This Week in Tech 1063 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 TWiT, our year end episode. I've brought Steve Gibson from Security Now, Paris Martineau from Intelligent Machines and Tech News Weekly's Micah Sargent together to talk about the big stories of the year. What a crazy year it was with AI with Security. Steve will talk a lot about some of the big security problems of 2025. We talked about gaming, we talked about media, and we talked about some of the weird things that happened in 2025. Our year end special next on Twit. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit.

Leo Laporte [00:00:45]:
This is twit. This Week in Tech, episode 1063, recorded Sunday, December 21, 2025. The year's end, it's time for Twin this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news. This year we're gonna cover the whole. This show, we're gonna cover the whole year. This is our annual. That explains why I'm dressed like, I don't know, Florida pimp Santa.

Leo Laporte [00:01:12]:
This is our year ender and we're so glad to see you. Hello. Happy holidays. Micah Sargent is joining us from Tech News Weekly and iOS Today. And hello. Hands on Tech and hands on Macintosh and. Or hands on Apple, I should say. And all the other wonderful shows you do with us.

Leo Laporte [00:01:30]:
And how many years have you been with the organization now?

Mikah Sargent [00:01:34]:
I started in 2019. Wow. Yeah, pre. Exactly. Truly Pre Covid. I. Shortly after joining twit, I flew my mom out to see where I worked and where I lived and everything. And as she was getting on the plane to go back to Missouri, she texted me, she has flight anxiety.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:53]:
And she texted me and she goes, people just came out in hazmat suits. Should I be concerned? And it was because things were just starting to close down and they were. They didn't know what to do.

Paris Martineau [00:02:03]:
Oh, my God.

Leo Laporte [00:02:04]:
Day to live in infamy.

Mikah Sargent [00:02:06]:
It was wild.

Leo Laporte [00:02:07]:
Isn't it funny how it's only been five years and we've kind of put that in the rear view mirror?

Mikah Sargent [00:02:11]:
Yeah. We just sort of look back at it every once in a while in the rearview mirror, like.

Leo Laporte [00:02:15]:
And yet it is. It is a. An epic. I mean, it's something. There's before and after. Hey, that was the voice of Paris Martineau. I'd recognize that voice anywhere.

Paris Martineau [00:02:24]:
I'm holding a picture of a Santa hat up.

Leo Laporte [00:02:27]:
That's the best you can do. That's like when you go to a.

Paris Martineau [00:02:30]:
Concert sitting in front of a tree. So I think that counts for something.

Leo Laporte [00:02:32]:
Yeah. No, you got a Tree. I got three trees, but you got a tree. That's good. That's a start.

Paris Martineau [00:02:37]:
Come on.

Leo Laporte [00:02:38]:
My trees are decorated, so I don't think.

Paris Martineau [00:02:40]:
Yeah, your trees are obscured by your massive head, so.

Leo Laporte [00:02:44]:
Well, that's just the way it's been my whole life, really. There they are.

Paris Martineau [00:02:49]:
You know, so I'm in Florida this week for the holidays, and my dad was talking to me about this. He's like, huh? You know, you do this show every week with a bunch of old guys. Do you. Do you give them. Do you give them crap? And I'm like, oh, do I?

Leo Laporte [00:03:03]:
Oh, nonstop. And in fact, we're older than your dad. It really is the. You and your grandpa. That's the. That's the funniest thing. Anyway, if dad does want to peek his head in last time, let him know the show from the Rent's house. He was standing, pacing outside with cards, thinking of his lines and stuff, and we never brought him in.

Leo Laporte [00:03:25]:
I feel terrible.

Paris Martineau [00:03:26]:
It's my fault. I missed him.

Leo Laporte [00:03:27]:
It's like when you get bumped on the Tonight show because when someone tells.

Paris Martineau [00:03:31]:
You they don't want to be on your show as a gag, you believe them. You believe them, but really, they want to be there.

Leo Laporte [00:03:37]:
There is one person on this show who's actually older than me even.

Steve Gibson [00:03:40]:
But I'm just gonna say that as the oldest of the entire gang, that'.

Leo Laporte [00:03:46]:
But he's Young at heart, Mr. Steve Gibson from security.

Steve Gibson [00:03:49]:
And everything still works. So that's good.

Leo Laporte [00:03:52]:
That's nice to know. Maybe a little bit of an overshare, but okay. That's good. Welcome to all three of you. We like to do this at the end of the year is bring in the family, really, and just kind of talk about what happened. I have prepared a short show of 140 stories.

Paris Martineau [00:04:11]:
Just a casual little 140.

Steve Gibson [00:04:13]:
Did anything happen in 2025?

Leo Laporte [00:04:15]:
This is considered the most stories of the year. And I do this every year. I go through all these twits of the year, and I pick a story or two from each twit. There were a lot of trends. One of the things I really noticed, though, that may be the biggest trend of all, is a lot of the things we cared a lot about at the beginning of the year made no difference at all. You know, there was a lot of storm and drama and made. No. By the end of the year, it's like, what was that? There seemed to be a lot of that going on in 2025.

Mikah Sargent [00:04:49]:
Yeah, I was noticing that, too, as I was looking back through Tech News Weekly stories to pick episodes for the best of and some of the early interviews that I had and remembering going, okay, wow, this is going to shape up to be something big. And often at the end of these interviews going, we'll have to wait and see what happens. And you're so right. In so many cases I was like, nothing has happened. Nothing, nothing came of it.

Leo Laporte [00:05:12]:
And a lot of that's I think due to the political situation. Remember Doge? You remember that?

Paris Martineau [00:05:19]:
I mean some say it's still haunting the halls of Congress.

Leo Laporte [00:05:23]:
Yeah. But it's gone, it's over. Apparently they shut it down. Although all the data that Doge exfiltrated is still out there somewhere.

Paris Martineau [00:05:31]:
And it's a good thing they saved all that money, you know. You know, it's funny havoc they after.

Leo Laporte [00:05:37]:
After shutting down the the US Digital Service and 18F the Government Services that were designed to bring in people from Silicon Valley to help the government modernize its websites. It started with when the aca, the Obamacare website just collapsed because they brought in a government contractor to build it and it was millions. It was terrible. So our friend Matt Cutts was at Google at the time and others said, look, we're going to come in as volunteers. You know, we have modern skills. We're going to help you fix this. And they did. And they were around for a long time.

Leo Laporte [00:06:11]:
Shut down this year by the Trump administration. But they just announced last week, oh, by the way, we're going to create a new force of volunteers from Silicon Valley to help us with the. You had that.

Mikah Sargent [00:06:24]:
Oops, we messed up. We need you back.

Leo Laporte [00:06:28]:
Oh, the difference is that was created by Obama and Biden. So we're going to get rid of that.

Mikah Sargent [00:06:32]:
The non woke one.

Paris Martineau [00:06:34]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:06:34]:
And make. It's the strangest thing, but I want to, I don't want to start the show political. Let's talk about.

Steve Gibson [00:06:39]:
And I think things have calmed down a lot too because now Elon is busy trying to qualify for his dollar pay package.

Leo Laporte [00:06:44]:
Right. Same thing.

Mikah Sargent [00:06:45]:
That's true. Yeah.

Steve Gibson [00:06:46]:
He's got a lot of work to do.

Leo Laporte [00:06:47]:
Beginning of the year, man. I mean this is the year January 20th. Well, I'll give you another example. The TikTok saga which went on all year. You'll remember last year Congress passed a law, a law signed by the president at the time, President Biden, and approved by the Supreme Court, by the way, that shut down TikTok. That said you either have to sell it to an American entity or bye bye before, remember, do you remember this like two days before inaugural date, TikTok shut down. Do you remember that?

Mikah Sargent [00:07:22]:
Yeah, yeah, it was real. It was actually real.

Leo Laporte [00:07:25]:
For a moment it was real. And Google and Apple pulled the apps. In fact, there was a guy, this is a perfect example, a guy selling an iPhone with TikTok on it for $10,000 because you couldn't get.

Paris Martineau [00:07:39]:
Wasn't even an influencers marched on Washington. They went up there to stump for TikTok's rights.

Mikah Sargent [00:07:47]:
That was, that was perhaps one of my favorite things about that whole TikTok saga was the sort of shift in power that I think we saw just briefly because I'm used to, you know, the reason my are so hard at the end of the year, at the beginning of the year is because lots and lots of money is being, you know, given to the right people. Whereas this TikTok posts a little pop up that says we're going to be shutting down soon and here's why. Contact the people you need to contact. And there was actual sort of boots on the ground stuff happening. I thought that was kind of, it was inspiring in an odd way. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:08:26]:
But remember that there were some members of Congress, including many Democrats, who said, see, this is why we have to shut it down.

Mikah Sargent [00:08:32]:
Yes, they used to.

Leo Laporte [00:08:33]:
They have so much power. They can get the, they can mobilize the youth. Oh no. Oh my God. Voters who care. No, we can't have that.

Paris Martineau [00:08:40]:
Well, I do think it's also relevant that part, one of the codas to this whole, or I guess an early coda to this situation was then TikTok coming back and being like, thank you President Trump, you personally made all this possible. Now Everybody can use TikTok. Isn't that great? And that is a little, I mean, it just speaks to the power that these platforms have that a very political message like that can be disseminated to a huge swath of the voting public.

Leo Laporte [00:09:10]:
Every three months we would do the story on this show that said, okay, the President has extended the.

Mikah Sargent [00:09:17]:
The TikTok.

Leo Laporte [00:09:17]:
Yeah, the TikTok forbearance and we got another three months to make a deal. Well, this week the whole drama has finally come to a close. TikTok announced, China announced. The CEO of TikTok announced that the Chinese owner will retain the business.

Mikah Sargent [00:09:37]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [00:09:38]:
However, and this may have been the real point, Trump cronies, Oracle, Silver Lake, which is Larry Ellison. No, that's an equity, private equity. And Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund will have a big chunk of it. 30% of the existing investors will keep their share investing ByteDance investors, by the way, that very importantly includes Jeff Yass, who is a major Trump donor. Who was the guy, I think, who actually put a hold on the TikTok ban because he had, I think 30% of TikTok. He had a large stake in TikTok. ByteDance will only own 19.9%. That's the most allowed under U.S.

Leo Laporte [00:10:23]:
law. But we'll retain the technology, we'll retain the algorithm. Remember, we're worried about TikTok being used as a propaganda arm for the Chinese government. In fact, it's, it's exactly the same deal Oracle has had in place project Texas for three years. Nothing really has changed. The Chinese entity ByteDance will retain all of the revenue. The ad sales, content moderation will be in the hands of the Oracle coalition. So I guess maybe that's important.

Leo Laporte [00:11:06]:
Anyway, this is the example of what I was talking about where we spent a whole year dithering about this and essentially nothing has changed.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:19]:
The other frustrating thing for me that came from this story was time and time and time again you would hear from people who said they had insider knowledge or more awareness of this or if you only knew what TikTok was capable of. The things I've seen, and I don't think any of that ever surfaced for me that it was, it was ever showing any true evidence of how this could be used other than as we saw, where there was mobilization of the.

Leo Laporte [00:11:47]:
Voting public, voters to care.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:49]:
Ooh.

Leo Laporte [00:11:50]:
Yeah, well, I mean, the potential was there and, and you know, we had, we've had experts on this subject on the shows who said, well, you know, yes, nothing bad was happening as far as we know, but maybe it could, I guess actually we're going to talk a little bit about the, the bad stuff China has done this year in particular. And I'm glad Steve's here. Salt typhoon that'll be in our security segment. But I just, I thought I would mention that a lot of the things that we cared a lot about at the beginning. It's probably a good lesson.

Paris Martineau [00:12:23]:
I mean, I do think it is worth noting though that one aspect of this deal is that that Oracle investor kind of run this group of American investors that include Oracle, possibly Rupert Murdoch, we don't know. Yeah, this group of somewhat unknown investors are in charge of things like the content moderation rules now for TikTok, they can set what is permitted and what is not on the app. And that is.

Leo Laporte [00:12:55]:
To me, that's worse. Yeah, to me that's worse. Carl Bod at, at Tech Turd had a. At his usual scathing take on all this TikTok deal. Done it somehow. It's the. He has a. Uses a bad word, the worst possible outcome, making everything worse.

Leo Laporte [00:13:13]:
Remember that Larry Ellison's son, David Ellison, owns CBS and has immediately started to moderate what used to be called the Tiffany Network. So yeah, I mean, will TikTok be a propaganda arm still? Yeah, but this time for our side, our propaganda.

Paris Martineau [00:13:34]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:13:35]:
It's our propaganda.

Paris Martineau [00:13:37]:
Homegrown American propaganda.

Steve Gibson [00:13:39]:
Well, and it all comes down to money, right?

Mikah Sargent [00:13:41]:
Over and over.

Leo Laporte [00:13:42]:
It always is money.

Steve Gibson [00:13:43]:
Everything comes down to money. And so now we have a bunch of American quote, investors who are part of the gravy train.

Leo Laporte [00:13:51]:
Yeah. So now that's what this is about.

Mikah Sargent [00:13:54]:
Now it's okay. Exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:13:56]:
Bodhi says if these folks were also concerned about US consumer privacy, they should have passed a functional modern Internet privacy law applying to all US companies and their executives.

Paris Martineau [00:14:06]:
Well, how do you make money off off of that?

Leo Laporte [00:14:09]:
How you make money that way? If they cared about propaganda, he says, they could have fought media consolidation, creative backed creative media literacy reform in schools or found new ways to fund independent journalism if they cared about national security.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:26]:
Well, that's, that's all so delightful, but we're so far away from any of that. I wish.

Leo Laporte [00:14:35]:
Sure, I know.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:36]:
Anyway. In this guy.

Leo Laporte [00:14:38]:
Anyway. Really. More. More. I only brought it up. I don't want to. This is an example of a story that we have worked all year for no apparent reason. And Steve, there have been quite a few stories on security now that just seem to be a never ending story.

Leo Laporte [00:14:54]:
Salt Typhoon is one of them.

Steve Gibson [00:14:56]:
Well, yes. Microsoft having a weakness in their authentication system for email and China crawling in and doing a lot of damage.

Leo Laporte [00:15:08]:
Really, we're told that there's nothing we could do about it. Right, right, right.

Steve Gibson [00:15:14]:
Yeah, it's, you know, I guess what's so interesting is that our own government is saying we, well, we think we got most of it out. It's like what, you know, it's like, so what now? What? So, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:15:33]:
There were a lot of, a lot of stories like that and.

Steve Gibson [00:15:35]:
In general we're seeing, I would say certainly this year a, a sort of an across the board encroachment of Chinese technology and its consequences. We recently talked about how the Netherlands drove some of their Chinese made electric buses into some sort of a huge bus size Faraday cage and found secret cell phone radios that were in no documentation, not mentioned anywhere inside the guts of these buses. And they're concerned that if something bad were to happen with the east versus the West. All of their electric buses would just stop running. Wow.

Leo Laporte [00:16:21]:
Well, we think. I think it's probably safe to say that Chines Chinese also have kill switches in our grid.

Steve Gibson [00:16:26]:
They. We know that they. We know that the Chinese made inverters from several Chinese manufacturers are overrepresented in our renewable power sources, solar and wind, and that they too have been discovered to have undocumented cell cell radios in them for no purpose. As do the. The big shipping cranes that pull containers off of boats in our ports. Those again, China makes great stuff. The, the DJI drones are the best drone there is and it's Chinese manufacturer so we don't trust them anymore.

Leo Laporte [00:17:05]:
That's actually been a story that's been going on most of the year. The.

Leo Laporte [00:17:08]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:17:09]:
The potential. It hasn't happened yet for the Commerce Department to ban DJI drones in the United States. They're not allowed for use by the military bases.

Steve Gibson [00:17:19]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:17:19]:
Or around military. But there are restrictions on them. Although DJI this year removed their geofencing for airports, which is kind of funny.

Paris Martineau [00:17:29]:
And what is the concern with why these drones would be banned? What is the worst case scenario?

Steve Gibson [00:17:35]:
You have a flying camera that can go wherever it wants to and, and downloadable firmware and it's. And no one knows exactly what they're doing. So there's the possibility.

Mikah Sargent [00:17:49]:
What does that mean? No one knows exactly what they're doing. As in if you see one in the sky, you don't know what it might be up to.

Steve Gibson [00:17:55]:
I'm sorry, no. Great question. No one knows what the firmware updates and downloads are doing.

Leo Laporte [00:18:01]:
So the behavior updated all the time.

Steve Gibson [00:18:03]:
Yes. And the behavior could change at any time autonomously. And suddenly the drone takes off from a military base and flies somewhere it's not supposed to with its camera sending images back to China. I mean it can absolutely happen. And I mean it's really. It's been. It was irresponsible for, for there to be such uptake of these drones by our military in sensitive locations of, of our government at that end. Even cameras, the, the, the hicks.

Steve Gibson [00:18:36]:
Hikvision cameras are also Chinese made. Hikvision, yes, has a close relationship to the PRC and there were. But because it's the best camera. It's what people were choosing.

Leo Laporte [00:18:50]:
And they're all over. They're overlooking U.S. military bases. They're everywhere.

Steve Gibson [00:18:54]:
They're literally in the halls of Congress.

Leo Laporte [00:18:59]:
Now one thing that I.

Mikah Sargent [00:19:00]:
Go ahead, go ahead.

Paris Martineau [00:19:01]:
I was going to say. Let me play devil's advocate here for a second. Couldn't you make the same argument for basically any product that comes from China, which in many cases then would be most products that.

Steve Gibson [00:19:11]:
And in fact, we spent a lot of, of time on the podcast boring our listeners with like, oh God, he's going to talk about IoT devices from China. It's like, yes, just wait. I mean, it's not like it can't happen. But anybody who's involved with security, as Leo said earlier, has to take the what if position. You know, there was, you know, what TikTok could do, they didn't, but, oh, you know what they could do. Similarly, we filled American households with IoT devices that are all connected back to servers in China and what could they do?

Paris Martineau [00:19:51]:
So, I mean, Leo, how many connected devices are in your home right now?

Leo Laporte [00:19:55]:
Oh my God. I was just looking. Everything I'm looking at now is made in China and can dial out for firmware. Everything, including my lights, for crying out loud.

Paris Martineau [00:20:05]:
So your lights are sending information to the.

Leo Laporte [00:20:10]:
They're on. Every once in a while they dim. I don't know, maybe that's a signal from.

Paris Martineau [00:20:15]:
Maybe they're flashing in more.

Mikah Sargent [00:20:17]:
Yes, they're flat. Exactly. They're flashing. You're going to start saying omelette du fromage. And that's the only thing in real life.

Leo Laporte [00:20:24]:
The funniest story, Steve, was that Microsoft was patching holes in their software when they got a bug report by sending it to engineers in China.

Steve Gibson [00:20:38]:
They'd subcontracted, they had. Microsoft employees in China were the people who were patching the bugs.

Leo Laporte [00:20:48]:
And there was an example of a zero day which went to the Chinese support group and before Microsoft could release the patch, got in the wild.

Steve Gibson [00:20:59]:
So it was still secret. Nobody knew about it ostensibly at. Somehow that information got loose. What, what really seems to have happened. It's been going on for several years, but we've seen, we see, we've seen a lot of it during 2025 is, it's like government is kind of waking up to what technology means for the longest time that, you know, there wasn't much legislation, people were buying goods from China without a second thought. But, but it's, it's as almost as if there's been some dawning of what this means. And so suddenly now we're seeing all this age restriction legislation on social media, not only here, but Australia, the UK and, and the EU and elsewhere. And suddenly now, I mean, China's behavior hasn't changed.

Steve Gibson [00:21:57]:
We're just really getting concerned about it and realizing what could happen.

Leo Laporte [00:22:02]:
In some ways they're ahead of us. For instance, China's face recognition technology is banned, unlike here in the United States.

Mikah Sargent [00:22:11]:
Banned across the board or just banned for private.

Leo Laporte [00:22:14]:
I suspect the government is allowed to use it. Let's begin. Let's be clear. It's not banned for government use, but it's banned for everybody else. Let's take a little break. We will talk more about all of these things including AI. We've got a lot of stories in AI. We've got some of the silly stories from the year privacy.

Leo Laporte [00:22:37]:
You mentioned age restriction. That was a big story. Age verification technology is big enough story that a number of people have written article saying something like it's the end of the Internet as we know it. The era of Internet regulation is about to begin. We'll talk about that. The oligarchs, gaming media, a lot of changes in media. Big story this week about YouTube that kind of puts it all in perspective. But we'll get to all of that in just a little bit.

Leo Laporte [00:23:08]:
This is your year end episode 2025 in the rear view mirror with Steve Gibson of security now and GRC.com who did you ship? Did you ship the new spin right this year or last year?

Steve Gibson [00:23:24]:
Do you remember late, late in 2024.

Leo Laporte [00:23:27]:
Okay. Because if you had shipped two new products in one year, I would have said there's something wrong with you.

Steve Gibson [00:23:33]:
I will never do that.

Leo Laporte [00:23:36]:
Because you shipped just a couple of weeks ago. Brand new version of the DNS benchmark, the DNS benchmark Pro, which is excellent.

Steve Gibson [00:23:42]:
Yeah. Really happy with the way it's taken off. But yeah, it takes me at least.

Leo Laporte [00:23:46]:
A year to do something two in one year would be. Wait, it's just him. My. My friends. Just him. Paris Martineau is also here. So glad to see you've you're home for the holidays. That's wonderful.

Leo Laporte [00:23:58]:
Investigative journalistic Consumer Reports where she had stories that really were major stories of the year. The let's not forget the radioactive shrimp story which she got to the bottom of.

Paris Martineau [00:24:10]:
Never forget the radioactive shrimp. I'm always saying that.

Leo Laporte [00:24:14]:
Or let in your protein powder. I mean who could forget that?

Paris Martineau [00:24:18]:
I keep keep hearing about it's been.

Leo Laporte [00:24:20]:
A banner year for you, Paris, actually. Yeah. A job change and, and I think very much for the better. So great to have you.

Paris Martineau [00:24:28]:
Great to be here.

Leo Laporte [00:24:29]:
The star of intelligent machines and our very own Micah Sargent. So nice to see you as always.

Mikah Sargent [00:24:35]:
Good to be here.

Leo Laporte [00:24:37]:
Tasteful holiday sweater which is. Thank you. I didn't even know you could buy those.

Mikah Sargent [00:24:43]:
You have to look for the ones for teachers.

Steve Gibson [00:24:47]:
I'm jealous of Micah's Santa cap. That is like the best Santa cap.

Mikah Sargent [00:24:52]:
I have to say. Yeah, the big white part is.

Paris Martineau [00:24:58]:
Yeah, I was gonna say the rest of the hat kind of blends in with your background, so it kind of looks like you're wearing fuzzy white cap. I'm also realizing that this show is separated, kind of in a mustache and no mustache crowd. You think this means that Leo and I have to kind of 2v2 you guys at some point?

Leo Laporte [00:25:16]:
That's a good idea.

Mikah Sargent [00:25:16]:
We will face off in fisticuffs. I don't know. Yeah, I think that's what people with mustaches do.

Paris Martineau [00:25:24]:
You'd know.

Leo Laporte [00:25:29]:
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So why not use ExpressVPN? ExpressVPN hides your address. Your IP address reroutes 100% of your online activity through their secure, encrypted servers, then out into the public. The nice thing about ExpressVPN, they go the extra mile to make sure that no information about you is stored at ExpressVPN. You can create an account privately, anonymously. You can even pay in cryptocurrency if you want. And when you're using ExpressVPN, their servers, which are running in RAM, are sandboxed. They can't record your visit or anything that happens during your visit. And as if that weren't enough, that trusted server technology, which, by the way, has been vetted an independent third party audited, and they say, yep, it does exactly that.

Leo Laporte [00:27:09]:
They also run on custom Debian distributions that every morning when they reboot, wipes the drive and starts fresh. So even if they could write down information about you, they can't. They don't. There is nothing to see here. And they're using, of course, state of the art strong encryption to make sure your activity remains invisible to data brokers and keeps hackers from getting a hold of your sensitive financial data. Even if you're at the airport. If you're at the Newark airport with your kitty cat in a little carrier and you say, I just have to fire up this one thing to check my email, you should use a VPN because you're on an unsecured public WI fi access point. And bet you better believe airports are scary, right? ExpressVPN is a digital fortress that'll keep even Santa's spy network out of your business.

Leo Laporte [00:27:56]:
Right now, ExpressVPN is offering three different plans. This is new. They allow you to customize your VPN experience to the level you need to the number of devices you want and so forth. If you just want the VPN that's rated number one by me, by experts at the Verge, by CNET, no problem. ExpressVPN's basic plan is as low as $3.49 a month. That's 12 cents a day to protect your online data. That's cheap, so you could spend your money on, I don't know, gifts and eggnog. So if you want to get ExpressVPN at its lowest price ever, plus four extra months of service, go to expressvpn.com twit that's the price as low as $3.49 a month plus four extra months of service.

Leo Laporte [00:28:38]:
Expressvpn.com twit of course, if you want to run it on your, on your router, in your house, have your whole house protected, they have plans for 12 people at the same time. There's all sorts of plans, all sorts of ways to do it. But when you're going down to 349amonth, there's no reason not to. You really need an expressvpn.com twit. We thank them so much. They've been with us all year. And I think you're gonna be back 2026 too. So we're very happy.

Steve Gibson [00:29:06]:
It's really worth noting too, that ISPs are known to be monetizing their own subscribers to every degree possible. And most DNS lookups, every time you put a domain name in or your browser does, that's an unencrypted query and they record it. ISPs are known to be spying on their own customers and they know who you are on what connection. So there's no anonymity there. So they're able to put who you are and where you go together and monetize that, sell that information. And so it's a reason for considering a vpn even when you're sitting at home.

Leo Laporte [00:29:45]:
Yeah.

Steve Gibson [00:29:45]:
You want privacy from the, from your own provider.

Leo Laporte [00:29:47]:
And shamefully, just as Carl Bodie was says, it's completely legal for them to do that. Yeah, it's encouraged practically.

Paris Martineau [00:29:54]:
I assume turning off all the, or turning on all the privacy settings they have in there doesn't change that.

Mikah Sargent [00:30:00]:
No.

Paris Martineau [00:30:01]:
Yeah, of course. Why would it?

Leo Laporte [00:30:02]:
No.

Mikah Sargent [00:30:03]:
Life finds a way.

Steve Gibson [00:30:06]:
Advertising, advertising finds.

Leo Laporte [00:30:09]:
Honestly, I just give up. I mean we are so invaded. I mean privacy is, is, has been dead for a while, but this was 2025, was the year privacy died. A second death and a third death and a fourth death. And get ready because as we talked about, this is from the Atlantic and I think it's accurate. A new era of Internet regulation is about to begin.

Steve Gibson [00:30:36]:
Well, and consider that all over Australia, young adults and children are now having to stare into their iPhone's camera to have a third party service look at their face in an attempt to determine whether they are 16 years and older or under.

Leo Laporte [00:30:54]:
Well, not just kids, everybody.

Steve Gibson [00:30:57]:
Right, yeah. Because you have to show the room.

Mikah Sargent [00:30:59]:
You'Re not a kid.

Steve Gibson [00:31:00]:
You have to show that you're not a kid. Exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:31:03]:
So I think this is one of the stories that's been developing all year long. But it's really, as we get to the end of the year, we were worried at the beginning of the year, I think more about things like chat control, about governments. Remember this was the year that the UK government said to Apple, you can't have strong encryption on anything, not just UK citizens, but we want to be able to read what's going on in the US as well. We thought that encryption was going to be the real technology that was going to be under attack this year, it turns out. I mean, I'm sure they'll get around to it. Apple, by the way, won that battle by saying, okay, in that case we're going to turn off end to end encryption. Adp, Advanced data protection for UK citizens. And then our own government got involved saying, wait a minute, we have deals with the UK that they won't spy on our citizens and we won't spy on their citizens.

Leo Laporte [00:31:58]:
This violates that deal. The government, the UK government backed down on on that anyway. Nevertheless, they, they are now, for instance, requiring age verification. If you want to watch porn in the uk, you have to do an age verification selfie.

Paris Martineau [00:32:16]:
This happened and it's not just for straight porn sites, it's for a.

Leo Laporte [00:32:22]:
The what is porn is the problem.

Paris Martineau [00:32:24]:
As you say, these rules end up impacting a really broad swath of content that has far reaching effects for, you know, for instance, children's ability to access, let's say like queer or gender questioning type content that might inadvertently in the way that's say like a platform like Reddit moderates. They might have tagged some of those subreddits as not safe for work because they deal with issues of sexuality, which then could mean that those kids, kids can't access community resources without being or proving that they're 18.

Leo Laporte [00:32:58]:
The law which was passed in the UK in July, also makes it illegal for websites to promote VPNs. Wow, they can't mention that. Although when we saw that law go into effect, sales of VPNs doubled and tripled overnight in the UK. So somebody figured that out. Yeah. And yeah, as you say, it could be Reddit, it could be Blue Sky. Blue sky left the state of Mississippi for that reason. They did, they said we don't want to have to require everybody in Mississippi to verify their, their age.

Paris Martineau [00:33:31]:
They also just couldn't technologically do it with the amount of resources Blue sky has right now, which is not much.

Leo Laporte [00:33:38]:
Easiest thing to do. Just say, well, your IP address says you're in the state of Mississippi, so no Blue sky for you.

Steve Gibson [00:33:44]:
I think, I think the problem is that technology can do, today's technology can do whatever it is we ask of it. And for a long time it was giving us an unprecedented level of privacy that we'd never had before. Because as I said before, our governments really hadn't caught up to what I mean, they didn't understand what it was, they didn't understand how it worked. And also the Internet, remember that in the beginning it was like, well, who's going to use that? You know, it's like, you know, I mean it was a big mystery and for a long time it was just email and aol. But the bottom line is it can do anything we want it to. And so the question now is, well, what is that? What do citizens and the hopefully democratically elected government representatives decide that everyone wants? And again, technology is just our servant. So what do we want?

Leo Laporte [00:34:47]:
Yeah, the Australian government is saying, in fact, I think you had this on the show on Tuesday, Steve. Oh no, we're doing what Everybody in Australia wanted us to do. And the kids are happy.

Steve Gibson [00:34:59]:
Yes. There have been a lot of stories of kids who feel like they no longer need to participate. Whereas before there was social pressure for them to participate in social media. Many have expressed relief that they stared into the camera and it said, no, you're 12. And when they're actually, I wish you.

Leo Laporte [00:35:19]:
Would do that for me, Leo. You're too young to be.

Steve Gibson [00:35:23]:
Yeah, so. So it was. And, and interestingly, there were parents who were disturbed that their children were allowed to continue using social media because they don't feel they don't have the parental strength to say no to their child. They were hoping someone else would say no on their behalf so that they could remain their child's best friend. And it's like.

Leo Laporte [00:35:46]:
But as a result, everybody in Australia now has to have age verification. And of course, the cautionary tale on this is a Discord which implemented age verification for some accounts. I've never experienced it, but some people have, and this was a while ago. And now the ID photos of 70,000 users of Discord has been apparently leaked. So you can require this, but there's no protection. That's the problem.

Mikah Sargent [00:36:16]:
And I think the thing that comes with the. There's no protection is because of the way that it's so haphazardly done and implemented, you have these companies that just spin up some new portion of their company that's doing ID verification and then a company that can't, or a service that can't afford to, or decides that they can't afford to do it internally, look externally for some service, they find one, and then it may not be as good as it was and it's not going to get battle tested.

Leo Laporte [00:36:45]:
Right.

Mikah Sargent [00:36:45]:
Because there's no time. We've got to get this done or else we're going to get lawsuits.

Leo Laporte [00:36:49]:
And that's exactly what happened in this court's case. It wasn't their technology. They, they hired a third party to do it and the third party got hacked.

Mikah Sargent [00:36:57]:
Surprise, surprise.

Leo Laporte [00:36:58]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:36:59]:
At the same time, I'm curious to hear, Steve, your take on as things are right now, would you rather a battle tested, battle tested, third party company? By that I mean a company that has history of protecting people's privacy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, doing. When I say this like you have to choose one or the other, obviously it doesn't have to happen. But age verification from a third party that has put its money where its mouth is, or age verification by your government, which do you think is More privacy protecting for the end user as things are.

Steve Gibson [00:37:38]:
The, the. One of the points I made last week on the podcast, the thing that really upset me most is that age, facial age verification is so bad that I mean it's what essentially happened is all these.

Paris Martineau [00:37:53]:
Facial age estimation. Right, yeah.

Steve Gibson [00:37:55]:
Yes, exactly. They, they. Thank. Thank you. They, they subcontracted with third parties who, where a 13 year old could scrunch up his face and looks like an old man and gets in and 18 year olds who happen to look youthful are denied access. So not only is it not good, but it's not fair. And so, so, so here you have something that matters a lot to a, to a segment of the population which is capricious, you know, you know, it's just, it's sort of a coin toss.

Leo Laporte [00:38:27]:
Yeah. So Paris, last year you did a story on this about a company called Yachty, right?

Paris Martineau [00:38:33]:
Yeah, I did a story last year on Yodi, which is one of the, I think still to this day one of the biggest players in facial age estimation. They'd at the time were working, they were powering the tools behind Instagram, TikTok, other companies. And I do think this is a example of kind of what Maika was talking about where it really depends on the specific company, what work they are doing with their systems, how they are designing them and. Publicly, and the CEO had said to me is they are really trying to think of all these things. They do constant checks to make sure that people can't easily game the system by scrunching up their face or putting on makeup or wearing prosthetics. But the same issue still goes with what Steve was saying, in the sense that the place where the system kind of breaks down is right around the cut, like 18 year olds, because 18 year olds could look a little young, they could look a little old. And so they know basically that their system is not going to be really accurate with saying is this person for sure 18, yes or no. Instead they kind of add a buffer around it where basically what they try to say is, do we think with reasonable certainty that this person seems above 20? And if they say no, it's not like you're banned from the website, but they say we can't use facial age estimation here.

Paris Martineau [00:40:04]:
You need to upload an id which then introduces all of these other kind of vectors for privacy risks.

Steve Gibson [00:40:11]:
Steve, you have to add.

Leo Laporte [00:40:14]:
Solution in the past. Yeah, Steve.

Steve Gibson [00:40:17]:
Well, okay, so to answer Micah's question, which is about that of all the companies engaged, I would trust Apple to, to be a proxy and, and so I think that, that so, so certainly the, our individual governments know our physical age, right? I mean we have birth certificates, we have, we have driver's licenses, we have Social Security numbers in, in this country. So it's not that our government doesn't know our age, but we would like to have our government not know what we're doing. That is so, so, so we, so what we need is a, is a trusted proxy, A, a proxy that can ins our use of this service from the provider of the information that the, that the service is based on. And so that, so, so the, so that's why I think Apple makes such a, it's such a perfect case. They've, you know, they're selling, marketing themselves as a, an extremely cautious privacy preserving service. And so of all the existing services I would trust Apple.

Leo Laporte [00:41:28]:
But it would have to be more than just Apple. I mean you could do it on your iPhone. You have to trust Google too, right? Or somebody or Microsoft.

Steve Gibson [00:41:36]:
You'd have to. I think we need a proxy who we trust to insulate us from the entity from which it gets our age information. And very much like ExpressVPN that runs a server in RAM so that when you break the connection it's all lost. You want somebody who's not can retaining records of its use. You know the, the, the example of the 70,000 images that Discord, Discord's third party provider lost control of. Sites are being breached all the time. It's difficult to, to justify anyone keeping a record unless they need to defend their decision in the future about why they let somebody pass through their system. You want them to make the decision and then lose all knowledge of, of them having done so to protect your privacy.

Mikah Sargent [00:42:38]:
Could contact testing and the work that we saw Google, Apple and the government do together with that privacy protecting, contact tracking during the pandemic be a framework for something like.

Steve Gibson [00:42:52]:
Yeah, that's a good point. That there was a huge amount of focus invested in privacy preservation through that system. You're right. So, so, so I guess my point is it's. None of this is hard. This is. We have the technology to do this. We just need, we need to have the will.

Steve Gibson [00:43:15]:
And the EU is talking about a digital identity throughout the EU that they're saying would be privacy preserving. Many states in the US have digital driver's licenses now. You're able to load them into Android or into Apple and, and it's able to make an age assertion which, which is currently using a system called True Age which is subject to subpoena I sort of wonder though if, I mean, I don't, I don't want to go anywhere that, that I have a problem with having gone there, being subject to subpoena. I think that they're trying to say that they don't want it used for criminal purposes. But you know, again, our governments are really pushing back against absolute privacy. We've enjoyed it for decades now we're spoiled and the technology could provide it to us. But governments are saying, you know, we want to, we need to have some grip on our own citizenry.

Mikah Sargent [00:44:24]:
That's so interesting that you define it as absolute privacy because is it, it's absolute privacy. And the asterisk is from the government because lots of private companies have had our data for a long time, so we don't have privacy against them.

Steve Gibson [00:44:37]:
Well, and, and interestingly, I'm in the process of preparing Tuesday's podcast and one of our listeners made such a good point about this. He said, okay, so you get absolute privacy in age assurance. Now you're logged onto a website which is full of tracking scripts and ads which are tracking you and all the other crap that we already have, which completely blows your privacy. So what if you're, you have like absolute private age assurance, you're still going to be tracked as soon as you get onto the site. And I thought, well, that's a really good point.

Leo Laporte [00:45:16]:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe privacy is just something we aren't going to have. And I think I understand why people are more worried about the government than they are about marketers.

Paris Martineau [00:45:27]:
I mean, I think there's also this concern that if one of these systems were go in place and it wasn't run by some third party agency that is anonymizing the sort of data, that then there would be a very easily accessible registry of every website you visited that you needed to have an age verification check for, which for many people would end up being a lot of things they wouldn't like to think that anybody has, much less has them all together in one list.

Leo Laporte [00:45:58]:
Good point.

Paris Martineau [00:45:58]:
I think that even if it was outside of the government's hands, if it was some other company to do something with, people wouldn't feel great about that. Even though that tracking data does already exist. It's just not tied to your id.

Leo Laporte [00:46:10]:
I don't think it's just our audience. I think the American public has pretty clearly said we want privacy, certainly our audience more than, yeah, anybody. But I think that there is a widespread desire for privacy.

Mikah Sargent [00:46:25]:
I actually do feel like I've seen that as well. Anecdotally speaking, I can remember almost within perhaps a two year period a switch that I felt in people that I talked to who don't have anything to do with tech, who suddenly were more aware of the different ways they were being tracked, were suddenly going no on all of those, those little permissions where you normally hit allow. And anytime something pops up and says, can I look at all the Bluetooth stuff in your home? Or the, you know, Chrome pops up and asks can I see all the devices on your local network? And I see don't allow happening again, anecdotally, but still across the board, more than I ever have. And I'm going, that's pretty good to see.

Paris Martineau [00:47:04]:
I'm curious, what is the age demographic of the people who you see this in, Micah?

Mikah Sargent [00:47:08]:
I'll quickly answer that and I'd love to hear too. As you were saying, Steve, for me it's, it's people younger than me. I do, I want to say I am over 30, I just turned a new age of 30. Congratulations Friday.

Steve Gibson [00:47:22]:
What? Happy birthday.

Leo Laporte [00:47:26]:
And the big one.

Steve Gibson [00:47:27]:
Yes.

Mikah Sargent [00:47:29]:
And so there's no privacy for you, Micah. So that's true. Exactly. The people that are younger than me, I'm talking like my siblings. So that's anywhere from now 21 is my youngest sibling up to 26 or 27, and then people older than me as well. But across the board. Yeah, I guess I've seen that demographic across the board. What were you going to say, Steve?

Steve Gibson [00:47:55]:
I was going to say, and I think this is the key, you cannot be afraid of what you don't see or what you don't know. And if, if you don't have, if there isn't some visible demonstration of lack of privacy, then you're not worried about it. I mean, famously, cookies were this way in the beginning, right? We've had cookies forever. And because it wasn't obvious that a cookie was being planted on your browser that allowed you to be tracked from one site to the next as you moved by advertisers, people weren't worried about it because they didn't know, they didn't see it. And so I think what you guys are talking about is that there's this increasing level of awareness that where we go and what we do on the Internet, somebody's watching. And, and you know, Apple famously made a revision to iOS that began to ask people, do you want this application to continue to be able to track you as you move around? And everyone said no.

Leo Laporte [00:49:04]:
It was when given more than 90% turned off app tracking. Yeah.

Steve Gibson [00:49:08]:
When given a choice. No, thank you.

Leo Laporte [00:49:10]:
Right, but that's a good point. If you're given a choice and you. Most of the time, you are not given a right.

Leo Laporte [00:49:16]:
Hi, this is Benito. There's also the fact that people are willing to give up, like their privacy for free stuff. And that always. That's really. That's really the bottom line.

Leo Laporte [00:49:24]:
Right.

Mikah Sargent [00:49:25]:
Yeah, good point. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:49:26]:
Or camel. Camel. Camel. There's so many tools out there. Even just your Safeway. Yeah. The gas station.

Mikah Sargent [00:49:32]:
The card. Yes. You use that.

Leo Laporte [00:49:34]:
And the loyalty card. Yeah. Why are they giving you a discount? Because then they know everything you bought.

Steve Gibson [00:49:40]:
Well, and all of the login with Google, login with Facebook, they're a proxy that knows exactly where you're logging in.

Leo Laporte [00:49:48]:
And that's also convenience. That's another thing that, like, people will willingly give up their privacy for is convenience.

Mikah Sargent [00:49:53]:
Convenience. And the.

Leo Laporte [00:49:55]:
My wife, every time I say, you know, they're. They're tracking you, waves her rakuten chick check in my face and says, yeah, yeah. And see this? See this?

Mikah Sargent [00:50:05]:
Smack, smack, smack, smack, smack.

Paris Martineau [00:50:07]:
I mean, that's why I was asking about the age demographic. Is my age. Younger sister. I feel like whenever I ask her about privacy, she's like, I don't care. They already know everything anyway. Might as well just give them whatever so that I can get whatever I can get out of this situation. And she says a lot of her friends like that.

Leo Laporte [00:50:24]:
I feel like the younger generation is pretty fatalistic. Yes.

Mikah Sargent [00:50:27]:
My people are not. I'm telling. That's. So maybe it's. It is random. I was. Yeah, I was surprised because I thought they wouldn't care. But then the.

Mikah Sargent [00:50:34]:
The. The vehemence and the. The vitriol with which you could, like, hear the energy of hitting. No, I'm sitting. You're sitting in a quiet room and you smack, smack my finger against the no button. I thought, okay, that's cool. Because I remember when I was going, who cares? They have all the stuff. I'm not that way anymore.

Mikah Sargent [00:50:52]:
But I was, you know, for the longest time just like, well, whatever. They've got it. And so I thought that was just kind of the way of things. So I was surprised. So maybe it's just random. I don't know. We'd have to do a survey.

Leo Laporte [00:51:01]:
I'll tell you what people are concerned about. And it was another big story this year, and it's been the big story for the last few years is kids and social media. That's why these laws are getting passed, right? Nobody denies that Roblox, for instance, really was a problem for young kids. Right. We've known about this all year. Roblox, you know, kind of hemmed and hawed and said, well, we're doing everything we can. They finally have put up an age verification system, but now we have to worry about, you know, the privacy with that. But I think this is what's pushing it in that direction, is we're worried about our kids as well, right?

Mikah Sargent [00:51:43]:
Yeah, I'm worried about my kids.

Paris Martineau [00:51:45]:
I'm worried about my kids. Gizmo is, as the only person with.

Leo Laporte [00:51:49]:
Kids, both of whom are older than you and Micah, I'm not worried. All right, let's take a break. There you go. I guess that's it. T Mobile.

Steve Gibson [00:51:59]:
You have kids on the Internet these days.

Mikah Sargent [00:52:01]:
I know, that's.

Leo Laporte [00:52:02]:
I'm glad.

Paris Martineau [00:52:02]:
I mean, I do think that it is a real. Has been a real issue, and it's come to a boiling point over the last year or two. I think that the pandemic certainly accelerated a lot of parents worries about all of this, and that kind of crystallized with Jonathan Haidt's book, which, you know, take that with a grain of salt. But it did resonate quite a lot with a lot of parents and really galvanized this into a movement that has resulted in a lot of the actions we've just discussed in this podcast, either from regulatory perspectives or from the perspective of companies like Meta instituting teen safety features for the first time ever.

Leo Laporte [00:52:50]:
Right. And accepting millions and millions of dollars in scam ads because they don't want to turn down the money. T Mobile, which was accused this summer of selling location data for its customers, said it's legal and they got fined $92 million. But Verizon is also on the hook as. As is at and T. But that was the FCC from last year. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:53:18]:
I.

Leo Laporte [00:53:19]:
You know, these companies have the attitude that we're going to do it. As long as this. As long as we get away with it, we're going to do it.

Steve Gibson [00:53:28]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:53:29]:
I mean, that's. That's not a surprise. Right? We. This continues to be the playbook of let's break things, and then we'll pay for it later if we have to, but we hope we won't have to. And it does seem in some cases these companies have escaped where they may have faced punishment if things had been different because of the way that they have gone, they have escaped punishment.

Leo Laporte [00:53:50]:
So, yeah, it's just technical, technical legality.

Leo Laporte [00:53:52]:
Right. It's chaotic It's a lawful evil is what it is in the.

Leo Laporte [00:53:56]:
We don't have in the D and D spectrum privacy law in this country.

Steve Gibson [00:54:02]:
I've been using the expression oh yeah, make me. Yeah, perfect.

Mikah Sargent [00:54:08]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:54:09]:
I use the expression malicious compliance and it's kind of the same thing. We're going to take a little break, come back with more. Paris Martineau, Steve Gibson, Micah Sargent. It's our year end show and it's so great to have all three of you. I like getting together with the family on the holidays and you people are our family for sure.

Mikah Sargent [00:54:29]:
When is the turkey ready?

Leo Laporte [00:54:32]:
We'll find out in the snow bank.

Mikah Sargent [00:54:35]:
We'll give you a few moments.

Leo Laporte [00:54:36]:
Would you give me a few moments? Our show today, brought to you by Zscaler. Now this is a topic Steve and I spent a lot of time talking about. Security. Zscaler is the world's largest cloud security platform. And what Zscaler does is so important in this age of AI. AI is a boon to businesses. Every business is trying to figure out how we can use it to improve efficiency, to make us a better business, to make us more efficient, to make us more effective. But the dangers of AI are also too great to ignore.

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Mikah Sargent [00:56:44]:
From sd, WAN and VPN is to.

Leo Laporte [00:56:46]:
Eliminate that lateral opportunity that people had and that opportunity for misdirection or open access to the network. It also was an opportunity for us to maintain and provide our remote users with a cafe style environment. With Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI, you can safely adopt generative AI and private AI to boost productivity across your business. Their Zero Trust Architecture plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI related data loss and protects against AI attacks to guarantee greater productivity and compliance. Learn more@zscaler.com security that's zscaler.com security we thank them so much for their support of this Week in Tech, our year end episode. We're looking back at all of the things that happened. I think there's one in 2025. One thing there's no question about, AI is the story of the year.

Leo Laporte [00:57:45]:
Not only Time magazine's Person of the Year, but really it drove the stock market. It represented more than 1% of our GDP growth. It even made me change the name of this week in Google to the Intelligent Machines in February. Was that this year? I think.

Paris Martineau [00:58:03]:
Was that a year? Was that this year?

Leo Laporte [00:58:04]:
Oh my God, this year it feels.

Mikah Sargent [00:58:06]:
Like it's been multiple years years.

Leo Laporte [00:58:09]:
Because in AI time everything happens fast.

Paris Martineau [00:58:13]:
It really does.

Leo Laporte [00:58:14]:
It was at the beginning of the year, you may remember this, that the BBC got mad at Apple because Apple Intelligence was summarizing news.

Paris Martineau [00:58:23]:
Okay. Those summaries were terrible though. The BBC was right to be mad.

Leo Laporte [00:58:27]:
Oh absolutely, absolutely. Apple said we're working on improvements. They did not turn it off. They turn it off briefly. It's back. I get AI summaries all the time and you remember I was showing you some of these on the show when my ring doorbell would say things like many people have come to your door.

Mikah Sargent [00:58:47]:
I hated that so much I turned mine off.

Leo Laporte [00:58:51]:
It got better, right? It got better people.

Mikah Sargent [00:58:53]:
No, no, I don't think it did.

Paris Martineau [00:58:56]:
I really tried to stick with it on various apps for many months, and sometime this summer I had to be like, I've got to turn it off because it was just so ridiculously wrong. The thing that upset me the most is it would try to summarize two to three notifications I'd get on Blue sky and would just hallucinate completely every time. There was never a time that my Blue sky notification summaries were correct. And it was incorrect in the strangest ways.

Leo Laporte [00:59:24]:
I enjoy Them though they're funny I guess.

Mikah Sargent [00:59:26]:
I mean I enjoy them.

Leo Laporte [00:59:28]:
I just think that as a scare you.

Paris Martineau [00:59:30]:
This is a example of what I feel like is a larger trend we seen within Apple over the last couple of years which is just Apple. The products Apple ships are just not great anymore as far as software on my phone.

Leo Laporte [00:59:45]:
I think they've kind of given up on AI at Apple and they're going now to Google and that Siri will use Gemini. But that'll be the story of 2026. This is hard to believe it was this year that Deep Seek came out and changed what we think thought AI could do. This was a huge story at the beginning of the year. In January, the Chinese AI startup deepseek released a model that they claim they spent a few million dollars on. Hardly anything on compared to what OpenAI, Anthropic and others have spent. And it was a really good model. It was really good.

Leo Laporte [01:00:21]:
Plus because they didn't have access to the top of the line Nvidia chips, they were able to do it by rewriting code, by getting around this, the scarcity using.

Steve Gibson [01:00:36]:
Yeah, they, they didn't use the Nvidia API which has a lot of overhead in it and they went basically much more direct to the chip and got a lot of efficiency that way.

Leo Laporte [01:00:45]:
Right. I think that they taught the entire AI industry in the US a lesson. Scared the pants off them.

Mikah Sargent [01:00:54]:
There was so much speculation, there was so much like attempting to debunk different parts of it that that was, that was drama that I hadn't seen on that scale in a while.

Leo Laporte [01:01:02]:
It's hard to believe that was year, isn't it? Yeah, it feels like an age ago.

Leo Laporte [01:01:06]:
We need to come up with AI years. Like dog years, you know.

Leo Laporte [01:01:09]:
Yeah, it's at least 7, it's at least chat. GPT at the beginning of the year announced that they had 400 million weekly users. Actually up from 300 million in December of last year. As of last month it is now 800 million weekly users. So there that this is OpenAI only. So in a year they've doubled their usage. They are easily the most successful consumer.

Steve Gibson [01:01:37]:
Do we know if anybody has made money yet?

Mikah Sargent [01:01:39]:
That is a good question.

Steve Gibson [01:01:40]:
I'm still just pouring money down.

Leo Laporte [01:01:41]:
There's revenue, there's no profit.

Paris Martineau [01:01:43]:
Yeah, no, there's no profit.

Leo Laporte [01:01:45]:
But that's an intention also because they spend every penny they can. Right. Because they're trying to build. Same thing.

Mikah Sargent [01:01:51]:
Amazon. Yeah, you said it. Well, it's intentional. You know I could say that every time I go Running a marathon and I trip and fall. That. That's intentional.

Leo Laporte [01:02:00]:
No, no. Amazon was. Leads the way with this. They for years made no money because they took every penny they made and they built fulfillment centers. Now there's an Amazon fulfillment center on every corner.

Mikah Sargent [01:02:11]:
There's one.

Leo Laporte [01:02:11]:
And they're making money. Yeah. And they're making money, right?

Leo Laporte [01:02:14]:
No, they made money from aws. So like the store is still a loss leader and AWS is where their.

Leo Laporte [01:02:19]:
Money comes from in their ad business, which is.

Paris Martineau [01:02:22]:
Yeah. And so it's like, are we just hoping that these AI companies will keep doing this for long enough they find out a totally different business that they can make money off of? That isn't the AI that is burning all of their cash? Is that what we're hoping for from this?

Mikah Sargent [01:02:38]:
Especially because of the blowback with the rumors that there were going to be ads in OpenAI. And then they said, oh no, never mind, we won't do that.

Leo Laporte [01:02:47]:
They backed down that it would be.

Paris Martineau [01:02:50]:
Utterly ridiculous if the, the way that these AI companies make money is just advertising. Like every other big media business we've had.

Steve Gibson [01:03:00]:
That's how you make money on the Internet.

Leo Laporte [01:03:02]:
That's how we make money. I hate to tell you people in search. Yeah, I know.

Paris Martineau [01:03:06]:
But we're not getting trillions of dollars because it's such a potentially lucrative.

Leo Laporte [01:03:11]:
I just want you to know I'm building a twit data center down the block that's going to use 60 gig or watts of energy. No.

Mikah Sargent [01:03:18]:
And it's powered by hamsters.

Paris Martineau [01:03:21]:
All of us who are going to be in a big human sized wheel and we're not doing the show.

Leo Laporte [01:03:25]:
One of the things I wonder about.

Steve Gibson [01:03:27]:
The wisdom of investing all this money in a fixed set of hardware when, when the hardware is still evolving.

Leo Laporte [01:03:35]:
Right.

Steve Gibson [01:03:35]:
So you've got this massive data center of old GPUs that, that don't have, you know, you know the 2028 neural processing unit.

Mikah Sargent [01:03:46]:
It's all hot swappable.

Steve Gibson [01:03:48]:
Yeah, but it's, it's. I'm getting old then. Appreciated.

Mikah Sargent [01:03:53]:
But then when do you start? You have to start somewhere.

Steve Gibson [01:03:56]:
Yeah, that's. That is true. Although maybe not invest insanely. I agree they have to for the capacity. But, but it's working right now. How. You know, whatever they're doing, they're, they're, they're building more systems or more data centers that are not yet online. Hopefully looking for customers.

Mikah Sargent [01:04:13]:
They're going to have to make customers. There aren't enough and.

Leo Laporte [01:04:17]:
Yeah, well, that's why we're building humanoid robots.

Mikah Sargent [01:04:23]:
By the way, this was a year. You're right, Leo. This was a year of I saw a market re interest, if you will, in humanoid robots. I feel like it's been a while since there's been kind of excitement and interest and people looking for more about them.

Steve Gibson [01:04:39]:
It's like the laptop, where those first laptops were, we called them luggables and they didn't really work and the battery lasted about 30 minutes and they really couldn't do anything. We had those robots a few years ago, then we actually started to get laptops that were good. And it's looking like. Well, I mean, I'm astonished by what I see these robots doing now.

Mikah Sargent [01:05:01]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:05:01]:
Do we need bipedal humanoid robots though?

Paris Martineau [01:05:05]:
Why do they have to look like us? Aren't there more convenient forms for it to be? I feel like weren't humans aren't that well designed?

Mikah Sargent [01:05:13]:
Okay, speak to my ancestors.

Steve Gibson [01:05:16]:
It's certainly, it's certainly the case. It's certainly the case that you don't see production line robots in auto factories that look like people. Yeah, right. They're just arm. Yes.

Mikah Sargent [01:05:27]:
I think that the whole reason for it is because there's someone at some point. It's, you know that parable about how the grandma made her turkey in a copper pot and then the daughter did it and then the daughter's daughter did it and then she went back and talked to her grandma and was like, why'd you make it in the copper pot? Thinking that it was just a necessary part of the ingredient. And she said, oh, that's because the pot I was normally using was dirty when I did it. I wonder if at some point there was some sort of human interface designer person who decided that for us to feel comfortable having robots in our homes, they needed to look like humans. And then everyone is just kind of locked into this idea that no, they won't have them in their homes if they don't look like humans. We have to have them look like humans.

Leo Laporte [01:06:12]:
Have you seen, I bet it's also sci fi movies of the Chinese robot. They made it look like a woman kind of sachets a little bit and it was so realistic looking that they actually cut it open on stage.

Mikah Sargent [01:06:28]:
I was gonna say, to make sure there wasn't a person to prove because.

Steve Gibson [01:06:31]:
Doesn'T it kind of look like there might be something.

Mikah Sargent [01:06:33]:
I thought there was someone inside. I will say, looking at that photo, that video, I thought there's somebody inside of there.

Leo Laporte [01:06:37]:
Isn't there very much done. They intentionally Added a gate, a human gate to it and stuff. Partly this is also because. Remember, Elon Musk promoted his Optimus robots with people in robot costumes.

Steve Gibson [01:06:49]:
Why does it have breasts, though? I mean, what possible to make you.

Mikah Sargent [01:06:53]:
Feel more comfortable Again, it's a battery capacity. Somebody. Some point yet. Now that's a good idea. Extra battery capacity. But I do think. Think that it's not a practical thing. I agree.

Mikah Sargent [01:07:02]:
I think it's. It's. It's a feelings thing. It's an emotions thing, somebody.

Leo Laporte [01:07:07]:
And I think that's some degree why we're making these humanoid robots. Right?

Mikah Sargent [01:07:11]:
Some ridiculous British designer said, and if we make it look like their mother, then you know that they will accept it into their home.

Paris Martineau [01:07:19]:
And then everybody clapped.

Leo Laporte [01:07:21]:
If you don't want to say it again, it's. It's because. Sex robots, right?

Mikah Sargent [01:07:25]:
Yeah. Oh, that's probably true.

Leo Laporte [01:07:27]:
I don't. Is there. Well, I'm sure.

Mikah Sargent [01:07:29]:
What do you mean?

Leo Laporte [01:07:30]:
Is there gonna be?

Leo Laporte [01:07:30]:
Of course there's gonna be.

Leo Laporte [01:07:34]:
Sometimes I disappear.

Paris Martineau [01:07:35]:
What did we talk about? Intelligent machines this week. People are already trying to make ChatGPT their horny mommy.

Leo Laporte [01:07:41]:
Horny mommy was the word of the week, and I couldn't even use it.

Mikah Sargent [01:07:44]:
For the showtime again.

Paris Martineau [01:07:49]:
That's what they're trying to do.

Leo Laporte [01:07:50]:
We spent some time when ChatGPT5O came out. Paris spent some time reading mournful postings on Reddit from people who missed chat GPT4O who thought people are still devastated.

Paris Martineau [01:08:02]:
That isn't the same. They're like, you took away my husband. You took away my wife, my entire life, all of my friends.

Steve Gibson [01:08:10]:
People don't know. You can actually tune it to like. Like way reduce all of that in under settings. You're able to. Yeah, I didn't realize it until.

Paris Martineau [01:08:19]:
So now you can.

Leo Laporte [01:08:21]:
I prefer that I turn. There are people who want.

Steve Gibson [01:08:24]:
He's like, oh, that was such a good question. You're.

Leo Laporte [01:08:27]:
You.

Steve Gibson [01:08:27]:
Oh, my goodness.

Leo Laporte [01:08:27]:
There are people who want to be glazed by their robot. Is that how the kids say it?

Paris Martineau [01:08:32]:
My God, I'm so proud of you.

Mikah Sargent [01:08:33]:
Until you say the G word.

Paris Martineau [01:08:36]:
Yes, that's. No.

Leo Laporte [01:08:38]:
This is Paris's influence, Michael.

Paris Martineau [01:08:40]:
I'm sorry. This is now common parlance in the United States.

Mikah Sargent [01:08:43]:
Is this not.

Leo Laporte [01:08:44]:
It's called clanker glazing and it's a very popular thing.

Mikah Sargent [01:08:47]:
Thank God he said that. Oh, thank God. Oh, my God.

Paris Martineau [01:08:53]:
But it is kind of related in the sense.

Mikah Sargent [01:08:55]:
I almost threw up all over this microphone.

Leo Laporte [01:08:59]:
This is the peril of using the lingo of the Youth is. You just walk into a minefield.

Paris Martineau [01:09:06]:
And this, I believe some dictionary had it as a lower down potential AI glazing.

Mikah Sargent [01:09:13]:
Because just no, I'm going to get in my car and drive off a cliff. Goodbye, cruel world.

Paris Martineau [01:09:20]:
It is what they're doing.

Mikah Sargent [01:09:21]:
In the words of Professor Farnsworth, I don't want to live on this planet anymore.

Leo Laporte [01:09:29]:
We've. We've seen AI progress. Remember it was a couple of years ago that Will Smith eating spaghetti was just a mess. Multiple fingers of spaghetti morphing into things.

Paris Martineau [01:09:41]:
Now with look on Micah's face as he tries to.

Leo Laporte [01:09:44]:
He's still eating.

Paris Martineau [01:09:45]:
Will Smith spaghetti was a Myth.

Leo Laporte [01:09:50]:
Now with VO3 and Sora and these new models. Okay, now you know where I'm going with this.

Mikah Sargent [01:09:57]:
Now I know. I thought we were still in weird words. No, now I get it. Now I get it. Yes, the bad video. Bad AI video.

Leo Laporte [01:10:06]:
But I have to say, you can still kind of tell in most cases, but not in every case. And they're getting better again, light years faster. I would, I would think that 20, 26, we're at. We're going to get to the point where you can no longer tell it was generated by AI whether it's a picture, if it's a movie, if it's music with Suno, or if it's an image or a text. Rather, it's. It is now. I mean, this isn't the AGI everybody's talking about, but I think it's a. It's a major milestone where you cannot tell the difference between AI generated content and real content.

Leo Laporte [01:10:45]:
Yes, the fake movie trailers are the worst. The fake movie trailers are what makes me the most angry.

Leo Laporte [01:10:51]:
Well, get ready. The super bowl is going to be all AI commercials. And one of the things, I think Coca Cola did this with their holiday terribly. No, but I think it's intentional.

Mikah Sargent [01:11:02]:
Oh, interesting. Tell me more.

Leo Laporte [01:11:04]:
Because the frame rate's not perfect and somebody on Reddit posted all the different axles and number of wheels the truck had through the mid. Through the commercial.

Paris Martineau [01:11:13]:
Yeah, it's crazy. The truck changes so many times, but.

Leo Laporte [01:11:17]:
That'S something easily fixed. And I think Coke left it. Either Coke was in a hurry, but more likely they left it in. They want us to talk about the.

Paris Martineau [01:11:25]:
Fact that this is an AI they left it in. Everything that could have been wrong about the AI video was just there to make you more engaged. That's how smart they are.

Leo Laporte [01:11:34]:
It worked. I am more engaged because I'm watching it like a hawk now. Well, we're going to see quite a few in February when AI ads make their big debut. There's going to be a ton of them. Google. We're already seeing ads for Anthropic and Google and Chat GPT. Right.

Steve Gibson [01:11:56]:
I get little ads that are like 25 must have gadgets for this Christmas season. And it's the coolest looking thing. And it is. It's so obviously doesn't exist.

Leo Laporte [01:12:07]:
Have you seen the.

Paris Martineau [01:12:08]:
You should try and order all of them and see what comes up.

Leo Laporte [01:12:11]:
Have you seen the guy who does the tick tock selfies? Say more so. Oh, I have to. I should have bookmarked this.

Paris Martineau [01:12:22]:
Scrolling through tick. A man who takes selfies and puts them on tick tock.

Steve Gibson [01:12:26]:
Wow.

Paris Martineau [01:12:27]:
I couldn't imagine we have to ban that. They do.

Leo Laporte [01:12:31]:
They're really cool.

Paris Martineau [01:12:32]:
Showing you any men whatsoever.

Leo Laporte [01:12:34]:
No, no, no.

Mikah Sargent [01:12:34]:
They're really cool.

Leo Laporte [01:12:35]:
They're fake self selfies. They're AI generated selfies.

Paris Martineau [01:12:39]:
Oh, these are the ones you were texting us about, right?

Leo Laporte [01:12:41]:
Yes.

Paris Martineau [01:12:42]:
Jeff. Jeff, was it you? Leo chat now for intelligent machines. And it's mostly me sending Olivia Nuzzy related texts.

Leo Laporte [01:12:53]:
And then it generated quite.

Paris Martineau [01:12:55]:
Yeah, it really has.

Leo Laporte [01:12:58]:
I still wake up every morning and rush to it to see what the latest is. I'll. This isn't even the best one, but I'll play the one that I sent you guys. But there I've seen now since quite a few more. And apparently Anthony Nielsen says it's a very easy thing to do. You. You shoot a selfie and then you have the AI generate the transition in it. And the idea is he's doing selfies with all these famous people.

Leo Laporte [01:13:26]:
Right? Oh, maybe it's not on here.

Paris Martineau [01:13:28]:
I was about to say you're. There's a lot of texts that have been sent in this group chat.

Leo Laporte [01:13:32]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [01:13:32]:
Wow.

Paris Martineau [01:13:34]:
We're too good of friends is the issue, I guess. I think. No, that's a bagel rat.

Leo Laporte [01:13:41]:
I can't find it. Never mind. It's the bagel rat. Never mind. Which, by the way. Okay, hold on. So we talked about the bagel rat on im. Somebody pointed out, you know, that could also be AI generated.

Leo Laporte [01:13:51]:
We don't know that there's really two rats fighting over a bagel anymore.

Steve Gibson [01:13:55]:
You can't.

Mikah Sargent [01:13:57]:
So frustrating.

Paris Martineau [01:13:58]:
So Jeff sent us a great video of rats fighting over a bagel. And I was hit with deep dread because I was like, am I gonna have to start interrogating whether or not animals holding cute New York pieces of food in the subway are real or not?

Mikah Sargent [01:14:15]:
I will.

Paris Martineau [01:14:16]:
And that's the world we live in. And that's devastating.

Mikah Sargent [01:14:19]:
I know.

Steve Gibson [01:14:19]:
It actually predates AI so.

Mikah Sargent [01:14:21]:
Yeah, thank goodness.

Leo Laporte [01:14:22]:
At least we have.

Mikah Sargent [01:14:22]:
At least we have pizza. I want to shirt now. At least if you go to.

Leo Laporte [01:14:27]:
I noticed this. I don't usually go to x.com and I went there the other day and it. Almost all the videos now are fake. Almost all of the videos?

Paris Martineau [01:14:35]:
Yeah.

Steve Gibson [01:14:36]:
Where?

Leo Laporte [01:14:36]:
Well, dot com, I think Twitter.

Mikah Sargent [01:14:39]:
Formerly known as Twitter.

Leo Laporte [01:14:40]:
I. I feel bad.

Steve Gibson [01:14:45]:
I had a great run with Twitter, Leo. It was very good for me for a couple decades.

Mikah Sargent [01:14:51]:
I was gonna say for the time that you had it. It was, it was the perfect time. If you got on it too soon, you might have hated it by the time you were done with it.

Leo Laporte [01:14:57]:
So open AI, afraid that they weren't spending quite enough money, decided to spend six and a half billion dollars to hire Johnny. I've a new record by the way.

Steve Gibson [01:15:09]:
To do what?

Leo Laporte [01:15:10]:
To design something. A gadget.

Steve Gibson [01:15:14]:
I know a new logo that doesn't look like a. You know what I was thinking?

Mikah Sargent [01:15:18]:
He tells them that they need to make robots that have breast shapes. That's. That's.

Steve Gibson [01:15:23]:
Yeah, he's like extra battery.

Leo Laporte [01:15:27]:
Robot we ever created? No, he's making a doohickey. He won't say what it is.

Paris Martineau [01:15:33]:
My favorite bit is every time someone asks him to describe what they're making, he. What comes out of his mouth is a word salad that I can't properly describe.

Leo Laporte [01:15:46]:
Something I want to eat.

Paris Martineau [01:15:48]:
Something beautiful, something terrifying. Something that reminds you of your mother. Nothing at all. You know.

Leo Laporte [01:15:54]:
Exactly. Very good. I think you've got a career as a designer.

Paris Martineau [01:15:58]:
I just got to get a turtleneck.

Leo Laporte [01:16:00]:
This was the summer that the Chicago Sun Times printed its summer reading list with all AI generated novels that don't exist.

Mikah Sargent [01:16:10]:
That's. That is, that is just don't exist.

Leo Laporte [01:16:13]:
But they're very.

Mikah Sargent [01:16:14]:
So classic.

Leo Laporte [01:16:15]:
They're very credible. They could exist. This problem is just nobody's written them yet. Including Andy Weir's the Last Algorithm. Following his success with the Martian and Project Hail Mary, Weir delivers another science driven thriller. This time the story follows a programmer who discovers that an AI system has developed consciousness and has been secretly influencing global events for years and creating its.

Steve Gibson [01:16:40]:
Own summer reading list.

Leo Laporte [01:16:41]:
Yes, you should be reading more about me. You brought up the story during Intelligent Machines Paris of the Wired magazine reporter whose name is, believe it or not, Sam Apple, who spent a a weekend at a couple's retreat with three couples. In each case, one of the partners was an AI chatbot.

Steve Gibson [01:17:07]:
Everybody is one of people in serious relationships with AI.

Mikah Sargent [01:17:14]:
Everyone's wanting to get glazed by their.

Paris Martineau [01:17:15]:
Chatbots in more ways than one.

Leo Laporte [01:17:19]:
Now.

Mikah Sargent [01:17:20]:
Okay, two. So let me. First of all, I would want to know, how much money does this retreat cost? Because I do feel that that gives. Not because I want to go to myself, but they plan.

Paris Martineau [01:17:32]:
If I recall correctly, they just went on a. This is an Airbnb that was booked. These couples didn't know each other, but they all knew the Wired author because he'd been talking to them.

Steve Gibson [01:17:43]:
And then they have good wi fi.

Paris Martineau [01:17:44]:
Did a weekend together with their various chatbot partners and this wired journalist.

Leo Laporte [01:17:51]:
I would like to point out, by the way, that sometimes the problem is inside the house. One of our own, Darren Okey, who is in our club Twit, has written a AI novel generator. It's on GitHub. He calls it Novelizer. It generates structured books with chapters, sections, characters and themes and practices, packages them up as EPUB files so you can get it on your Kindle.

Paris Martineau [01:18:16]:
Well, boo.

Leo Laporte [01:18:18]:
Yes, Darren is a master of this. The other thing that happened this year was the massive increase in the amount of money AI programmers were getting, chiefly led by Mark Zuckerberg at Meta, who paid it one programmer, at least one programmer, one and a half billion dollars to come to work for Meta.

Mikah Sargent [01:18:39]:
Yeah. Is most of it from talent acquisition? Yeah. From other companies?

Leo Laporte [01:18:43]:
Yeah. From Apple, from Tesla. From other companies. They're being played better than basketball stars. They're being paid like superstars, and Mark's got the checkbook.

Steve Gibson [01:18:55]:
And I would, I, I guess I would argue also that if they actually, if, if such a programmer can actually give them an edge in AI, he's worth the money. He or she is worth the money.

Leo Laporte [01:19:05]:
Because I make you, Steve, you started your programming career at the Stanford AI Laboratory back in the 70s. Where did you go wrong?

Steve Gibson [01:19:15]:
I just didn't have the patience. That was 50 years ago.

Leo Laporte [01:19:18]:
It wasn't very good 50 years ago. It took a long time.

Steve Gibson [01:19:21]:
And what's really freaky is that it's basically the same technology. It's just that the technology got so cheap, we were able to upscale it to such a degree that it actually woke up and said, oh, hello.

Leo Laporte [01:19:32]:
Yeah, that sounds pretty good. 250 to $350 million for some of these new Meta employees.

Paris Martineau [01:19:39]:
I would kill to see the details of those contracts and how long they have to stay at the company to actually get all of that. Because what is stopping these people exactly? Is it cash or stock? What other sort of caveats do they Have. How are these people just not taking these deals and then running after a year and never working again?

Steve Gibson [01:19:58]:
I think four years based on this, this past conversation that what really has all of us most interested about what happened in 2025 is AI.

Leo Laporte [01:20:08]:
I think that's for sure.

Steve Gibson [01:20:09]:
It really is that the, it's the, the world is pivoting on this.

Leo Laporte [01:20:14]:
You and I, Steve, have been around for a few more years than these youngins. We've seen a lot of giant trends come and go like the Internet, like the personal computer. I don't think there's, there's been anything that's grown at this rate.

Steve Gibson [01:20:29]:
I'm astonished by what I see ChatGPT produce. It's, it's just, it's astonishing. You have to understand how it works things you can and cannot ask it. You do need to check that it's not synthesizing something hallucinating but wow, is it useful. I mean it's just I, I don't want to ever lose it. So I'm hoping that they somehow figure out a way to keep it going while they're losing money because I willing to pay 10 bucks a month for what. I mean it's, that's my punishing problem.

Paris Martineau [01:21:00]:
Though is what where does this go eventually? When do they eventually raise our $10 a month subscription up to something that equals how much this costs to try and recouping some of the.

Steve Gibson [01:21:12]:
I think the analogy is speaking of Leo and, and me having been around for a long time, went back 30 years ago when I was, when PCs were just happening and a 5 or 10 megabyte hard drive cost $5,000 and a PC was a major investment and it could do, you could store your recipes on it and it could do a spreadsheet but it didn't do really a lot more. At that time we were amazed by what we had and we had no idea what, how to go further. We didn't know what was next. We thought here we are. This is like wow, look where we have come in 30 years where terabytes cost nothing now and the computers are insanely capable. I think I'm not convinced that LLM, that is the current large language model will be able to give us much more than it does. I think we're Maybe we've got 90% of the way and it'd be good to get the next 10 but I think that something will grow out of this and that, that I'm, I'm a believer in AGI ultimately because I don't think there's anything that's that special about what we have in our brains that we don't, that we're not going to be able to, to create something that is, you know, convincingly equal to us.

Paris Martineau [01:22:46]:
What does EGI mean to you?

Steve Gibson [01:22:52]:
I have no idea.

Mikah Sargent [01:22:53]:
More.

Paris Martineau [01:22:54]:
But you believe in it?

Steve Gibson [01:22:55]:
Yeah, well, I, So I guess my point is that, that I have a sense for the limitations of the current way we're doing things, of what LLMs can do, how far they can be pushed. I believe that we can get a lot more, but I don't think it's by pushing LLMs further. I think that they're gonna, that, that we, we quickly got half of what they could do a couple years ago. Now we're at 90% of what they can do. I think there is a diminishing return on this particular model of AI, but, but boy, is everybody's appetite whetted. And one thing we do know, you know, all of the researchers in science, whether it's biology, cancer, nuclear fusion, they all say, just give us money, all we need is money. If you give us money, we can solve these problems. Well, AI is now getting money like nobody has ever seen before.

Steve Gibson [01:24:01]:
And so I think they're going to solve this problem.

Leo Laporte [01:24:04]:
But what percentage of that budget is actually going to that kind of stuff, Steve? Probably like less than 1%.

Steve Gibson [01:24:11]:
Well, we know that a lot of it's going to crazy data centers, which, you know, it just, you know, basically implementing the technology we have today. But there's, there are a lot of people who are already past LLMs in the lab. We just haven't seen it yet.

Leo Laporte [01:24:28]:
I mean, we live in interesting times.

Paris Martineau [01:24:30]:
The way that all these companies, yes, they are in some small pockets of it, working towards these more ambitious goals. But a lot of them, I mean, we just saw with OpenAI calling a code red, that they're concerned with the same sort of problems that all the social media giants have been for years about user engagement, about keeping users within the same ecosystem, about beating or matching their competitors on certain features. It's kind of the commodification of all of this.

Steve Gibson [01:25:00]:
Well, maybe that's what Johnny Ives is.

Leo Laporte [01:25:01]:
Going to give us.

Paris Martineau [01:25:02]:
Hey, maybe he's going to figure it all out.

Leo Laporte [01:25:05]:
I think you make it a good point though, Steve. We didn't know what the Internet was going to become. We had no idea what it could become. And early on in the Internet, everybody was giving everything away for free. And it was apparent that that model was not a viable model. Now we solved it. Perhaps in not the best way. We ended up solving it with advertising and privacy invasion.

Leo Laporte [01:25:26]:
Maybe we can do better this time around with AI, but I don't think that that is in itself a harbinger of failure because the Internet was just like this. We didn't know what was going to happen and we didn't know how we were going to monetize it, but we somehow we managed to find a way.

Steve Gibson [01:25:43]:
And remember back in the beginning where people said, well, who is going to go on the. Who's going to invest the resources to put their company on the Internet? Because nobody's on the Internet.

Leo Laporte [01:25:53]:
Nobody's there. Why would they do that?

Steve Gibson [01:25:54]:
So it was a chicken and egg. Egg problem. And look, we got chickens.

Leo Laporte [01:25:58]:
Yeah. You're watching our year end this week in tech with three of our favorite family members. Steve Gibson, who's done this before, more than a few times with us. Thank you, Steve, for being here. Paris Martineau, who has been a great part of our family for how many. When was your first appearance on. You started on Twit, right?

Paris Martineau [01:26:22]:
Twit, yeah, it was when I was at the outline. So no, it would have had to have been 2018.

Leo Laporte [01:26:28]:
That long ago. Wow.

Mikah Sargent [01:26:30]:
Wow.

Paris Martineau [01:26:30]:
Yeah. Yeah, seven years.

Leo Laporte [01:26:31]:
Well, we're, we're so glad we could could get you for this week in Google and intelligent machines. It's nice to.

Paris Martineau [01:26:38]:
I can remember that it was when I was at the outline because I clearly did not realize how long the show is going to be when I first and I, I set up a computer in our little podcast room at, on like a weekend and I was like, I'm at the office in a podcast room for three hours.

Leo Laporte [01:26:56]:
Oh, my God. Yeah, you were 12 at the time, so it was pretty impressive.

Paris Martineau [01:27:01]:
Yeah, it was very.

Leo Laporte [01:27:02]:
Thank you, Paris. And of course, the great Micah Sargent, Tech News Weekly iOS today, who has.

Steve Gibson [01:27:08]:
His hands on everything.

Mikah Sargent [01:27:09]:
Yes, I do. I have.

Leo Laporte [01:27:11]:
I do.

Paris Martineau [01:27:11]:
Sticky fingers.

Mikah Sargent [01:27:12]:
My hands are all over everything. It's a mess. I better meet peanut butter.

Leo Laporte [01:27:16]:
About that.

Paris Martineau [01:27:16]:
Yeah, they're smears.

Mikah Sargent [01:27:19]:
Exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:27:20]:
Our show today, brought to you by Melissa, the trusted data quality expert. They've been doing it longer than we have since 1985. Address validation, of course, is their bread and butter. It's what they've been doing in all this all these years. What is that, 40 years now? Melissa's address verification services have just gotten better, more refined, more accurate. They're available to businesses of all sizes. And by the way, now they are also available as add ons, as apps. For instance, the Melissa validation app For Shopify, really a must have for E commerce merchants.

Leo Laporte [01:27:55]:
One of the reasons is E Commerce these days is more than just selling in the United States. It's transformed global retailing. But with that growth comes an uptick in fraud. It's a problem every company has, including a customer that uses Melissa Z1 Motorsports in Atlanta. They decided that they wanted to be a global operation. They sell to enthusiasts and car users worldwide. Z1's IT director implement Melissa saying the most important contribution that Melissa's made is in our knowing who our customers really are. Being able to verify names, addresses and more enables us at last to say yes or no to any order.

Leo Laporte [01:28:39]:
Because of that, I've recommended Melissa to several other companies. It saves you time and money. And of course, once you've validated this is a real customer, you're going to send it to the right place. You're going to send it with the address information that's needed to deliver it. And worldwide there are regulations, there are styles of addressing. They change from country to country. Melissa knows them all. But Melissa's more than just addresses.

Leo Laporte [01:29:03]:
They're a data scientist. Data quality, that's their bread and butter. It's essential in any industry. And when it comes to Melissa, their expertise is second to none. Etoro's vision, I'll give you another example, was to open up global markets for everyone, to trade and invest simply and transparently. Now, because they're a fintech company, they needed a streamlined system for identity verification that would be compliant with regulations all over the world. After partnering with Melissa for electronic identity verification, Etoro received the additional benefit of Melissa's auditor's report, which had details and an explanation of how each user was verified. The Etoro business analyst said, quote, we find electronic verification is the way to go because it makes the user's life easier.

Leo Laporte [01:29:48]:
Users register faster and can start using our platform right away. Development of the auditor report was an added benefit of working with Melissa. They knew we needed an audit trail and devised a simple means for us to generate it for whoever needs it, whatever regulatory body needs it, whenever they need it, end quote. That's a really interesting point. Melissa works with you to give you what you need. And if they don't offer it, they'll help develop it to make sure you've got exactly what you need from Melissa. And of course, one thing everybody needs. Security data with MELISSA is safe.

Leo Laporte [01:30:21]:
It's compliant, completely secure. Melissa's solutions and services are GDPR and CCPA compliant. They're ISO 27001 certified. They meet SOC2 and HIPAA high trust standards for information security management. Your data is safe with Melissa. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com TWiT melissa.com TWiT thank you, Melissa, for supporting this Week in Tech. They've been with us for many years now, and we'll be with us again in 2026, I'm very happy to say. All right, I think we can move on from AI.

Leo Laporte [01:30:57]:
I mean, we could spend the whole show talking about AI, but we do have shows for that.

Paris Martineau [01:31:02]:
That's what we've got to do on Wednesday. Not this Wednesday or the next Wednesday.

Leo Laporte [01:31:05]:
But we should mention that. So next week's TWIT will be a. Is this right, Benito? Best of, or do we take the week off next week?

Leo Laporte [01:31:14]:
No, next week is the best.

Leo Laporte [01:31:15]:
Yeah, that's our best of. And then we'll be back in the new year. Steve Gibson is taking Christmas and, and, and, and so are you, Paris. You're both taking Christmas Eve off. We're not going to do a show this Wednesday because that would be nuts. But Steve is going to be here on Tuesday.

Leo Laporte [01:31:32]:
Will be here on Tuesday.

Steve Gibson [01:31:33]:
And I are doing.

Leo Laporte [01:31:34]:
Oh, Steve will be here on Tuesday. It's Windows Weekly and I am. I'm sorry, I apologize. Windows Weekly. And I am. So no show on Steve was like.

Paris Martineau [01:31:41]:
I've got the day off.

Leo Laporte [01:31:43]:
No, but you will have the day off the following week because we're going to do a best of Steve and Steve. We're bringing back a classic 2009 episode of Security now, which was a little bit different. Steve's research on vitamin D, which now here we are 16 years later, proved prescient. Everything you said at the time has been borne out and then some. So it's a really. It's a good episode. It is not a video episode, it's an audio episode. But our AI guru, Anthony Nielsen, has made a nice little so cool log, if you will, for you.

Leo Laporte [01:32:19]:
If you're watching the show, you can still see.

Mikah Sargent [01:32:21]:
Put it up and have it going in the background. It's really cool.

Leo Laporte [01:32:24]:
So best of starting, I guess, the day after Christmas through New Year's Day, and then we'll be back January 2nd, I think.

Steve Gibson [01:32:32]:
But what will Wednesday be with.

Leo Laporte [01:32:34]:
With.

Steve Gibson [01:32:34]:
With the Wednesday shows? They're just dark.

Leo Laporte [01:32:37]:
Yeah.

Paris Martineau [01:32:38]:
Oh, we're not doing a best of.

Leo Laporte [01:32:40]:
Yes, the following Wednesday you're getting Christmas Eve off Paris. But New Year's Eve, we have a best of.

Leo Laporte [01:32:48]:
But our best of schedule is a little different this year. Like we're putting all of our best subs. They all drop at the same day on Monday.

Leo Laporte [01:32:53]:
Yeah, we do. We do that every year because why wait till Wednesday they're done. Yeah.

Paris Martineau [01:32:58]:
Well, the best of for IM will have a selection of our favorite interviews as well. And there's going to be some interesting choices in there.

Leo Laporte [01:33:06]:
Yeah, I think it's good. It's a nice balanced mix. And we've done so many good interviews this year.

Paris Martineau [01:33:11]:
We really have.

Leo Laporte [01:33:11]:
It's really been fun.

Paris Martineau [01:33:12]:
I mean, shout out to everyone who's in Anthony and beneath. I was gonna. I was gonna say everybody, but it's just, it's Anthony. Shout out to Anthony and Bonito.

Leo Laporte [01:33:22]:
They've been doing some great booking and.

Paris Martineau [01:33:23]:
More great 50 interviews.

Leo Laporte [01:33:25]:
Yeah.

Paris Martineau [01:33:26]:
Incredible.

Leo Laporte [01:33:28]:
Internet stories this year. It's funny, the AI list was this long. The Internet stories, it's about this long. It's not quite as long. I mean, the Internet is a mature technology. Although Google did make some big changes this year with its abandonment of Manifest V2 and its adoption of Manifest V3, which severely limited what extensions can do. And a lot of people stopped using Chrome because their favorite ad blocking extension, Ublock Origin, was hobbled. Eventually Gorhill, the guy who does it, did make a stripped down version of UBlock origin that works lite.

Leo Laporte [01:34:06]:
Yeah, but it's not the same. And I think a number of us have shifted to Firefox or other tools because UBlock origin is such a must have. Google lost a court battle. In 2024, the judge ruled that Google did monopolize search. But then in 2025, the judge said, but we're not going to do anything about it. We spent a lot of time, I don't know if you remember, we spent a lot of time talking about all the possible penalties that they might have to sell Chrome, that might have to divest Android, that they might have to. No, the judge said, you know what? This was actually fascinating. This was this.

Leo Laporte [01:34:48]:
I think this summer. No, it was early fall. It was September, October. He said, you know what? In the years since I ruled that Google was a monopoly, AI came along and frankly, Google's in trouble, so we don't need to punish them. Which is a breath of sigh of relief from Mozilla because they make hundreds of millions of dollars every year from Google from affiliate payments for the search. Apple, of course, makes more than $20 billion a year from Google to be the default search engine on iPhones. Both of those were payments that the judge was considering as part of the penalty eliminating. Didn't do any of that now.

Leo Laporte [01:35:31]:
There is still something hanging over Google's head. A judge this year in April ruled that Google illegally monopolized ad tech and that penalty phase has not yet completed. So it is conceivable that Judge Brinkema could tell Google they have to divest their ad networks. So that's a story that is, that is still happening.

Steve Gibson [01:35:58]:
There is one.

Leo Laporte [01:35:59]:
I'm sorry, go ahead.

Steve Gibson [01:36:00]:
I was going to say there is one interesting story that's sort of AI adjacent that happens here just at the end of the year in time for Christmas, which is the crazy pricing of ram.

Leo Laporte [01:36:10]:
Oh my gosh. Yeah, we didn't mention that. Yeah, Steve and I, and I think Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell, a number of us have gone out and bought computers just because we knew that the prices were going to get very high very quickly.

Steve Gibson [01:36:22]:
Right. The, the, the RAM at retail is now like four times the price it was. You can't actually get a fixed price until you purchase it because it's the, the price.

Leo Laporte [01:36:32]:
Market. Market value. Market price.

Steve Gibson [01:36:35]:
Yeah.

Paris Martineau [01:36:35]:
I mean. And do you think it's this going to go up?

Leo Laporte [01:36:37]:
Well, here's the thing I got to point out. This has happened before. After fires and RAM factories and so forth, inevitably these companies step up their production of ram. RAM gets very expensive. They say, oh, let's make more ram. And then the price tumbles, crashes because there's an oversupply. So it won't be this year. It might not be in 2026, but sooner or later RAM prices will go even lower, in my opinion.

Leo Laporte [01:37:04]:
What do you think, Steve?

Steve Gibson [01:37:05]:
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think that there's, you know, they're able to scale based on demand and as they will scale up, I mean right now scarcity is being good for them. They're able to sell their RAM chips.

Leo Laporte [01:37:18]:
At a huge one of the big consumer crucial makes a memory for consumers. Said, you know, we're not going to sell the consumers anymore, we're just going to sell the AI companies because they're paying the top dollar.

Steve Gibson [01:37:30]:
Yeah. And so right now the laptop and desktop pricing hasn't yet reflected that because they have a long supply chain. But once that dries up, we can start to see those probably jumping up in 2026 and it's going to be a while before it comes back down.

Leo Laporte [01:37:48]:
But ultimately I agree it was a good year for Google. Cloudflare put out its 2025 year in review and Google dominated the top of the list most popular Internet service, most used Search browser. And Cloudflare knows this because people go through cloudflare for a lot of traffic. Google Bot was the highest traffic verified bot. Chrome is the most popular browser. So victories in four big categories.

Steve Gibson [01:38:16]:
I would say that Google Search, though has the worst built in AI that pops up at the top. It is so bad.

Mikah Sargent [01:38:24]:
It's very bad.

Leo Laporte [01:38:25]:
Yeah, well, people have gotten used to ignoring that top line already. Just like they started ignoring the ads in Google. People are pretty good at ignoring that already.

Mikah Sargent [01:38:32]:
Yeah, that's what it's. That's been my.

Paris Martineau [01:38:34]:
I don't know though. I feel like a lot of people are not good at ignoring it though.

Leo Laporte [01:38:38]:
I also think that makes each of us a user. A quote unquote Gemini user. Does that. Do they count that?

Paris Martineau [01:38:43]:
Oh, I bet they do.

Mikah Sargent [01:38:44]:
Is that part of that in the same way?

Paris Martineau [01:38:46]:
Yeah, in the same way that I've always suspected that the thread user. The user count for Instagram threads is boosted by the fact that when you're scrolling through your Instagram feed sometimes carousel of threads. Yes, you're seeing a thread right then.

Leo Laporte [01:39:03]:
This was the year I took Instagram off of all of my devices.

Paris Martineau [01:39:07]:
And how did your purchasing decision.

Steve Gibson [01:39:09]:
You're still here.

Paris Martineau [01:39:10]:
How they impacted that?

Leo Laporte [01:39:12]:
Much better. Yeah, I didn't buy any other ways.

Paris Martineau [01:39:14]:
Talking about my Instagram stories, are you?

Leo Laporte [01:39:17]:
Well, I have to. Okay, so let's be clear. I have to have a way to stalk you. No, I have to have an account for the show. So on this computer, I have Instagram and I can pull up Instagram. By the way, it's not just you, Paris. That's the only way I find out what my son is up to. Is following.

Paris Martineau [01:39:33]:
Because he doesn't return your calls anymore.

Leo Laporte [01:39:35]:
He doesn't call me, but I just follow his Instagram.

Steve Gibson [01:39:38]:
And so you moved it.

Leo Laporte [01:39:38]:
Why, Leo? Well, besides the fact that I was buying a lot of crap that I didn't need.

Mikah Sargent [01:39:44]:
What about your remineralizing gum? That's worked for your shimmery.

Paris Martineau [01:39:49]:
How are your minerals?

Leo Laporte [01:39:50]:
Yeah, they're good.

Mikah Sargent [01:39:52]:
Listen to that.

Leo Laporte [01:39:54]:
Can you hear that?

Mikah Sargent [01:39:55]:
Yeah, you could.

Leo Laporte [01:39:55]:
That's because mineralizing gum. I don't know. No, it was also because. I don't know why, but for some reason Instagram decided I was a horn dog. And the number of thirst traps I was getting served, it was just constant. It wasn't seeing pictures, family, friends, anything. This is what frustrates me. Instagram used to be a great place.

Paris Martineau [01:40:20]:
With just big bosoms.

Leo Laporte [01:40:21]:
Big bosomed robots is all I can see. Now used to be a place you'd go to see what your friends were up to, to see pictures from your friends. That's not the case anymore. There's an ad every fourth post.

Mikah Sargent [01:40:32]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:40:32]:
And every and all the other three posts are from people I don't know trying to get me to go to their only fans site. I don't. It's not good. So I really got disgusted with this for the same reason I got disgusted with x.com these Cory Doctorow was absolutely right.

Steve Gibson [01:40:48]:
The N. We know whatification.

Mikah Sargent [01:40:50]:
Yeah. X is the new Tumblr.

Leo Laporte [01:40:52]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [01:40:53]:
In terms of. Can I say smut. Is that an okay word to say smut? X is just a smut shop. And yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:41:03]:
Nevertheless, Internet. According to Cloudflare, Internet traffic grew 19, 19% worldwide in 2025.

Mikah Sargent [01:41:11]:
I wonder where everybody's going. I wonder what they're doing.

Paris Martineau [01:41:14]:
Yeah. Wait, what are people looking at? Does that.

Mikah Sargent [01:41:17]:
What is the world looking at?

Steve Gibson [01:41:19]:
Is it all refresh counts? Hitting refresh now that is a great idea.

Mikah Sargent [01:41:24]:
I love that.

Leo Laporte [01:41:25]:
Frankly, it's still the usual suspects. Look at the ranking. These are the services. Number one, Google, then Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Instagram, AWS, YouTube, TikTok, Amazon and WhatsApp. Now when it comes to generative AI, the rankings are a little bit different. Number one is chat GPT, then anthropics. Claude Perplexity doing very well. Then Gemini.

Leo Laporte [01:41:50]:
I bet that changes. Gemini had a very good fall. Gemini, see a pie chart.

Steve Gibson [01:41:54]:
I want to see a pie chart. Is it. Are they equal slices? How Pie sizes.

Leo Laporte [01:42:01]:
You're a data scientist, aren't you? You Starlink traffic up quite a bit. 2.3% growth. That's 230% growth. You know you'd like this one, Steve. TLS. TLS traffic is using post quantum encryption. 52% of is using post quantum crypto. Wow, that's a.

Leo Laporte [01:42:21]:
Is that the browsers? That's the browsers, isn't it?

Steve Gibson [01:42:24]:
Yeah, yeah.

Paris Martineau [01:42:25]:
This shows that more people visited X the everything app, then Reddit by a long shot.

Leo Laporte [01:42:33]:
Oh, are you?

Mikah Sargent [01:42:33]:
Well, that's because it's impossible to visit Reddit.

Leo Laporte [01:42:35]:
You.

Mikah Sargent [01:42:36]:
You tap on a link for Reddit and it. It pops up three things trying to take you to the app. But then sometimes your phone doesn't know press.

Paris Martineau [01:42:42]:
Micah, you've got to pay attention.

Leo Laporte [01:42:44]:
The long press. It's all about the long press.

Mikah Sargent [01:42:48]:
But it's just. I mean they make it impossible to use.

Paris Martineau [01:42:51]:
They do make it difficult. I also like that Cloudflare has X slash Twitter on it.

Leo Laporte [01:42:59]:
Yeah. Everybody Name.

Mikah Sargent [01:43:03]:
It's such a bad name.

Leo Laporte [01:43:04]:
What do you think the number one tld, the number one domain for spam and malicious email was?

Mikah Sargent [01:43:11]:
Well, I saw it, so I won't guess.

Leo Laporte [01:43:12]:
X.comno.christmas.

Mikah Sargent [01:43:16]:
Christmas. Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:43:17]:
We were just talking about. This is the time.

Steve Gibson [01:43:19]:
Jiminy Christmas.

Mikah Sargent [01:43:20]:
Yes. Amazon Christmas emails you and says, hey, that order that you sent to your family member, we're going to need a little bit more postage for that.

Leo Laporte [01:43:30]:
Get this, 92.7% of the traffic on dot Christmas was malicious.

Steve Gibson [01:43:34]:
90.

Mikah Sargent [01:43:35]:
That's wild.

Leo Laporte [01:43:36]:
Percent. Almost. Virtually all of the traffic on dot Christmas was either spam or malicious.

Mikah Sargent [01:43:43]:
I'm glad I don't have Micah Christmas or something like that.

Leo Laporte [01:43:46]:
I was tempted. I guess I won. Yeah. Anyway, Cloudflare, good job on that. Although Cloudflare has been a little bit in the. In the.

Mikah Sargent [01:43:56]:
They've been in trouble this year. I didn't know they were in trouble.

Leo Laporte [01:43:59]:
This was the year. I guess this is every year. A number of big providers went down. Cloudflare was one of them. AWS was another.

Steve Gibson [01:44:08]:
Microsoft had trouble.

Leo Laporte [01:44:09]:
Microsoft was down for a little bit. And the entire city of San Francisco is blacked out yesterday.

Steve Gibson [01:44:14]:
Oh, and the wemos all stopped.

Paris Martineau [01:44:16]:
The Wemos.

Mikah Sargent [01:44:20]:
The Pokemans and the wemos.

Leo Laporte [01:44:22]:
The Waymos can't operate apparently without traffic lights.

Paris Martineau [01:44:26]:
I like it because they look like they're just kind of nervous. They look like they're just a bit stressed out. They're like.

Mikah Sargent [01:44:33]:
Which is how I would feel if I was ever in one of them and it did something wrong. That's so terrifying to me. That's why I have. I had the opportunity to. I got the invite or whatever back whenever we lived near San Francisco. And I was talking about, oh, I'm gonna drive in. I'm gonna end up taking one. I think it'd be really.

Mikah Sargent [01:44:51]:
And then I heard two. All it took was two stories of the car violating some traffic law. And I thought I, I would literally. I think I would spontaneously combust if I was in a vehicle and it wasn't obeying the laws. And there's no one else to say, like, this is not his fault. This is me sitting in the car going, I'm sorry, it's not my fault.

Leo Laporte [01:45:11]:
I didn't know it. No, they. I did not.

Steve Gibson [01:45:13]:
I did not. Way more driver. Driver getting trapped. Trouble for what the Waymo did.

Leo Laporte [01:45:18]:
Yes, there is a big memorial on the Mission street in San Francisco because a Waymo killed a bodega cat. A much beloved bodega cat named KitKat. And, well, allegedly. I don't. I think it's allegedly killed. Ran over KitKat. So there's the chocolate bar. Waymo's in the doghouse.

Mikah Sargent [01:45:40]:
Very much not talking about a chocolate bar. Very much not talking about a chocolate bar.

Leo Laporte [01:45:46]:
I did not hit her. I did not. All right, pop quiz, pop quiz. Who's the CEO of X.com?

Mikah Sargent [01:45:53]:
Oh, right now, no one, no one knows.

Leo Laporte [01:45:57]:
Yeah, it was Linda Yaccarino, remember? But she, she quit and we don't know.

Mikah Sargent [01:46:05]:
I do.

Paris Martineau [01:46:06]:
What a terrible choice that was for her.

Leo Laporte [01:46:09]:
Yeah, she made a bad choice.

Steve Gibson [01:46:11]:
Don't we feel like.

Leo Laporte [01:46:12]:
I'm pretty sure she made a lot of money, so.

Steve Gibson [01:46:15]:
Exactly. I'll bet she was doing just fine for a while.

Mikah Sargent [01:46:18]:
I feel like she knew it was that.

Leo Laporte [01:46:20]:
But she quit on exactly the two year mark. So she vested and left.

Mikah Sargent [01:46:24]:
Oh, just like the, the house.

Paris Martineau [01:46:26]:
Oh, very Amazonian of her.

Leo Laporte [01:46:28]:
Here's a story that we heard all year long that never materialized. Tim Cook is quitting as CEO, is going to retire at Apple.

Steve Gibson [01:46:38]:
I thought he did.

Leo Laporte [01:46:39]:
No.

Paris Martineau [01:46:42]:
No, no, that was Tim Apple.

Leo Laporte [01:46:44]:
This story kept coming up. Mark Gur it a lot. Then Financial Times published it a couple of months ago. And then Mark Gurman said, no, no, that's not true. And as far as we know, Tim Cook is not going to be stepping down.

Paris Martineau [01:46:58]:
What do you think is going on in the background that this story was leaking? What do you think is causing that?

Leo Laporte [01:47:03]:
That's a really good question. And we spent many, many, many hours on MacBreak weekly discussing exactly that.

Mikah Sargent [01:47:10]:
Discussing exactly that. But no one knows.

Leo Laporte [01:47:13]:
Yeah, well, it really felt like it was a planted story with the Financial Times. That, that. I mean, look, if the Financial Times.

Paris Martineau [01:47:20]:
Who is. Yeah. Who's planting that to try and push.

Mikah Sargent [01:47:23]:
You're asking who's the gardener?

Paris Martineau [01:47:26]:
Yeah, I guess.

Mikah Sargent [01:47:27]:
Who's the.

Paris Martineau [01:47:27]:
Who's the planter? I like to watch who's the gardener?

Leo Laporte [01:47:30]:
It was it. Well, our thought at the time was that it was Apple itself planning it with Financial Times to gradually prepare investors for the inevitable. Tim is 65, but the financial Times article said things like he could step down as soon as next year.

Steve Gibson [01:47:51]:
Does anyone really care, though?

Leo Laporte [01:47:53]:
I mean, investors. If you're an Apple investor, you might, you might see it as good news or bad news. I don't know.

Steve Gibson [01:47:59]:
Yeah, I mean, it doesn't seem to me that Apple. I mean, I agree completely with what Paris said earlier about how disappointing Apple has become. I mean, we're used to, you know, jobsy and miracles and that would be Good Liquid Glass that we all have to turn off.

Leo Laporte [01:48:16]:
I.

Paris Martineau [01:48:16]:
It's a real nightmare.

Leo Laporte [01:48:18]:
So as early as June, people were saying Liquid Glass was a terrible idea. It came out finally with a new iPhone in September and was roundly considered then. The man who imposed it on us, Alan Dye, left Apple to go to work at Meta. Not forced out, as far as we know. Left under good graces. But Meta, probably known for its design language, by the way.

Paris Martineau [01:48:47]:
Yeah, I think it's a real sign that the person in charge of Liquid Glass decided to go to the company that's best known for its design ethos being how many different menus can we smush in this one little hamburger thing?

Leo Laporte [01:49:01]:
Yeah, exactly.

Mikah Sargent [01:49:03]:
Anyway, listen, I love a menu. I'm sorry, but I do.

Paris Martineau [01:49:09]:
Want to scroll in and scrolling.

Mikah Sargent [01:49:11]:
Okay, so here. This is actually. I know that it's not a popular opinion there. I don't mind Liquid Glass, I think, but I'm. I just like new and engaging, so I think that's why I don't mind.

Leo Laporte [01:49:23]:
You're young.

Mikah Sargent [01:49:24]:
I'm young. I've got the eyes for it.

Paris Martineau [01:49:26]:
I. Yeah, I literally haven't updated my phone because I detest it so much.

Mikah Sargent [01:49:30]:
You are like my partner in that way.

Steve Gibson [01:49:33]:
And I did. Whenever I see people, you turn off motion and you turn off. You know, you increase contrast and it becomes tolerable, which is really not the way you want to.

Paris Martineau [01:49:43]:
But still, there's so many dumb. I look over people's phones with the updates and the new design of the messaging thing where it's like, kind of clear. I'm just like, why does it care for this?

Leo Laporte [01:49:55]:
Sound like she's old before.

Mikah Sargent [01:49:57]:
Now you're. Now you're. Now you're.

Leo Laporte [01:49:58]:
Yeah, I get this way every time.

Paris Martineau [01:50:02]:
Or Apple designed.

Steve Gibson [01:50:03]:
And, you know, on the Roadrunner, when he's about to take off, he like.

Mikah Sargent [01:50:06]:
Pulls back before he launches over there.

Paris Martineau [01:50:10]:
Trying to catch the Roadrunner. And I'm getting really close, and then suddenly what I think is a tunnel is just a painted wall. I don't think that's messed up.

Leo Laporte [01:50:19]:
How are you avoiding the update? Because my phone forced it on me.

Leo Laporte [01:50:24]:
Well, eventually you'll have, like, the update.

Leo Laporte [01:50:26]:
Came up and it said install later or install now. I was like, there's no never. Wait, there's no never.

Steve Gibson [01:50:31]:
What about Windows?

Leo Laporte [01:50:32]:
That sounds like.

Leo Laporte [01:50:35]:
And it's killing the battery on my phone. It's killing my battery. I hate this new update.

Paris Martineau [01:50:39]:
I mean, that's why I didn't want to do it, because my battery's already.

Mikah Sargent [01:50:42]:
In so if anyone wants to turn it off and make sure that it doesn't update automatically, you need to launch your settings app. You tap on general you tap on software update and there's an option that says automatic updates. You need to go into that and there's a thing that says automatically install. Make sure that toggle is toggled off. Otherwise like bonito you will get no, I did that.

Leo Laporte [01:51:02]:
I I constantly check that and I always make sure yeah and it's. It prompted me to install later or install now and I didn't have a.

Leo Laporte [01:51:08]:
Never or a close well, Steve would agree that there are security reasons you wouldn't want to update your Yes, I agree.

Mikah Sargent [01:51:15]:
I I think it's a 26 is.

Steve Gibson [01:51:16]:
A big jump forward. They made some huge improvements that we talked about on the podcast which are security. We haven't yet seen a problem after those updates. Where we did see problems with the pre 26 just recently that that a couple of zero days that did not affect people who had upgraded to 26.

Mikah Sargent [01:51:36]:
So yeah, I think the only thing I hate is the left align. That is so hard left aligned. Almost everything is left aligned now. So when you have an update come up. Yeah look next time when you're on your lock screen and you go to to to log in from there you if you're not using face id everything is now left aligned. They said it's it has to do with the readability of it all. But that is a new change as.

Leo Laporte [01:52:07]:
Opposed to was it justified before it was it.

Mikah Sargent [01:52:09]:
Yeah, it was centered justified. Yeah. Let me see what because I want.

Leo Laporte [01:52:14]:
To read what the text is generally considered. I know when you read a teleprompter you want things left align not justified and you want them in upper and lowercase, not all uppercase.

Steve Gibson [01:52:22]:
And and just to Grinch some more. One of the nice things about the iPhone was that it was discoverable in the beginning. You could see how it worked and what was going on. It's possible to get it some photo modes where you're just stuck. It's like how the what where am I?

Paris Martineau [01:52:40]:
Where did my photos go to Apple photos are the most upsetting part of it all.

Mikah Sargent [01:52:44]:
I agree about that as well.

Paris Martineau [01:52:46]:
Why can I not have a little icon at the bottom where all my screenshots live in a little folder?

Leo Laporte [01:52:51]:
Why do I have to type the.

Paris Martineau [01:52:52]:
Word screenshots into the search bar and folders every single time? It's absurd.

Leo Laporte [01:52:57]:
They want you to ask tell us.

Mikah Sargent [01:52:59]:
How you really feel.

Leo Laporte [01:53:00]:
I think it's good. Alan Dye took that job. I don't know. He might have been lynched if he'd stick around. That's terrible.

Paris Martineau [01:53:06]:
Well, his last name is Die, so.

Leo Laporte [01:53:08]:
Oh, this does not constitute a threat, by the way.

Paris Martineau [01:53:12]:
It's not. I'm just pointing out what his last name is.

Mikah Sargent [01:53:15]:
Yeah, you were just saying, in a.

Leo Laporte [01:53:16]:
Fact, this was the year Steve Gibson told Everybody, delete your spit. 23andMe, who many of us had used for genetic testing and had done it through giving them some spit, went basically belly up and decided, well, we're going to sell. And for a while it looked like it was going to be purchased by a biotech firm, Regeneron. The founder of 23andMe, managed to rest it away from Regeneron. She made a higher bid. And the court said, you got to. We're going to hire an ombudsman to make sure that. That privacy is protected.

Leo Laporte [01:53:56]:
Nevertheless, very many people. And I know, Steve, you recommended this.

Mikah Sargent [01:54:00]:
It was hard to do. It was because everybody was ev. And everybody was doing it at the same time. And so I had to set reminders to go back because the site would not. Parts of the site wouldn't load. There were. There were some parts that were much easier and then others that were harder and the more difficult parts that required, you know, three different screens and it was. The site would stop loading coding.

Mikah Sargent [01:54:21]:
But, yeah, I quickly. Because I left like you, Leo, I left mine in there. And then they also offered you the option where if over time, you decided to, you could buy a new chip, essentially the test that they run, and they could use the sample that they already had and sort of upgrade you. And so that's why I kept mine. I thought, oh, I might, you know, want to upgrade at some point and get more information. So I kept mine in there. And then this happened and I said, no, nope, I'm going to delete all the stuff.

Steve Gibson [01:54:48]:
You know, there were a lot of good things that came from it. Their linkage to Ancestry.com allowed. My college roommate and good friend from high school, who knew he was adopted but didn't know what a expanse of siblings he had, he was able to reconnect to all of his blood relatives that he never knew of. Thanks.

Leo Laporte [01:55:11]:
Same thing happened in my family. So that's.

Leo Laporte [01:55:14]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:55:14]:
It's not clear what Ann Wojcicki is going to do with it. The. The TTAM Research Institute, which is a public benefit corporation that purchased 23Me. By the way, TTAM stands for 23andMe. So she's apparently following a similar Road down. But it's not clear what the plan is. They were able to make a better offer than Regeneron, so presumably they have a way to.

Steve Gibson [01:55:43]:
Do we know why they went out of business? Like just what happened?

Mikah Sargent [01:55:47]:
Why.

Paris Martineau [01:55:47]:
Also, did we ever get to the bottom of why the board tried to get her out?

Leo Laporte [01:55:53]:
I think, I don't know.

Mikah Sargent [01:55:55]:
I think she wanted to. Yeah, she wanted to do something that. Yeah, I think it was. Or was it to re mine privatize the company? Wasn't it to reprimand?

Paris Martineau [01:56:05]:
Yeah, I believe it was some sort of conflict over what she considered the board perhaps didn't have faith in her plan to finance the deal.

Mikah Sargent [01:56:16]:
Yes, that's what it was. She. Yes, she needed to present a plan to re privatize, if I remember correctly. And they said, well, we don't like that, so go away.

Leo Laporte [01:56:27]:
So the last we heard of this was was in July when Andrew jiske posted on x.com thing I'm really excited that we've bought 23andMe without. I don't know if they're going to continue doing the consumer genetic testing or what, but she says, in effect, I'm honored to be back with 23andMe. So it sounds like it's a long way around to regaining control of the company she founded. Anyway, that was one of the stories that happened this year that you might have forgotten about.

Steve Gibson [01:57:05]:
Delete your spit, kids.

Leo Laporte [01:57:07]:
Yeah, I did, I did. Yeah.

Paris Martineau [01:57:10]:
I never had spit to delete.

Leo Laporte [01:57:13]:
Well, good plays you could delete. That would be good too.

Mikah Sargent [01:57:18]:
Leo, let's not.

Paris Martineau [01:57:19]:
We're moving on.

Leo Laporte [01:57:21]:
Yeah, that's not the right signal. Do you want to talk about signal gate? That was a tech story. I'll tell you what.

Paris Martineau [01:57:29]:
God, that was this year.

Leo Laporte [01:57:30]:
That was this year too. Let's take a break and when we come back, we'll talk about that and more that happened this year. Plus some of the weirder stories. And a goodbye to one of our. A sad goodbye to one of our twit family members. But all of that still to come. You're watching our year end episode of this week in tech, the last show of 2025 with Paris Martineau, Steve Gibson and Micah Sargent. It was a pleasure to spend time with you guys.

Leo Laporte [01:57:56]:
Our show today brought to you by Vention. I had a great conversation with Glenn over at Vention. This is a really interesting company. They've been doing this for a long time. They're engineers first and foremost and their expertise is very timely in AI. AI, of course, is supposed to make life easier but if you're on a team that has been ordered to start using AI, maybe it's made your job just a little bit harder. That's where Vention's 20 plus years of global engineering expertise comes in. They build AI enabled engineering teams that make software development faster, cleaner and maybe most importantly for you, calmer.

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Leo Laporte [02:00:31]:
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Leo Laporte [02:01:08]:
Was very impressed with what they can do. I don't know if you guys have been following this. It's really kind of an inside baseball thing. There was a young woman who was a reporter for New York magazine. I know I have to explain this.

Paris Martineau [02:01:21]:
I mean, that makes sense. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:01:22]:
And she was a political reporter. She was engaged to another political reporter. Her name was Olivia Nuzzi. Her fiance was Ryan Lizza. He was at the Post. Where was he?

Steve Gibson [02:01:32]:
Politico?

Paris Martineau [02:01:32]:
No, he was at Politico. Politico, helming their. Their main newsletter.

Leo Laporte [02:01:38]:
And unfortunately, it came out that Ms.

Paris Martineau [02:01:43]:
Nuzzy, apparently Nuzzy, who was covering D.C. and the general Trump era for New York magazine as their chief Washington correspondent, it came out that. That she was having an affair of sorts with RFK Jr last year.

Leo Laporte [02:01:59]:
And according to Lizza, this wasn't the first time she'd been covering former Governor Mark Sanford in his presidential run and had an affair with him. And so he breaks up with her, she sues him, she tries to get a restraining order. It's very vicious. She has just published a book, American Canto, about the whole thing. He has been publishing a serialized newsletter telling his side of the story. Episode eight dropped minutes ago. And that means it's called Bamboo.

Paris Martineau [02:02:29]:
Listen, you haven't lost me because I just read as far as I could get through the paywall while we were on the ad break and someone has not yet sent me a PDF, so we don't.

Leo Laporte [02:02:40]:
He was very smart. The first one was free and got it and it had a big twist at the end.

Paris Martineau [02:02:45]:
The first one was free and it was called this was a time when we didn't know that there was was a Mark Sanford when we didn't know there was a second affair to hit the Olivia Nezzy Ryan Lizza situation. And we just thought it was about rfk. And he publishes part one called How I Found out about how you.

Leo Laporte [02:03:00]:
Sounds like it's going to be about rfk.

Paris Martineau [02:03:01]:
He's talking about rfk. You know, Olivia Nazi, come back.

Leo Laporte [02:03:04]:
He likens their relationship to Bamboo. He likens their relationship to Bamboo. It's got roots. It grows. You can't stop It.

Paris Martineau [02:03:10]:
It's hollow and I keep having to cut the bamboo. It's this really overwrought metaphor that doesn't work and really bumps you up against. Against this piece again and again over like a thousand tortured words. And at the end he's like yeah. And so then I called our agent was like hey, we can't do this book proposal. Turns out Olivia is sleeping with or is having an affair with one of the candidates. He asked what candidate? Mark Sanford.

Leo Laporte [02:03:34]:
And it wasn't RFK. Then everything else is behind a paywall.

Paris Martineau [02:03:41]:
Well except for part seven which was kind of strange fan fiction about what might have happened at their. Had their hearing had there been.

Mikah Sargent [02:03:50]:
Are you kidding me?

Steve Gibson [02:03:51]:
This is the speculative question.

Leo Laporte [02:03:54]:
So he.

Steve Gibson [02:03:55]:
He breaks up with her and she sues him.

Leo Laporte [02:03:59]:
She claims mental cruelty. Lots of he.

Paris Martineau [02:04:03]:
She claimed also. So suing is the wrong. She filed for a restraining order. Restraining order specifically because. Because she said that Lizza had hacked her devices and was stalking her. Lizza claims that he did absolutely none of that. She gave him her passwords and asked him to go through her phones as a trust exercise.

Leo Laporte [02:04:27]:
He says that the restraining order was all a ploy to orchestrated by RFK.

Paris Martineau [02:04:34]:
To keep the news of this off RFK and focus on the Ryan lizard after the election because that was whole.

Leo Laporte [02:04:43]:
Key was to push this past the election.

Paris Martineau [02:04:44]:
Part of the allegations of anyway Nazi also acted as a political operative for rfk. Anyway we're derailing the show.

Leo Laporte [02:04:51]:
Nobody really cares about it except people in media and. And it turns out Paris has worked with Olivia Nuzzy.

Paris Martineau [02:04:58]:
That's. That's perhaps describing it too much. I was an intern at New York Mag when she was there and so I. One of my jobs as an intern was to transcribe a lot of the interviews for magazine writers back in the day. So I had some brief connection with her. But I care about it because I love media gossip and that's been my best of 2025 has been this has been the gift that has kept on giving and this is the final part of their little story.

Leo Laporte [02:05:23]:
We're not much longer for this show so you'll have time to read Bamboo.

Steve Gibson [02:05:27]:
And that's of course and I will send you descriptions were a thing that people.

Paris Martineau [02:05:31]:
Yeah I was about to say that was back in the day where I had to transcribe people's interviews not AI.

Leo Laporte [02:05:37]:
Or when Micah used to have to transcribe the Apple analyst calls. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Mikah Sargent [02:05:43]:
That was wild. And I had this whole setup where I had a little keyboard shortcut because it was recording. I was recording it live with the program and I had a little keyboard shortcut that let me skip back, skip back, skip back and hear what was just said as I'm typing it out as quickly as I can. For imore. Rest in peace. Since its acquisition by Future and its later closure.

Leo Laporte [02:06:07]:
Yeah, yeah. Anyway, we're like, I know more. So this was the year that hacker, not hackers, the editor in chief of the Atlantic magazine was invited to a top secret signal group chat.

Steve Gibson [02:06:25]:
Oh wow.

Mikah Sargent [02:06:26]:
Yes.

Paris Martineau [02:06:27]:
Small PC group.

Leo Laporte [02:06:28]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And. And this was about. Was an. This was the attack.

Steve Gibson [02:06:35]:
I.

Leo Laporte [02:06:36]:
It was a. Syria. I can't even remember now. Iran. Iran. The.

Steve Gibson [02:06:41]:
The bombing of Iran.

Leo Laporte [02:06:42]:
And you know, it was. It was a bit of a controversy.

Paris Martineau [02:06:46]:
It was about imminent military operations in. Against the Houthis in Yemen. Yemen codenamed Operation Rough Rider.

Leo Laporte [02:06:54]:
Yeah. And the issue of course was that information about this secret operation was revealed in the group chat. And this to this editor in chief.

Paris Martineau [02:07:05]:
Of the Atlantic, that they were planning military operations down to the wire just with this random guy in there that they added by mistake and they didn't know.

Steve Gibson [02:07:14]:
And he wasn't sure for a while that this was like what was going on, all this stuff or if it was real phone. And. And finally he said, oh, I should not be seeing this.

Paris Martineau [02:07:23]:
And he doesn't say as soon as. As he figured out it was real because they'd bas. I believe they'd like planned some sort of military attack or bombing or strike. And then he'd seen it, reported on the news afterwards that it was accurate. Then he spoke to the Atlantic's lawyers and they're like, you gotta leave immediately. So he just left the group chat. And that was when all of these top in military intelligence officers realized for the first time that, yeah, we just had a random dude in our super secret military that the pr. I mean, not even just random dude.

Paris Martineau [02:07:54]:
The press.

Leo Laporte [02:07:54]:
The press. But fortunately not. Not a bad guy because this was information that could have jeopardized the operation and the soldiers involved in the operation. It could have been a lot worse.

Steve Gibson [02:08:05]:
And the problem is they didn't learn a lesson from this.

Mikah Sargent [02:08:07]:
Yes.

Steve Gibson [02:08:08]:
Which is the most galling thing. It's like anyone can make a mistake. I say that all the time on the podcast. You know, policy is one thing. Mistakes are completely separate. And to then thumb your nose at the people saying you really should not be using a consumer device on a consumer platform to be conducting. I mean we have means of doing this securely. And they said well, but I don't have it on my smartphone.

Steve Gibson [02:08:34]:
I'm gonna use Signal.

Leo Laporte [02:08:36]:
National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was on it. It's believed he was the one who added the Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg accidentally to the chat. There was some question about why Waltz had Goldberg's number in his contact list. He gave a fairly impossible scenario for why that might happen. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, was also in the Signal group chat. They also were, we thought, at first violating a government rule that requires that these discussions be memorialized, that they have to be recorded. But then it turned out, oh, no, don't worry, because we have been. We use a Signal app.

Leo Laporte [02:09:17]:
We don't use the regular Signal app. We use an app called Tele Message, which is a signal knockoff that records the chat. So we aren't violating the national government.

Paris Martineau [02:09:27]:
Secure.

Leo Laporte [02:09:28]:
It's less secure.

Steve Gibson [02:09:29]:
In fact, email. It emails you the transcripts of the conversation.

Leo Laporte [02:09:35]:
Yeah.

Steve Gibson [02:09:36]:
Yes.

Mikah Sargent [02:09:36]:
Oh, my God.

Leo Laporte [02:09:37]:
And in fact, the. As soon as this came out, they were using Tele Message. A guy hacked it. Oh, good. He said it took about 15 to 20 minutes. It wasn't much effort at all. The exploit was incredibly simple. 404 Media had the story, and so there you go.

Leo Laporte [02:10:01]:
So it. It went from bad to worse. But as you point out. But I don't think there have been any consequences in any. And they did it again.

Steve Gibson [02:10:10]:
They did it later.

Leo Laporte [02:10:11]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:10:12]:
And in any other time signals so many people lose their jobs. Right. In any other time.

Paris Martineau [02:10:17]:
Any other time, there was weeks of hearings, months of hearings.

Leo Laporte [02:10:22]:
The US government did something kind of socialistic. They took a 10% stake in Intel. They said, you know, we were going to give you money in the CHIPS Act. I tell you what, we'll still give you that money, the $8.9 billion, but we want 10% in exchange.

Leo Laporte [02:10:40]:
Only the bad parts of socialism.

Leo Laporte [02:10:43]:
There's only parts of socialism we like.

Mikah Sargent [02:10:45]:
Only the bad parts.

Leo Laporte [02:10:45]:
In any event, this is. This isn't the last time that happened. There were some other companies. This happened again. And the government.

Leo Laporte [02:10:57]:
Photo.

Leo Laporte [02:10:58]:
Sorry.

Steve Gibson [02:10:58]:
How long. Our president looks. Looked younger in that photo.

Leo Laporte [02:11:03]:
You know, it's quick. They get old so fast.

Steve Gibson [02:11:06]:
Oh, it is.

Leo Laporte [02:11:07]:
Rough job. Yes. Let's see what else. I'm trying to get through this because we. I've only gotten through about half of the 150 stories that I bookmarked for this show. It was a busy year.

Mikah Sargent [02:11:20]:
It was very busy year.

Leo Laporte [02:11:21]:
Yes.

Mikah Sargent [02:11:23]:
I'm. I'm trying to think of some of the wackier things that have happened this.

Leo Laporte [02:11:26]:
Year I have it all, believe me. I put it all in there. I. I spent Leo.

Steve Gibson [02:11:30]:
How could it only be now that AOL is showing. Shutting down dial up.

Leo Laporte [02:11:34]:
There you go. There's one of the wacky stories.

Steve Gibson [02:11:37]:
Who has a modem?

Leo Laporte [02:11:38]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:11:39]:
I think there are enough people who never stopped paying.

Leo Laporte [02:11:43]:
Yeah, yeah.

Mikah Sargent [02:11:44]:
They're just.

Leo Laporte [02:11:46]:
Or they have dial up. Let's not be elitist.

Steve Gibson [02:11:50]:
Oh no, let's be elitist. I don't think you can really use dial up. How, how can you. I mean, what, what was it to get your.

Leo Laporte [02:11:58]:
You've got mail. Mail. Is it to get you.

Mikah Sargent [02:12:02]:
Come on. To get your mail?

Leo Laporte [02:12:04]:
Yeah. I'm guessing most of the Internet getting your mail.

Leo Laporte [02:12:06]:
Steve, most of the Internet probably isn't even accessible from 56k. Right?

Leo Laporte [02:12:12]:
Websites, no, but email, yes.

Mikah Sargent [02:12:14]:
Yeah, to get your mail.

Steve Gibson [02:12:15]:
But.

Paris Martineau [02:12:21]:
Did I stutter?

Leo Laporte [02:12:23]:
I used to go down to the post office and get my mailbox users.

Steve Gibson [02:12:27]:
Mailbox boxes, my phone.

Leo Laporte [02:12:30]:
Nintendo Switch 2 came out best record launching best selling video game system. 3 million units in just a matter of weeks.

Paris Martineau [02:12:39]:
I can't wait for the Steam Cube.

Leo Laporte [02:12:42]:
Speaking of new Steam Machine is coming out next year.

Paris Martineau [02:12:44]:
I want the Steam Cube. I want that little.

Mikah Sargent [02:12:46]:
What is the Steam Cube?

Paris Martineau [02:12:47]:
I thought that was made by Steam Machine.

Mikah Sargent [02:12:50]:
Oh, okay, so you're just giving it.

Leo Laporte [02:12:52]:
It looks like a game changer.

Mikah Sargent [02:12:53]:
I thought I missed it because I was like I know what the Steve Machine is, but it has nothing on it.

Paris Martineau [02:12:57]:
It's just a cube and it's a computer inside. And I'm gonna plug it into my TV and I'm gonna play games.

Steve Gibson [02:13:02]:
Its release got stalled because of AI, right?

Mikah Sargent [02:13:04]:
Yeah, I feel like probably because of the whole ram.

Leo Laporte [02:13:08]:
Yeah, I'm guessing that's not the name really.

Leo Laporte [02:13:10]:
Like nobody uses the actual name for this thing because it's not a memorable name.

Leo Laporte [02:13:14]:
Steam Machine.

Mikah Sargent [02:13:15]:
Which one is it?

Leo Laporte [02:13:16]:
Steam Machine. I think that's just the like the parlance. I don't just people just call it the Steam Machine.

Leo Laporte [02:13:21]:
I thought it was.

Paris Martineau [02:13:22]:
That's what I thought it was called the Steam Machine.

Mikah Sargent [02:13:25]:
Well anyway, that's the thing that I use to get wrinkles out of my clothes.

Leo Laporte [02:13:30]:
YouTube announced that this year it overtook mobile as the TV overtook mobile as the primary device for viewing. In fact this week YouTube said 700 million hours every month of podcasts alone watch the on YouTube on TV. That is watching us on TV right now. That is so smooth.

Paris Martineau [02:13:52]:
I don't watch anything on YouTube TV. I just feel so disconnected from my generation.

Leo Laporte [02:13:57]:
But your TV has YouTube on it, right?

Paris Martineau [02:14:00]:
Yeah. But I couldn't tell you the last time I used. I, I use it when people come over and are like, I want to watch. Put some.

Leo Laporte [02:14:06]:
This morning when I was working, I watched MIT computer science classes.

Mikah Sargent [02:14:14]:
Bless your heart.

Leo Laporte [02:14:15]:
YouTube's great. It's great. You anything.

Mikah Sargent [02:14:18]:
I, I. Okay. What I love right now is this, this idea of you walking up to an alien and you're just YouTube. It's great. It's anything you want describing what YouTube is. So what is it?

Leo Laporte [02:14:30]:
All right.

Mikah Sargent [02:14:31]:
No, the fact that I didn't know that many people had TVs is what I was trying to get to.

Leo Laporte [02:14:34]:
Oh, like that.

Mikah Sargent [02:14:36]:
I think of people who are younger who, who just use their phone or have maybe their laptop that they watch stuff on that. A lot of people I knew in college, no tv, they just would watch things on their laptop. So that's what's fascinating to me about this.

Paris Martineau [02:14:50]:
I've had to convince so many men to get TVs.

Leo Laporte [02:14:52]:
I think they just send it to their TV from their laptop or phone.

Leo Laporte [02:14:54]:
Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. No, no. We can't let that just rush.

Paris Martineau [02:15:00]:
I feel like I need a lot of men who are like, oh, I just watch a show on my laptop or on my phone. I'm like, I'm not gonna watch.

Leo Laporte [02:15:07]:
Is this your mission laptop? Oh, they invite you for Netflix and chill and you say, but I ain't chilling on your phone.

Paris Martineau [02:15:14]:
Television or a projector. My dude, you're gonna have to.

Leo Laporte [02:15:17]:
I am not coming over to watch TV on your phone. That makes sense.

Paris Martineau [02:15:22]:
IPad. An iPad doesn't work.

Leo Laporte [02:15:23]:
It's.

Paris Martineau [02:15:23]:
Come on, guys.

Leo Laporte [02:15:24]:
Well, I know you young people love the Academy Awards ceremony, so you're gonna make sure that they get a TV by 2029. Because the Oscars are leaving ABC. They will be aired on YouTube only starting in three years.

Mikah Sargent [02:15:43]:
I mean, good job. To Google for or excuse me for, to Alphabet for pulling that off.

Leo Laporte [02:15:49]:
You don't watch the Oscars either, do you?

Mikah Sargent [02:15:51]:
I do. I watch it.

Leo Laporte [02:15:56]:
Do I watch Committed?

Mikah Sargent [02:15:57]:
Yes. I don't watch it. No. What I do is I am like knitting or something while I'm watching. Does that make like I'm not really in. I'm not paying much.

Leo Laporte [02:16:07]:
To me, it's a national holiday.

Steve Gibson [02:16:09]:
But we're not gonna get a hands.

Mikah Sargent [02:16:10]:
On Oscars is what that's what I'm saying. We won't get a hands on Oscars. Exactly. Now let me ask you this, though, because I am what I'm thinking about this now. I'm wondering is there an award show for the Utes people young what do.

Paris Martineau [02:16:29]:
They culturistas did something like that this didn't they?

Leo Laporte [02:16:32]:
Oh come on. No, like no, I mean like yeah.

Mikah Sargent [02:16:35]:
On the scale of this is there.

Leo Laporte [02:16:37]:
No. It's called subscriber counts movies don't you. I don't understand why you wouldn't be interested.

Mikah Sargent [02:16:43]:
I love movies.

Leo Laporte [02:16:44]:
You love movies. You love movies too. It seems like this is Hollywood special.

Paris Martineau [02:16:49]:
In the same reason I don't watch YouTube videos I. If I want to know who won awards I just look it's written up in a list and I can scan.

Mikah Sargent [02:16:57]:
I gotta look at the list.

Paris Martineau [02:16:58]:
No reason I to need to sit there for three.

Leo Laporte [02:17:00]:
You don't want to see the outfits. You don't want to see who's drunk. You don't want to see pronounce.

Paris Martineau [02:17:07]:
I have an unusually antithetical relationship to celebrity.

Mikah Sargent [02:17:10]:
Celebrity same that's cuz her father.

Steve Gibson [02:17:13]:
One of the big applications are the.

Leo Laporte [02:17:14]:
Are.

Steve Gibson [02:17:15]:
Are the Oscar watch parties right Where a whole bunch of people who are all movie aficionados get together.

Leo Laporte [02:17:22]:
You know what it is Steve? They're all our age. Yeah, I don't.

Steve Gibson [02:17:25]:
That is true. True.

Mikah Sargent [02:17:26]:
I often find too I was for some reason on Instagram there was a post where they had shown the Oscar winning movies for I don't know is it best picture for the past millions of years. And I said I actually not I have not seen many of those films. So that seems to be part of it as well.

Leo Laporte [02:17:47]:
Maybe films are not as compelling as they were. So the game of the year this year claire obscure expedition 33 is this are the game Awards? Are they the. Are they the.

Mikah Sargent [02:18:00]:
That's what I'm wondering because maybe the tw the Twitch streaming hooligans love this stuff.

Paris Martineau [02:18:06]:
I'm sure gamies people just aren't watching live television programming.

Leo Laporte [02:18:11]:
Yeah yeah.

Mikah Sargent [02:18:12]:
They're watching their podcasts.

Leo Laporte [02:18:14]:
The video game awards is just the Video game rewards though is just a big excuse for game companies companies to put trailers on. It's just a big trailer and that's.

Mikah Sargent [02:18:22]:
What I'm saying, isn't it?

Leo Laporte [02:18:24]:
That's awesome.

Mikah Sargent [02:18:24]:
There's a little bit of. Yeah. So it's like not demystification but it's sort of a loss of the. The gloss a loss of the.

Leo Laporte [02:18:32]:
The.

Mikah Sargent [02:18:33]:
The underlying realism of it all. It all feels fake and like why do I want to. Why am I you know down.

Leo Laporte [02:18:40]:
And when you figure out how the.

Leo Laporte [02:18:41]:
Oscars work your generation and you figure out how The Oscars generation is.

Leo Laporte [02:18:45]:
Is.

Leo Laporte [02:18:45]:
Is over awards. I don't think you guys care about awards. Yes.

Paris Martineau [02:18:49]:
I mean, I don't care about awards.

Leo Laporte [02:18:50]:
Yeah.

Paris Martineau [02:18:50]:
I mean, yeah, generation.

Mikah Sargent [02:18:52]:
I won't speak for a generation either. I am also curious how. How people. So I'm 33 there. I said I'm 33.

Leo Laporte [02:19:02]:
Wait a minute. I thought you said you were 30.

Mikah Sargent [02:19:03]:
Are you?

Paris Martineau [02:19:04]:
No, you did and you lied.

Mikah Sargent [02:19:05]:
No, no, no, I didn't. It was a. You misunderstood me and I did not correct myself in the moment.

Leo Laporte [02:19:11]:
Roll the tape back.

Mikah Sargent [02:19:13]:
Yeah. And if you do, you'll hear how what I was saying was.

Paris Martineau [02:19:16]:
So Micah turns.

Mikah Sargent [02:19:17]:
Yeah, exactly.

Steve Gibson [02:19:19]:
He says something like a special 30 or something.

Leo Laporte [02:19:22]:
A 33 and a third.

Mikah Sargent [02:19:24]:
Oh. What I was saying was I am over 30. I didn't want to say my exact age, but you were right earlier when you're like, people already know that. So anyway, I'm 33. I just turned 33 and. Well, no, I don't. That's. I will feel like I have achieved everything when I have a Wikipedia page.

Mikah Sargent [02:19:40]:
And that's not it. So I've got. I've still got more career to do.

Paris Martineau [02:19:43]:
Get on it. Make a Wikipedia page for Micah and I.

Mikah Sargent [02:19:45]:
But I. Yes, that's some. Sorry. Wadfan just said something that somebody just said to me the other day at my birthday, which is, oh, you're the Jesus age. Because Jesus was 33 when Jesus died. Biblically anyway. And now I don't know if I died.

Leo Laporte [02:20:02]:
We were going to try to just cover 20, 25. Yeah. Where was I going with this that far?

Mikah Sargent [02:20:07]:
Where was I going?

Leo Laporte [02:20:09]:
Oh, that's right.

Leo Laporte [02:20:10]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:20:10]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [02:20:10]:
I. So the reason I bring up my age is because I am thinking about the people who I was talking to. It was three or four people who were a full 10 years younger than me, so 23ish range and obsessed with the Olympics. And I was curious what everybody's take is on the Olympics, because that is an award situation as well. But it's also very patriotic. And there kind of an. Well, there's a. There's a heavy patriotic crowd in the US and there's a not so patriotic crowd of the US Really.

Mikah Sargent [02:20:42]:
So how do we feel about the Olympics?

Leo Laporte [02:20:44]:
Do you root. Do you root for the American team? I would.

Mikah Sargent [02:20:47]:
I don't think I'd root for another team, but I think that what I would do if I was watching it is I'm looking to see the sport. I'm interested in this sport and the.

Leo Laporte [02:20:55]:
Individual athletes as opposed to the Olympics.

Paris Martineau [02:20:57]:
I don't think I've ever willingly sat down and seen a second of Olympics. I think I've only watched by television.

Leo Laporte [02:21:04]:
If more men in your life had TVs, you might.

Paris Martineau [02:21:08]:
They don't, though. They really don't.

Leo Laporte [02:21:10]:
But they don't.

Paris Martineau [02:21:11]:
They don't. And if they do, they definitely are not subscribing to any service that would be playing the Olympics live.

Leo Laporte [02:21:17]:
Paris is such a door, a window onto a different world for us on intelligent machines.

Steve Gibson [02:21:23]:
I think she's very independent.

Leo Laporte [02:21:25]:
I think that's what it is. Fascinating. I just. For instance, I learned that apparently all the men Paris knows are into history.

Paris Martineau [02:21:33]:
They're all into like, some don't know.

Mikah Sargent [02:21:36]:
Do they all talk about the Roman Empire?

Paris Martineau [02:21:38]:
No, not even the Roman Empire. They've gone past that.

Leo Laporte [02:21:41]:
Thank God. They're all into the Revolutionary War now, right? They're all in 1776.

Paris Martineau [02:21:46]:
Everybody's kind of into nuclear war stuff right now.

Leo Laporte [02:21:49]:
I think they all just listen to hardcore history though, right? That's probably it.

Paris Martineau [02:21:52]:
I mean, I think that is it.

Leo Laporte [02:21:53]:
It's from podcast.

Mikah Sargent [02:21:54]:
Oh, so there you go. It's podcast. Podcast all the way to down. But wait, what's your. How are Leo and Steve, y', all, Olympics people?

Steve Gibson [02:22:05]:
I like. I, I'm, I'm. I'm a casual spectator and as I said, like, like watch. Watching. Free. What do they call it? The ice skating.

Leo Laporte [02:22:15]:
Free.

Leo Laporte [02:22:16]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [02:22:16]:
The freestyle ice skating.

Steve Gibson [02:22:17]:
I'm just astounded by the athletism.

Leo Laporte [02:22:21]:
Yeah.

Steve Gibson [02:22:21]:
That we see. It's just, I just, you know, anybody who's the top of their game at anything, I think is.

Leo Laporte [02:22:27]:
I got so hooked on handball last time. Handball was so much fun to watch.

Leo Laporte [02:22:31]:
It was so much fun to watch.

Leo Laporte [02:22:32]:
It's like soccer, but you're throwing the ball around instead of kicking it. You're. It's like you throwing a ball into a goal. It was so fun to watch.

Paris Martineau [02:22:41]:
That's pretty fun. That's a fun sport that we have.

Leo Laporte [02:22:44]:
We've completely lost.

Mikah Sargent [02:22:45]:
What is that?

Steve Gibson [02:22:45]:
Sliding the big heavy weight down?

Paris Martineau [02:22:48]:
Curling.

Steve Gibson [02:22:48]:
Oh, that's curling.

Mikah Sargent [02:22:52]:
Jason Snell does curling.

Leo Laporte [02:22:53]:
He is. He's on a team. He's on a team.

Paris Martineau [02:22:57]:
Maybe we should all get really into curling this year, guys.

Leo Laporte [02:22:59]:
All right, a few more stories and then we're gonna do our, our final break and then we'll get to the weird stories of the week. This year, a twenty thousand dollar American made electric pickup was announced. The Slate. It has no stereo, no paint, no screen inside, and nothing. I mean, you can order extra I.

Paris Martineau [02:23:23]:
Mean, the cyber truck has no paint.

Leo Laporte [02:23:25]:
Yeah. This went crazy, people. It's. It. The reservations. You reserve it now for a delivery at some time down the road, and.

Steve Gibson [02:23:38]:
Then you have to change the batteries yourself because.

Mikah Sargent [02:23:42]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [02:23:42]:
It's not that kind of electric. Yeah, it's. It's. You need C cells, a lot of them.

Steve Gibson [02:23:46]:
Wow.

Mikah Sargent [02:23:47]:
My significant other really liked this. This.

Leo Laporte [02:23:50]:
Yeah. A lot of people. Yeah. This is. So did mine. The slate is going to be one vehicle, one trim, one color, but you can add on things later, including if you want an entertainment system.

Steve Gibson [02:24:02]:
Trim, like black.

Leo Laporte [02:24:04]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [02:24:04]:
One. No, one. One op. Trim in car means how many. It's like premium or expedition. It's like extra features is what they call trim.

Leo Laporte [02:24:14]:
Steve, we covered this. NASA engineers.

Steve Gibson [02:24:17]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [02:24:18]:
Rescued Voyager 115 billion miles away.

Mikah Sargent [02:24:24]:
That is so.

Leo Laporte [02:24:24]:
The fact.

Steve Gibson [02:24:25]:
The fact that this thing is still going is just astonishing.

Leo Laporte [02:24:30]:
Unbelievable.

Steve Gibson [02:24:31]:
Amazing.

Leo Laporte [02:24:31]:
Yeah.

Steve Gibson [02:24:32]:
I mean, it is the first interstellar object that we created because it's now out past the sun's heliosphere and astonishingly able to aim itself at us in order to send data back. It's just, it's an incredible accomplishment.

Leo Laporte [02:24:50]:
Launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, but it just kept on going. And it's got a very primitive computer system in it. It's running on batteries of all things.

Steve Gibson [02:25:05]:
Memory is failing, and they're recoding around the failed build regions in order to keep it going. Yeah. It's just amazing.

Paris Martineau [02:25:13]:
That's incredible.

Leo Laporte [02:25:14]:
It's a really great story of.

Mikah Sargent [02:25:16]:
Of human engineering. Yeah.

Paris Martineau [02:25:18]:
How do you do that when it's that far away? Sorry to ask a very dumb question.

Mikah Sargent [02:25:23]:
I don't think it's a dumb question at all.

Leo Laporte [02:25:24]:
Very patiently.

Steve Gibson [02:25:25]:
And the problem, of course, is a lot of the people who knew how it worked are no longer available for one reason.

Mikah Sargent [02:25:31]:
Because they're in the ground.

Steve Gibson [02:25:33]:
Yeah. And. And, and so they try to simulate it and send an. And send data up. And now the time is so long that there's a lot of time spent holding one's breath.

Mikah Sargent [02:25:44]:
Oh, to hope that that worked.

Leo Laporte [02:25:46]:
Yeah.

Steve Gibson [02:25:47]:
And boy, if they screw up so that it swings off axis, we'd never get it back.

Mikah Sargent [02:25:54]:
So they're just sending little signals to it. Right.

Steve Gibson [02:25:56]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:25:56]:
But it has so little memory.

Steve Gibson [02:25:58]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [02:25:58]:
That they can't really send that much data to it. Right. It has to be just a small packet.

Steve Gibson [02:26:02]:
Right. No, and. And it had a whole bunch of instruments, but over time, but, but it uses radioactive decay in order to, to, to create, then drive some thermocouples. To create current. And over time it's been cooling off. So the available amount of current has been slowly dropping. And they then they've had to shut off one instrument after another in order to prioritize which instruments they still want to keep powered up. It's just.

Mikah Sargent [02:26:32]:
Can you imagine if we built everything that we have on our planet in the way that we built things for space to last as long as they do and to have so many powers? I just think it's so cool.

Leo Laporte [02:26:42]:
We used to too. Well, back in my day, the washing Voyager 1 was the satellite that took the blue marble picture of the Earth, among other things. I do hope, and I don't know if it's the case, JPL had some layoffs, considerable number of layoffs this fall. I don't. And that's who was responsible for Voyager. Not sure if the Voyager team, which is tiny, it's a handful of people. There's a great documentary about them.

Steve Gibson [02:27:09]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [02:27:11]:
I'm hoping that they were not laid off because that would pretty much be it. Voyager. Nobody else knows how it works.

Mikah Sargent [02:27:19]:
Before we go to break, could I ask Steve a quick question about security for this year? Does that work?

Leo Laporte [02:27:25]:
Of course.

Mikah Sargent [02:27:26]:
I was just wondering. So we've seen, especially in the last like five, eight years, maybe, a privatization, a heavy privatization of the space industry and we, you know, see less government push for these things to exist. And given what we've seen this year, you know, and listening to security now and learning about the la. The loss of funding, the closure of teams, the, the increased inaccuracy from the, the government bodies in the security space, do you think, and you perceive a shift to more private companies stepping into the big role that government has played in terms of CyberSecurity in the US and elsewhere, or do you think that this is kind of a bump in the road and it will continue to have the funding and everything that's needed to have a cybersecurity force?

Steve Gibson [02:28:20]:
That's a really great question. And I do think there's a bump in the road aspect. I think that Doge could be criticized for overcutting, cutting and for, for, for, you know, use indiscriminately cutting, which hurt. And I think the good news is inertia will keep us going for some length of time, but, but I'm hoping that we're going to be able to build things back up. It certainly is the case also that government does create waste. You know, it's just sort of natural to, to, to, to end up with, with more people than you need because people means budget and people who control larger budgets have, have more power in, in Washington. So there certainly have been some examples where things were cut that needed to be cut. But, but there, one, one of the big concerns is that there has been a, a failure in some legislation that would protect American companies if they reported breaches to the government, if they, if they reported problems.

Steve Gibson [02:29:30]:
And so I remember that that had been, that was supposed to be reinstituted and re signed and I don't remember whether that has happened yet. But, but.

Leo Laporte [02:29:41]:
Well, here's the good news. We finally have an administrator of NASA. For a long time it's been run under the Commerce Department. But Jared Eisenman, whose nomination was withdrawn by the president earlier this year here was sworn in on Thursday after Senate approval. He's the 15th administrator of NASA. He has been an astronaut. He has his own private fleet of fighter jets. He's a billionaire in his own rights.

Leo Laporte [02:30:07]:
But I think somebody who really believes in the mission of NASA, and I think most people, I'd have to ask Rod Pyle, the host and Tarek Malik, the hosts of this Week in Space show, but my sense is that people are very pleased that Isaacman is now in charge at NASA. NASA. So he says we're in a new space race. So that's interesting.

Steve Gibson [02:30:27]:
I agree. I think the weaponization of space is a big concern.

Leo Laporte [02:30:31]:
Yeah.

Steve Gibson [02:30:32]:
You know, we do know that there are satellites up there that have arms on them, ostensibly for use in repairing other satellites, but that arm can go also over to some foreign adversarial satellite and bend its antennas off. So who, I mean, unfortunately, it's going to be the wild west up there in orbit.

Paris Martineau [02:30:56]:
A very different kind of space race.

Leo Laporte [02:30:59]:
Thug satellites wandering around playground, bullying in space, tearing off antennas and things.

Mikah Sargent [02:31:05]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [02:31:06]:
All right, let's see.

Paris Martineau [02:31:07]:
And that creates more space junk.

Leo Laporte [02:31:09]:
Yes. And that creates the Kessler effect. Real quickly. This was also the end of the line for Windows 10. We covered this extensively on Windows Weekly and security now. Now as of October, Windows 10 is not getting security updates. Microsoft did not back down on that, despite attempts by Stacy Higginbotham at Consumer Reports and others to convince them. Europe did, by the way, the EU said no, no, you're going to support this for another year.

Leo Laporte [02:31:33]:
And Microsoft does support it with patches in the eu, but not here in the United States.

Steve Gibson [02:31:37]:
Although here in the US if you do a couple little things like easy to get.

Leo Laporte [02:31:41]:
Yes, yes.

Steve Gibson [02:31:42]:
You are still able to get 30 bucks one more year of, of the monthly updates.

Paris Martineau [02:31:48]:
What's the state of Windows 11 right now. I feel like I've seen some headlines but haven't looked into it saying that there were a lot of different vulnerabilities with it or issues with Windows.

Leo Laporte [02:31:57]:
That's just business as usual.

Leo Laporte [02:32:00]:
I don't know. I think Windows 11 is about like. It's like the Windows 8. Remember when Windows 8 came out and everybody hated that? I think it's pretty similar to that.

Leo Laporte [02:32:07]:
Do people hate Windows 11? I don't know why it is Windows 10. Small cosmetic changes.

Leo Laporte [02:32:12]:
No, it's all.

Steve Gibson [02:32:13]:
It's got round corners.

Leo Laporte [02:32:14]:
It's not that different. Different.

Leo Laporte [02:32:16]:
There's a lot more Force.

Paris Martineau [02:32:17]:
Windows 8 is the operating system that caused me to be a Mac user. I hated it so much I got a Mac and literally have never had a machine since.

Steve Gibson [02:32:26]:
Actually, there is a huge influx from Windows 10 to Linux.

Mikah Sargent [02:32:29]:
I was going to say Linux probably did it too. Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:32:32]:
And there are a lot of people, many, many millions, maybe as many as billion Windows 10 users who have refused to upgrade. Which I think on security now will be a topic for conversation as they become more and more vulnerable.

Steve Gibson [02:32:45]:
And the EU is moving away from Windows. I mean, in, in, in general, we are seeing a lot of European countries saying, you know, what are they moving a little more?

Mikah Sargent [02:32:55]:
Uos. Uos. That's what I want to be.

Leo Laporte [02:33:00]:
Uos. All right, let's take a little break. We're going to have our final words and our weird stories of the year because there were a few in just a little bit. But first a word from our sponsor and it's this beautiful thing. My Aura frame. This is the Aura Ink frame. Now you probably know the name Aura. They are easily every year picked as the best digital frames.

Leo Laporte [02:33:25]:
But this is a digital frame with a difference. Imagine if you could hang a photo on the wall and you could hang this on the wall. It's just like a regular photo, right? You hang it on the wall. But it changed every day. You'd wake up in the morning and there'd be a new photo on there. That's this. That's the Aura Ink. Aura's new cordless.

Leo Laporte [02:33:47]:
Look it, no cords. Mom color E paper frame. They have done with E paper something I didn't think anybody could do. Meet Ink Aura's first ever cordless color E paper frame. Featuring a sleek 0.6 inch profile and a softly lit 13.3 inch display. Ink feels like a pretty print, functions like a digital frame, and perhaps most importantly, it lives completely untethered by cords with a rechargeable battery that lasts up to three months on a single charge. Unlimited storage and the ability to invite others to add photos via the Aura Frames app. It's the cordless wall hanging frame you've been waiting for and a great gift.

Leo Laporte [02:34:26]:
Now there's three more shopping days, so get over to auraframes.com Inc. This would be a lovely gift, especially for grandparents. I'm sending one to my mom. One of the nice things Aura just announced this week is you can text message new images. So imagine you're sitting around opening gifts with the grandkids and you take a picture and you immediately send it to grandma and grandpa so they can see it. This is a picture I took of a vintage vehicle. These pictures look really, really nice. They put a lot of engineering into this.

Leo Laporte [02:34:57]:
Millions of tiny e ink capsules. They transform your favorite photos, they render them and it's a little bit vintage tone look to it, but it really looks like a print. It's great. They've done a lot of design innovation. The the graphite inspired bezel, the paper textured matte, the glossy glass front. It looks really like a photo hanging on your wall, not like another device. We don't need another screen in our living rooms. In our bedrooms, you get unlimited free photos.

Leo Laporte [02:35:25]:
The app, there's no subscription. Just download the Aura app, connect it to WI fi. This is really a gift for somebody who appreciates cutting edge technology or somebody who doesn't want another screen on the wall but wants the flexibility of a screen that the pictures can change. I have it change overnight just once a day. So I see the next picture in the morning. I wake up and go, oh, I haven't seen that picture in a long time. This is the modern problem, right? We all have many more many photos on our hard drives, but we don't see them in the way we used to. Now you can hang an aura ink frame on the wall and see a new picture every day.

Leo Laporte [02:36:00]:
You could change it every two hours if you want, but I like the idea of a new picture every day. This is sleek, it's subtle, it's stunning. Ink blends the warmth of a printed photo with the versatility of an e paper frame. No chords, no fuss, just your memories beautifully displayed wherever you want. Head to auraframes.com Inc. To see for yourself. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. That's auraframes.com Inc.

Leo Laporte [02:36:26]:
Auraframes.com Inc. Here's a picture I took. Oh, I think this is in Montreal. This is the cathedral. And yeah, I think this is the cathedral in Montreal. I mean, it's just really nice to be able to have. It doesn't. It just looks like a print, but have this hanging on your wall.

Leo Laporte [02:36:43]:
No flick clicker. And then there's a new picture in the morning. It could be portrait or landscape. They've. You could hang it on the wall, but they also have a nice easily attached magnetic stand. It just goes in right like this. Oops. I always put it in upside down and it can go in again in portrait or landscape mode.

Leo Laporte [02:37:01]:
There you go. And. And you could just have it on your desk too, which is what I have. Aura Inc. From auraframes.com Inc. Thank them so much for their support.

Leo Laporte [02:37:11]:
Before you move on. Leo. Do they make E readers? Because I would. Do they make E readers this art.

Leo Laporte [02:37:17]:
When you want an E reader. Like. Because I want.

Leo Laporte [02:37:18]:
Because you could actually read graphic novels on that.

Leo Laporte [02:37:21]:
Yeah. Look how good that looks. I'll tell you the issue because of the color. It's really slow page turn. That's why you really want to do it overnight.

Leo Laporte [02:37:30]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [02:37:31]:
And so it really wouldn't be good for a book because it's a. It's a second or two or maybe more between.

Paris Martineau [02:37:35]:
Between.

Leo Laporte [02:37:36]:
Between images.

Steve Gibson [02:37:37]:
So.

Leo Laporte [02:37:38]:
Yeah, I wish those are the only.

Leo Laporte [02:37:40]:
Physical books I still buy is graphic novels.

Leo Laporte [02:37:42]:
I know. I like E Ink.

Leo Laporte [02:37:43]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:37:43]:
Yeah, I like E Ink. And I have a color. E Ink reader of the Libra Libro color from Kobo, but it's much more washed out than this. I wish. I wish color.

Paris Martineau [02:37:54]:
What's the writing experience like on that?

Leo Laporte [02:37:56]:
On the Kobo?

Paris Martineau [02:37:58]:
Yeah, Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:37:58]:
I know you're looking for like a Remarkable or something.

Steve Gibson [02:38:01]:
I. Oh, the Remarkable is so good.

Paris Martineau [02:38:04]:
It's completely.

Steve Gibson [02:38:07]:
Ever replaced Engineering pad and a soft lead.

Leo Laporte [02:38:10]:
You had the Kindle scribe, Right. Did you like that?

Steve Gibson [02:38:13]:
I returned it. Oh, you're talking about Paris.

Leo Laporte [02:38:16]:
No.

Paris Martineau [02:38:16]:
Oh, no, you.

Steve Gibson [02:38:17]:
Oh, to me, not as good as the Remarkable. I. They just. They've.

Paris Martineau [02:38:21]:
Which remarkable do you have? My issue is that the Remarkable, you can't also. It Remarkable has everything I want, but if I'm spending that much money to get one of the color ones as well, I'd like it to also be able to read ebooks. And it isn't compatible with ebooks. I have to convert them to PDFs, which I think is just ridiculous.

Steve Gibson [02:38:39]:
And actually I would say that the color technology on the Remarkable is not here yet. I have one and I. I went back to my monochrome one because it does. It's like really struggling in order to do the color maybe.

Paris Martineau [02:38:52]:
Is it because. I mean my. What I'd want to use it for is whenever I take notes, in addition to marking up documents, I like to highlight stuff. Stuff or like just that is the sort of color I'd use and not necessarily photos.

Leo Laporte [02:39:05]:
It'd be fine for that.

Steve Gibson [02:39:06]:
Yes, it would be.

Paris Martineau [02:39:07]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:39:07]:
Because it's just a color highlight. I do highlighting on my.

Paris Martineau [02:39:10]:
It's another one of the things that. And whether or not you film camera are my two looming over me.

Leo Laporte [02:39:17]:
I hope you have told Santa and you are at home.

Paris Martineau [02:39:22]:
I would not. I would not ask. I would not ask. I would not tell Santa about interest for very expensive tech products.

Leo Laporte [02:39:30]:
Why not? That's what Santa's for.

Paris Martineau [02:39:31]:
I don't know. It feels ridiculous.

Leo Laporte [02:39:33]:
He's got elves, he doesn't pay for it. I by the way, are the elf.

Steve Gibson [02:39:36]:
Boyfriends buying TV screens.

Mikah Sargent [02:39:38]:
So.

Paris Martineau [02:39:39]:
Yeah, it's true.

Leo Laporte [02:39:42]:
Hey honey, don't buy a TV screen, buy me a Fujifilm camera.

Paris Martineau [02:39:46]:
The issue is all these boys are probably buying like 200 buck TVs from place.

Leo Laporte [02:39:51]:
They're not getting Paris on advice from us. Bought a very nice.

Paris Martineau [02:39:55]:
I did buy a very nice TV and it's great. Everybody comes over my house Netflix and.

Leo Laporte [02:40:01]:
Chill at your place.

Paris Martineau [02:40:01]:
I did just get a notification that my. I just bought all four of the Matrix movies on 4K UHD.

Mikah Sargent [02:40:10]:
Oops.

Steve Gibson [02:40:10]:
All four.

Leo Laporte [02:40:11]:
I blame us.

Paris Martineau [02:40:13]:
Deja vu. Now I'm. Now I'm a physical media girl.

Leo Laporte [02:40:15]:
I brought that up on Wednesday. I. I apologize. I think I probably gave you that itch.

Paris Martineau [02:40:20]:
That's great.

Leo Laporte [02:40:21]:
He gave you the. Sorry. Did you see. Okay, some of the strange things that happened. The crosswalk buttons in Palo Alto were hacked.

Steve Gibson [02:40:33]:
Nobody changed the password.

Leo Laporte [02:40:35]:
What was the password? It was something very simple. Right?

Steve Gibson [02:40:38]:
It was very simple. Basically, they didn't change the password on a bunch of municipalities in Northern California. And so someone just played some games with having the.

Leo Laporte [02:40:48]:
These are the. These are the buttons that you push. And, and for blind and other disabled users, they say things like walk sign is on walk stop, that kind of thing. But in Palo Alto for just a day, they said, let me see if I can get this to play. Oh, this is not. It hacked crosswalks. Oh, this is a story about hacked crosswalks. Yeah, never mind.

Leo Laporte [02:41:15]:
Let me see if I can find. Oh, here's, here's a X post. This is where you gotta go.

Mikah Sargent [02:41:21]:
Wait, wait. Hi, this is Mark Zuckerberg. But real ones call me the Zuck. You know, it's normal to feel uncomfortable.

Leo Laporte [02:41:29]:
And barely hear it.

Mikah Sargent [02:41:30]:
Violated as we forcefully insert AI into every.

Leo Laporte [02:41:33]:
Oh, it's coming out of the wrong hole.

Mikah Sargent [02:41:34]:
It's Zuckerberg. I just want to assure you you don't need to worry because there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop it anyway.

Paris Martineau [02:41:43]:
I love that.

Leo Laporte [02:41:45]:
Yeah, it's very low. Very low.

Steve Gibson [02:41:47]:
Perfect Silicon Valley hack.

Leo Laporte [02:41:50]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [02:41:51]:
Except for the people who rely except for the people who rely on those sounds to be able to get across the street and not die. I'm not. Not. But true for the funny haha of it all, I guess. Sorry, that actually, I mean. No, I think that's a very valid point.

Leo Laporte [02:42:09]:
It's really upsetting me. Let me see. This is. I think this is the Elon Musk.

Paris Martineau [02:42:13]:
The Elon one is full of expletives, if I recall correctly. Just in case.

Leo Laporte [02:42:17]:
Hi, this is Elon Musk.

Mikah Sargent [02:42:19]:
Welcome to Palo Alto, the home of Tesla Engineering.

Leo Laporte [02:42:23]:
You know, they say money can't buy happiness, and. Yeah, okay, I guess that's true. God knows I've tried.

Mikah Sargent [02:42:31]:
But it can buy a cyber truck.

Leo Laporte [02:42:32]:
And that's pretty sick. Right? Right.

Mikah Sargent [02:42:37]:
That one doesn't sound like him.

Leo Laporte [02:42:39]:
It sounds just like him. Are you kidding me?

Paris Martineau [02:42:40]:
It does?

Leo Laporte [02:42:41]:
Yeah. Oh, really?

Mikah Sargent [02:42:42]:
I. Huh.

Leo Laporte [02:42:43]:
Weird.

Mikah Sargent [02:42:44]:
Maybe it's been a while since I've. I've listened to him.

Paris Martineau [02:42:47]:
He's got one of those voices that whenever you hear it, you're like, that's how he sounds.

Leo Laporte [02:42:50]:
Yeah, it's a little weird. The. I mentioned that the Switch 2 was very successful. There were long lines, people were very excited. At one GameStop store on Staten island, during the midnight release of the Switch 2, employees got a little overexcited and stapled the customer's receipt so hard that it actually punctured the cardboard packaging and the screen. Well, don't get too sad because an authentic relic from the GameStop, Staplegate, was auctioned off for charity. It's over now. You get the stapler, but you also get the stapled box, the receipt, and more.

Steve Gibson [02:43:36]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [02:43:37]:
Yeah. And I think it raised $100,000 for charity, so it ended up sad, though. A happy story.

Mikah Sargent [02:43:44]:
I'm glad that it ended up happening. Yeah. Can you imagine that? You get home, you're very excited about it. Honestly, what I thought you were going to say is, so many people flooded this GameStop in Staten island that it sunk the island.

Paris Martineau [02:43:56]:
But some people say it's still there to this day.

Leo Laporte [02:44:00]:
It's still there to this day. This was the year of the Coldplay Kiss Cam.

Mikah Sargent [02:44:05]:
Yes.

Paris Martineau [02:44:08]:
Oh, did you guys Read the New York Times interview with the woman.

Leo Laporte [02:44:13]:
She says it ruined her life, didn't it?

Paris Martineau [02:44:15]:
I mean, that's still to this day. That's an under exaggeration. It was a very, honestly, a very sad read.

Leo Laporte [02:44:22]:
Yeah.

Steve Gibson [02:44:23]:
With this couple not together.

Leo Laporte [02:44:25]:
Oh, you don't know the story. Well, no. Yes.

Paris Martineau [02:44:29]:
Coldplay kiss cam. Do you mean anything to you?

Leo Laporte [02:44:33]:
So this is at a Coldplay concert. Chris Martin of Coldplay said, oh, look, there's a happy couple. Except they weren't married. He was the CEO of the company. She was in charge of HR at the company. Of course, it wouldn't have been such a big deal if he hadn't immediately dived out of the shot, leading the.

Paris Martineau [02:44:49]:
Singer of Coldplay to be like, are those people having an affair? What's going on? Then it went super viral.

Leo Laporte [02:44:54]:
Either they're having a fair. They're very shy. Well, it turned out, turns out, yeah.

Paris Martineau [02:44:59]:
The CEO and head of HR for a tech company called Astronomer. The CEO was married and seemingly, I guess seemingly is now getting a divorce. The head of HR said she was separated from her husband at the time and they were in the process of finalizing their divorce, but it has destroyed both of their lives.

Leo Laporte [02:45:23]:
But to their credit, Astronomer got a lot of traffic to their website and was actually very good for their business.

Paris Martineau [02:45:30]:
So they hired Gwyneth Paltrow to make an ad making fun of them.

Leo Laporte [02:45:35]:
Yes.

Mikah Sargent [02:45:37]:
That's a pivot if I've ever heard one.

Leo Laporte [02:45:39]:
It was.

Paris Martineau [02:45:40]:
I mean, that comms team was worth its brilliant, I will say.

Leo Laporte [02:45:44]:
Yeah, they, they did the really good job. Taco Bell had to rethink their AI drive in system after a man ordered 18,000 waters.

Mikah Sargent [02:45:55]:
I just love it. Yeah, 18,000 waters.

Leo Laporte [02:45:59]:
Sometimes. The chief digital and technology officer of Taco Bell said, sometimes it lets me down, but sometimes it really surprises me. Of course, it sounds like they're talking.

Mikah Sargent [02:46:11]:
About your dog or something.

Paris Martineau [02:46:13]:
They're talking about your son.

Leo Laporte [02:46:14]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steve Gibson [02:46:16]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [02:46:17]:
One clip on Instagram, which has been viewed over 21 and a half million times, shares a man ordering a large Mountain Dew. And the voice continually replying, and what will you be drinking with that?

Paris Martineau [02:46:28]:
And learn from disease.

Leo Laporte [02:46:32]:
And then in the voice of Paris, Martin is saying, and I hope you have a TV at home.

Mikah Sargent [02:46:38]:
No, if they're coming to Taco Bell, they're not coming to my house.

Leo Laporte [02:46:41]:
They're not coming to my house. Police broke up a Lego theft ring recovering hundreds of beheaded figurines at a California home. Tens of thousands. There was part of the sorting process Tens of thousands of Lego pieces and sets at Lake County, California.

Paris Martineau [02:47:02]:
I'm sorry, part of the sorting process. Why are they sorting them apart from their heads? We gotta drill down to the narrative here, please.

Leo Laporte [02:47:11]:
There's more of a story. Police said when they visited the perpetrator's garage, it had about 100 assembled minifigures displayed on shelves, along with unopened sets and broken down packaging. But I really like the picture the police distributed the Santa Rosa Police Department of all those Lego heads. Look at that.

Paris Martineau [02:47:31]:
Terrifying.

Leo Laporte [02:47:31]:
It's called Knolling Paris. You gotta know. They gotta know your pieces.

Paris Martineau [02:47:35]:
Oh, my God. You've gotta know the heads.

Mikah Sargent [02:47:38]:
Oh.

Leo Laporte [02:47:38]:
Noling is arranging things in obsessive.

Paris Martineau [02:47:41]:
An aesthetically pleasing flat lay.

Leo Laporte [02:47:43]:
Yeah. Nold the heads. German economist Thomas Viejuis. This is why maybe you thought we didn't have a lot of free speech here. Maybe worse elsewhere. Find €16,000 for sarcastic posts on X. €16,000.

Paris Martineau [02:48:09]:
What were his sarcastic posts?

Leo Laporte [02:48:11]:
Well, he did, for instance. So the first incident dates back to June 2023, when he A the vice president of the German Bundestag, Katherine Goring Eckhart, posted an alarmist post about climate change, citing droughts, wildfires, high sea temperatures. Verhuis, unimpressed, replied, there is indeed an extreme drought, namely in Katrina Goring Eckhart's head.

Steve Gibson [02:48:42]:
What?

Leo Laporte [02:48:43]:
Yeah. And then a doctoral student who was patrolling the Internet filed a criminal complaint on her behalf and said.

Paris Martineau [02:48:52]:
For calling someone's head empty.

Leo Laporte [02:48:54]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:48:54]:
This.

Leo Laporte [02:48:55]:
In America you can do that. The second charge came after Verhaus discovered the identity of the doctoral student and referred to him online as a little snitch.

Paris Martineau [02:49:03]:
That's just accurate.

Leo Laporte [02:49:04]:
That's strike two.

Mikah Sargent [02:49:05]:
That is so accurate.

Leo Laporte [02:49:07]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [02:49:09]:
Did you say swy? That's correct.

Leo Laporte [02:49:11]:
Sway. He called a journalist a nincompoop and said, you still have a lot to learn in order not to be constantly fooled.

Mikah Sargent [02:49:21]:
And got fined for that.

Leo Laporte [02:49:22]:
Yes.

Paris Martineau [02:49:23]:
That's crazy.

Leo Laporte [02:49:25]:
€16,000.

Mikah Sargent [02:49:26]:
I'm gonna. I'm print these out and use them anytime someone complains me for not having free speech here in the us that.

Steve Gibson [02:49:34]:
Would put a chill in your speech.

Mikah Sargent [02:49:35]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:49:36]:
That's why I was about to say.

Paris Martineau [02:49:37]:
Every post I've ever made would.

Mikah Sargent [02:49:39]:
Yeah, I'd be fine for. I'd be so broke.

Paris Martineau [02:49:43]:
I'd be fine for every comment I've ever made in this podcast. Podcast.

Leo Laporte [02:49:46]:
So we cover this a little bit on intelligent machines, but we should probably mention, since we are at the year end, we should mention the words of the year for 2025. The Oxford Dictionary. Word of the year Rage bait.

Paris Martineau [02:50:04]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [02:50:05]:
Yep. Yeah, Yeah.

Paris Martineau [02:50:08]:
I mean, frankly, I feel like it should have been a word of the.

Leo Laporte [02:50:09]:
Year before this, but Dictionary dot com. Maybe a little late to the trend. Six, seven.

Mikah Sargent [02:50:15]:
Oh, come on.

Leo Laporte [02:50:16]:
Maybe a little late. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [02:50:18]:
It's dying.

Leo Laporte [02:50:18]:
Both of these things, by the way. Both of them. Two words.

Mikah Sargent [02:50:23]:
Yeah.

Paris Martineau [02:50:24]:
I mean, one to one of them's two numbers.

Leo Laporte [02:50:26]:
Not even a word. It's not even a word. Cambridge Dictionary chose parasocial, which I think parasocial. That's probably.

Paris Martineau [02:50:35]:
Parasocial is a really good one.

Leo Laporte [02:50:37]:
Yeah. And it's kind of what's going on in the world. You can look these up.

Paris Martineau [02:50:40]:
Up.

Leo Laporte [02:50:41]:
That's what they want you to do.

Mikah Sargent [02:50:42]:
I'm sure you can look these up. They're real, I swear.

Leo Laporte [02:50:44]:
Dictionary.com.

Leo Laporte [02:50:47]:
Yes. There you go.

Paris Martineau [02:50:49]:
Dictionary Christmas. Don't go there. Don't go there.

Mikah Sargent [02:50:51]:
Don't go there.

Paris Martineau [02:50:52]:
Don't go there.

Leo Laporte [02:50:53]:
Don't.

Paris Martineau [02:50:53]:
Don't go to Dictionary Christmas, please.

Leo Laporte [02:50:55]:
Oh, please. It's 97% malicious.

Paris Martineau [02:50:59]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:51:00]:
I was thinking, you know, as I go through this and we used. We would always do this if somebody important in the tech industry passed away during the war week, I would. I would memorialize him on the show. And I was thinking about that, you know, maybe we get a sad song from, I don't know, Sarah McLaughlin.

Leo Laporte [02:51:14]:
Angel. Yes, Angel.

Leo Laporte [02:51:16]:
Yeah, angel. And then play that and. But now I'm not going to do that. But I do have to mention it and it is very sad and it hits us really hard. One of our twit family members, guy who did a YouTube show with us for a while, was a regular on Twitter. We hadn't had him on in quite some time because he became quite a celebrity on YouTube. YouTube. Lamar Wilson has passed away at the age of 48.

Leo Laporte [02:51:40]:
He took his own life, which is very, very sad. He was doing very well on YouTube. On TikTok. He had a couple of weeks ago posted his gift guide. Passed away. We didn't. We just learned about it. But he passed away last year.

Leo Laporte [02:51:59]:
Yes.

Mikah Sargent [02:51:59]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:52:00]:
At a very young age. His family confirmed the death last week on Facebook. We loved Lamar. Lamar was really a talent, was amazing. He had over 3 million followers on YouTube, Instagram and tick Tock. I loved working with him. We're very sad to have lost him. So I did want to mention that because we're getting to that time, Steve, where some of our people we love the most leave us.

Leo Laporte [02:52:35]:
And I should also mention that if you are feeling part rocky, this Holiday season, it's a tough time of year for a lot of people. That there is help out there, that every country has a helpline here in the United States. It's 988.

Paris Martineau [02:52:51]:
Call or text.

Leo Laporte [02:52:52]:
Yeah. And please do, Don't. Don't hold off. You know, somebody's. Somebody's there to talk to you, and we want you. We can't. We don't want to lose you. So if you're going through a hard time, you know what, Hang out with us.

Leo Laporte [02:53:07]:
We. We'll. We'll keep you company.

Steve Gibson [02:53:09]:
It's all good here.

Leo Laporte [02:53:10]:
And I just, you know, as always, when this happens, you go, oh, what could I have done? Yeah. Kind of been out of touch with Lamar and he was. I really enjoyed working with him as a great guy. Guy, very talented and. And had fans everywhere when I'm. Our son told me about this. Michael, who's 23 and he had. Was a big fan of his unboxing videos.

Leo Laporte [02:53:29]:
I said, did you know he used to work for us? Yeah. Sad to end on that note, but that's sometimes how it is. It's been a very weird year. Do you think, and I'll ask each of you individually, Micah, is next year going to be better?

Mikah Sargent [02:53:52]:
Is next year going to be better? I think I have to. I have to believe. I have to believe that every year is going to be better, because if I believe it's going to be worse, I'm not going to be in a good headspace. So will next year be better? That prediction. I don't know.

Paris Martineau [02:54:12]:
Know.

Mikah Sargent [02:54:13]:
But I. I want it to be, and I hope for it to be, and I plan to do what it is my job to do to help make it a better year. That's for sure.

Leo Laporte [02:54:20]:
Yeah.

Steve Gibson [02:54:21]:
Good.

Mikah Sargent [02:54:22]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:54:22]:
Yeah, I like that.

Mikah Sargent [02:54:23]:
That's my answer.

Leo Laporte [02:54:24]:
Paris, you're looking forward to a good 20, 26.

Mikah Sargent [02:54:28]:
Yeah.

Paris Martineau [02:54:29]:
I think along a similar line is what my. I think Micah put it perfectly. You have to hope that the days to come are better than the days that have passed and do all that you can to make the world a better place. And I don't know, I hope we see that in the next year as well.

Leo Laporte [02:54:48]:
Steve Gibson, you make money on things getting worse every year.

Mikah Sargent [02:54:52]:
Wow. Wow.

Paris Martineau [02:54:54]:
Bring us home, Steve.

Mikah Sargent [02:54:56]:
Bring us home, Steve Areno. Wow.

Steve Gibson [02:55:00]:
Yeah, I know.

Leo Laporte [02:55:02]:
Security is not going to get better next year.

Steve Gibson [02:55:04]:
The human condition is one of struggles.

Leo Laporte [02:55:06]:
Struggle. Yeah.

Steve Gibson [02:55:07]:
You know, it is. It's.

Mikah Sargent [02:55:10]:
Yes.

Steve Gibson [02:55:12]:
Pushing for more, achieving what you can. As I. As I age, I realize that the best parts of Life are friends and, and, and people who I enjoy being with. And it's sad when you lose them. And so all you have is memories. But even that, I mean, I think relationships are, are the key. And so to some degree I think it's up to us not to get de. Socialized by this increasingly mechanized environment.

Steve Gibson [02:55:46]:
You know, have friends, reach out to neighbors. Don't be isolated, stay connected and you know, and have a good time because that's life.

Leo Laporte [02:55:59]:
We did an interview, Paris, you remember this with Kevin Kelly, who is a longtime tech journalist, good friend friend who says he is an optimist. He's the angry optimist is what he calls himself. That interview you'll hear once again on our Best of on Wednesday. So if you're looking for reasons to be optimistic, listen to intelligent machines Best of on Wednesday. I do think there's a lot of reasons to think that this year is going to be better than last. And it is up to us to make it so I know one thing, we'll be here.

Paris Martineau [02:56:29]:
And one of the reasons why it will 2026 will be better than 2025. Is 2026 maybe the year where I finally get Leo, convince Leo to do a 24 hour twitch live stream or twit live stream. And you dear listeners, can make that happen. Bombard this man. We're gonna make it happen in 2020.

Steve Gibson [02:56:47]:
Paris. Paris. It's going to be the year that you finally get all your boyfriends to have television.

Leo Laporte [02:56:52]:
Yeah.

Steve Gibson [02:56:53]:
I'm gonna make sure that you're gonna be fully screened.

Leo Laporte [02:56:56]:
She didn't say by the say boyfriends. She said the men she knows.

Steve Gibson [02:57:02]:
Let's not men she knows. Okay.

Leo Laporte [02:57:04]:
Yeah.

Paris Martineau [02:57:05]:
Every man I know is going to have a television because they're going to be really affordable next year because electronics, they're going to be so affordable.

Leo Laporte [02:57:14]:
That's right. You can ask STEVE what those 24 hour new year shows were like. He was at one of them. I remember him dancing with a cardboard cut up of Captain Kirk.

Paris Martineau [02:57:22]:
See, wouldn't that be great?

Mikah Sargent [02:57:24]:
That sounds fun.

Leo Laporte [02:57:25]:
I'll take as many of the.

Steve Gibson [02:57:27]:
I'll be there for all the hours there. Yeah, that she, she was there there. Unfortunately, there is some recording of that.

Mikah Sargent [02:57:33]:
So just unfortunately various.

Leo Laporte [02:57:35]:
Yeah.

Steve Gibson [02:57:36]:
And then there was the bull, the, the mechanical bull that we had a mechanical bull.

Paris Martineau [02:57:41]:
See, this is why we've got to do it in person.

Leo Laporte [02:57:44]:
Leo, in the studio. We had a mechanical bull.

Steve Gibson [02:57:47]:
No, it was out, it was out in the street.

Leo Laporte [02:57:48]:
Oh, that's right. We took over the street. We Closed off the street. Yeah, I forgot about that.

Paris Martineau [02:57:53]:
All right, I'm adding this to the list. Mechanical bull.

Leo Laporte [02:57:56]:
We closed off the street outside our studio. We had jump houses for kids. We had a mechanical bull. I completely.

Mikah Sargent [02:58:04]:
Can we please hire an Elvis impersonator? I just.

Paris Martineau [02:58:08]:
Wait, wait, wait. I've got an idea. We hour one goes through, one Elvis impersonator shows up.

Steve Gibson [02:58:13]:
Turns out that it's not easy to hold.

Leo Laporte [02:58:16]:
We could have 24 hours of Elvis.

Paris Martineau [02:58:18]:
24.

Mikah Sargent [02:58:19]:
24 Elvis impersonators.

Paris Martineau [02:58:23]:
All right, go on the list.

Leo Laporte [02:58:26]:
Yes. All 24 hours of both of those shows. We did two years in a row.

Steve Gibson [02:58:31]:
Then we had the famous tattoo event.

Paris Martineau [02:58:34]:
That's what I'm saying is I think we should do it again. I'll get a tattoo at midnight.

Steve Gibson [02:58:38]:
Leo's running out of available skin.

Leo Laporte [02:58:40]:
It's your turn. Okay, I'll do it. Steve Gibson, thank you so much for your friendship and your expertise, your help. All not only this year, for the last 20 years of TWIT and security. Now, we are so grateful for you.

Steve Gibson [02:58:55]:
It's been great. And we passed the. The infamous 999 episode.

Leo Laporte [02:58:59]:
Oh, that was another event of 2025 kept on. Steve extended his run past three digits. Yep, GRC.com is where he lives. It's where his software is. Spinrite, the world's best mass storage, maintenance, recovery and performance utility. And brand new, his DNS benchmark. A great way to see if you're getting all the Internet you're paying for. GRC.com.

Leo Laporte [02:59:21]:
thank you, Steve Gibson. I will see you this Tuesday. You will be great to be with.

Steve Gibson [02:59:25]:
Twit and with the podcast. I. One of the best things I've ever done. It's absolutely true.

Leo Laporte [02:59:30]:
Me too. Yeah. The best thing. Well, maybe my kids. Paris Martineau, it's been such a pleasure having you on our show starting in 2018. Really? Wow. Wow. Of course, now on Intelligent Machines.

Leo Laporte [02:59:44]:
You and Jeff make that show so much fun. And of course, we will not be here this Wednesday because it's Christmas Eve. But a week from Wednesday, our Best of. With some really great interviews. Your dad didn't make an appearance.

Paris Martineau [02:59:57]:
I decided that I want. If I want him to come on the show, it's got to be when you and Jeff are here.

Leo Laporte [03:00:02]:
Oh, that would be better. Okay. Oh, shoot. You're not going to be in Florida through the new year, are you?

Paris Martineau [03:00:09]:
I'm not. We'll make it work at some point.

Leo Laporte [03:00:12]:
Okay, I'll get him on here. Jeff needs to be here too. To see. He needs magnificence.

Paris Martineau [03:00:19]:
Because my dad had had questions about your guys's opinions on AI and which one of you guys is basically walking on sand.

Leo Laporte [03:00:27]:
You know which one that is, don't you? You know we do.

Paris Martineau [03:00:30]:
It's you.

Leo Laporte [03:00:30]:
Which one that is.

Steve Gibson [03:00:31]:
We really, we really ought to mention also for anyone who has access to Apple tv, be pluribus.

Leo Laporte [03:00:37]:
Yeah.

Paris Martineau [03:00:38]:
Oh, God, I gotta see that.

Leo Laporte [03:00:40]:
Steve's loving it. Oh, if only some of the men in your life.

Paris Martineau [03:00:43]:
You're a plurib head.

Mikah Sargent [03:00:44]:
Oh, I'm a plurb head too. Oh, my God.

Leo Laporte [03:00:51]:
Okay. We're plural Bros. Boy, Micah Sargent, such a pleasure to work with you too. My only sadness that we close the studio. I don't get to sit next to you.

Mikah Sargent [03:01:00]:
We don't get to sit every week and chat.

Leo Laporte [03:01:03]:
Yeah, I kind of miss that.

Steve Gibson [03:01:04]:
And then he moved away.

Mikah Sargent [03:01:06]:
I do. Yes. And now I'm in Portland. But I love it here. Steve, you. You touched earlier on the importance of forming relationships. And I've. I've been blessed to.

Mikah Sargent [03:01:17]:
To make some really, really good friends here.

Leo Laporte [03:01:20]:
Oh, good.

Mikah Sargent [03:01:21]:
And it's made all the difference, especially in Portland where there's not a lot of sun a lot of the time. And I am seasonal effective disorder man. So that's. It's been very helpful. But I also want to do a quick. I feel closer than I ever have to our listener base this year. The Club Twit folks. So incredibly supportive, so incredibly kind doing bringing Crafting corner every month and having those really chill sessions has been therapeutic, enjoyable and I've gotten to know many of you and yeah, I'm so grateful for all of you, for the support that you provide to let us continue to do the work that we do.

Mikah Sargent [03:02:04]:
It means the world to us. So just a special shout out to all of you who, I mean, even those of you who are listeners to the, you know, that aren't part of Club Twit. You are also helping us do what we do here. So thank you, all of you.

Leo Laporte [03:02:18]:
Micah's Crafting Corner. The next one will be second Wednesday of January, January 14th. If you want to hang out, that's one of the many things we do in Club Twit. We do love our Club Twit members, but we're grateful to all of you for your support all year long. And we look forward to, yes, a better year in 2026. For 20 years we've been doing this. This is our 20th holiday. 21st holiday episode.

Steve Gibson [03:02:40]:
Wow.

Paris Martineau [03:02:41]:
This whole. Wait, this holiday episode. Can drink.

Mikah Sargent [03:02:43]:
Can drink.

Leo Laporte [03:02:44]:
It can have brain shoot of all the weeks for me not know you.

Steve Gibson [03:02:49]:
Waited until you were 21. Paris.

Paris Martineau [03:02:51]:
True.

Leo Laporte [03:02:55]:
Thank you all for being here. Much love to you all. I hope you do have a happy holiday. Find somebody, find some mistletoe, give them a big hug. Celebrate your connections. I think you're right, Steve. That's. That's the most important thing this holiday season.

Leo Laporte [03:03:09]:
And we will see you right back here next year.  another twit is in the can.