:14:07):
A friend of mine is the former president of Estonia Thomas, miss S. And it's fascinating to watch him on Twitter because he really hates Putin and, and, and Russia and says basically I've been warning you all these years. Are you gonna listen? And he said to Finland outright, are you gonna listen?

Leo Laporte (00:14:28):
Well, that was, you know, one of the points Corey made is that we've been, we've been building up to this for 20 years. PO our America policy and NATO policy has really have been preparing the way, paving the way for this all along. But that's not very useful at this point. It's like, okay, great. Let's take a time machine back. What do we do today is the real question, right? And, and what can we do today and what will be effective today? One of the things I brought up it reminds me of how much, and you've always said this, Jeff don't regulate use norms to control behavior. Don't regulate the internet use norms, how much we rely on norms in our lives. But when people are willing to act outside the norms, I was, this came to me. I was watching a video of a drugstore in Los Angeles where a guy just walks behind the counter, starts loading a bag with stuff behind the counter. And everybody's like, freaked out. Somebody's calling 9 1 1. But you know, the guy's gonna is walks out the door with all this stuff. He violated a norm. We're so used to that norm, we think we're P somehow protected. There's no consequence to that.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:15:34):
This was the entire Trump presidency was a guy who was that's right. Repeatedly, willing to violate more. I mean,

Leo Laporte (00:15:40):
Then what do you do?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:15:42):
Well, that's, I think that's one of the things that we've learned over the last few years is that, well, in, in that case, you have to have some sort of accountability or response that is, I

Leo Laporte (00:15:52):
Mean, yeah. That's the challenge

Stacey Higginbotham (00:15:54):
Not to use force. That's the, that's when the state comes in when you're like,

Leo Laporte (00:15:57):
Oh yeah, but

Stacey Higginbotham (00:15:59):
Now we have to regulate this.

Leo Laporte (00:16:00):
Yeah. But when you're using a force against another nuclear power,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:16:07):
Yeah. States

Leo Laporte (00:16:07):
That's are so high. And, and this, this is where I don't, I don't think we have a good solution. It's interesting to watch. Well,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:16:17):
Yeah, this is a go terrible. No, this is a terrible problem. It is. I mean, this is where mean, this is a snotty kid with nos basically, you know, just yeah. Having a Tant going

Leo Laporte (00:16:30):
His own. And, and this is Julie I off, he take a guy with nothing to lose. Right? Yeah. And that's really scary. And she points out, this is the problem with people, with dictators, with people like Hitler and Paul pot. And so forth is, you know, Hitler wanted Germany to be destroyed if he couldn't, if, if they couldn't win, that didn't, that the country did not deserve to exist for his generals did not follow up on his, but

Jeff Jarvis (00:16:56):
There's a piece of that to Stacey's Stacey's exactly right. About, about Trump time. And my argument is that that's about, about people who know that they're going to lose their white Heman and they don't wanna share it with those who follow. And so they'd rather destroy

Leo Laporte (00:17:11):
The institution. Yeah. Yep. So the reason I bring this up is, is we're seeing a lot of companies, tech companies try to respond in a way that's reasonable. But it's also, there's two kinds of reasons you to respond. One is it's it's looks good. It looks bad not to,

Jeff Jarvis (00:17:30):
Or we can't get our money out anyway. So we might as well shut down. 

Leo Laporte (00:17:33):
Maybe the that's another reason cuz we can't help it. But, and then there's the third you're really trying to do some good and it, and there's I think a very strong question about, well, how, what can you do? That's gonna do some good one of the things. And we don't

Jeff Jarvis (00:17:45):
Want Google to leave entirely cuz we want people to have some access to information.

Leo Laporte (00:17:49):
Well, there's a good, there's a good example. Apple and Google both pulled down their app stores, leaving many Russians who wanted to use signal

Jeff Jarvis (00:17:58):
Right

Leo Laporte (00:17:59):
In the, in the dark because they could no longer get it or a VPN because they could no longer get it. And so yeah. Okay. You, you think

Jeff Jarvis (00:18:08):
They should have left the app store up?

Leo Laporte (00:18:09):
I don't know. I don't know. What do you think? I don't know what the answer is. You don't, you certainly wanna send a very strong signal that this is not okay, but you also don't. I mean, look, the Russian, most of the Russian people are innocent in this. Right.

Jeff Jarvis (00:18:24):
Stacey, what do you think?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:18:28):
I mean, this is the sort of thing we debate over dinner at our house. So I, I think here's the issue. I think most people in Russia, you know, there's, it's like 120 million people, 110 million people. It's it's a lot of people. And even if you look at your VPN stats, not everybody cares to know or wants to know or seeks this out. Right. So you've gotta recognize that by pulling

Leo Laporte (00:18:56):
45 million.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:18:57):
Oh

Leo Laporte (00:18:57):
Wow. Yeah. And there's, and there's 40 million in Ukraine.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:19:02):
Okay. So if, if you take their access away, not all of them were gonna access it. Anyway, what you're doing is taking easy at access away. And I still think in times of war, the people who want the information will actually go to efforts to get it. Does that make sense?

Leo Laporte (00:19:22):
Yeah. That's what, that was the doctrine in China, right?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:19:29):
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:19:30):
One to get information, you also create languages to share information

Leo Laporte (00:19:35):
Right.

Jeff Jarvis (00:19:36):
In China,

Leo Laporte (00:19:37):
Right.

Jeff Jarvis (00:19:37):
You create heuristics to, to AB stand for things because you can't use

Stacey Higginbotham (00:19:42):
The actual and ever evolving.

Leo Laporte (00:19:44):
So we've mentioned before, we'll probably mention a lot the Ukraine minister of digital transformation, the 32 year old Mahalo Federoff here shown in a black hoodie appropriately has called for hackers to come to the eight of Ukraine. And the response has been dramatic tens of thousands of self proclaimed hackers have volunteered. And I just don't even understand how you would assign them jobs and yeah. Manage them. So what you're really asking for is total chaos

Stacey Higginbotham (00:20:22):
They'll benefit from it. But did you also see Bloomberg actually did a really good story about an employee, I believe who used to work at Uber who was Ukrainian and now he's gone over back to the Ukraine or back to Ukraine to manage their supply side and procurement. Nice. Oh, it was, it was a really interesting story about people who have, you know, other skills coming back and trying to help build the infrastructure needed for more based

Leo Laporte (00:20:53):
On Andrea Lee SCO experiences.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:20:56):
There you go. You found him

Leo Laporte (00:20:57):
Yep. This an article from Brad. Good Googling. Brad stone.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:21:00):
It's a good story. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:21:02):
Yeah. 

Jeff Jarvis (00:21:05):
Changes, courage. That's a, it's a really nice friend.

Leo Laporte (00:21:07):
Yeah. Yeah. And then there's of course there's the mother and children who were killed, who in Ukraine fleeing the fighting, who was in fact a controller working for a Silicon valley tech company remotely. So it goes both ways. I mean, it, it really hit all of us and you want, you just wanna do something and you know, of course we can donate and things like that. But but what, what can these tech companies do that's appropriate and it's gonna not gonna backfire. It's very, and you raise Nick, you really interesting point, Jeff, which is whatever you don't do is permission. You know, whatever, wherever you don't draw the line right. Is permission. And that's terrifying.

Jeff Jarvis (00:21:57):
And the same with the, with the Polish jets now is no that's too risky. Okay. So now we've said, now we've acknowledged that line. 

Leo Laporte (00:22:06):
Yep.

Jeff Jarvis (00:22:07):
It's it's I mean, I just, I was gonna say this in, at the end, but, but I'll bring it up now. I just finished listening to eh, where'd to go the fun Noman biography. That's just out man from the future, the visionary life of John Vollman

Leo Laporte (00:22:24):
To that. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:22:25):
Oh, you'll like it, you like it a lot. Both of your, you will, I think but of course he was a, a arguably the pioneer of game theory. And so listening to was fascinating in the current context of this is all game theory. Right. And are you dealing with, with, with someone who's gonna make rational if sick choices in Putin?

Leo Laporte (00:22:49):
Yeah. It is game theory. Not, it is game theory.

Jeff Jarvis (00:22:50):
It's all game theory. Yeah. All game theory and it's, and it's really interesting to see it then abstracted to that level.

Leo Laporte (00:22:58):
But you remember all of the game theory stuff that went on with atomic war.

Jeff Jarvis (00:23:04):
That's exactly it.

Leo Laporte (00:23:06):
And oh wow. It seemed like brink brinksmanship in many ways. You have to have a lot of, well, it was, I have a lot of faith in game theory. I don't know if I have the nerve. My brother, it's a game of chicken.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:23:21):
Yeah. My brother texted me. He's like, I love you. We might die soon. And I was like,

Leo Laporte (00:23:25):
Oh my God,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:23:26):
Like calm down. I

Leo Laporte (00:23:27):
Don't think he's that bad yet. I hope not.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:23:29):
No. I, my husband did let me know that just nearby in Bremerton is the largest supply of nuclear bombs in the United States.

Jeff Jarvis (00:23:38):
So I was like, oh, there's that?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:23:40):
But you know what, if I'm gonna go out in a nuclear explosion, I'd rather be closer than farther.

Leo Laporte (00:23:46):
Actually. I'm embarrassed to admit I, I did go to the nuke map to see, Do you know about nuke map? You put in your location and then you choose what kind of bomb let's send a yield or you could select a preset. Let's say little boy hear Shima bomb. A 15 kiloton bomb. I'll I'll I've got my pin dropped in New York city. So let's just see well

Jeff Jarvis (00:24:16):
Thanks a lot, Leo.

Leo Laporte (00:24:17):
Oh, you're safe. You're safe. Hi, Jeff. You're safe. But well, one

Jeff Jarvis (00:24:21):
Of the big stories I did at the examiner in San F when I was a Sunday editor there, way back when was Lawrence Livermore lab had developed a neutron bomb. We, we, we destroyed life, but the buildings stay okay. It's the real estate bomb. Yeah. And, and it was developed at Laura's Livermore right there near you. Yeah. And so we did the same thing. We did maps of, of the bay area and what would go and you know, it was, it was irresponsible as hell, but

Leo Laporte (00:24:45):
You'd publish that in the newspaper.

Jeff Jarvis (00:24:47):
Well, page one.

Leo Laporte (00:24:49):
Yeah, that is, I don't know if it's irresponsible. It's certainly scary. I don't know where if, I mean, you're not gonna, I think you think Oakland, well, it's ship building. There's a lot of ship building, but they're not gonna try to knock our ships out. They they're gonna, they're gonna try to cause as much paint cuz it's the wars gonna be over valley in 15 minutes. I'm not Silicon valley. I'm not worried about Silicon valley. I'm saying what's the closest point that might be hit by a bomb. You see what I'm saying?

Jeff Jarvis (00:25:15):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:25:17):
I'm trying. Look, Hey we're this is kind of nuclear secrecy.com. If you want to have some fun, here's a nuclear weapon tested by North Korea in 2017. If we're detonating say, yeah, we're still safe. We're still safe. The the fireball radius is that yellow circle. Radiation radius is the green moderate blast damage, gray, thermal, radiation, yellow, and then light blast damage gray.

Jeff Jarvis (00:25:46):
Well then, and then obvious. Well, so the device is the best thing you can do is stay in your home. Yeah. Until the worst of the radiation blows over

Leo Laporte (00:25:54):
You. So the largest bomb ever tested by the us S R is a hundred megaton bomb. And even that doesn't quite reach Petaluma. They

Jeff Jarvis (00:26:06):
Have a few of 'em Leo,

Leo Laporte (00:26:09):
When they're not gonna drop a bomb on Petaluma. Now they might on Bedminster. So I, if I were, I'd be nervous and Bremer's true. And Bremerton is definitely on the list. So anyway it was nice knowing you. No thanks. No,

Jeff Jarvis (00:26:23):
But Leo when you were, let's do an old guy's moment here. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:26:28):
No, never did duck and cover. Never did duck cover. Never did. I

Stacey Higginbotham (00:26:31):
Did. Oh, we did duck and cover.

Jeff Jarvis (00:26:33):
You're kidding me, Stacey. You did your age

Stacey Higginbotham (00:26:38):
Where you got under the desk. Oh no, those were tornado drill. Nevermind. You also got under the desk, but no

Jeff Jarvis (00:26:45):
One apocalypse or another apocalypse.

Leo Laporte (00:26:47):
I do remember in my grade school there were civil defense signs. Yes. And there were bomb shelters. There were nuclear bomb shelters. And so the civil defense sign and there were barrels of water in there. So I was aware of it. I don't remember the ducking cover was the, and that was more in the fifties where they, for some reason

Jeff Jarvis (00:27:07):
It was,

Leo Laporte (00:27:07):
But I thought you'd be safe under your desk. If there were a nuclear war.

Jeff Jarvis (00:27:11):
I know it's absurd. It's so magnificently absurd.

Leo Laporte (00:27:15):
Yeah. it's you know, I think this is a way sometimes people deal with the unthinkable is to trivialize it a little bit. And and so I, I, well,

Jeff Jarvis (00:27:28):
Or was that, was that a, was that a PR effort to, to make us more scared than we needed to

Leo Laporte (00:27:32):
Be? Oh, do you think they wanted you to be scared?

Jeff Jarvis (00:27:35):
Yeah. Politically

Leo Laporte (00:27:36):
Here's a fun little tweet. If you wanna be scared, this is Russian police in in Moscow stopping people to see what's on their phones. Just

Jeff Jarvis (00:27:48):
It's very star wars too. And

Leo Laporte (00:27:49):
What, yeah. Look at how they're dressed. They're just randomly, apparently stopping people and scrolling through their messages. Just make sure that they're not that

Jeff Jarvis (00:27:58):
Means they have the gloves that have the the, the, the skin that's content.

Leo Laporte (00:28:02):
A good point. Yeah. Capacity mitten. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:28:04):
Ambassador. Thank you.

Leo Laporte (00:28:06):
Wild. I mean, I don't know how widespread this is. Obviously a lot of people are walking by and not being stopped. I don't know why they stopped these guys, particularly. I don't also know why wearing shoulder pads, but maybe it's just more intimidating that way. The other funny thing is, and you'll be glad to know this. The police are wearing body cameras in Moscow, not to your advantage of sure. In any way, but they all have body cameras on. Wow.

Jeff Jarvis (00:28:35):
What do you think about Twitter doing the tour onion?

Leo Laporte (00:28:39):
So the, I, I think this is what this I would put in there. I greenwash it looks good. Not sure what the benefit is. So they've launched a service that makes it in theory, easier to access Twitter, which is right now very much curtailed in Russia. I don't think they've turned it off, but they've slowed it down and they're certainly going through stuff. So the idea is to let people in censored countries, access Twitter through tour. And then this is the long address. If you, I can't, I'm not gonna say it, cuz it would take me half an hour to read it, but there's a long onion dot onion address. You need a tour O and you can go here. And the idea is which I'm not using, so I'm not getting there. I, the idea is that by going through onion routers, go through many, many, many, many other servers to kind of anonymize your traffic. But there is a flaw in tour, which is that it's possible to control the entry or exit nodes in such a way that you're de anatomizing people. Ah, almost certain Russia does that. We do it. So I would not, if I were worried about my life in a authoritarian regime, I would not use tour. I would not assume tour is private any more than a VPN is private. Right. So, so I think that's kind of a mistake to encourage that. Oh, so that's

Stacey Higginbotham (00:30:23):
Well, do you wanna talk about another tech security thing? I think this is actually a really good one.

Leo Laporte (00:30:28):
Yes.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:30:29):
It is the critical infrastructure defense project, which is CrowdStrike, CloudFlare. And it's not Royal Pingdom. It is,

Leo Laporte (00:30:40):
Should be something with cloud in their name though.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:30:43):
No, it's ping ping identity. That's it? That's who it is. They are, they got together. So CSA, we talked about them last week. They did their shields up document on February 22nd. That was basically like, Hey, monitor your stuff. We're not being attacked from a cyber perspective yet, but here are best practices you should follow. So these three companies got together, they teamed up on their various different service offerings and created a free for the next four months set of services that enterprises can use to implement the ceases shields up program. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:31:18):
That's great. And

Stacey Higginbotham (00:31:19):
So the critical,

Leo Laporte (00:31:20):
Yeah, it's a really structured defense project. There's a posting here on a CloudFlare describing it CrowdStrike is by the way, a sponsor. So I'm proud of that. Good job CrowdStrike. And I think CloudFlare has been a sponsor. I don't think they're currently and ping identity is the third. That's really interesting. Good for them.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:31:43):
Yeah. I just, I, you know, we're, we're talking about all the, you know, these things that are terrible and we're debating all these moral things and those are worth debating, but it's also worth noting that there are actual steps that if you are in it, you can take, and

Leo Laporte (00:31:57):
This is not greenwashing. This is absolutely genuine good stuff. Right? Yeah. Critical infrastructure, defense.org is the website free cybersecurity services and support for four months. And this is in response to a potential threat from Russia of cyber warfare cyber attack,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:32:15):
Which I will toot my own horn. I have a guy coming on my show tomorrow, so tomorrow's show we're gonna talk about the potential for industrial controls being hacked. So infrastructure attacks by Russia as a result of the invasion of Ukraine. And just as a sneak peek, I'm gonna tell you that right now, it's not happening. We don't need to worry about that. Which is interesting right now.

Leo Laporte (00:32:38):
And I'm not sure if that's showing restrain on the part of Russians or if the Ukraine is they're a little busy, so yeah. Maybe, or Ukraine is knowing that Russia's been testing out their cyber warfare capabilities in Ukraine for a decade. Maybe they're prepared. Maybe they knew this, you know, maybe they're actually pretty heartened by the way,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:32:57):
I, I think it's a, yeah, go

Leo Laporte (00:32:59):
Ahead.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:33:00):
They are. I mean, in, in Ukraine, yes. They've been yes. Taking action, but also I think Russia can't do it in other places because that is, you know, going to demand an immediate repercussion. Right. If Russia suddenly comes in attacks our infrastructure, we know they're already in

Leo Laporte (00:33:19):
They're here.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:33:20):
Yeah. if they do anything with that, especially if it leads to loss of life, that's like Pearl Harbor all over again, except launch from right. You know, a computer keyboard.

Leo Laporte (00:33:29):
Well, we have our cyber warriors. They have theirs. China has theirs. North Korea has theirs, ironic buts.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:33:36):
If they do

Leo Laporte (00:33:36):
A, I think we wanna keep this from kind of getting into a hot cyber war.

Jeff Jarvis (00:33:41):
I think that's, I think that's really a lot of this too.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:33:44):
I think also any sort of cyber attack in this, it's not going to remain in the digital sphere. Right. If they actually blow up one of our dams, we're gonna send actual military ex you know, military resources over there. That's what I mean, it's not going to be us going and hacking them back. It's gonna be as

Leo Laporte (00:34:03):
Oh, oh yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:34:04):
You flooded, you know, Buffalo, New York we're coming after you now.

Leo Laporte (00:34:09):
Yeah. But what if you did something less? What if you shut down the power grid and you could, and, and you did it in a way that maybe was not attributable to bad guys from Russia. What if you did that?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:34:19):
It would be attributable. I mean, we, we can figure that stuff out pretty well. I mean, it might take us

Leo Laporte (00:34:23):
A week. We're not gonna use, what are we gonna do if we do that? See, this is the thing.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:34:27):
If sit down the power grade. Yeah. How many people

Leo Laporte (00:34:29):
Die? What are we gonna do?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:34:31):
Well, if people actually die, okay,

Leo Laporte (00:34:33):
Let's say people die. What do we do? Okay.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:34:36):
If 500 people die, we're going after them. I promise troops.

Leo Laporte (00:34:40):
We send,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:34:41):
Will send troops over.

Leo Laporte (00:34:42):
The problem is how does this not escalate into a nuclear war that will kill hundreds and hundreds of millions?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:34:46):
Well, that's, that's why I think Russia's kind of saying, Hey, we're not going to deploy this yet. That's why we're not there yet. See people are worried about it, but

Leo Laporte (00:34:55):
They threatened last week to use Nokes. And let's hope that maybe cooler heads are prevailing. But if Putin is nihilistic at this point, I think there's a real danger in the next few months. If it, if it does not go well for Russia, that there, they will start doing things that are the other thing that's gonna happen security of the entire world.

Jeff Jarvis (00:35:18):
Yes. And I think the other thing that's gonna happen is I, I follow very closely. Oddly, Finland and Sweden. I was, I fascinated by this and thanks to the very good Google T I can do that. And they're inching closer and closer and closer to joining NATO.

Leo Laporte (00:35:31):
They're terrified. They're right on the border.

Jeff Jarvis (00:35:34):
Oh, there's and the

Leo Laporte (00:35:35):
Fear is

Stacey Higginbotham (00:35:35):
Well, and they've

Leo Laporte (00:35:36):
Freshest succeeds in Ukraine. Who's next.

Jeff Jarvis (00:35:40):
Exactly. So, and, and in Finland, literally people are calling and saying if it happens, where am I gonna be called up to and where do I volunteer? And, and, and stuff like that. So, so that's gonna freak him out. That's gonna him off. He considers that a a hostile act, but they need to protection. And then, and we are, you know, on the hook to protect them. But I go back to my, my post if, if he goes into attack Finland. Okay. We stand back again. If he uses chemical weapons in Ukraine, we stand back. Is there no other line besides crossing the NATO bridge and Nokes is that it, you know, I don't know,

Leo Laporte (00:36:19):
Patrick Beja, who's been on our show many times as a podcaster who lives in Helsinki had a long Twitter thread about how, you know, just his own anecdotal stories of what's going on in Finland. Right, right now I found it very very interesting. Let's go to the very top here, the view from Finland I, you know, I don't know, it's complica, I'm not gonna read it to you, but it's cuz there's like 20 tweets, but Russians have always been tort between the reality of their TV and the reality of their fridge, which relates to sanctions, whatever finished authorities thinking about right now, they're starting to look at decades old plans for handling hundreds of thousands of refugees, not from Ukraine, from Russia, trains and buses from St. Petersburg have been full for days. And with the rush economy about to collapse things aren't gonna get better. Finland has a population of 5 million that's St. Petersburg alone. Yep. And they're just over, they're just over

Jeff Jarvis (00:37:28):
That's half the size of new Jersey's

Leo Laporte (00:37:30):
Population. Yeah. so there's,

Jeff Jarvis (00:37:33):
I saw video of people at the train station in, in Finland saying we had to get out.

Leo Laporte (00:37:38):
Yeah,

Jeff Jarvis (00:37:39):
We'll

Leo Laporte (00:37:39):
Go anywhere. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:37:45):
I don't wanna make this, the 

Jeff Jarvis (00:37:47):
No,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:37:48):
The, the Russian this weekend,

Leo Laporte (00:37:50):
This, you

Jeff Jarvis (00:37:51):
Can't, you can't ignore it.

Leo Laporte (00:37:52):
Yeah. This

Jeff Jarvis (00:37:53):
Weekend

Stacey Higginbotham (00:37:53):
World war three.

Leo Laporte (00:37:55):
Yes. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:37:57):
I started putting stuff in, in, in the rundown and I did know what your decision was gonna be. So I, I put it together down at the bottom and other, and I think it'll, it'll, it'll sadly get there where it is kind of other, but we, we can't not ignore it for a while. My, my happy place in the world, my happy place on Twitter is my book history wants Twitter list. Right. Which I go to when, when all else fails me Gutenberg and such and it's, it is all Ukraine now of course, cuz these are human beings all concerned for the world and everything is Ukraine. Now, everything as it should be right now.

Leo Laporte (00:38:27):
Well even if it's not, and you have moments of forgetfulness, which happens on our shows all the time and then it just, it floods back in on you shortly thereafter. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:38:39):
Last week you did a hell of lot of stories to sell

Leo Laporte (00:38:41):
The topic. Yeah. We're gonna, I think we we've done enough. We have plenty of other things we can talk about our hearts about

Stacey Higginbotham (00:38:48):
Mind. Do you wanna talk about Google by Mandy as part of this? Or is that, I mean, it kind of could go here or

Leo Laporte (00:38:54):
That's not related to Russia, is it?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:38:57):
It's just cybersecurity.

Leo Laporte (00:38:59):
Yeah. We're gonna get to that. Definitely. Okay. Definitely. That's I would call that not a Ukraine story. So if it, if it, if there's certainly cybersecurity is gonna be part of what we, Google,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:39:10):
Google makes the pitch that it's more important now than ever.

Leo Laporte (00:39:14):
Yeah. Than ever. They have been talking with Mandy since before the war. So

Leo Laporte (00:39:19):
The reason I know this to Mandy, the reason I know this is Mandy talked to us about advertising about a month ago and then said, hold up, hold up on that advertising thing there for just a minute. Oh, just a minute. And now I think I know why our show day brought to you by streak. Look, if you're using Gmail, you should be using streak as a startup founder and entrepreneur, just a busy person. You probably live in your inbox, tracking sales, tracking, fundraising, hiring supporting your users streak S T R E a K is a CRM. That'll help you stay on top of all your processes without even leaving Gmail, use streaks free email tools to check. If your emails have been opened, you can even send bulk emails with automated follow up emails to improve your response rates. And yes, Google loves straight.

Leo Laporte (00:40:17):
They don't just tolerate 'em. It was recognized as Google's technology partner of the year is used by thousands of founders and entrepreneurs and small business owners it's built right inside of Gmail. So it's part of your everyday workflow. And it all comes down to these pipelines, which are so cool. You create pipelines to track what you're doing. All your processes within Gmail, whether you're prospecting for new customers or raising a fundraising round, create a pipeline, growing your team, create a pipeline, managing support. Tickets, create a pipeline. You don't have to leave Gmail everything's in there makes it easy to collaborate by automatically sharing emails and notes with anyone in your team. Look, I, it could, it does so much. It's so powerful. And it's so easy to use. I say, if I tell you all the things it does, you're gonna say that's hard to use.

Leo Laporte (00:41:03):
And if I don't, then you're gonna say, well, it doesn't do enough. It does everything you want. And it's easy to use. How about that? But you gotta try it. That's the only way. That's the only way. And the good news is it's free to use on your own. You could try streak out today for free on your own. If you feel like it's doing the job, get the pro plan. And you can fact, if you're gonna do that, get 20% off your whole first year of their pro plan. That's the most popular option. Of course, when you go to streak.com/TWiG, S T R E a k.com/TWiG, if you're using Gmail, you know what a power tool it is, but now you can do a heck of a lot more manage everything from within Gmail, get 20% off your first year of their pro plan, straight.com/TWiG. Thank them for their support by using that address and that way you, we get credit. So that's, it goes, what comes around, goes around. President Biden has signed an executive order that the crypto boys are going excited are all over about. They're so excited. I'm not sure why they're excited, but I guess it it's at least acknowledgement that crypto exists yesterday, signed an executive order emphasizing. This is for vice the us government's commitment to ensuring that virtual assets are developed responsibly and foreshadows the development of a digital dollar I'll

Jeff Jarvis (00:42:30):
Make him happy or unhappy

Leo Laporte (00:42:31):
Makes him happy. Huh? I don't know.

Jeff Jarvis (00:42:33):
So rich, the rich dad, poor dad guy who I didn't know was a Trumpian kind of off the, off the rails. He was, he was going all. They're gonna, they're gonna destroy crypto. They're gonna take it all over. They're gonna make it one federal dollar. And I don't know why I'm quoting him cause he's nuts. But 

Leo Laporte (00:42:47):
Well see, that's the thing

Jeff Jarvis (00:42:48):
There's that extreme part of this that's

Leo Laporte (00:42:50):
Yeah. I, I mean, I'm not sure I buy the interpretation. This is good news, cuz you're right. It's all it's saying is we're gonna look more into this. But everybody I, I read said, oh no, this is great. Vice says, industry insiders appear to welcome the executive order, which was expected to be essentially positive on cryptocurrencies. This is Jerry Brito director of a DC based think tank coin center. He tweet message. I take from this ex from guess what kinds of coins? The message I take from this executive order is that the federal government sees cryptocurrency as a legitimate, serious and important part of the economy in society. I think it's a good signal to serious people. Who've been holding back from getting involved. One of the things I think people like Jerry are are saying is we needed guidance from the feds about this, or nobody would take it seriously. We, if they're going to do things they got, at least we'll know what the roadmap is.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:43:50):
They're validating the technology. They're saying, Hey, this is a thing worth looking at because we think it's a real thing. And when the federal government does that, that's a hu. I mean, even if they come in and squash it, at least they've said, okay, I mean the next step is going to be like, not squashing it, but if they come in and say, okay, we're looking at this, then everybody else is like, oh, well the federal government's gonna look at it. We'll take a look at it.

Leo Laporte (00:44:14):
Well, it's partly that, but it's also just, we need some certain effect. There was a cryptocurrency exchange. One of our sponsors actually that was find a lot of money by the S sec, but welcomed it because they said, look, you know, we'll pay the fine, fine. What we wanted was clarification. They've never said, are these securities, you know, what is, what are these they've? So the FCC fine essentially said, yeah, if you're trading crypto futures or whatever it was, that's a security and we're gonna treat it like a security. Okay. So they actually, as bad as it is to get fined, welcomed it because now we know what the rules are and this is a problem and it's, what's gonna make it hard for it to, to mature and to get people invested in it is the uncertainty of knowing how the feds are gonna come down. So even if they come down potentially badly, at least we'll know, we need to know. And I think that if there is a digital dollar, there are people who would say that's a terrible thing. Probably the rich dad poured that guy because of course that means maybe no more anonymity and you know, the government's snooping on transactions there really right now, there is really only one completely private transaction that's cash, unmarked pills. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:45:34):
Well, the other thing is, is that, is that the, the reputation of crypto keeps getting worse and worse. I put a whole bunch of crypto stuff down in, under other, in the one of which is 4 million crypto fraud operation with a brother and sister.

Leo Laporte (00:45:48):
Oh yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:45:49):
When that kind of stuff goes on, it hurts the reputation of safety of the entire field.

Leo Laporte (00:45:54):
That's right. If

Jeff Jarvis (00:45:55):
They wanna make this broad,

Leo Laporte (00:45:56):
Same thing with NFTs, there's all sorts of scams. And I saw somewhere 80% of NFTs are scams. Yeah. So this needs, it has to stop being the wild west. And then yeah, if you're wide IP you might say, oh man, I'm gonna miss those good old days, but there's no future. If you don't get if you don't get some certainty

Jeff Jarvis (00:46:19):
On this, I would find it useful. I don't know if you agree or not, because this is not a democracy. It only matters if you do to almost discuss crypto a little more often on the show, just cuz it's, it's such an important crypto and watching, okay, I will. Right. That was

Leo Laporte (00:46:33):
That. Who was that? I'll

Jeff Jarvis (00:46:35):
Discuss the blockchain. That was the pain noise of like, Oh

Leo Laporte (00:46:39):
God, I thought, oh

Jeff Jarvis (00:46:40):
Wow, that was a dog pig.

Leo Laporte (00:46:43):
I know one, it was some animal was no, I think we should.

Jeff Jarvis (00:46:48):
I, can I up my ring tone, please look, we 

Leo Laporte (00:46:52):
I am not. Wow. I am increasingly skeptical of all of this stuff. In fact

Jeff Jarvis (00:46:59):
That's why it's interesting. Yeah. But, but the architecture has potential.

Leo Laporte (00:47:03):
Nobody's saying there's not some interesting stuff. And blockchain obviously has some applications is a decentralized ledger. That's great. But as it's been implemented through cryptocurrencies and, and now NFTs and Dows, it almost, almost always seems to be at, at best speculative and at worst to scam. And so I'm very very bearish on, on cryptocurrency in general and crypto in general, but yes, Stacey and that's why Stacey made that noise. I'm sure she feels the same way. I will. She doesn't want this to be the crypto bro show. And I

Stacey Higginbotham (00:47:40):
Understand I do not. I will, I will abandon ship, but I bring up things

Jeff Jarvis (00:47:46):
That, Oh no crypto for us,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:47:50):
That is a, that is not a out, it's just a legitimate like, Nope, no,

Leo Laporte (00:47:54):
You would not.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:47:55):
My, you wouldn't

Jeff Jarvis (00:47:56):
God.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:47:58):
I promise to y'all cuz I, I follow a lot of this because I do think the blockchain is important for establishing you your trust. Yeah. Too trust, not this authenticity in IOT. I get a lot of interesting pitches around data. I will bring those to you. And I will say, Hey look, this is actually too legit. This is pretty cool. Yeah, I've done it in the past. I'll continue doing it, but we don't have to talk a lot about or cryptocurrencies.

Leo Laporte (00:48:25):
Look, it's not blockchain's legit, but it's not about blockchain. I otherwise people would be all excited about Mongo DB or you know, the latest UBI key it's it's it's it's if it were just a decentralized ledger database application by itself, no one would want to talk about it. They wanna talk about it because of the huge amounts of money that can be made. Spec made speculating on currencies that are created by using that technology now. So we could talk about blockchain, but I think blockchain absent, all of that stuff is about as interesting as talking about Hadoop. It's just not

Stacey Higginbotham (00:49:06):
Ma DB is not a distributed

Leo Laporte (00:49:08):
Database. I'm saying it's a technology. There's lots of technologies out there. Yeah. What's

Jeff Jarvis (00:49:12):
Interesting is the, is the

Leo Laporte (00:49:13):
Use we didn't, we don't spend hours talking about public key crypto. Yes. Hugely important. Valuable, because it was never tied to a $60,000 instrument. Nobody cares about it. So we talk about all of that stuff all of the time. I'm just saying, saying it's a good technology is not why people are talking about it. It's not why it's interesting.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:49:36):
Right? Well, I'll bring you the use cases that are yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:49:38):
There's great. That's,

Jeff Jarvis (00:49:39):
There's

Leo Laporte (00:49:40):
Great use cases for public key crypto too, but that doesn't, that's just technology. That's not why there's all his tension. And by the way, every time I say this and I will get it today, I'll get emails and tweets saying, okay, boomer. But yeah. And I am, I think Larry David isn't far off on all of this. Let's just, let's just, let's just put it that way now. There are lots of good news.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:50:02):
I wanna say that I am not a boomer, right.

Leo Laporte (00:50:04):
But we didn't

Stacey Higginbotham (00:50:05):
Be to dear gen Xer.

Leo Laporte (00:50:07):
We did not. We did not spend hours talking about RSA and encryption as useful and positive and beneficial as it is. It is the reason we spend a lot of time talking about blockchain is not cuz it's a great technology and a distributed ledger.

Jeff Jarvis (00:50:24):
Well it's, it's the simple rule to what Ivan, didn't say, I need to find a new use for print. He said I wanna invent something new and

Leo Laporte (00:50:32):
Was the to create the novel. Yeah. people talk about print a lot more than they talk about blockchain.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:50:39):
I was gonna say so if we bring up a lot of blockchain issues, are we just going to be tilting at windmills?

Leo Laporte (00:50:45):
Oh, very cool.

Jeff Jarvis (00:50:47):
Very good.

Leo Laporte (00:50:48):
Very good. All right. All right. 

Stacey Higginbotham (00:50:52):
What else we gotta talk about?

Leo Laporte (00:50:55):
Have we done all the blockchain we wanted to do? Oh

Stacey Higginbotham (00:50:59):
No. I was. I'm like

Leo Laporte (00:51:02):
Let's see. Well,

Jeff Jarvis (00:51:03):
I found this fascinating. I found this interested the Islamic debate over the permissibility of crypto because in, in Islam.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:51:11):
Oh, cuz they don't allow, USY not USY right.

Jeff Jarvis (00:51:16):
There's there's, there's a, there's a TDIC to misuse it. A debate going on, which I found

Leo Laporte (00:51:24):
Maybe

Jeff Jarvis (00:51:24):
Thank you. Yes. It's much better. Yes. a discussion about whether or not buying in a blockchain is a form of us or is it just something that develops and builds value? And it's interesting how you take these things and people have to adapt them into their own norms and structures. So I that's just work bench. All

Stacey Higginbotham (00:51:44):
They call it. Is it Sharia? Sharia,

Leo Laporte (00:51:47):
Sharia. Well,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:51:48):
Sharia finance. Finance is what I've heard it used or called. If you wanna give it the not MDIC but it's Sharia. If you wanna thank you. Give it the proper

Leo Laporte (00:51:59):
Affiliation. God has permitted trade as and forbidden usey. So is it trade or is it USRI? I would say it's closer to trade than us use three is borrowing for interest.

Jeff Jarvis (00:52:11):
Well, I would say gas is USRI

Leo Laporte (00:52:13):
Just cuz it's USOR gas prices. Doesn't make it USI, right? Yes.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:52:20):
Everyone's complaining about gas prices. Yes. They're high, but good.

Leo Laporte (00:52:24):
You say that as a Tesla driver. You don't. I

Stacey Higginbotham (00:52:26):
Say no. There's two reasons. It's because traveled frequently enough in Europe that I'm like our gas prices are nothing. I

Jeff Jarvis (00:52:33):
Met Ethereum gas, you know?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:52:35):
Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:52:36):
Oh. I thought you made gas.

Jeff Jarvis (00:52:37):
I met Ethereum.

Leo Laporte (00:52:38):
See, we're talking about price per gallon. Yeah. I thought

Stacey Higginbotham (00:52:42):
You were getting off on some weird old man tangent.

Leo Laporte (00:52:44):
I was like,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:52:45):
Oh, come

Leo Laporte (00:52:45):
On that. What all is about $6? No, we're not talking about those gas prices.

Jeff Jarvis (00:52:57):
This is a technology show for God's sake. I

Stacey Higginbotham (00:52:59):
Was so confused.

Leo Laporte (00:53:01):
A chef. It's not been beyond you in the past to bring up non-technology related stories. Hey like, so in the novel thought that's legit. That's legit. It was technology back then. No, yes.

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:17):
That's the point

Leo Laporte (00:53:17):
I grant you that yes. Yes. In its day it was technology. Technology is anything that wasn't invented when you were born. That's my definition. So Microsoft's purchase of nuance. Just closed with the EU. Finally can close after 11 months of regulatory scrutiny. That's why the man thing while interesting. Doesn't, you know, we, we always give the headline Google to acquire mandate $4.5 billion deal, but we don't really mention, and that may go through in a year after all the regulators get ahold of it. And, and Corey doctor very quick to point out some very good news, I think on Sunday on TWI that with Lena Conn running the E or the FTC and Tim woo in the white house as an advisor, we've got some very strong antitrust proponents with the ear of the president and, and, and with the administration. And this may in fact, not be a very good time to make big deals.

Leo Laporte (00:54:30):
This would be the second largest history, a deal in history for alphabet. I'm trying to think of what the largest would be. Was it Android, maybe 5.4 billion Manian is a security cybersecurity company. They they had fire eye. They bought fire eye. So they, for a while, they were called fire eye. But that Mand fire eye or not just Manian they publish reports about we, we often quote their reports about cyber campaigns. They are often the ones that identify nation states is involved. And in fact, the us intelligence agencies, apparently according to the wall street journal rely on insights provided by Manian.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:55:18):
Oh, you wanna know the biggest acquisition? Yeah. Motorola mobility for 12.5 billion. Wow.

Leo Laporte (00:55:25):
How much was YouTube? It was like 1,000,000,003 or something.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:55:29):
1.5.

Leo Laporte (00:55:29):
Yeah. It was nothing. Why 0.4 billion. Why would Google Google want a cybersecurity company, I guess is the question

Stacey Higginbotham (00:55:39):
They need something to differentiate their cloud products. It gives them. And if you think about it, Microsoft has a huge cybersecurity business. They have their whole forensic

Leo Laporte (00:55:49):
Well, and Google has project zero and you know, TAs Armandy and they have a very good security group.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:55:57):
They may just be looking at it as the next big thing. You need to have to be a cloud,

Leo Laporte (00:56:02):
A cloud

Stacey Higginbotham (00:56:02):
Provider service, an infrastructure provider even.

Leo Laporte (00:56:05):
Yeah. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:56:10):
I don't know.

Leo Laporte (00:56:12):
They,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:56:12):
I mean, Microsoft was trying to buy it wasn't weren't they?

Leo Laporte (00:56:15):
Yeah. go wall street journal talked to a cybersecurity analyst at the bank Needham group, Alex Henderson, who said it's not a great fit. In my opinion, the acquisition will test the degree to which Google can use man's consulting services. That's their business, by the way, to sell automated cyber security tools, tailored to cloud only environments. He said the deal will put Google into more direct competi with Microsoft. As you said, Stacey annual revenue for Microsoft security business, 15 billion is big business.

Jeff Jarvis (00:56:56):
Wow.

Leo Laporte (00:56:57):
But, but, but does Google wanna become a security consultant? That's cuz that's the business. I think,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:57:03):
I mean, I think it's become so much more relevant in what's ha what we're seeing happen, especially with the digital transformation is that a lot of companies are trying to go get all of their infrastructure and tech expertise in just a few places. Yeah. So if you have that consultancy and can offer it, then you can just go all in on Google, right? You don't have to

Leo Laporte (00:57:28):
That's the journal says Manian is often called by a company once they realize they've been hacked to, to Mo up and figure out why and how and how not to do it again.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:57:38):
They've every single hack is a phone call to Mandy. I'm not kidding. Anytime you see like colonial pipeline. Oh really? Any of these they call me. No, it's a very well known name.

Leo Laporte (00:57:50):
So is, so that's the question. Does Google wanna have this as a business and they charge, and this is you call Google man and they come in or do they wanna offer this as value add to their existing cloud business?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:58:02):
I assume they'll start just by owning in offering it. Yeah. And then they'll look for ways to integrate it. But if they're smart, they'll leave it enough alone for a while and then start to bring what they can in house additive to their own right stuff. Is Stacey,

Jeff Jarvis (00:58:20):
Are you you're, you're inspiring a question. I isn't this like a transitional point as, as what IBM went through. Right? Well, we, we, we make computers and then they became a consulting company and well, we offer hosting, but we need to offer a whole set of services. And, you know, I wouldn't, you know, does Google at some point buy a top seven accounting firm, you know, to become a business consultant. That's

Leo Laporte (00:58:47):
The, it seems like it's on the order of that, right? Yeah. It's buy that capability. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:58:53):
You're you're right. I'm trying to think of any other business that Google has. That is, I mean, cuz everything else is pretty much automated. Even all their ad stuff. The only is that that would be the only place I'm not familiar enough with their, you

Leo Laporte (00:59:05):
Don't bring in Google can consultants to help set up your company network or to move you to the cloud. But

Jeff Jarvis (00:59:09):
Maybe you

Leo Laporte (00:59:10):
Do, maybe that's that's the new thing.

Jeff Jarvis (00:59:12):
Maybe that's that's the way they can grow versus Amazon or maybe

Stacey Higginbotham (00:59:15):
They see it as something they can productize. Yeah. Maybe in two years they'll be like, all right, we've learned everything we can from these consultants. And now we've turned it into an AI service.

Leo Laporte (00:59:27):
Do you think that part of this comes from the fact that Google's looking into the fact that they're a week third in cloud it's Amazon, it's Microsoft and then everybody else. Yes. And that

Jeff Jarvis (00:59:38):
Microsoft is a consulting company too, isn't it? Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:59:40):
Yeah, yeah. Microsoft. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

Jeff Jarvis (00:59:43):
Security thing. Google's gotta and, and Amazon is not. So the only way Google's gonna keep up, I think is by adding those kind of product lines.

Leo Laporte (00:59:50):
Yeah. It's their, it's their, yeah. It's what they need to do if they want, if they're serious about being in the cloud, they need to do something. Right. That makes sense. Well, the cloud is

Jeff Jarvis (00:59:59):
The new mainframe, right? If, if you take the IBM example then that's where you end up going

Stacey Higginbotham (01:00:07):
A thousand people in the cloud business, just their souls just curled.

Jeff Jarvis (01:00:11):
I know exactly. Oh exactly. I love it. That's why I kind of, I like, I love the hairy of it.

Leo Laporte (01:00:16):
I, I, I don't know enough. Maybe somebody in our chat room or a discord is more year with cloud providers and so forth. But what does Amazon offer along these lines? Does Amazon have a security consultancy? What do they do?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:00:29):
They don't have a security consultancy to mine. I mean they have over 200 something odd cloud products. So there may be like a secret one that I'm not aware of. They have started in the IOT side and the, to get the more sophisticated cuz like Amazon has historically been seen as like more basic infrastructure or infrastructure for startups and such Microsoft. And that's why they're such a big player in the cloud is because the established big companies go to Microsoft. Right? So to get some of that business over is part of like the big companies doing digital transformations. Amazon has started to add some consulting around like data analysis and predictive maintenance and optimizing your cloud infrastructure for some of this. But they don't have anything to my knowledge on the security

Leo Laporte (01:01:17):
Side. No, in fact, I'm looking at a list of Amazon security tools for AWS and almost all of them are completely automated. They're just, yeah. It's just software running in the background. You know, that will tell you Amazon inspector, a security assessment service for applications deployed on AEC, two AWS shield fully, fully managed, distributed knowledge, service protection denial DDoS protection service. I knew we actually use shield. That web application firewall, all that stuff. This is all software. So they, they, yeah, they must. That's interesting. And yet they're number one. So maybe you don't need that. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:01:54):
But they're, They're not number like it's not mutually exclusive to buy, put your infrastructure on Amazon and then use Microsoft security stuff. Right. So that's another thought process. Google is not doing a bang up job being this awesome cloud service provider. It's number three, right? Distant number three. What if it can then come in and say, oh, I'm gonna offer a security service that competes more with Microsoft, but you could be an Amazon customer and maybe I'll make it more googly feeling more developer friendly than maybe a Microsoft option.

Leo Laporte (01:02:29):
Right before this story broke. Mandy actually put out a report saying that the political I'm sorry, the prolific Chinese hacking group, a 41, a P T 41 had compromised multiple us state government networks. This is according to man dent. The group conducted a months long campaign during which it targeted successfully breached at least six us state networks, all of which it been notified by mania, but they did not publish which states. The it's interesting. You wanna know how the hack happened? There is a software application offered, I think by the ag department, widely used in many states called USA herds. It's an more health management tool and it used log for shell,

Jeff Jarvis (01:03:26):
No

Leo Laporte (01:03:26):
Log for J rather. So it was vulnerable to log for shell between according to man dent between May, 2021 and February of last month of this year apps 41 used vulnerable internet face seeing web applications to gain a foothold into state networks, including exploiting a zero day in USA herds and the log for J logging library, Mandy and said at 41 began exploiting log for shell within hours of the vulnerability being announced in December of last year. So there you go. As soon as there's disclosure, you are vulnerable led to the compromise of two us state government networks and other targets in the insurance and telecoms industries. After gaining that foothold on the network, apt 41 went on to perform extensive credential collection, which I guess got them into the other network works. In one instance they use a sequel injection vulnerability and a proprietary web app. Wow. So that's, this is nation state hackers. This is China. I'm sure Russia's doing the same thing. But one of the things Manian said is while everybody's looking over at Russia, don't forget, there are other major threat actors, continuing operations as usual.

Leo Laporte (01:04:56):
Yikes. Yikes.

Jeff Jarvis (01:04:59):
So one more second. Just one more second. I'm trying to think as a brand who would you more likely call for consulting if they had the arms Google or Amazon

Stacey Higginbotham (01:05:13):
Go, those are really terrible options.

Leo Laporte (01:05:16):
Google. Yeah. Really

Stacey Higginbotham (01:05:17):
Trust, trust you

Leo Laporte (01:05:18):
Mightly you might call IBM or HP or, you know,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:05:22):
I would call Microsoft.

Leo Laporte (01:05:24):
Yeah. Microsoft. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:27):
That and I think is the essence of this. I think that that's that's you inspired it Stacey and Leo, but I think, I think that's they may see that it's the missing piece. They have to

Leo Laporte (01:05:35):
Have who you gonna call.

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:39):
All right. Thanks

Leo Laporte (01:05:41):
Stacey. On IOT story. Ooh. Researchers find potentially vulnerable, smart home devices. Last as we're talking about vulnerabilities. Tell us about it. Miss Hickin B stay delicious. Oh,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:05:57):
Like where, where is the stay delicious coming

Leo Laporte (01:06:00):
From? I'm just trying to figure out if Stacey were a nickname for a longer name.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:06:06):
It's it's a nickname for Anastasia.

Leo Laporte (01:06:08):
Oh, okay. Is it, is that your name?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:06:12):
No. My name is Stacey. I was born

Leo Laporte (01:06:14):
Hopes

Stacey Higginbotham (01:06:14):
Up smack in the Stacey.

Leo Laporte (01:06:17):
Anta you I'm gonna call you that from now on. Is that like that? Stacey is the, is the nickname for Anastasia? That's interesting.

Jeff Jarvis (01:06:25):
Anastasia HIIN

Stacey Higginbotham (01:06:27):
Station

Leo Laporte (01:06:28):
Name. That's gotta be your novel. That's

Jeff Jarvis (01:06:30):
A lot of Sy

Leo Laporte (01:06:31):
That's that's your novel name? Anastasia. Hi, she writes me

Jeff Jarvis (01:06:35):
Anastasia w hi.

Leo Laporte (01:06:38):
Yes, I do enjoy those murder mysteries by Anastasia w Higgin BFO.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:06:44):
I shall keep that in the back burner for when I do my prime series.

Leo Laporte (01:06:49):
Are you gonna do one? I hope you do. By the way. Speaking of which Stacey does do the Stacey's book club in our discord. And the next book is Corey, Dr. O unauthorized bread. I told Corey he was very thrilled that you're gonna do that. So Woohoo. That's neat. That's neat. And John's reading it right now says it's great.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:07:08):
Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:07:09):
It's about a toaster. We

Stacey Higginbotham (01:07:10):
Don't take the bad books.

Leo Laporte (01:07:11):
Toaster DRM, baby.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:07:14):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:07:17):
Unauthorized bread. That'll be a club Twitter event coming up when soon. Yes,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:07:24):
It it's the 24th

Leo Laporte (01:07:26):
Actually. Oh, it's a couple of weeks.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:07:28):
And I will tell you the time as I pull my calendar up. Oh, it is 9:00 AM.

Leo Laporte (01:07:35):
9:00 AM. So just so you knows Paul throt will be doing a fireside chat on March 31st. We've got Stacey's book club, the untitled Linox club Linox show. These are all things that happen inside the club. It's an amazing club. It's really taken off. Thanks to Ann. I should have mentioned Ann's not here cuz it's his birthday. Happy birthday, Ann,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:07:57):
Happy birthday.

Jeff Jarvis (01:07:58):
And we know we don't know how old he

Leo Laporte (01:08:00):
Is. We don't know.

Jeff Jarvis (01:08:02):
We want to know, but we don't.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:08:05):
He told us all to do five squats before breakfast. No.

Leo Laporte (01:08:08):
Before lunch five, I could do five. I could do well.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:08:13):
Yeah. That's you just gotta start. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:08:15):
Just gotta start somewhere. Thank you aunt for doing all of these great events and for doing this, the book club and everything. And if you are not member of club TWI, that, that isn't even the main, that's not even the main show. The main deal is ad free versions of all of our shows. We thought that this court will just be, we'll throw something for fun. It turned out to be a fabulous place to talk about everything, not just the shows, but all sorts of topics that geeks are interested in. And it goes, the list goes on and on even sport ball. If you're not a member seven bucks a month gets you. Those ad free shows access to the discord, the TWI plus feed all the extra shows we do inside the club or on that feed, just go to twi.tv/club TWI, please join club TWI. It really helps keep the lights on here at TWI central TWI party central. So, oh, oh, Patrick Delehanty is gonna be also doing a fireside chat. He is our engineer. If you wanna know how all, how all this stuff runs. He's the guy who does that. That's March 17th, St. Patrick's day, March 24th for the book club, March 31st for Paul thro AMA. So it's a very busy March and club TWI. How exciting?

Leo Laporte (01:09:38):
Let's take a little break. Okay. And we'll have more oh, wait a minute. Were we starting to talk about something before that? Yes. It's like potentially. Do you wanna talk about my story? Forget that article. Forget that article pastor

Jeff Jarvis (01:09:49):
To, to

Leo Laporte (01:09:50):
Summarize it somehow. Anastasia Hein. Bathum got me off on a tangent. So what

Stacey Higginbotham (01:09:56):
My alter ego does. Yes. okay. What three years ago bunch of researchers launched something called IOT inspector. And if you downloaded it, we

Leo Laporte (01:10:07):
Talked about that when it came out, right? Yeah, yeah,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:10:09):
We did. And if you downloaded it, it tracked like the behavior of smart devices in your home. And about 5,000 people downloaded at it. They got about a huge database, about 50,000 devices behaving in the wild.

Leo Laporte (01:10:22):
So this is the upshot of that. We talked about getting it and using it. Now we know what the results are and what are the results?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:10:30):
Well, we, we know, so, I mean, they're using this pool of data for other research, but this particular research, they looked at it and they said, oh, holy cow, a lot of these device, or some of these devices are behaving in ways that devices that use older vulnerable versions of open SSL are behaving. So they can't say that these 32 Amazon devices, these 22 Samsung devices and the list goes on are actually using vulnerable versions of open CSL because they don't actually know what versions they're using. This isn't information that's available, but they do behave like vulnerable versions. And some of these vulnerabilities they're, they're allowing for remote code execution. And the idea here is they didn't do this to be like, gotcha. They did it to, because they're trying to figure out how we make I O T devices transparent and secure in the way that, you know, we try, we try to make web browsing transparent and secure using public key encryption. So public key infrastructure. Sorry does it. So yeah, this

Leo Laporte (01:11:41):
Isn't it gonna require though, hardware manufacturers to step up as much as anything else.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:11:45):
So hardware manufacturers are already stepping up. They're doing like most of these companies, not all, but most of them are start starting with like design secure by design. They're also starting programs for like defense in depth and all the good buzzword. But what happens is maybe they don't update everything. Maybe they're just not on top of something. And nobody knows. The other thing is like we have certificate authorities on the web. I didn't realize that. But some companies issue their own I device certificates. They don't even have

Leo Laporte (01:12:18):
An oh self-signed yeah. That's not good.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:12:20):
Yeah. So everything's self-signed so they're basically, this is basically just them saying like, look, this is an immature ecosystem. We need to make it more secure. What are the let's open up conversations that how we can do this.

Leo Laporte (01:12:35):
This chart is interesting. You have this in your blog posted at Stacey on IOT. The number of days that companies ran outdated versions of open SSL. After I guess it was heart bleed. Was it after the heart bleed vulnerability there is it whatever the SL vulnerability was? And some the waited a long time look, LG, look here LG between thousand and 2000 days who was the fastest am. Samsung is pretty quick. Sonology was pretty quick. Glad to hear that. That's what I used QAP. Another network attached storage was probably the quickest Amazon, a lot of stuff, but not all this stuff.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:13:18):
And some of this could be indications of like little devices they sold like a few of, and then right. Deco like discontinued. So they're just not thinking about it. A lot of these are smart TVs. If you look at these devices, a lot of them look like media storage or smart TVs, and those are notorious for being kind of Hmm. Hmm. Is what I'll go with

Leo Laporte (01:13:39):
The biggest range. And maybe it's a measure of how many devices they offer is Google which patched some of its devices within just a few days and took, you know, several, it looks like several years to patch the rest of them. How many?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:13:56):
Just two Google only has two devices that we're behaving weirdly

Leo Laporte (01:14:00):
What? Okay, so explain this graph.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:14:03):
So they're looking, yeah. It's, it's a complicated, I was

Leo Laporte (01:14:05):
Like

Stacey Higginbotham (01:14:08):
The devices, the number of devices that are affected are in parentheses.

Leo Laporte (01:14:12):
Oh, there they are too. The number I see. I see.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:14:15):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:14:16):
I see. Okay. Amazon had to, to give you some sense, 32 devices that were affected this brand that's device lines, I guess we should say Samsung 22 device lines. So, wow. Wow. What

Stacey Higginbotham (01:14:31):
So? And they're, they're gonna continue using this pool of data for other research. So, you know, we, I note in there, if you want to, you can, it's not something you should run all the time because it does kind of slow down your internet speeds cuz it's using deep packet inspection, but you know, running it occasionally and having it

Leo Laporte (01:14:47):
Really valuable. Yeah. Thanks to those of you who that so that we can see some of this information there is an attack on Amazon's echo devices. It's a little bit, you know, I was thinking about how could this yeah,

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:02):
This

Leo Laporte (01:15:02):
Is okay, but wait a minute. I was so the way it works is you have to be within range of the echo so that you can shout pair with my what's phone

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:11):
That can happen. And to an apple echo.

Leo Laporte (01:15:13):
Well, once I'm paired, once my phone is paired to your device, then I have control of the device. Yeah. So

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:21):
Do what to give you the wrong weather

Stacey Higginbotham (01:15:23):
To tell it. Well, no. To tell you to unlock the doors or something, this is a stupid attack.

Leo Laporte (01:15:28):
Well, okay. I thought it was, then I thought about it. You know, who should worry about this people in apartments with thin walls?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:15:34):
Yes. That's what I was thinking. I was, this is something for people in apartments or possibly hotel rooms, maybe like cuz they are putting Amazon echos and hotel rooms. Yeah. So if you had someone, so you

Leo Laporte (01:15:46):
Need to be at voice ranged initially for the initial attack and then Bluetooth range the rest of the time. So, but if you had a thin wall and you could shout experiment with your neighbor, shout, echo, what's the weather gonna be like? And if it responds, then you know that he is vulnerable and then if you have an echo, so are you

Stacey Higginbotham (01:16:05):
Yeah. Yeah. I'm like,

Leo Laporte (01:16:09):
Or if you hear endless fart jokes then you know,

Jeff Jarvis (01:16:13):
So right. Yeah. That's, that's more fun. I like that.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:16:16):
And that the hacker is a teenage boy. Yes. Or a five year old child

Leo Laporte (01:16:20):
Or the host or our fan of a podcast called this in Google. There, you Right now I'll do the,

Jeff Jarvis (01:16:32):
I don't even know what we went off to while we went off to it. I

Leo Laporte (01:16:36):
Can't remember. It started with an, it started with stay delicious and then Anastasia and then, and then it went down and then it was the Stacey's book club. And then I did an ad for the club TWI and then anyway, just, you know, that's me.

Jeff Jarvis (01:16:49):
What, what, what is your middle initial squirrel? Stacey

Jeff Jarvis (01:16:53):
Squirrel

Stacey Higginbotham (01:16:53):
L gods world. And my middle name is Lynn

Leo Laporte (01:16:58):
Anastasia. L Higginbotham perfect name. W

Jeff Jarvis (01:17:02):
I thought w was better. I

Leo Laporte (01:17:03):
Thought L w is pretty good. You want more,

Jeff Jarvis (01:17:05):
More syllables? Yeah. More syllables. Yeah. Yes. Okay. Dear your end.

Leo Laporte (01:17:11):
Lisa came very close, very close to sending you our word square from last night. But I said, no. Jeff would hit

Jeff Jarvis (01:17:19):
The roof. Don't do it to me. Lisa, what did I do to you? Lisa GE.

Leo Laporte (01:17:25):
She said,

Jeff Jarvis (01:17:26):
We should send this.

Leo Laporte (01:17:27):
We should send this to All right. Jeff Jarvis is here from CUNY and a buzz machine. And have you been on MSNBC lately?

Jeff Jarvis (01:17:43):
No, I don't know what I said. Be on an ages. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:17:47):
It's the war, you know?

Jeff Jarvis (01:17:49):
Well, no I've been on pandemic, you know? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:17:51):
Used to be on all

Jeff Jarvis (01:17:52):
Here. I, you know, like every, like every white male on the internet, I am an epidemiologist. So yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:17:59):
You have opinions. Let me

Leo Laporte (01:18:00):
Explain COVID to your ladies.

Jeff Jarvis (01:18:02):
I'm now an expert in, in, in flyer zones and, and diplomacy too.

Leo Laporte (01:18:08):
Also Stacey. He, who was a very legitimate expert in all things chip. Oh she is. Were you impressed? Did you follow at all the apple announcement yesterday? I was

Stacey Higginbotham (01:18:17):
I, I followed some of it. I had to get on a plane. I

Leo Laporte (01:18:20):
Was, the plane had to take off blown away.

Jeff Jarvis (01:18:23):
No, please can the captain hold off. They haven't announced. Wait a minute

Leo Laporte (01:18:28):
Yet.

Jeff Jarvis (01:18:28):
I'm

Leo Laporte (01:18:28):
Hearing something about an inner connect, secret feature. I don't know how secret it was, but I it's true. I had not read about it. That was in the apple processors. Theil apple, Silicon processors that allowed them to do a high speed interconnect with other chips. Now up to other dyes up to now, there's only been one dye in all the apple Silicon devices. But now with these new apple studio devices, there are who die on the ultra anyway. And the interconnect is apparently very, very fast. I can't remember the numbers they gave, but it was something several hundred gigabytes, no terabytes. It was two and a half terabytes, a second of data over these interconnects, which is incredibly fast. And at this point it feels like in chip design, Apple's starting to leave everybody in the dust. There's

Stacey Higginbotham (01:19:14):
A, oh yeah. I mean, memory bandwidth was our big issue and Apple's just like, they they're like let's buy some chip firms. Let's hire some people. And then like two years later, they're like, bam, we've changed. The, we have changed everything. It's really impressive. Yeah. Go apple.

Leo Laporte (01:19:29):
Yeah. It's it is. I mean way I'm I I'd say go apple cuz we can buy apple products, but I'd love to see until an AMD and Invidia and others say, okay, okay. Okay. We'll do that too. But well

Stacey Higginbotham (01:19:41):
They have been trying to do it right. I mean they really have, it's not like they weren't solving for this problem. It's just that apple

Leo Laporte (01:19:47):
Solved better.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:19:49):
Yeah. Has done a really good job. And you know, they also do a, a really good job marketing. I mean nobody, nobody tunes into Invidia's

Leo Laporte (01:19:56):
No, no I do. We did. We do. We do. Actually we, we covered it last year anyway and I probably covered it again this year. It's the next month I think. But you're right. It's not, doesn't get the attention that apple 

Stacey Higginbotham (01:20:10):
Doesn't get the love and the cool graphics. I mean Invidia's last thing was cool. You know why cuz they did it all in VR, right? For

Leo Laporte (01:20:16):
AR or yeah. And they, in fact, we, we found out that even there, after the fact, after the fact, even their CEO was, was a imaginary. In fact, I love it for a couple minutes. Not for the whole talk. No, we followed that. I thought that was very interesting. I'm really excited about Invidia. The, what they're doing with AI as and cars as well as gaming, they really have found a way to use these GPS in very exciting ways. 

Stacey Higginbotham (01:20:41):
Yeah. I wanted to put 'em on the cover of fortune in 2015, but they said, no, it's too nerdy. You were the 2017. They did it.

Leo Laporte (01:20:49):
Hey, here's some good news and I wouldn't call this greenwash at all. Tesla's just announced, you know, remember that Elon Musk announced that SpaceX was gonna send Starlink terminals to Ukraine. Now Tesla's announced they're sending power walls to Ukraine and expanding the supercharge network for, for Teslas and plug

Jeff Jarvis (01:21:12):
In your

Leo Laporte (01:21:12):
Tank. Yeah. And giving up to three months of pay to employees going back to work. So I don't know what that has to do with Ukraine. You power walls. You may mock that. I did. But in a way, if you're worried about inconsistencies in power generation, having a big old battery in your house is, you know, possibly value. If you

Jeff Jarvis (01:21:36):
Have some way to charge it. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:21:37):
Yeah. Wait, did we do, did we do

Leo Laporte (01:21:39):
The ad? No, no, no, no. I'm

Stacey Higginbotham (01:21:42):
I, I keep

Jeff Jarvis (01:21:43):
Running off. I thought I was old and a too. And it passed by and I didn't notice, at least you had the courage to ask,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:21:51):
I'm running the courage. Okay. To go get a

Leo Laporte (01:21:53):
Snack, go get a snack. And then I'm That?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:21:56):
They're like talking about Elon Musk. I'm like, okay,

Leo Laporte (01:21:58):
Just throwing some in. I like to throw in little tidbits here and there. Cause then people,

Jeff Jarvis (01:22:02):
I thought I zoned out on Twitter. So effectively it's

Leo Laporte (01:22:05):
All a strategy to keep people from skipping the ads. If you don't know where the ad began, where the ad

Jeff Jarvis (01:22:12):
Ends, you just ruined it. Stacey. You just ruined.

Leo Laporte (01:22:16):
The's just gonna keep it going because you might miss something good like that.

Jeff Jarvis (01:22:21):
You

Stacey Higginbotham (01:22:21):
See? Yeah. My quest, my quest for snacks, I'm like, wait, no,

Jeff Jarvis (01:22:24):
Come back.

Leo Laporte (01:22:25):
So they're all, there's a bunch of people who are coming back from their snack break. Guess what? It's time for the ad. Our show today brought to you my code academy. Ooh, love Coke academy. You wanna change your career? There's never been a better time to be a coder. I'm I'm a hobbyist, but I think it's, it's so great. It's such a fun thing to do to write. And maybe you've thought I'd like to know more about this. I talk to people all the time. Say boy, I, I, I, I think I might like coding. Well, here's how you find out. Learn to code in your own terms with code academy, you won't be alone over 50 million. People already know that code academy is the best way to learn to code cuz code academy not only teaches you job ready, coding skills. It also, this is really important.

Leo Laporte (01:23:17):
Helps you build unique projects for your portfolio, earn certificates. You could put on your LinkedIn page, even prepped, technical interviews, everything you need to get a job doing something you love coding. Oh man, it's so cool. One of the things I love about code academy and, and by the way I do, I just do their classes for fun. But I took some Python classes there. For instance, I I'm keep trying to get better at Python on is you are coding from the very first day, your, the interface with code academy, you start typing some code you press submit or run, I guess. And then it tells you, did you? Nope, that's not it. Here's what you need to work on. So you're actually getting instant feedback, right from day one, you can learn at your own pace. There's no hurry perfect for me cuz I'm kind of, you know, I'm a casual coder.

Leo Laporte (01:24:11):
But if you're in a hurry to get a job and qualify for in demand jobs, you can do it as fast as you want. As fast as you need. You could choose what to learn from building basic websites to artificial intelligence, everything in between. And it doesn't matter if you've never on any coding before you'll be writing real working code in minutes. And if you're a pro, you could start at a level that's appropriate to you and get even better at it. Look at the list of languages, go to go to code academy.com, just see. But of course Python and you know, if you wanna be a full stack coder, you'll need to HTML CSS. You probably need SQL JavaScript. Those are the most popular right now, but there are, there's a lot of languages there. If you're not sure where to begin.

Leo Laporte (01:24:58):
Well, don't worry. In fact, Lisa and I did this for fun. There's a programming personality quiz on the site that you can take. It's not asking you coding questions or by out, you know, math ability. It's asking what you like, what you're interested in, how you think. And it will then tell you what track would be the best tailored career advice and which courses you should take based on your interests and your strengths. And it was exactly right on. I have to tell you for both me and Lisa, it said, oh, you need to do a code sci a computers, science track. Lisa, you need to do statistics. It suggested I do I think learn Python. It suggested Lisa learn R which is a statistics language. It was really right on. It was very interesting. Get instant feedback. Your code will be tested as soon as you submit it.

Leo Laporte (01:25:43):
You always know if you're on the right track, but don't worry. There's lots of help there as well. You're not on your own by any means. It's a completely interactive platform, but you learn by doing and build that portfolio. Very important. Get that certificate of completion. You will be much more marketable to future employers. And then you can land your dream job in web development or programming or computer science or data science and tons more. If you wanna learn a new skill to build websites, to troubleshoot tech issues, to transition into a new career, this is where you go. Code academy.com. Join over 50 people learning to code with code academy, to see where coding can take. You get 15% off your code academy pro membership. When you go to code academy.com, use a promo code TWiG. That's a T w I G is the promo code C O D E C a D E M Y. Code CA deme.com 15% off code academy pro is a great deal. The best way to learn to code code academy.com. The promo code T w I and G. Okay. We're back with Jeffrey, Jarvis Anastasia. Higa them

Leo Laporte (01:27:07):
All fully you're you're fully fed. You're not gonna pass out

Stacey Higginbotham (01:27:12):
Sort of fed, but yes, I was shoving. Did you see me shoving my crackers in

Leo Laporte (01:27:15):
My mouth? No, no, no, I wasn't. I, I give you a complete privacy privacy while you're eating like a pig. John sees it all, but not, I

Stacey Higginbotham (01:27:25):
There's no trough. Y'all it's just, you know, rapid fire crunching. I, I try to mute too.

Leo Laporte (01:27:29):
You know, if you want, I could take more time on those ads and you'd give you a little more time. I don't want you to rush. I don't want you no. Make

Jeff Jarvis (01:27:36):
A ice grilled cheese sandwich and

Stacey Higginbotham (01:27:38):
Yeah. I'm like, I'm like really how much time do we have? Cuz you know, most food requires a little bit more time.

Leo Laporte (01:27:45):
Yeah. Crackers. I'm disappointed. I was hoping waffles. At least

Stacey Higginbotham (01:27:48):
The waffles take six minutes to toast.

Leo Laporte (01:27:51):
Ah, you should have a toaster in your office. He caught

Jeff Jarvis (01:27:53):
You a peppy. He only takes seven minutes. So

Stacey Higginbotham (01:27:55):
Hey. Oh well I could be eating, but then you know, the pasta would be messy. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:28:03):
Not to mention the slurping. 

Stacey Higginbotham (01:28:08):
It's just as SMR right there.

Leo Laporte (01:28:10):
Hey, you know, remember when

Stacey Higginbotham (01:28:11):
Paying good money for that

Leo Laporte (01:28:15):
Stas SLS. It's a new show on the TWI network. Amazon. Remember when

Jeff Jarvis (01:28:21):
S slurpy. Hi ma

Leo Laporte (01:28:22):
Yeah. Slurp, BAE, Anastasia slippery. Higginbotham a group of remember the the testimony all the, all the CEOs came to talk to the house committee about data and, and all that stuff. The judiciary committee. Jerry Nadler. Yeah. Stupid questions. David SI you remember that? Well a letter comes from the committee to the department of justice today. Urging it urg. We urge you to open an investigation into Amazon and its executives for criminal obstruction of Congress.

Jeff Jarvis (01:29:07):
What could this be?

Leo Laporte (01:29:11):
The group contends. Amazon is engaged in a pattern and practice of misleading conduct, lying that Congress in response to our questions about private label practices and its collection of third party seller data.

Jeff Jarvis (01:29:26):
Why don't you bring in Walmart and great Atlantic and Pacific tea company,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:29:30):
Dude, Nolan, no, Amazon has not only enshrined this process, but it's part of their business strategies to harvest this data and take advantage of it. So yeah, as

Jeff Jarvis (01:29:39):
It was for every retailer before, from Macy's to

Stacey Higginbotham (01:29:46):
Walmart extent that emit,

Jeff Jarvis (01:29:48):
I know they got more data, but well, but Macy's has dated two online now and, and Walmart. So it's a practice of retailing since time and Memorial,

Leo Laporte (01:29:58):
You wouldn't have all those generic brands on the grocery shelf. If they didn't know that you wanted to buy those products, right. Lawmakers have zeroed in claiming Amazon made false and misleading statements to the house committee about its practices. I remember Jeff Bezos saying things like, well, that would be illegal if they did that. I don't think they did. Let me check. Apparently after the fact, they refused to turn over evidence that would either corroborate its claims or correct the record. So if you're gonna assert no, no, no, no. We tell them you can't do that. And they didn't do that. And if they did, they did it against orders, but you need to prove that according to the letter, quote, it appears Amazon appears to have done. So to conceal the truth about its use of third party sellers data to advantage its private label business and its pre of private label products and search results, which were the subject of the committees investigation signed by Jerry Nadler, David CE Ken buck, Matt gates. And Parilla J Paul. There's a there's

Jeff Jarvis (01:31:13):
There's

Leo Laporte (01:31:13):
Some interesting bed fellows. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:31:14):
If, if you're agreeing with Matt gates, what does that tell you think for a second? What does that

Leo Laporte (01:31:21):
Say? So they sent it to the DOJ. Now it's up to Merick Garland in the department to decide whether to prosecute or not and who to prosecute and all that stuff. There is no guarantee of prosecution we should point out. But

Stacey Higginbotham (01:31:36):
They're just saying we're Congress, you lied to us. You

Leo Laporte (01:31:39):
Lied to this. Yeah. I don't think it's all that clear that they were lied to. 

Stacey Higginbotham (01:31:45):
I, I think they were, this is basically their, their effort to say, look, we ask this we're serious. We wanna know. And you can't just OB OB, I cannot say that word. OB spook,

Leo Laporte (01:31:57):
OB Fu good

Jeff Jarvis (01:31:58):
OBS escapes

Stacey Higginbotham (01:32:01):
Skate anymore.

Leo Laporte (01:32:04):
Lawmakers pointed to credible investigative reporting. Thanks journalists from Reuters, the markup and the wall street journal that directly contradicts testimony from Bezos wall street

Jeff Jarvis (01:32:15):
Journal.

Leo Laporte (01:32:19):
Yeah. I, you know, see this, regardless of that, there is that fundamental question. What did Amazon Amazon do? That's so very different from what grocery stores have been doing for the last century. Grocery stores knows exactly how much tuna fish you buy and if they think it's worth it for them to have a can of generic tuna fish, just put on the shelf next to the chicken of this. See, they're

Stacey Higginbotham (01:32:39):
Gonna, you could argue that because Amazon, I mean, you could also argue that some grocery stores now have this, but Amazon sells what 50% of e-commerce here in the us. Right. Which then means that you don't have other alternatives to bring your goods to market. So you have to,

Jeff Jarvis (01:32:56):
Here's the, here's the better argument for you, Stacey? I think on your side of this question is playing devil's advocate, trying to be Leo for a minute is if I search for Pellegrino and you do a really good job of, of serving me am a bubbles, then it's at that point that it could be an unfair use of the data about you as an individual

Leo Laporte (01:33:25):
In Brad Stone's book, Amazon and bad, which is very good by the way the successor to the everything store, the first book he wrote about Amazon, he talks about this specific issue and about at least for some of the time, Amazon's very clear instruction. They said, interestingly, we'll get in trouble. If you share data between the private you know, our stores and church and state church and state and they, and that they knew that that was potential problem, that there were some executives who wanted to do it. Who thought it'd be just fine, but they'd had decided in this book. And I wish I had the book with me, I'd look up the passage, but they decided in the according to Brad stone. No, yeah, we better not do that. But there were executives who were Cowboys who said, no, no, no, no, this is too valuable. We gotta do this. So there was a, the Beit over it anyway, interesting that Amazon should, they saw that as potentially problematic. They did not choose the Jeff Jarvis defense.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:34:28):
They could have thrown those guys under the bus with Congress and then Congress wouldn't have an excuse for, you know, calling for the justice department to intervene. But Amazon's like, eh, no,

Leo Laporte (01:34:37):
I think Jeff tried to, I mean, essentially he said, well, if we did, that would be wrong. We don't do that.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:34:43):
You know? Yeah. But then you do, actually in that case, you do have to follow up. I mean,

Leo Laporte (01:34:47):
You have to find somebody and we

Jeff Jarvis (01:34:49):
Could do that, but that would be

Leo Laporte (01:34:51):
Wrong. That would be wrong.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:34:52):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:34:54):
That would be wrong. I'm not, I guess. Is it more harmful to consumers than Amazon does it than the amp did it?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:35:04):
Yes, because Amazon is, oh,

Leo Laporte (01:35:07):
Go ahead. Well, one of the issues I think for Congress that Amazon first reco, Amazon recommends what, you know, when you search for a product, that's the key. It says Amazon essentials. And then it also says Amazon's best suggestion. And it's never been clear how you qualify for that.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:35:26):
So there's that. So yes, the Amazon recommends is a huge problem. The other problem is that a lot of companies can't go to market without Amazon and Amazon actually has programs to pull these kinds of products in and then it kind of scours their data and then is like, oh, this is interesting. Let's make one. So it there's, there's many levels of what I think most normal people would recognize is, is unethical potential

Leo Laporte (01:35:53):
Problems. Yeah. Well it's problematic unethical or, you know, look at what are, what is Congress looking for harms to consumers, right? Or harm

Stacey Higginbotham (01:36:02):
To competitors. Well, so Lena, Lena Conn, as we've talked about is really shifting the conversation from harms to consumers, which no one can argue Amazon does because consumers can buy so much more stuff. Right. Much

Leo Laporte (01:36:15):
More cheaper. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:36:16):
To harm to society harms to labor harms to competitors in the market harms to startup and innovation. If you, we talked about this a couple weeks ago with the FTC putting out their request for, it's not a request for proposal, what is it? They did a memorandum that was basically like, should we look into all of this? Right. And that's, that's the crux of this because Amazon built their entire parcel of unethical behaviors around, eh, we're fine. Cuz we're making cheaper things for consumers.

Leo Laporte (01:36:51):
Yeah. I mean, from the consumers point of view, this is, I just did a search for dish show. One of the things I always liked about Amazon, it will show me a variety, your products and something that you could find in the stores, but it's hard the cost per ounce. Right? oh,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:37:05):
Well let's talk about pricing because Amazon doesn't show me and you the same pricing and that pricing changes.

Leo Laporte (01:37:11):
That's interesting.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:37:12):
Yeah. Several times a day.

Leo Laporte (01:37:14):
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:37:14):
And that's another issue where as, as companies, Amazon, and Walmart's doing this too, I mean, it's not that particular issue is not only Amazon's issue. We're seeing a lot less transparency around pricing that is really going to hurt consumers in the long run.

Jeff Jarvis (01:37:33):
Well, and that that'll bite them. If it turns out that there's a bias in that pricing.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:37:38):
Well, it may not be, cause they've gotten so big. There's not like a lot of opportunities for me to find alternatives. And that's, what's really interesting cuz they've squeezed out a lot of those alternatives at the moment. And if I were an alternative and I had something cheaper than Amazon in a way to do it, I'd probably have to go through Amazon to sell it to the wider market.

Jeff Jarvis (01:38:01):
Well, but I'm also saying Stacey that if, if, if, once you decide to do variable pricing, if you are not careful, if you end up charging poor black people more than for Latino people,

Leo Laporte (01:38:16):
I don't think that

Jeff Jarvis (01:38:17):
Rural people more than whatever then you, you, you, you better be careful about, about the, how the algorithm. So

Leo Laporte (01:38:24):
Stacey, you

Stacey Higginbotham (01:38:25):
Said they don't care about that

Leo Laporte (01:38:26):
Though. You said that any given time, different people see different prices, is that the case or just that the pricing varies, but we all see the same thing at any given time. I think it's more that 

Stacey Higginbotham (01:38:35):
No it's, the price can vary both. It can vary across geographic reasons or regions.

Leo Laporte (01:38:41):
Well, that might make sense. Time of that would make sense. But if it's offering Stacey a deal that it's not offering me,

Jeff Jarvis (01:38:49):
That's what I'm saying.

Leo Laporte (01:38:50):
That would be re that an old fart. Yeah. That would really wrong.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:38:53):
So that happens though. Okay. That does have, did you not New York times did a story actually documenting this not too long ago, like a week ago differential pricing is probably what you should Google. Let's see.

Leo Laporte (01:39:06):
Here's a hand soap cuz I know that Amazon sells its own brand of liquid hand soap. The Amazon choice is actually from a competitor's soft soap, right. To theirs solo Mo which is half the price. So you might say, well, that may be Amazon's choice, but, but I'm gonna buy Amazon's brand. They also have a best seller indicator.

Jeff Jarvis (01:39:29):
Okay. So let's wait,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:39:30):
Let's let me do this. Let me go to liquid.

Leo Laporte (01:39:32):
Let me search for liquid.

Jeff Jarvis (01:39:33):
I just did I get different results?

Leo Laporte (01:39:35):
So my first result was soft soap, moisturizing, hand liquid $7 74 cents for a six month.

Jeff Jarvis (01:39:41):
Mine is dove, nourishing foaming. Handwash for

Leo Laporte (01:39:44):
14. What the hell? I don't see dove on here at all. Wait, is

Stacey Higginbotham (01:39:46):
Yours

Leo Laporte (01:39:48):
Responsible

Jeff Jarvis (01:39:48):
Search? Okay. No, I go

Stacey Higginbotham (01:39:49):
Down. Show me, show me your screen again. Leo

Leo Laporte (01:39:51):
Liquid hand soap. Here we go. No sponsor. Okay.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:39:53):
So right under the results. Yep. So mine is so my, my first result is sponsored. It's evolved by nature, liquid hand soap refill. Then it's the second one.

Jeff Jarvis (01:40:04):
How much?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:40:07):
2399.

Jeff Jarvis (01:40:07):
It's okay. I get that too. That's sponsored.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:40:10):
And my ammo then, I mean, next one is featured from our brands, which is not sponsored, but also feels a little weird

Leo Laporte (01:40:18):
Who's is

Stacey Higginbotham (01:40:19):
That, and that is that's Amazon brand. So

Leo Laporte (01:40:21):
Solely how much is your Somo?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:40:25):
6 58, 4.

Jeff Jarvis (01:40:27):
I

Stacey Higginbotham (01:40:27):
Get a 32, a two pack of 32 fluid ounces.

Leo Laporte (01:40:30):
Funny. I see a two pack of 56 ounce. They must think I hands, my hands are dirtier than yours.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:40:34):
So I've been getting charged 10 cent, a fluid ounce.

Leo Laporte (01:40:38):
So

Jeff Jarvis (01:40:38):
Leo, I get the same soft slope you have under Amazon's choice.

Leo Laporte (01:40:41):
Yes.

Jeff Jarvis (01:40:43):
That I get highly rated

Leo Laporte (01:40:45):
For 1488

Leo Laporte (01:40:48):
1488. Yeah. Six

Jeff Jarvis (01:40:49):
Pack of

Leo Laporte (01:40:50):
Six. I mean, this is obviously so anecdotal. It's not useful, but, but yeah. Well

Jeff Jarvis (01:40:55):
It's also interesting. How do you say what's the prime position here except for what's on top. What's on what's on top. Top is aromatic aroma, therapeutic hand care product. I means they don't know. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:41:07):
It's a home brand.

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:07):
I hate aromatherapy. I hate it.

Leo Laporte (01:41:09):
Well, yeah, that's an advertisement and I don't, I, for some reason not getting it, maybe cuz I have an ad blocker running. I

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:15):
Don't know. But then you have the sponsored results as resulted on the far right? Sponsored that's the dove and the evolved then Amazon's choice and then highly rated and then more results.

Leo Laporte (01:41:26):
I don't even have highly

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:27):
Rated. So what's the prime position in all that

Leo Laporte (01:41:29):
The top line is obviously the prime position. Right?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:41:32):
Well I don't, I mean don't even have

Leo Laporte (01:41:34):
Highly hated.

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:35):
Well that's all's all sold. That's sponsored. That's the that's why Amazon? No, this

Leo Laporte (01:41:38):
Is not sold

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:39):
Advertising business and newspapers.

Leo Laporte (01:41:41):
So how so in how do I know if it's sold? Wouldn't it? Is there no indicator that it's sold?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:41:47):
Oh, you're interested. Don't so yeah, mine. I get

Leo Laporte (01:41:52):
No that's must be my ad block far, right? Yeah. That's my ad block. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:41:56):
That must be your oh. Cause my

Leo Laporte (01:41:58):
Results featured. I can also sort by price. Maybe I wouldn't have the same issues if I searched by price high to low, low to high average customer review, actually that's often how I will search for this kind of thing. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:42:14):
I get the soft soap. 10 83. What was yours? What was your lowest

Leo Laporte (01:42:18):
Low price? Yeah. Soft soap. Alovera 9 0 4

Jeff Jarvis (01:42:23):
7.5 ounces. Yeah. Okay. Price difference. Minus 10 83.

Leo Laporte (01:42:27):
What? Mine has a line through 10 83 and it shows me 9 0 4. For some reason. I do see the 10 83, but it's crossed out maybe because I'm a special person.

Jeff Jarvis (01:42:43):
Mine says only one left in stock. Let's fight for it.

Leo Laporte (01:42:46):
Leo mine says I could buy two and save 2%. Wait a minute. That's the one I know is a lie. Only one left in stock when stuff like that. That's that I know yeah. Is made up. Let me see if I see it. No that doesn't say anything about that, but wait a minute. No. See this ships from herb Herb's pro see that's the other thing is this is a third party. This is not an Amazon. You can't tell that from the front page.

Jeff Jarvis (01:43:15):
Well we, your

Stacey Higginbotham (01:43:16):
Ad block can prime

Jeff Jarvis (01:43:17):
Recognize it's an ad.

Leo Laporte (01:43:18):
Well, but if it's sold by Amazon, is it always prime?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:43:23):
No, not everything is prime. I mean, they've got some of this stuff, but

Leo Laporte (01:43:26):
And could you buy no, see, this is ships from Amazon by sold by health and wellness and it is prime. So you and

Stacey Higginbotham (01:43:33):
That's actually bought from someplace else. That's not and Right. But so this is one of the like I don't shop for things as much on Amazon, any like I shop very little for on Amazon anymore because I can't cuz it's like going into like the dollar store or like TJ max or it really is. It's it's cluttered. It's confusing. I'm not feeling like I'm getting not even the best deal. Just a fair deal on. Stuff's so hard

Jeff Jarvis (01:44:00):
To, I think it's to say in Seattle, I think the Amazon police are gonna come and get you Stacey.

Leo Laporte (01:44:04):
You know, if you go to the Amazon front page though, you might be hard pressed to figure out what exactly their business is. I'm being for their gaming service Luna, the marvelous Mrs. Mazel and some various sundries, including some headphones, some books from Kindle.

Jeff Jarvis (01:44:21):
It's keep shopping for a hand soap. I'm gonna get so much hand soap.

Leo Laporte (01:44:24):
Oh no, no. Stop next to you. Well, here's a toilet seat. I don't know why. Wow. I don't know why. That, and

Jeff Jarvis (01:44:34):
Then the stethoscope.

Leo Laporte (01:44:36):
Oh they know I want an office chair or a desk. And then this is the new thing. By the way, these shop live streams. Have you ever watched these? No.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:44:45):
No. My friend used to do them. For, in she she would do them for Chinese goods. These are great. Oh he's he's signing. How cool is he?

Leo Laporte (01:44:54):
Yeah. Yeah. Look at that set though. Wow. And he's got your little E D lights on the background.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:45:01):
Those are, those are not brand name E D lights in the background right there. I'm just gonna tell you that right now.

Leo Laporte (01:45:06):
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:45:07):
Those are knockoff led lights.

Leo Laporte (01:45:09):
Do you think a lot of people watch? These sounds like you do. It's

Stacey Higginbotham (01:45:13):
A big trend. It's a huge shopping trend. So hundred Amazon

Leo Laporte (01:45:16):
Doing it.

Jeff Jarvis (01:45:17):
Well, how many shopping channels we have on TV after all these years at Kati, there's like five channels on my cable.

Leo Laporte (01:45:24):
What if I were gonna do an Amazon live? Shopable live stream? What should I sell? Could it's gotta be something. The people who would watch me. Thermo

Stacey Higginbotham (01:45:36):
Mix.

Leo Laporte (01:45:36):
Thermo mix. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:45:39):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:45:41):
Subt stack has an RSS reader. You miss Google reader today. Subt stack here's Hamish McKenzie saying we're launching an app for SubT stack using it makes me feel like a reader again. It's where I read my favorite writers at their best. I love it.

Jeff Jarvis (01:46:00):
Good news. Bad news. It's only an app, not web and only apple, not Android.

Leo Laporte (01:46:09):
Who gets maybe the bigger questions who gets on that app?

Jeff Jarvis (01:46:13):
Their stuff is there. So you can read it, but you can add it. They say you can add any RSSV

Leo Laporte (01:46:17):
Oh, by going to reader dot SubT, stack.com. But you

Jeff Jarvis (01:46:22):
Have to use the app,

Leo Laporte (01:46:23):
But you have to use the app, but you can add it online. Okay? Okay. So it is open in that sense. Although they figure

Stacey Higginbotham (01:46:30):
Harvesting as much data as they can. You're an app instead of

Jeff Jarvis (01:46:34):
True. I asked Dave Wener what he thought of it. And he said kind of like, well it's an app. I don't really use that. Then everybody was asking Dave, he said, why is everybody asking me this? Cause, cause you're RSS Dave, you're the band. We, we, we depend upon you. So he had some thoughts. I'm trying to find what it was then

Leo Laporte (01:46:52):
Silenced no more. The second Washington state, your state is now the second state in the union to pass the silence. No more act. Just take a guess. What does that do? Silenced no more.

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:07):
I've cheated.

Leo Laporte (01:47:09):
I don't know. Thank you for being honest, Jeff. It bans employers in the state and California's the other state from using NDAs to prevent workers from talking about instances of illegal harassment and discrimination, retaliation, sexual assault and wage violations, which seems to me should be a federal law.

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:30):
Yes, it should be. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:47:33):
So, but why this is in response to she Scarlett, who was the apple employee who kind of was a whistleblower on, on apple saying, you know, they basically silence you if you want to talk about any of this stuff. So it is no longer illegal to to force employees to sign a non nondescript, non I should say what a non, what an NDA is. It's a non-disclosure act.

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:59):
Well there's also, or often it's also non-disparagement there

Leo Laporte (01:48:02):
Also non-disparagement too well when it's not unusual when people quit we will say, okay, we're or are fired. We'll give you termination. We'll give you a severance. If you sign a agreement, not to not to, I wouldn't

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:17):
Sign the managing editors contract at time, Inc. And as a result, you

Leo Laporte (01:48:21):
Didn't get, you didn't catch a severance

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:23):
Three year, three years, salary bonus and benefits

Leo Laporte (01:48:28):
I gave up. And as a result, have you been, have you been disparaging them freely ever since?

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:33):
No, but I am finally writing the story of VW though.

Leo Laporte (01:48:35):
Ah, now there's an interest now that it's gone.

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:39):
Yeah. I know.

Leo Laporte (01:48:42):
Yesterday was international women's day. Nice that you have a day of your own Stacey.

Speaker 5 (01:48:50):
Yeah. Like

Leo Laporte (01:48:54):
Actually apple took it to heart. I don't know if you noticed, well, you, you didn't cuz you were at the airport, but lot of women presenters, in fact, when they talked about the creators using the new hardware, they were all women. And I think that's very conscious on Apple's part they're very aware of this. This is the pay gap bot or maybe I should say the gender pay gap bot on Twitter pay gap app at pay gap. You

Jeff Jarvis (01:49:21):
Need some in there. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:49:22):
Yes. My was my fault, my fault gender pay gap bot. 

Jeff Jarvis (01:49:29):
So what they do is I don't know where they got the, the data from exactly, for every company that put up a Hey yay. International. What was a day? Oh, The bot puts up the, the differential for

Leo Laporte (01:49:41):
That's

Jeff Jarvis (01:49:43):
Was then you see the company's deleting the original tweet one after another, after another, after another. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:49:49):
Brilliant. So here's, Jake's a group housing 21 as part of our international women's day program of events, blah, blah blah. In this organization, according to gender pay gap bought the women's median. Hourly pay is 31% lower than men's rah, this Boomba I

Jeff Jarvis (01:50:07):
Think it's British data

Leo Laporte (01:50:08):
Clearly. It's British. Yeah. Clearly it's British Tata steel on occasion of international women's day 2022. We celebrate, we extend our best wishes in this organization. Women's median hourly pay. That's not too bad. Only four points, you know,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:50:23):
Percent that's that's fine.

Jeff Jarvis (01:50:24):
Yeah. That's I'll I'll take that.

Leo Laporte (01:50:26):
Yeah. There's some, that's actually better than others. Leads city college is only 3.1%. So yeah, it varies.

Jeff Jarvis (01:50:32):
I think the company cleared themselves out, but it's brilliant. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:50:36):
In the intellectual property office, UK 30% disparity, 30% good for you. Gender pay gap by job. Well done And happy international women's day

Jeff Jarvis (01:50:56):
Information can be a

Leo Laporte (01:50:58):
Weapon. Very powerful. Very powerful. Yes. And for some reason still to this day putting it on Twitter seems to have some real effect. I, I never won't understand why, but if you want to complain,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:51:10):
It's it's implementing norms. I mean, we talked about that earlier in the show. I think Twitter is a great place to police social norms.

Leo Laporte (01:51:16):
Sure. Yeah. Nobody wants to be disparaged on Twitter. That's where you should do your disparagement. Now that you sacrificed years worth of vacation base, you should really get so

Jeff Jarvis (01:51:30):
Anything vacation pay hell. It was full three years salary.

Leo Laporte (01:51:34):
How could you give that up?

Jeff Jarvis (01:51:37):
Cause I was a young schmuck. That's a of money and benefits. You said

Leo Laporte (01:51:40):
I want the right to you guys.

Jeff Jarvis (01:51:42):
Who? The penny.

Leo Laporte (01:51:44):
Wow.

Jeff Jarvis (01:51:45):
Yeah. For signed.

Leo Laporte (01:51:48):
Do you regret that now

Jeff Jarvis (01:51:50):
At this age? Yeah. At the time I was kind of

Leo Laporte (01:51:53):
Proud of it. That's all right. You would've spent it on cigars and hot women. It would've been wasted.

Jeff Jarvis (01:51:58):
I was buried. Oh, but

Leo Laporte (01:52:01):
I'm sorry that I said that Stacey, you would've spent it on a house. That's right. For your children to live in Reed. Hoffman is co founded his first new company since his sale of LinkedIn. He made, well, I dunno how much he made. He sold LinkedIn to Microsoft for 26 billion, six years ago. You know, after a few years spending a billion here, a billion there, maybe you wanna do something else. He's going to start a new company called inflection that will aim to develop AI software products to make it easier for humans to communicate with computers. But what's best in my opinion, most interesting is his partner deep mind. Co-Founder Mustafa Suleman and former deep mind researcher car. So, so some pretty heavy hitters working on this, how, what would you do to make computers easier for humans?

Jeff Jarvis (01:53:00):
This

Stacey Higginbotham (01:53:00):
Is a really good question. Cause I think go ahead. Well, so yeah, taking instructions in natural language is one, but think about what people don't realize is programs often have, you know, the logic has to be fully thought out. So if I'm communicating with a computer, I do have to still think out my logic for the steps, right? That's if I want something different to happen, I have to figure out the information I need to put in to get the result I want. And that's really where the challenge is. I mean, yes, coding is hard. Just from a, oh it's another language, but it's also hard because you have to think through what you're actually trying to do.

Leo Laporte (01:53:38):
Yeah. You have to be very precise. In fact, that's exactly what PDO said in conversation with CNBC Monday, if you think about the history of computing, we've always been trying to reduce the complexity of our ideas in order to communicate them to a machine. Even when we write a search query, we're simplifying, we're reducing, we're writing in shorthand so that the search engine can understand what we want. You know, I was thinking about Wolf from alpha, which does often does a very good job of kind of intuiting what you're trying to get at. In fact, it'll even tell you it's logic, which is great. But I, I guess there's even more we could we could do. I was trying to, you know, why I was trying the other day to match gas prices, not Bitcoin gas price is gasoline prices,

Jeff Jarvis (01:54:29):
Petrol, petrol,

Leo Laporte (01:54:30):
Petrol price. Thank you. Now we know why we call it petrol to presidents because somebody said, well, see what happened. You'll elect Joe Biden and the gas goes through the roof. And I thought, well, if I could only have a graph, correlating gas price to president

Jeff Jarvis (01:54:48):
And adjusted for inflation

Leo Laporte (01:54:49):
Adjusted for inflation. Well, let me see if I can president it didn't do work. President adjusted for inflation. I think it would do that naturally. All right. Let's see. And then Wolf for Alfred says, well, first of all, when you say gasp price, I'm assuming you mean gasoline?

Jeff Jarvis (01:55:10):
Not, not

Leo Laporte (01:55:11):
Ethereum. Yes, yes. Yes.

Jeff Jarvis (01:55:13):
See, and then

Leo Laporte (01:55:15):
Asks and then it does have the all grades of gasoline, average price per gallon history in the United States. Cause it's good. Going back to 1993, all the way up through 

Jeff Jarvis (01:55:26):
You go back to the seventies, it would be as high than and now, right,

Leo Laporte (01:55:31):
Because

Jeff Jarvis (01:55:31):
Of the era of oil and Margo. Right. Which was my first big story as a Cub reporter.

Leo Laporte (01:55:35):
Yeah. Jimmy Carter lines. Yep. Lines, lines, lines, lines. But unfortunately the presidents have just ignored.

Jeff Jarvis (01:55:42):
You extend the timing or before the nineties.

Leo Laporte (01:55:45):
Yeah. That seems annoying. Yeah. 

Jeff Jarvis (01:55:50):
Does it tell you the source of the data?

Leo Laporte (01:55:51):
Yeah, it does. It has all sorts of I love I, if you've not played with Wolffer alpha, it's fantastic.

Jeff Jarvis (01:55:58):
Wolffer is a big part of the Bon Noman book.

Leo Laporte (01:56:03):
Yeah. Because you, I'm not surprised. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:56:06):
Super genius. Manny's an editor, but super genius. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:56:09):
Love. Well, that's because I found out, do you know how he writes?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:56:14):
He just dictates

Leo Laporte (01:56:15):
No, wait a minute. Lemme see if I can find this. He posts the blog post on his work workflow.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:56:25):
Oh God

Leo Laporte (01:56:26):
Seeking.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:56:27):
He used to have to edit him.

Leo Laporte (01:56:28):
Did you? Oh, good. Well, you'll enjoy this. Yes. This is from his blog Steven Wolf, fromm.com seeking the productive life. Some details of my personal infrastructure. There he is. Apparently he spends a lot of time on zoom. But, but, but, and he's got a standing desk. Okay. Off. Oh, oh look. He's. He is on a treadmill while he is, while he is working. Okay. Now this is why I think he might be proli he's apparently he writes while he is walking as well. He's got a little, he's got a little, he's got a little look at this.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:57:03):
Oh my gosh. It's like a little cigarette girl.

Leo Laporte (01:57:06):
He's got a table, a stand for his laptop note. He's also got a microphone on. So he is apparently he's also dictating, dictating or talking on the phone and he calls it his popcorn rig. And so he gets his walks in, but you know, if you've got a long walk, you will keep writing.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:57:27):
Yeah. That fits

Leo Laporte (01:57:30):
Not really. I just, I don't know why, but that's stuck in my mind. This I've always, I'll never forget this picture. Well, Stephen Wolf in the woods, he he's a physicist. Right. And a nerd, obviously.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:57:45):
I thought he was a bad tic, but he might be both for all.

Leo Laporte (01:57:48):
I know he does it all. He does it all. He's got, if you read this, it is fascinatingly nerdy. He said, I used to fill up a banker's box with filed papers every couple of months. Now it takes a couple of years. I have a printer under my desk. So he's, he's got, he's got these little slots. He has an array of drawers with a little hack. There's a slot at the top that allows me to immediately slide things into the drawer without opening it.

Jeff Jarvis (01:58:13):
Cause that would, that would waste at least five nanosecond. I think

Leo Laporte (01:58:16):
You need Jeff. I think you need this. Yes. Anyway just but brilliant, brilliant, very interesting fellow. Didn't he also write a cookbook.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:58:33):
He's done a lot of, he, he apparently wrote a nifty IOT data store for his nifty software stack. Of course I like, of course look at that. I wrote that forever.

Leo Laporte (01:58:41):
We 

Stacey Higginbotham (01:58:41):
But no, I,

Leo Laporte (01:58:42):
We had him on our, how did you edit Stacey? Yeah. Did

Jeff Jarvis (01:58:45):
He write for

Stacey Higginbotham (01:58:45):
All? I was a guest editor at giga O so. Or are you asking like why I was the editor or how as in, how did I make him short? I, well actually mention it For years. Well for a hot second, I was the manager editor. It could go and I hated it. And then I had to shed that job piece by piece. So for like two years, I edited and commissioned our guest columns said it was the worst time of my life, but he, he was a friend of the site. So he would always sit,

Leo Laporte (01:59:16):
Oh, I'm sure he and Elmer probably best buds. Here's the glasses. He, that help keep him from getting carsick. Oh

Jeff Jarvis (01:59:25):
My Lord.

Leo Laporte (01:59:27):
I don't know what they did.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:59:28):
He's a really good dude. No, he's

Leo Laporte (01:59:30):
Super cool. He's the coolest guy ever

Stacey Higginbotham (01:59:33):
Because you, I had to edit him on the phone. You could not just send him edits or you could, but you were gonna end up having to talk to him. So we would end up, we would end up talking, where

Leo Laporte (01:59:43):
Did he fight back?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:59:45):
He didn't ever fight back. He like all really smart people who know what they're doing. He hated any generalizations that I had to make to make things readable

Leo Laporte (01:59:57):
For. You're dumbing it down. You're dumbing it down.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:00:00):
And, and we went back, I mean, and he respected that, but he also, you know, it, it pained him and I, I get it. I mean, I'm a nerd. It pains me to see things dumb down. Yeah. But I, you gotta do it

Leo Laporte (02:00:15):
When you're as brilliant as Steven Wolf from. I, you think you need a dumb down for most of us very interesting fellow anyway way. How did we get there? Gas prices. I'm I'm doing it back. Rolling it.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:00:29):
Oh, no code low code from deep mind and re

Leo Laporte (02:00:32):
AI, you know, getting, making your queries less sophisticated, making the computer smarter about understanding what you want, that kind of thing. And Reed Hoffman's gonna be working on. Oh, I, you know what I did say, who is Reed Hoffman? He was the founder of LinkedIn and is widely like revered,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:00:50):
Brilliant. The guy who created the term scaling

Jeff Jarvis (02:00:57):
Full disclosure is that Reed gave us the funding to start bar engagement, journalism degree.

Leo Laporte (02:01:02):
Oh, nice. Thank you, Reed. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:01:07):
Big security flaw affecting Linux which includes by the way, Android terrible name, dirty pipe. It allows an attacker to do privileged escalations so they can get root. And because it's a Linux flaw and it's in the Linux kernel, it affects not only Android, but in Chromebooks, but Chromecasts speakers. And of course, desktop computers. Fortunately because Android devices use actually a fairly old version of the kernel. It's not a problem. Immediately. Only devices that started with Android 12 are recent enough to have it be an issue. Presumably it is being patched as we speak. There are no known exploits in the wild yet of dirty pipe, but it is considered by many to be the worst Linux exploit yet. Google is releasing an open source harassment filter for journalists, for journalists. What is a harassment filter?

Jeff Jarvis (02:02:24):
I actually forget, I put it in there and I

Leo Laporte (02:02:27):
It's called harassment manager here. It is on GitHub, online Abu and harassment, silence, important voices and conversation. Harassment manager is a web application that aims to empower users to document and take action on abuse. So it won't actually block abuse. You won't you'll see it, but you can take action. You can report. 'em It's designed for anyone that this is actually good. I might have to download this. Anyone that experiences significant online harassment, which can be episodic or an ongoing challenge. The tool has been built and tested using a community based research and design process with active Twitter users, the most harassed group in the world that experience significant or frequent or frequent harassment target users include folks who are disproportionately impacted by online harassment, women of the, or marginalized groups, journalists, activists, and politicians. Oh, this comes out of jigsaw. Jigsaw. Yeah. Neat. Okay. That should have been in the change log. That's a good one.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:03:33):
Oh, wait, do we have a change log? Really? Is it time for the change log?

Leo Laporte (02:03:36):
It's time for

Speaker 6 (02:03:38):
The Google change log.

Leo Laporte (02:03:42):
You got a free one, but we got more. We got more 12 L is now 12.1 and it's rolling out to pixel phones, the 12 L tablet hardware coming out by the end of the year. That was kind of the focus. I think of 12 L was tablet at pixel three, a pixel four, four, a five and five a will get 12 L it's weirdly the pixel six will not get an update. Yet later this month I've been running the beta of 12 L on my six pro and it's fine. So in fact, well boy, I've never had any problems with my pixel six. So I'm a weirdo in that. Anyway, 12 L it's here. It's time we call this release 12.1 says Google, cuz that's what makes the most sense? 12.1 is the version Google uses on the factory image page in blog posts. They're still calling it 12 L if you're open your phone's about page though, you'll find a third name under the Android version, Android 12, not L not 0.1, just old, plain old Android 12. So Google hasn't even figured out what the name, the name is, but you know, one of them, one of them, we

Stacey Higginbotham (02:05:01):
Should have just a running thread, things Google still needs to figure out,

Leo Laporte (02:05:05):
Oh no, it would be too long. It would be too long. There is a March pixel feature drop though which many of us will be getting I checked and last night and haven't gotten it. It was released on Monday, but I guess with all of these, as with all of these, it's kind of a staged rollout. If you have a pixel phone, you're gonna get some additional updates. The improvements are designed primarily for folding phones, tablets, and other large screen device ices, but Google's adding more functionality to live caption, which is a, I think a great feature. Now, when you're on a phone call, you can see captions of what the other person says and type back a response that will be read out loud on the other end, like a TT Y for a deaf people. Hmm. Ooh. Very interesting. So if you're on the train or the bus and you don't wanna have a phone call out loud, you can do it completely over text in effect, text messaging, love that idea. And of course, if your Def also great, the new feature drop also adds support for night site in Snapchat. There's a new moon icon in the Snapchat, camel. This is a Google working hand in hand with Snapchat to offer

Stacey Higginbotham (02:06:24):
Snapchat hosts on Google cloud. 

Leo Laporte (02:06:28):
Yeah. They're sorry. Good

Stacey Higginbotham (02:06:30):
Customer. It's weird that they're doing something for an app. The like a dedicated, sorry.

Leo Laporte (02:06:34):
Yeah, no, that, that, and, and for it's only for pixel owners.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:06:39):
Yeah, that is weird.

Leo Laporte (02:06:40):
Okay. it's not the first time the pixel six and six pro shipped with a quick tap, two snap feature. You may remember YouTube watch parties and live sharing functionality for duo also in the March feature drop weirdly the March feature dropped first arrived on the galaxy S 22 series. You, I don't, I'm confused emoji and sticker suggestions while typing in G board, a new interpreter mode and Google translate activated with, Hey, you know who be my Spanish interpreter, paint me like your French ladies and for a new battery, a widget that shows the status of connected devices. So there you go. The, the March feature drop coming soon to a pixel near you and as Samsung S 22 actually they're previewing to June pixel drop already on the Android, 12 QPR, three beta, one, Google kills another fabulous Google thing. You never used nobody

Jeff Jarvis (02:07:49):
Ever used

Leo Laporte (02:07:51):
Book on Google for hotels.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:07:56):
Oh, that was always terrible. The reason no one used it is cuz the prices were high and you could never, it was always in advance. You could never do it like the day of, or

Leo Laporte (02:08:05):
It just like they wanted to be Expedia or hotel.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:08:08):
Yeah, it was. Yeah. And it was frustrating because you'd be like, oh, is this available? And they'd be like, well it's too soon to tell cuz it's, you know tonight. And you're like, this is not helpful.

Leo Laporte (02:08:20):
Anyway, May 25th they're they're shuttering that feature Google fiber now has a business plan. Two gigabits for $250 a month. One gigabit down now to a hundred dollars a month.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:08:35):
I gig B

Jeff Jarvis (02:08:36):
Wow.

Leo Laporte (02:08:37):
Gigabit, envy.

Jeff Jarvis (02:08:39):
What do you have Stacey? What'd you get what'd you get?

Stacey Higginbotham (02:08:41):
I only have one.

Jeff Jarvis (02:08:43):
Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:08:45):
One's plenty. I should point out John's reminding me. He has Sonic net and his gigabit fiber gigabit is $40. You said? Yeah. 50 bucks with when you add the fees and stuff. That's pretty good. Half what? Google that's excellent. It's charging. If you are calling let's see, is it calling from or to Ukraine, Google voice and five temporarily wave calling fees to Ukraine. Let me see. International calling fees from Ukraine and from the us to Ukraine are now all the fees rates are now zero. Nothing. Not, not. You

Jeff Jarvis (02:09:29):
Can erase the fees from Ukraine anywhere.

Leo Laporte (02:09:31):
Yeah, that's great. And Google has said we have expanded of ability for project shield, our free protection against DDoS attacks. So that Ukrainian government websites embasies worldwide and other governments in close proximity to the conflict can stay online. And of course we saw it talked earlier about CloudFlare and CrowdStrike and ping services.

Jeff Jarvis (02:09:51):
Interesting. When I go to Kia of independent, which I recommended last week, which is excellent or, and I go to rt.com, CloudFlare comes up and says, I'm checking your browser for a few seconds of

Leo Laporte (02:10:02):
They've got DDoS. That's their DDoS protection DDO

Jeff Jarvis (02:10:05):
Profession.

Leo Laporte (02:10:05):
Yep. Yep. And

Stacey Higginbotham (02:10:07):
Legit,

Leo Laporte (02:10:08):
Legit are you legit? He's too legit to quit. Chromeos 99 just came out faster desk creation, improved Palm rejection nearby share. And one more thing on the byebye list. Google's pulling the plug on assistant snapshot, which was according to nine to five, Google, the only trace left of Google now. So if you wanna see if you wanna see what it did, you can ask your assistant for updates that you see in your snapshot, like calendar events, birthday Myers, stock prices. Why would they kill that? What do they save?

Stacey Higginbotham (02:10:43):
Google now used to be my favorite. So I just don't get up. Don't understand. I just give up.

Leo Laporte (02:10:48):
I remember when Google now came out, I was singing praises saying, this is the future. Me too. This is where's gonna, you know, put everybody in the dust.

Speaker 7 (02:10:57):
Did we all use it or not?

Stacey Higginbotham (02:11:00):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:11:00):
I used it and would've used it more. Had they beefed it up even more?

Stacey Higginbotham (02:11:05):
Yeah. They had to start tying it into more things. Yeah. It was such a disappointment.

Leo Laporte (02:11:10):
The idea was you'd get, it was card based. And when you get to the, the airport, there's your tickets, here's the weather of the city you're going to, you know, we'd kind of know what you're doing and I guess, you know, privacy advocates and just people scared about privacy just probably killed it. That nobody wanted to use it.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:11:26):
Oh, that actually makes sense. Cause it, but I opted into everything

Leo Laporte (02:11:30):
I did too. Yeah. For, you know, for it to be useful, you had to say, you can, you can see everything. You can look at my Gmail, whatever you want. And that's probably what killed it. I'm gonna guess. And well,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:11:40):
They still do things like they still pull stuff from my email, into my calendar for me and stuff like that.

Leo Laporte (02:11:46):
Oh yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:11:47):
They're new feature. I guess. They're not now features now. I guess. I don't know.

Leo Laporte (02:11:50):
Well, snapshot was one of

Speaker 7 (02:11:52):
Them, but that's going away. Ooh, that short, terrible. Oh, so sad. So sad.

Leo Laporte (02:11:59):
I thought I would check on my Samsung Galaxys 22 and see if I have a, a feature drop. Maybe they get it here before I get on my pixel. That'd be sterile. Nope. Software's up to date security patch. January. That sucks. That's why you buy a pixel, right? Right there. Right there in a nutshell.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:12:21):
Oh, make me have pixel envy. How's

Leo Laporte (02:12:23):
Your

Stacey Higginbotham (02:12:23):
Flip. How's your flip. It's

Leo Laporte (02:12:24):
Great. You like

Stacey Higginbotham (02:12:25):
It? It's I love it. Come to me TA.

Leo Laporte (02:12:29):
Oh, I like that wallpaper.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:12:32):
This

Leo Laporte (02:12:32):
Is just the chair. And you don't mind the manly wallet or you not. You're the case.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:12:37):
I am using the case. Oh, okay. I always use the case.

Leo Laporte (02:12:39):
Yeah, it's good. I don't for that phone, especially you kind of wanna keep it a little. Isn't that cute. Look how cute it is.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:12:45):
And it has a little, I didn't realize this until it was there. And then I was like, hello,

Leo Laporte (02:12:49):
Isn't that? Nice. Get a little screen on the back so that you can see what your notifications are, what the time is. And it actually, you can mess with that and get it to show even more stuff.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:12:58):
Ooh, show more stuff,

Leo Laporte (02:12:59):
Show more stuff.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:13:00):
I usually want my phone to show me less stuff in general. Cuz I'm

Leo Laporte (02:13:04):
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:13:05):
Easily distracted, but

Leo Laporte (02:13:06):
Yes. Yep. Turn off notifications that's for sure. And that change was Elon Musk says I was forced, forced. I tell you into an agreement with the S E you should throw it out now. Oh gosh.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:13:27):
Can we just all SI and move on, please.

Leo Laporte (02:13:30):
SI. This is the one where he tweeted funding secured to make Tesla private at $420 a share wink, wink, nudge, nudge I'll claim later determined to be untrue, but of course it sent the stock price sailing.

Jeff Jarvis (02:13:47):
Here's a question. Yep. Due tech startup founders need to be jerks.

Leo Laporte (02:13:57):
Well,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:13:57):
There's an argument for that. Yes.

Leo Laporte (02:13:59):
Yeah. Have, so there are, there's a couple shows on TV now about this, right. Did you, so there's the super pump, super pump to watch that the Uber story and he's a complete from day one Travis call

Jeff Jarvis (02:14:11):
Though, though the taxi people are sometimes worse.

Leo Laporte (02:14:15):
Oh yeah. Well its, you know, it's true in that sense. I mean the, the medallion owners and the taxi commission,

Jeff Jarvis (02:14:21):
Not for us.

Leo Laporte (02:14:22):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But I mean, even from when he's pitching at the very beginning, he's pitching what was called Uber car at the time to a venture, he lies and says he invented it. He didn't invent it. You know, he kind of took it over. So yeah. I mean, I don't know how accurate it is. It's honestly, it's a little painful me for me to watch cuz

Stacey Higginbotham (02:14:46):
I don't watch any of those shows cause I feel like I've lived through it. I don't

Leo Laporte (02:14:50):
Yeah. The dropouts quite good because it it's that's about Elizabeth Holmes and the Theno story. It starts when she's a little girl. And so it gives you a little bit more perhaps depending on how accurate it is a little more perspective into why she did. I mean, that's the question why she did this? Did she knowingly Tor fraud people was she swept up by events? What, what actually happened. And I think they give you a pretty good explanation in that. It's from a, I also like it cuz it's from a podcast and you know,

Jeff Jarvis (02:15:22):
So, so, so you're saying that so on the whole and I have an exception of a second on the whole, are you saying they do need to be jerks?

Leo Laporte (02:15:29):
No, but look, you look at Steve jobs. You look at bill gates, who is a real jerk.

Jeff Jarvis (02:15:33):
Ray Ford was

Leo Laporte (02:15:34):
A jerk who was Ray Ford. Oh my God. Was he a jerk? But maybe he wasn't a jerk for the times. I don't know.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:15:40):
What about Reed Hoffman? Was he a jerk?

Leo Laporte (02:15:42):
No, I don't. By all accounts,

Jeff Jarvis (02:15:45):
We had Perry Chen talked to my class the other day and he was not a jerk. And he also, you know, started what is in fact, a, a small, a successful company. And that's a,

Leo Laporte (02:15:53):
That's kind of the question that they ask in the dropout. Did she have to lie to get funding? Is it fake it till you make it? And does that, I mean, obviously it wasn't bro culture in her case, but, but it was that same kind of drive to break the rules, move fast and break things, fake it till you make it. I don't think that's necessarily of the case. If you, if I don't think you have to be, let me

Jeff Jarvis (02:16:16):
Ask a different question if they weren't then fine. Then if they weren't by chance. So jerky at tracking more jerks, would the internet be better? Would it have a better reputation?

Stacey Higginbotham (02:16:29):
I don't know. I think, I think it doesn't, it actually probably helps if you're a jerk. I really do think it helps. I don't think it's necessary, but I think it is helpful if you're a jerk to be a founder at a company. Because it helps you stick to your vision and also probably gives you a little Insulation from feeling from questioning the ethics or the ramifications of some of your decisions that I think are needed to succeed or to really burst out. I don't know. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:17:11):
Be glad you don't live in South Korea. You put this in didn't you?

Jeff Jarvis (02:17:16):
Yeah, I did. I did. This is

Leo Laporte (02:17:17):
South Korean election graphics are next level. You

Jeff Jarvis (02:17:20):
Gotta start that one over again. It's

Leo Laporte (02:17:22):
Unbelievable. This is a a bear. I don't know what's going on.

Jeff Jarvis (02:17:27):
I know exactly. A faceless bear that picks up the candidates like their dolls.

Leo Laporte (02:17:40):
They these, this screen technology

Jeff Jarvis (02:17:43):
See

Leo Laporte (02:17:43):
A lot, you see in a lot of places, the idea is it's really just a flat screen, but you can make it feel like it's 3d. There's a bend in it. And so it feels like the edge. It tricks your eye. And so it's, it's kind of cool, but it's just a flat screen. Here's there's more with the bear. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (02:18:02):
Skip down to any of them. They're they're all unbelievable. There's a bear. 

Leo Laporte (02:18:09):
We could do that. We could do this. Oh, here's the candidates. What, what

Jeff Jarvis (02:18:15):
You're doing Reig how

Leo Laporte (02:18:17):
Did they get them? Is sign language widespread in Korea or?

Jeff Jarvis (02:18:22):
Well, people are deaf. Lots of places. Sure.

Leo Laporte (02:18:25):
Oh, okay. Cause all of these, by the way, have somebody signing in the corner, which is interesting. Maybe they're just a little more sensitive to that. I don't know.

Jeff Jarvis (02:18:36):
Then there's the I think the next one down they're competing. Oh, oh this one. Yeah. They're that one they're

Leo Laporte (02:18:42):
Competing in. Well, I don't know if you ever, you probably don't watch the NFL, but there is a trend towards these quickie graphics now in the NFL, they're in incredibly corny and dumb because they're cheap. You know, they're quicky. They're not, not even as good as this, although this isn't the greatest that's so they're PA pointing this as a pace, playing this as an ice skate ice skating race.

Jeff Jarvis (02:19:08):
It doesn't add anything to the information. No

Leo Laporte (02:19:10):
Zero, but it makes you watch, you know, some it it's cultural. Some, some places maybe they like the graphics. They like more graphics. I love this this screen, we could do this. Should we start doing this? Anthony? You should do that. Right? The bear. Yeah. Or whatever. I could have Stacey and Jeff be in a curved box and they could feel like they're reaching out to grab me and

Jeff Jarvis (02:19:36):
Punching

Leo Laporte (02:19:36):
You Leo punching me. Oh, why punch you? Punching you? The doors are closing. Oh, oh, oh, wow. But what's funny is this is, I mean, you see this all the time in lighthearted stuff, but that it in a, in a light, they

Jeff Jarvis (02:19:53):
They're in the election today, I think. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:19:55):
Wow. I think this is an example of TV broadcasters, even in South Korea really don't think much of their audience.

Jeff Jarvis (02:20:03):
They think.

Leo Laporte (02:20:04):
Yeah. If we don't keep this very exciting. Yeah. You see. And then, and, and by the way, by as a corollary, you could see how much we trust and love our audience and their intelligence because we have none of this. We're in fact, quite a doll show. We don't attempt in any way to keep your attention. We just kind of slog along.

Jeff Jarvis (02:20:22):
We're very, very S

Leo Laporte (02:20:23):
This is, this is our show right here into that show. And then in other news, Did you see this? This is good. The endurance has been found off the coast of Antarctica. I love this three miles deep, almost perfectly preserved because it's so cold and so deep. And there's so little oxygen at that depth. This is the famous story of Shackleton who was trapped in the ice. The glacier squeezed his boat. His men had to get off. They hiked for days to get to civilization in very daunting odds. He saved every one of them. Look

Jeff Jarvis (02:21:03):
At that. Look

Leo Laporte (02:21:04):
At that great leadership.

Jeff Jarvis (02:21:05):
It's perfectly,

Leo Laporte (02:21:05):
It's like when you see the Titanic, you know four treaties mean that they cannot touch or remove any items for this ship. It's just, has

Jeff Jarvis (02:21:15):
I almost wish it could be up though.

Leo Laporte (02:21:17):
Well, yeah. I mean,

Jeff Jarvis (02:21:19):
There's that one and I'm in charge now. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:21:24):
Look at this. Isn't that amazing. Wow.

Jeff Jarvis (02:21:28):
And it was like an amateur sure. His story and have figured it

Leo Laporte (02:21:30):
Out. Yeah. It was three miles from where they thought it would be. Where was LA or position was last shacked

Jeff Jarvis (02:21:37):
Thought his, his,

Leo Laporte (02:21:38):
Yeah, yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (02:21:39):
Position was, I mean, give him a break. It, it was probably pretty stressful.

Leo Laporte (02:21:43):
Yeah. Yeah. 

Jeff Jarvis (02:21:46):
Is this where I parked my car?

Leo Laporte (02:21:48):
Scooter is telling the story in our chat room. Endurance never reached land, became trapped in the dense ice pack. And the 28 men on board eventually had no choice, but to abandon ship after months spent in makeshift camps on the ice flows, drifting northwards, the party took to the lifeboats to reach the inhospitable uninhabited elephant,

Jeff Jarvis (02:22:08):
Right? He's writing a novel in the chat

Leo Laporte (02:22:10):
Elephant island shackled in of five, others then made an extraordinary 800 mile open boat journey in the lifeboat. James cared to reach south Georgia shackled and two others then crossed the mountainous land to the whaling station of strongness. From there, Shackleton was able to eventually Mount a rescue of the men, waiting on elephant island and bring them home without loss of life.

Jeff Jarvis (02:22:36):
Pretty,

Leo Laporte (02:22:37):
Pretty impressive. Pretty,

Jeff Jarvis (02:22:39):
Pretty impressive.

Leo Laporte (02:22:40):
Impressive. Let us, unless there's a story that you either of you are itching to talk about. I think we've done all of your stories, Jeff.

Jeff Jarvis (02:22:54):
Oh, they're hidden in their,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:22:55):
Are you sure? Cuz we haven't done anything related to TikTok.

Leo Laporte (02:22:58):
Oh, oh well there is a TikTok story.

Jeff Jarvis (02:22:59):
Oh there there's. There, there, there is a video food story. That's pretty amazing.

Leo Laporte (02:23:05):
The remote village in Bangladesh.

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:08):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:23:09):
So one story actually we didn't talk about, but I think is very interesting is Amazon is launching something called amp, which Google might have something to say about, but it's not the same. Amazon amp is a live audio app. It's kind of like club house, but you can play music.

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:28):
You're you're a DJ

Leo Laporte (02:23:29):
And you could take phone calls. Yeah. So it it's basically talk radio or music radio in an app right now only available in a pre-release you have to be invited to use it. And I think they only have an iPhone app, but they will have others. Pretty exciting.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:23:47):
I would do it. I think it'd be fun.

Leo Laporte (02:23:49):
Yeah. It's free.

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:52):
You can spin. Yeah. Make your home. You can be Leo port because of his career.

Leo Laporte (02:23:57):
This is, I think as important as YouTube was to video creators. It's I mean, if, for instance I could do my own talk radio show. I could take phone calls.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:24:07):
Yeah. That's what I was thinking. I was like, oh, we could have a heck of a good time. Kevin and I doing some

Leo Laporte (02:24:12):
Play a song. Yeah. They have deals.

Jeff Jarvis (02:24:14):
Did you talk up the songs when you were DJ?

Leo Laporte (02:24:16):
Oh yeah, of course you have to. Yeah. Well you don't have to. It's terrible thing to do. It ruins the song, but it makes you feel pretty good. You can, you got tens of millions of licensed songs from big three music companies, a long list of independent music companies. CD baby is in there as well. No subscription, no additional hardware, no editing. It's right through the iPhone. Fascinating. they're gonna be shows from Nikki Minaj. She's gonna bring her radio show queen radio to amp Pusha T Tiana, Lindsey Sterling, the violinist, Travis Barker, Lil Yachty and big boy. Well known personalities, tey, Poso, and Nikita Dragoon, popular radio host, radio host, Zach sang Kate Corbit, Christian James and, and guy Raz who took his how I built this to Wondery to Amazon. They own it. So what, to me, this is really bigger than maybe you might think this is Amazon saying just like Spotify. Yeah. We wanna own the audio landscape.

Jeff Jarvis (02:25:27):
I, the podcasting I think, has been done. I mean, you've done it

Leo Laporte (02:25:30):
Now. It's done. So it's

Jeff Jarvis (02:25:31):
This is the next thing somebody's looking for. The next thing. Yeah, this

Leo Laporte (02:25:34):
Is and clubhouse. This is clubhouse and more. I

Jeff Jarvis (02:25:37):
Don't. I see, I see. I, I think that's, I think it's so far beyond clubhouse.

Leo Laporte (02:25:40):
Oh, I agree. Agree. So far. It's music.

Jeff Jarvis (02:25:45):
Everybody could be a radio station.

Leo Laporte (02:25:46):
Yeah. But I, you know, they focus on music, but I don't think it's just music. I mean, I really think you could do anything. Yeah. you also have can take callers with control over who speaks and when you can prep plan and schedule your shows, listen to songs in real time with your audience, they plan according to Amazon to add even more from Alexa integrations, to social sharing, to innovative new search and discovery features, man, I wish I'd get, I'd love to get an invite. This seems like I really think this might be the future. Yeah. You think what you and Kevin to could do.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:26:23):
Yeah, I am. Yeah. We already have a call in,

Leo Laporte (02:26:27):
Do you? Yeah. You could have more, more so interesting play by Amazon for, for this on amp.com O N P dot com. And it is, it is an iOS app. I guess you, you do your show in iOS.

Jeff Jarvis (02:26:52):
Oh no. Wanna do it, enter it.

Leo Laporte (02:26:57):
Well, its but this is prerelease. So it's right now it's right. Stream your own radio show with the songs you love. It's your mix and your,

Leo Laporte (02:27:11):
I don't know, clubhouse is kind of no longer the flavor of the month. So maybe this is the next big thing. Or maybe it's Korean election graphics who knows get ready. Your picks of the week are next boy and girl role. But first a word from our sponsors cash show is quite literally brought to you by cash. Our CDN content delivery network. We've used them for more than a decade. Now we wouldn't be able to do these shows without cash. Thank you. Thank you cash. Now you can do video with cash. I mean live video and you can go live in hours, not days and get this less than one second latency. It's cash flies, ultra low latency, video streaming. And it sure beats that unreliable web RTC solution for their web socket live video workflow, scalable to millions of users reach your audience anywhere in the world.

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Leo Laporte (02:29:13):
So we're closer to you. 30% faster than other major CDNs, a 98% cash hit ratio. And by the way, over the last 12 months, they've had a hundred percent availability, not down once. Best of all, 24 7, 365 day a year priority support. They'll always be there when you need 'em cash lie. We love you. Cash lie. Thank you. Cash lie. You should check 'em out. Cash's giving away a complimentary detailed analysis of your current CDN bill and usage trends. See if you are overpaying 20% or more, if you have a CDN, bring your CDN bill and your usage trends to cash life, you don't. Now you really need to go to twi.cash.com and talk to em just that's what I did and let him see how they can help you. And I boy, I've never looked back twi.cash, lie.com. They've been a great support. We'd love it. If you'd take advantage of this offer twi.cash, lie.com. All right. Let's see. What does Stacey have for her thing of the week?

Speaker 8 (02:30:25):
I have got some good stuff for you.

Jeff Jarvis (02:30:27):
Good stuff

Speaker 8 (02:30:30):
Out. Sorry. Okay. That's not opening. I've got a different, good stuff for you. Oh this

Stacey Higginbotham (02:30:39):
Is a USB powered air quality monitor. Oh, okay. From a company called PI. This is called the the can. It has a silly accent mark, but it's the Canary Here. I'll show you I'll show you the

Jeff Jarvis (02:30:57):
It's Anastasia.

Leo Laporte (02:30:59):
Kaar

Jeff Jarvis (02:31:01):
Canal. How you are. You can Air what's that's not an accent that's long a

Leo Laporte (02:31:08):
Yeah. They, you know,

Jeff Jarvis (02:31:09):
Can Canna can a cause there's

Leo Laporte (02:31:11):
A

Jeff Jarvis (02:31:12):
Can

Leo Laporte (02:31:13):
With that air

Jeff Jarvis (02:31:15):
Air can, can

Stacey Higginbotham (02:31:18):
Long a is a can a,

Leo Laporte (02:31:20):
A long, a is can a

Stacey Higginbotham (02:31:25):
Anyway

Stacey Higginbotham (02:31:29):
Sensor. This is a little bit more professional from your home. People use this in, in enterprise settings, but I was testing it because is a chip that is performing actual most. Let me back up most air quality sensors check for estimates. They, they use, they, they basically shine a little laser light. They count the particulates in the air using the laser lights. And then they're like, ah, this has about 20 and then X part per billion. Right? They, they make their assessment on this. This actually does some computer vision on the device to get the exact count. Am

Leo Laporte (02:32:08):
I in the right place? Is it

Stacey Higginbotham (02:32:09):
This? No, that's, that's a security product.

Leo Laporte (02:32:12):
See, this is why it's confusing.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:32:14):
Yeah. It's P I E R a systems. What this company did is built a chip and then they were like, well, what the heck can we do this with this?

Leo Laporte (02:32:23):
Cause

Stacey Higginbotham (02:32:24):
We're, we're able to at low battery power, do some machine learning that get to exact particulate measurements as opposed to estimates. So this is interesting because it's an exact measurement of

Leo Laporte (02:32:38):
Particulates. So the purple is an estimate is it's not an it's not doing the same thing. Yes.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:32:43):
The purple is a good example of an estimate. It's not exactly tracking your particular matter. I mean, it's still very, I mean, it's good enough for you.

Leo Laporte (02:32:52):
I have purples inside and outside from the, when we had the fires and it was, you know, really hard to breathe.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:32:58):
Okay. So you could get one of these and tell it for how much better it is or how much more accurate it is. And it also, I believe pulls data more often than purple, which can be useful simply because you want your data to be sampling as often as possible because when their quality gets bad, you wanna be like, oh, I know know now, instead of breathing it for 30 minutes when it's

Leo Laporte (02:33:24):
Not good. Yeah. Yeah. Well for the next fire, so you, you, you don't plug it to a computer.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:33:33):
So these get no these are designed to be plugged into access points, wifi access points. They've gotta deal with like a real and other places. I plugged mine into a just a, a, An outlet. What are they called? I just plug it into a USB port thing in the Don. Thank you. Yes. Power supply. Thank you, Stacey on

Leo Laporte (02:34:01):
IOT. One of those battery packs. Okay. No,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:34:05):
No, no, no, no. It's just the power supply. That's then plugs into the wall. It's

Leo Laporte (02:34:08):
The, oh, okay. A USB hub. No, just the power supply. It's good. And then does it use Bluetooth to talk to where, how does it, what is it talking to? It does,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:34:21):
Yeah, it uses Bluetooth. Okay. Sorry. I should have explained that.

Leo Laporte (02:34:25):
Nice.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:34:25):
And it contains an E P 32. Everybody's favorite alternative chip design.

Leo Laporte (02:34:29):
Oh yes. Do

Stacey Higginbotham (02:34:30):
Do, did

Leo Laporte (02:34:31):
You 200 bucks, so it's not cheap, but I think the purple,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:34:34):
No, this isn't really for people. Yeah. But it's, I, I think it's a really neat device and I think it's a neat concept because I'm a sucker for people who are like, oh, I've built some cool Silicon technology. Let me not sell that. Cuz that's commodity and sell, like build device blink did that and then was bought by Amazon, for example.

Leo Laporte (02:34:53):
Right. Neat from PI systems.com. P I E R a, the Canna, a one for Aruba. Oh, wait a minute. I got the one for Aruba access points. I was wondering why they kept saying Aruba access points. There's also that was $200. This is $250. That's the one you have, I think, connected to cloud using wifi, Bluetooth, ethernet or monitor year from everywhere. Cool. Do they have a, so one of the things I like about purple is you could be part of a larger map of air quality. 

Stacey Higginbotham (02:35:26):
They do not don't

Leo Laporte (02:35:27):
Have that. Yeah. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:35:29):
I mean, cuz part of this, they wanna design. This is for like companies who are like, if you're a small business owner and you're like, let's check out our indoor air quality. This is a solution for you for that. Right.

Leo Laporte (02:35:40):
Jeff J number a pick.

Jeff Jarvis (02:35:43):
I'm gonna do a really quick one. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (02:35:45):
So Matt Kroon is one of my favorite people on Twitter. Really, really smart guy. He's the general manager of boston.com, which is the Boston globe platforms. There he's a, was a Neman fellow at Harvard. He teaches journalism with the a Harvard extension. We were having a discussion on Twitter as we do about wonky media things this week the wall street journal did a supposed ex expose about ads misplaced in the Ette network. And they said there were billions of ads. And I said, this is ridiculous. And Matt and I were going back and forth. And then Matt came in Leo, this is gonna hit you with the solar plexus. Like it did me and he unrelated. I find it so bizarre that you reply to my tweets when I was in high school and college, I would listen to you on this weekend tech with wi port, you guys were just effectively fictional characters to me at that point. Yes.

Leo Laporte (02:36:34):
We still are.

Jeff Jarvis (02:36:36):
You've been around that long.

Leo Laporte (02:36:38):
You ought see Anastasia w Higginbotham he was

Jeff Jarvis (02:36:43):
In high school. Yeah. It's like that.

Leo Laporte (02:36:45):
That makes you get, but the worst thing is, and it happened just the other day on Reddit where people say, is he still alive? Is he still around? I remember him from when I was in high school, whatever happened or, or worse almost happened to him.

Jeff Jarvis (02:37:02):
Oh.

Leo Laporte (02:37:03):
I know. I know. That's all right. I, you know, that's the price of fame and fortune. What can I say? It is? It is. So is that a number? That's just a,

Jeff Jarvis (02:37:13):
That's just old.

Leo Laporte (02:37:14):
We're just old. Okay.

Jeff Jarvis (02:37:16):
Yeah. I could have done another. He's forgotten

Stacey Higginbotham (02:37:17):
The number because he's old.

Jeff Jarvis (02:37:20):
Yes. The man from the future visionary life of John fun Neman. I think you guys will like

Leo Laporte (02:37:25):
That. I wanna get that book. Thank you for the recommending. That that's great. That is a

Stacey Higginbotham (02:37:28):
Good wreck. Yeah. Excited

Leo Laporte (02:37:29):
To it. Yeah. Added to my wishlist very much. So

Jeff Jarvis (02:37:38):
Which plan do you use on audible?

Leo Laporte (02:37:41):
They've been trying to get, get me off it forever. Cuz I, oh, I signed up in 2000 when they had a, I think it was a, they called it the light listener plan. It was two bucks a month and it was fairly inexpensive. And I even got, I even got email from the founder and stuff saying, you know, when you, you sign up, that was that, You know, like he wanted me to like pay more. No, I, I have ideal. I have my deal. But

Jeff Jarvis (02:38:11):
When I, when I wanted to do my language lessons on it, I needed a lot of tokens, whatever they call it. And so I signed up for the annual 1 24. Yes. So it's about to come do and I'm gonna suddenly gonna w

Leo Laporte (02:38:26):
How much is how much go outta curiosity?

Jeff Jarvis (02:38:28):
I forget. I forget. But it's always, it's always, basically about 10

Leo Laporte (02:38:31):
Bucks. Think it was like, yeah, it was 10 bucks a month for two monthly credits.

Jeff Jarvis (02:38:36):
No, that's that's, it's about 10. So when I buy the three extra credits, which I do frequently.

Leo Laporte (02:38:41):
Yeah,

Jeff Jarvis (02:38:41):
Very frequently. It's I think an extra 10 bucks for the extra three credits. So no nos, 10 bucks per credit. I mean nine something per credit.

Leo Laporte (02:38:49):
Yeah. Well, I still love you audible. That's all I can say. And they are, so we should mention a sponsor which I probably should always say when we talk about them. Thank you. I'm not gonna do a pick because I'm too lazy,

Jeff Jarvis (02:39:08):
Lazy. You're you're just lazy and old and

Stacey Higginbotham (02:39:10):
It's five o'clock

Leo Laporte (02:39:11):
And it's five o'clock.

Jeff Jarvis (02:39:12):
I already ordered by sushi. The sushi takes forever. I already ordered it.

Leo Laporte (02:39:17):
The sun has gone over the yard arm. I thank you so much, Stacey, or as we know her Anastasia w Higginbotham oh Lord Stacey on iot.com. She does the podcast with Kevin TOFL and has a great newsletter too. That's free to all. So is the site please. So this poor woman starving, just join, join, join, do something. Stacey, I t.com. Do you have a, you have a premium membership? No, you don't even, you don't charge.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:39:51):
I, I don't charge. Well, I charge my advertisers. So if you feel like really special, you can click on my advertisers. They are a good group of

Leo Laporte (02:39:58):
People. There you go.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:40:00):
So that's, that's about

Leo Laporte (02:40:01):
It. That's the way to do it. Mr. Jeff Jarvis is of course, the director of the town night center for entrepreneurial journalism at the Craig Newmark graduate school of journalism at the city, university of New York, Ray crock called him a nickel millionaire, but he's our nickel millionaire. Oh, yep. Oh yeah. At

Jeff Jarvis (02:40:25):
Least, at least it's, it's at least 10 cents

Leo Laporte (02:40:27):
By now. John sees what I'm looking at right now. I didn't realize it's already to time to spring forward. So that means you've

Jeff Jarvis (02:40:37):
Just lost two hours of your life. Listening to us. You're about to lose

Leo Laporte (02:40:40):
Another hour. Another one's going away. Yep. Kiddo, March 13th, we spring forward. So if you wanna watch this show right now, it's 11. It it's on the air at 2:00 PM. Pacific 5:00 PM Eastern. And it used to be 2200, but we're gonna spring forward, which means relative to, to UTC, we're gonna spring backwards or it's gonna go backwards. We're gonna go forward. So it's 2100 U. I love you. It's very relativistic. It took me a long time to understand that if we set our clocks forward, that in effect, we are starting an hour earlier in the rest of the world. I think that even as I say, it doesn't make any sense.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:41:32):
Oh, it hurts my brain.

Leo Laporte (02:41:38):
If you are. However, as in the UK, cuz you know, ever since I think it was Obama where we decided no, we wanna do it earlier and later. And then so the rest of the world, it's not for a couple of weeks that even makes it worse.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:41:54):
It really does. But you know, it's even worse talking about it for five minutes. Let's go.

Leo Laporte (02:42:01):
All right, thank you. Everybody come back here next week at some time or other and we'll be here for you. Have a wonderful week and that's it for this week in Google byebye,

Rod Pyle (02:42:12):
Hey, I'm Rod Pyle, editor of ad Astra magazine and each I'm joined by Tariq Malik the editor in chief over at Space.com in our new this weekend space podcast, every Friday. Tariq and I take a deep dive into the stories that define the new space age what's NASA up to when will Americans, once again set foot on the moon. And how about those samples in the perseverance Rover? When are those coming home? What the heck is Elon must dumb. Now in addition to all the latest and greatest and space exploration will take an occasional look at bits of space flight history that you probably never heard of and all with an eye towards having a good time along the way. Check us out on your favorite podcast. Catcher.