This Week in Tech 976 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.
00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Twit this Week in Tech our 19th anniversary episode and a big show it is. We brought everybody in studio to celebrate. Jason Howell is here, Is Aunt Pruitt over in the corner, Micah Sargent is here, Abrar Alhidi from CNET is here. Lots to talk about. Section 702 of the surveillance law has been re-upped. What does it mean for us? Tiktok the ban. It looks like it's going to happen this time. Elon Musk says please pay me my $56 billion and we'll say hello to the new Atlas as we say goodbye to the old robot. All that and more coming up next on TWIT Podcasts you love.
00:44
From people you trust this is twit this is twit this week in tech, episode 976. Recorded sunday, april 21st Cereal churners. It's time for Twit this Week in Tech, celebrating our 19th anniversary today. Hello everybody, we're celebrating with a great live studio audience Thank you for coming from all over the country and Canada and with an entirely in-studio team panel today. It's so great. Look who's back. Jason Howell has consented to come back. He is now. His new title is the Techsploder.
01:40 - Jason Howell (Host)
Techsploder yeah, I love that name. Anyways, I was on a dog walk, I don't know how many months ago, and that name popped in my head and it was one of those moments I'm sure y'all have probably had a similar moment where you're like that's totally like that URL does not already exist. Somebody already secured that Nobody has.
02:01
Tech Sploder Nobody had it. I was like it sounds like Exploder, but with tech that's, somebody already secured that Nobody has. Techsploder Nobody had it. I was like it sounds like Exploder, but with tech Like that's so obvious. It was like one of the only times that that's ever worked for me.
02:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every other time somebody had it. And here's the tease the open for TechSploder Jason Howell technology podcaster nearly 20 years. So this is for the podcast. Oh, no, no.
02:25 - Jason Howell (Host)
Where's the other one? It's the hello. This one. Yeah, see, I love that you're you can tell I already watched it.
02:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My name is Jason Howell and this is Tech, tech, tech, tech, tech, tech, tech. See if you can name all these people Tech, tech, tech.
02:33 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Fast Tech Tech.
02:42 - Speaker 5 (Host)
Tech. Tech.
02:43 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
Tech.
02:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tech Tech, tech Tech Exploder. Is that great Nice. A lot of editing going into that. Well done, so happy. Well done, jason. He also is the host of AI Inside with Jeff Jarvis that's right, which you do every Wednesday morning.
02:58 - Jason Howell (Host)
Wednesday mornings yeah, right before Twig. So hopefully he shows up to the show bright-eyed and you get him warmed up. Yes, actually, maybe it gets a little bit of the ai like out of his system, for for no you can get all the grumpiness out of his system.
03:11 - Speaker 5 (Host)
That would be great, that would be all right, yeah, thank you also with us.
03:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's great to have a brahra al-heati who is with cnet. She's a technology reporter there in studio in studio for the first. So nice, you know, jason, but it's first time we've met. Yes, and the first time. So nice, you know, jason, but it's the first time we've met. Yes, and the first time you've met Micah in person, right, even though you appear on Tech News Weekly every month.
03:29 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
Yeah, it feels like I see him in person all the time. But first time yeah, it's so great to be here. Thank you for including me. I feel honored, honestly.
03:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So thank you, you know me Tech. News. Weekly. I know you. Ask the tech guys and all that I appreciate you and all that jazz Spending the whole day, and sitting off in the corner is Aunt Pruitt who's taking pictures for all of us.
03:51 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
With a green hat on instead of an orange hat. Yeah, where's your Clemson hat man?
04:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's all about the ducks now. Well, we should probably talk about tech news. I guess that's why we have gathered here, although I have to point out Macintosh, macintosh, macintosh yeah, one of these things is not like the other, though I'm running on Linux, just so you know.
04:17 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I mean we wouldn't have it any other way.
04:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It makes sense. I like to go to the terminal. As you might know, let's talk about a couple of stories we covered already on ask the tech guys, but I think are pretty big stories. The ninth circuit court of appeals has kind of clarified the situation, uh, with regard to fingerprint and face recognition on your phone. Uh, the the the case uh which was on appeal is the united states versus jeremy travis pain.
04:49
Uh, pain was a california parolee who was stopped by the california highway patrol in 2021. Uh, and the chp officer quote forcibly used pain's thumb to unlock his phone. So the question to the court was is that a violation of his Fifth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure? Payne's Fifth Amendment claim I'm reading from Ars Technica rests entirely on whether the use of his thumb implicitly related certain facts to officers such that he can avail himself of the privilege against self-incrimination. So, and there's some history with this, but oddly enough, the Supreme Court has yet to rule on this. So this is the highest court yet that has ruled on this, and the idea is that police can't come into your house and say unlock your safe, because that's something in your brain and the Fifth Amendment has been deemed to protect stuff you know in your head.
05:52 - Jason Howell (Host)
Well, your safe's, not in your brain.
05:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Your past combination your combination. Thank you very much. Your combination, the younger brain prevails. Combination is in your brain, so they can't say unlock that safe If a key exists can they compel you to use it? That's an interesting question yeah, probably, but I don't know what the case law is on that. The opposite is, the police can compel you to be fingerprinted when you're arrested. They can take a hair for DNA sample, so those are presumed not to testify against you. That's just something. Uh, you know, physical. Uh, there's no cognitive exertion.
06:33
Love this term I love that term, placing it firmly in the same category as a blood draw or fingerprint taking at booking. They can compel you to do that. So the question was I mean, we all know our smartphones have our lives in there right now and of course that's why police want you to unlock it, because they know there's probably evidence.
06:53 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Well, and that's the thing, is we. The whole idea is that what's in here is yours, right, and that you cannot be compelled to incriminate yourself. Not be compelled to incriminate yourself. And we have increasingly made these devices an external storage for what's in here. This is like a second brain, and we talk about the second brain, right, and that is where I do fall on the side of feeling that compelling someone to unlock their device and therefore incriminate themselves if there's evidence on that device, I don't know, because we we've kind of, as a society, put like I've got my health records in here, I've got, you know. We've got our banks, we've got every place you've gone, every place I've gone, got, uh, every place you've gone, every place I've gone, it's all there. And in the same way that you know I could probably recount some of the places that I've been in the past week that that idea that the police can say, okay, you have to unlock this so that I can get access to something, that is part of what would normally be up here.
08:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now you want your brain to really hurt. The ninth circuit panel also said quote its opinion should not be read to extend to all instances where biometric is used to unlock an electronic device. In fact, had the officer required pain to independently select the finger he placed on the phone, that would have been accessing the contents of his brain and he could have rightly refused required pain to independently select the finger he placed on the phone that would have been accessing the contents of his brain and he could have rightly refused Interesting.
08:33 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
But they grabbed him and they grabbed his thumb and put it on there and that was legal. Yeah, because they even mentioned about if he was unconscious. They could have done that too, and so that's why it was okay.
08:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the point. There was no cognition involved. So I guess the bottom line line, the reason I mentioned this, is we've always, we've thought for a long time that this is probably the case. Now the court's underscored it. You probably should have a passcode on your phone. Yeah, do android phones allow you? So on iphones, what do you do?
09:00 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
you can press and hold the two the volume up and volume down button and the side button at the same time, and when you do that disables Face ID and Touch ID. You have to type in a passcode to unlock it.
09:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's no accident, that that's there. I mean that's why that's there. That's why it's there.
09:14 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Is there an option on Android to disable fingerprint unlock? I think it depends on the manufacturer.
09:20 - Speaker 5 (Host)
It depends on the phone I do know that there is um, but I've never really used it never needed.
09:27 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You might want to learn that.
09:28 - Jason Howell (Host)
Yeah, exactly worth learning how to do that, but um, yes, I know that it exists on pixel phones and it's.
09:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We think although again this could be thrown out at a later date that they can't say what's your passcode, right?
09:40 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
they can't force, that's if that requires to do it if you're unconscious cognitive then you, then they can't make you do it.
09:48 - Jason Howell (Host)
Which is ironic, out of sync in the discord reminded me. So when I on this is a nothing phone to a, when I hold down the power button, I have the option to select lockdown.
09:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ah, well, that's what lockdown means We'll kick in. By the way, how do you like the nothing to?
10:06 - Jason Howell (Host)
It's good, you know, it-range phone, it's only $350.
10:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's pretty, it looks just like an iPhone. It's like differentiation is and it's really hard to see in this light. This is such a diversion from the topic we were just talking about.
10:18 - Jason Howell (Host)
It had the lights on the back in the past.
10:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The glyphs. The glyphs are there sort of they are.
10:22 - Jason Howell (Host)
There's three different LEDs which of course I'm not showing you right now because no notifications are coming through, but you know so if my phone is like down on, the table and a notification comes through. It blinks really quick. Okay, it also sounds this really loud, annoying thing. Yeah, it's fine. It's a $350 device that looks a little different but doesn't perform as well as better phones, you know, with better processors.
10:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So bottom line learn the lockdown mode on your phone. That's an important thing and if you're really worried, you probably shouldn't have fingerprint or face ID turned on.
10:54 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh, I thought you mentioned I wouldn't have fingerprints, shouldn't?
10:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
have no fingerprints.
10:57 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Let me know what to get acid.
11:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sounds like a Dick Tracy bad guy that might not have fingerprints.
11:04 - Jason Howell (Host)
At the end of the day, making security convenient has a lot of downside to it. Yet we interact with our smartphones and our digital life so much that when there's an easier approach and we feel comfortable, it's hard not to feel like it's worth the trade-off. Until something like that happens. And then you're you know absolutely you're wishing that you had just stuck to a pin. Like because if a pin's going to protect you over your thumbprint.
11:34 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
You know, like you probably want that, even as simple as when I can't use my fingerprint to open up my computer and I have to type in my password, I act like it's like the end of the world, like it's so dramatic about it.
11:43 - Jason Howell (Host)
Yeah, why can my password, I act like it's like the end of the world, like it's so?
11:46 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
dramatic about it, yeah, so why can't it just let me in, no right again with the password again again, it's like my.
11:53 - Jason Howell (Host)
My wife hates two-factor authentication oh yeah, any, and you know more. More bank sites and everything are implementing 2fa and I'm like, I'm like big time into it, everything 2FA, but with her it's taken a lot longer. She just hates it. I'm like, dude like this exists for a reason. Yes, it's inconvenient, but it's going to protect you.
12:11 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, you know the problem with not typing in your password as often is that if you don't type it in, then you don't remember it. And oh my goodness, if there's one thing that will bring my household down, it is my partner forgetting a password. That is a nightmare in the house. It is the end of the world. What happens? I, the, the, it's like it goes screaming around normal temperature. Suddenly it's very cold in the house.
12:37 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
The lights dim by like a mentor 40 yeah, it's intense.
12:41 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I suddenly can't breathe as well. The dog's hair is standing up and it. It's just like oh no, he forgot a password, they're here. I'm getting chills now just thinking about it.
12:51 - Jason Howell (Host)
They're here, the siren light starts flashing, yeah.
12:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, that's not all in legal news. The House has now passed another ban on TikTok, this time attaching it to a foreign aid package for ukraine and israel, which may mean that it will get through the senate. You remember, the senate was kind of a firewall against this. Uh, because they uh refused to bring it to a vote, uh, in the senate, uh, the democratic majority. But now, because it's attached to this foreign aid bill which has wide support the bill passed 360 to 58 in the House it may well be that this passes the Senate, in which case, get ready, tiktok will be banned. No, no, no, it can't happen.
13:42 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
It can't happen.
13:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It seems like this shouldn't happen in the United States of America.
13:46 - Jason Howell (Host)
Doesn't this have a year clause attached to it?
13:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So not immediately, yeah, so the previous bill was six months. They now have a year to divest. I don't know Big deal. We all know this. Actually, the way it works now. The new House text will provide an initial divestment period of nine months, but the president could give it another three. Uh, we know that people like steve mnuchin, the former secretary of the treasury, says I'll take it. Uh, oracle wants it. Um, there there's a but, but the problem is apparently that the the Chinese government believes it's an illegal transfer of information. Like we prevent the Chinese government from buying our technology. They don't want to allow it. They also don't want the algorithm, which is not a state secret, but they don't want the algorithm to leak out, so it might not be buyable.
14:41 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, that's the big thing to me. It's just you can divest. Well, what if they don't want to? Yeah, this I know, we all know this, but sometimes I just have to stop and go. The government is wild. Can we talk about how, if they? Because it didn't go through on its own. They're like you know, we're working on this big package and we're going to have all these strange and I know this happens all the time. I get it, but every time it happens I'm just like this is just a wacky system that we have in place, that we're talking about tiktok ban being snuck into foreign aid packages, yeah, and sort of uh, forcing it through.
15:19
And I know I I keep harping on this point on different shows, but I still do not like the idea of the TikTok ban coming into place for the sake of all of the people who use. These are the people that got Tide Pods onto national news because there was the whole Tide Pod challenge that was sort of fake and not real. Because there was the whole Tide Pod challenge that was sort of fake and not real. But the point is all very good at spreading information and all very good at teaching people how to do things. And I'm just thinking about, in a world where TikTok is banned in the United States, all of the tutorial videos on how to get TikTok whenever it's banned in the United States, and then it turns out that it's some Russian you know app that is actually actually tracking uh, united States citizens, and all these people have jail broken their devices just so that they can have tick tock on their phones.
16:15
Right that, I know it's a little sky is falling, but that is genuinely something that I'm concerned about because I have seen my youngest brother is the type to make poor decisions with his tech. How old he was born in 2000,. So 24. 24. Yeah, 23, 24. So he's a millennial.
16:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess he's a.
16:34 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I think he's Gen Z, gen Z okay, and he has jailbroken his device a number of times and then had his bank password stolen because of it. It's just a nightmare, and all they do is they watch a YouTube. Oh my, now I sound so old.
16:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All they're doing is they're watching YouTubes.
16:50 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
They watch the YouTube and all of a sudden and learning how to do this, and I just think about with TikTok. The people are going to still want TikTok, even if it's banned.
17:00 - Jason Howell (Host)
Not only are they going to want it, especially like the younger generation, not only are they going to want it, especially like the younger generation, not only are they going to want it, they're going to know ways in which to figure out how to get it, to sideload it, to go to the I mean, I guess, well, sideloading on okay.
17:16 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I don't know if they're going to be able to do that.
17:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not familiar with iPhone stuff not quite yet right, yeah, not in the US. You know, what's unseemly to me is that all of the American companies like Meta, with Instagram, and even LinkedIn and YouTube, are jumping on this going. Yeah, great, ban TikTok, because we are copying.
17:34 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
TikTok and it'll be good for us. Well, this would be Zuck's biggest dream come true if TikTok got banned. Yeah.
17:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So really, who's the beneficiary? You almost want to say did Zuck plan this?
17:45 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
Yeah, it's odd too, just given the fact that you know TikTok. If you're going to talk about data being mishandled, you can't say that TikTok is the only app doing that and that it needs to be targeted. I think my favorite part has been seeing videos of younger people calling Congress people and just like cussing them out like I just think, are you?
18:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
serious yeah, I spent five hours a day they put a big thing on tiktok saying, hey, they're about to ban us. Call your congress critter, yeah, and all of the congressional offices were flooded, which some people took it see the chinese government does influence that was fodder, that was they are influencing our youth.
18:23 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
They're actually participating in government. How dare they? How dare they? They're doing something we can't do ourselves. Get these kids to participate in government.
18:32 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
I just think also the ironic bit is that Joe Biden's re-election campaign is on TikTok.
18:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's awkward. Actually, probably many of the members of Congress who are banning it are probably using it Many of the members of Congress who are banning it are probably using it.
18:44
Yeah, so is there, but maybe you'll have to play devil's advocate to argue this. But isn't there a threat from a company that's owned by a Chinese company, bytedance that is? You know, the Chinese Communist Party has shares in ByteDance but, more importantly, they have laws that allow them to open up any servers and see what's on there. Isn't there a threat to our American citizens? Are young people today on TikTok? You know, I can't even say it with a straight face.
19:17 - Jason Howell (Host)
Maybe if they start asking our young people for their I don't know social security numbers and their deepest secrets, that's where my mind is at too Like, at the end of the day, like our data is being spread across all kinds of apps. Tiktok is one of many many services that we are putting our information online. There's the nationalist kind of aspect of this, which is no anything China bad, you know, and that like immediate reaction. Bad, you know, and that like immediate reaction, and maybe there's something to that. But if there is, I still have yet to really see any of the actual legitimate proof Uncle.
19:53
Sam, where are the receipts?
19:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's also to me a creepy nexus between yeah, creepy nexus, that's the show title Just watch out. The creepy nexus between this kind of xenophobia. It's China, right, and I think there's also especially among older members of Congress. The kids are always staring at their phone all the time. They've got to stop that. There's a deep feeling, deep-rooted feeling, that whatever the kids are always staring at their phone all the time, you've got to stop that.
20:32 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
There's a deep-rooted feeling that whatever the kids are doing with their phones is bad and we've got to stop that, and I think a lot of it is that You've brought this up before, when there's been some pushback on that and you reminded everyone that video games got the same thing TV rock and roll books were also going to ruin kids' imaginations, and so, yeah, there's always that deep-seated fear.
20:59 - Jason Howell (Host)
Moral panic. It's the natural ebb and flow. It's what happens when we get older. We start looking at the younger generation and going, oh, back in my day.
21:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, who did? One of our um regular contributors actually made a moral panic powerpoint of all of the. Who was that? Do you remember benito, who that was? Who did that? Yeah, he was on the show a couple weeks ago and he agrees so much that he actually made a presentation about. You know, starting with, dare I say it, gutenberg and the printing press. Yeah, you know what I'm, everybody could have it. Yeah, that's a Jeff Jarvis drink signal, but people thought that books were going to take away your imagination. My generation, rock and roll and long hair. Older generations have always thought the younger generation is screwed up and we've got to stop whatever it is they're doing. I have to say we have had people on the show, chiefly Brianna Wu. She said look, in my run run for congress I got a lot of access to national intelligence agencies and intelligence operatives whom convinced me she wouldn't say how. The senate, just like senate and congress, says well, we know, we won't tell you how that there is a real threat from tiktok and I rack my brain.
22:20 - Speaker 5 (Host)
She said if you knew brianna said if you knew, you would support this but yet nobody's yet produced that.
22:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and I, and it's hard for me to imagine how the mechanism of this. Okay, so one is privacy. But we know the chinese government can, can buy on the open market from data brokers all sorts of information about us which is collected by american companies like Meta. So I don't know if it does any more to protect your privacy at all. And then two, the other one is propaganda. Right, that it would brainwash our youth. I guess that's possible.
22:55 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, I suppose that's possible. That's the only place where I could start to be convinced, because of what we saw in past elections um with twitter primarily, or x, formally known as twitter, uh primarily and I guess twitter is still running rampant with chinese and russian propaganda, right? I mean, I guess the kids don't really use twitter, so it's not but Facebook too right, yeah, but again, I haven't seen proof of that being an issue and I guess if it started, then yeah, that's whenever I'm suddenly compelled to believe this should be banned.
23:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, agreed. Do we all think Uyghurs are awful people because the Chinese government thinks so and put it in TikTok? No, I haven't seen anything about the Uyghurs on TikTok, to be frank. What exactly?
23:52 - Audience (Host)
Waste all your time on TikTok and don't do anything productive. Well, that's true.
23:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you think it's to sap our nation's youth Productivity? Precious bodily fluids are going to all. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's a bad thing. Oh, it's like WALL-E.
24:10 - Jason Howell (Host)
But you ban it because of that. Yeah, that's a personal responsibility thing right.
24:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, by the way, doesn't Instagram want to do the same thing to you?
24:20 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
Yeah, right, yeah, so should we ban Instagram, let's ban Instagram too In place.
24:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh wait a minute. Now we can't do that because of First Amendment.
24:29 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
It's all arbitrary.
24:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It seems a little arbitrary. I don't know.
24:32 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
The fact that this is the one thing that everyone could agree on is kind of odd.
24:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I kind of think there should be other priorities, but it is aid for Israel as well which?
24:44
is very controversial in this country. In fact, 28 Google engineers lost their job this week protesting Google's involvement in weapons systems that Israel's using, and Google just fired them. In the past Google's kind of said, oh you're right, we shouldn't be doing that, and back down. This time Google said, no, get out of here, You're fired. Tiktok has a ton of pro-weeger, anti-communist party content, says Joe in our Discord. That's what I think. They don't allow it in China. Tiktok is ironically banned in China. Tiktok is ironically banned in China. If you search for Uyghur on TikTok, you'll find all sorts of positive content about Uyghurs and my son's sandwich videos which everybody should watch.
25:33 - Speaker 5 (Host)
It's salted and delicious, I'm sorry.
25:36 - Jason Howell (Host)
I'm sorry I brought that up. I can't wait to get my recipe book.
25:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you order it, heck?
25:41 - Jason Howell (Host)
yeah, can't wait, all right.
25:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to take a little break. Then there's more congressional action afoot. The Senate has reauthorized the FISA bill, particularly Section 702. Not just reauthorized it the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act but extended it in ways that at least some senators, like Ron Wyden and others, are against. We'll talk about that in just a little bit. You're watching a very special, you know. I should go back and look at the things we talked about 19 years ago on the first Twitter. I don't think it was this. We didn't imagine a TikTok Right. We weren't really worried about privacy yet.
26:22 - Jason Howell (Host)
We didn't even know what social media really was. In 2005,? Probably not. We didn't even know what social media really was In 2005, probably not.
26:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Twitter didn't even exist yet. This is pre-Twitter.
26:29 - Jason Howell (Host)
We're older than Twitter 34 minutes of Skyping fun. Episode one Skype was a thing. Yeah, Skype was still a thing. That's how long ago that was.
26:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I saw even John Oliver a couple of weeks ago said Skype how did you miss this? How did you lose in COVID? How did that happen?
26:52 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That is kind of sad. It's kind of pathetic.
26:54 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
You had one job. Yeah, I just don't understand how you butchered that.
26:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What else were we talking about in 2005? Well, you know it was Patrick Norton it was Kevin Rose, yeah, and Robert Heron. Robert Heron, David Prager it was all people from the screensavers, basically.
27:06 - Jason Howell (Host)
I mean, you know it was so early in podcasting that apparently show notes weren't built with topics.
27:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We didn't know Show notes. What are those?
27:14 - Jason Howell (Host)
I mean, there are show notes, but they say nothing about the actual topics. April 17th 2005.
27:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just kind of like there wasn't a lot we were in a brew pub in San Francisco. It was right after one of the last Macworld Expos. No, I guess they went on for another five or six years, actually seven years right.
27:32 - Jason Howell (Host)
We plan to do this weekly with a rotating cast of characters. Your input is welcome. Anyone want to design a logo?
27:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We didn't have a logo. Dorothy Yamamoto, who is a retired graphic designer. She'd retired to raise a family, so I want to get back into graphic design. She designed that twit bug. She had it sideways because it was more like an and gate or an and gate.
27:52 - Jason Howell (Host)
I never knew that.
27:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and I said, well, let's turn it this way, so it has legs, and put an eye in it and to personify it a little bit, and it became the twit bug.
28:10 - Jason Howell (Host)
Yeah came the twit bug, yeah, which you could see right behind me on the uh, on the gear up here, and then you could you could see this legs, I guess yeah, and then kind of looks like it's the gear is smiling at you.
28:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The gear is smiling hi gear and then we didn't have the name either, we. It was called the revenge of the screen savers. Yes and uh r-o-t-s-s r-o-t-S-S.
28:23
And immediately Comcast sent us a cease and desist letter, said we're still using that name. You can't use it. They kept it for G4 TV. So we also asked the audience to name it. Was anybody around back then in the beginning? They got a lot of name suggestions. Were you? Yeah? The one name that kind of rang a bell in my head was this week in geek or the week in geek. I said I don't want to use the word geek. What about just this week in tech? And then the acronym. And people don't. People think I did that by accident. The acronym will be twit, which I thought was funny. And I to this day I get emails saying you know that it's not a nice thing to say yeah in england.
29:02 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
every time I it, I have to explain it to everybody. I thought that was not a nice thing to say. Yeah, it is. It's not a nice thing to say it's called self-deprecating or a pregnant goldfish.
29:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you know that that's a twit? Fun fact, yeah, fun fact it is.
29:16 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, yeah that is a fun fact the funnest anyway.
29:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
19 years uh later and we're still doing it. It's kind of amazing yeah, we used to have a round table.
29:29
We've lost half of it, but, other than that, everything else nights of the half table, everything else is uh still the same. It's been. It's been a nice 19 years and I thank everybody who's made that uh possible. Um, and you know, all of you, especially my wife and our executive producer and our CEO, lisa Laporte, who put us on a sound financial footing. I had to hire her. I didn't. I didn't met her.
29:56
My, my, our tax guy said you're going to jail. You need to immediately hire somebody to put this, these books, in order. These are terrible. You're going to go to jail. And I said, okay, I mean, I don't know, what do I know about books? Okay, this was about 2008, I think 2007. I said, okay, what do I do? He said, well, I got two names. I'm going to give you these names and you can hire one of them to do this. And the first one was Lisa. I never found out what the second name was. Lisa had a specialty bookkeeping business where she would take people who were going to jail and fix their books. No, come on.
30:35 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
So that was not an exaggeration. I've heard some stories.
30:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not sort of. Anyway, she fixed the books.
30:42 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You didn't go to jail, yay.
30:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I didn't go to jail and I thought, well, I should marry that woman Anyway. So she actually put us on a sound financial footing and kept me out of jail, which is pretty darn good. So fix is a wrong word. She didn't fix the books. Corrected Corrected.
31:03 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
You might have escaped jail for a little bit. She didn't fix 20 years ago.
31:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They all have the same numbers, but they're in order now, before you have I incriminated myself. Oh boy, just stop talking. She didn't fix them. There aren't two sets of books, trust me, there is barely. There were no books. That was the problem. There were no books.
31:24 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
They've been waiting for this moment yes now we're here finally we got him.
31:30 - Jason Howell (Host)
So, leo, real quick. I uh saved the mp3 of episode one, did you?
31:35 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
run it through an ai for transcript.
31:38 - Jason Howell (Host)
I popped that into perplexity and said tell me all the topics on the podcast. And you talked about no news on episode one.
31:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've been saying that for 20 years almost. There's no news.
31:49 - Jason Howell (Host)
There's no news you discussed various tech-related topics, like cell phone carriers, gadgets, websites that you're working on. Yeah, and you reminisce about your time at Tech TV.
31:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was really a terrible show. It sounds like it was awful.
32:02 - Jason Howell (Host)
Episode one Just people hanging out.
32:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Dvorah joined us on episode four. He kind of became a regular. Uh yes, and we went this, we're in our third studio now. The original was the cottage. People thought I was doing it in my, uh, basement or my bedroom, but it was kind of like that, wasn't it? It was a little tiny room in the garret of this cottage which slowly expanded, we metastasized and eventually took the whole cottage cottage up. And then, uh, I realized one day when the entire staff was sitting around a small table it's much smaller than this there were about eight people and they were all spitting at each other and I thought I gotta get it, we gotta get a bigger place.
32:40
Lisa and I went down the road a bit it was on the same street and found a much larger, 10,000 square foot empty facility. She built a beautiful studio in there. We were there for five years the brick house and about six years ago how many years? Seven, seven years ago we moved in here. The owners of the building that we were in decided to triple the lease. They had been told by the previous owner oh, they they'll never move. They built a million dollar studio in there. But what they hadn't, what he didn't know is when you build a set, you build it so that you can move it. So we said no thanks, took the whole thing and it's all here and it looks the same and it's because it's a set and if we had to move it again we could. Anyway, it's been a fun time and I thank all, all the people who've been with us for all or some of that time, and to our great Club Twit members as well. All right, enough reminiscing. I did that, it was done. I'm not going to do it again.
33:32
Our episode today brought to you by something brand new and something very cool. You've heard us talk about Anchor. We love Anchor. Great company Anchor created a couple of sub-brands. One was Soundcore for sound, for headphones and stuff. The other was Eufy E-U-F-Y and that was for their home security systems, their cameras. We got the other day we got the Eufy Video Smart Lock E330, and, micah, you installed this, that's all. It took that one Phillips screwdriver. He installed it on the door to our engineering room.
34:02
The Eufy Video Lock combines two features you want. It's got a great camera on it and it is a remote lock. It's got fingerprint recognition 0.3 seconds. It unlocks in one second. It's got a self-learning chip which will get better and better, more accurate, with every use. It's battery-powered. It's a removable, 10,000 milliamp hour rechargeable battery that goes about four months. There's a powered. It's got a 10,. It's a removable, 10,000 milliamp hour rechargeable battery that goes about four months. There's a battery. You could have a second one right and swap it in, or you could just plug it in. It charges up. You get a loan battery notification before it runs out. So it's not going to run out.
34:36
But here's the thing You're never locked out. It's one of the things I really like about this. It has a key. So if for some reason it's not working, you can slide that little piece on the on the bottom side and unlock it with a key. So the fingerprint touch pad you can. You can share the code with somebody. So look at that. There's a little key in there. To me that's like a. I love that you got to have this table stakes, because if the thing dies for whatever reason, it's just like before. You still have a key to get into your house. But I love that you can have passcode unlocking. You can have remote control. It's look at this 2K ClearSight, two-way audio, enhanced night vision. There's Burke. He says can you let me in and Micah can do it from down the hall. Look at that. You can also share the code with workmen or anybody who has to get in the house, friends and family and then revoke it after you get tired of mom sleeping on the couch.
35:26
But here's the best part of the Eufy video lock no monthly fees, no subscription, and all your recordings are stored locally, so you don't ever have to pay for storage. That is great. You just pay one time, you get it set up and you're good to go. 18-month warranty, which is fantastic, and Eufy's 24-7 professional customer service team. The Eufy Video Lock. Search for it on Amazon E-U-F-Y Video Lock, or you can go to eufycom E-U-F-Ycom. This is great. We still have it on the engineering room door and Burke still can't get in. This is a side benefit. E-u-f-y the Eufy video lock. Thank you, eufy, for supporting our show.
36:10
So the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or the FISA Act, which I think basically is a consequence of 9-11, right, they gave all these extra police powers to the intelligence community and it expires Every few years. It expires because the idea back in 2001 was this shouldn't go on forever, only while there's a big emergency. Well, here we are, 23 years later and it's been renewed every single time. It was renewed again, uh, on friday midnight actually was. It was going to expire on midnight friday, but they managed to get it passed. So it's going to continue for another year. But, uh, it's expanded and this is not great.
37:02
Senator uh r Wyden and Josh Hawley senators did not like language in the bill that expanded the definition of electronic communications services or service provider. The new provision says anyone who has access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store wire or electronic communications. So in the past you'd have to be a cell phone company, a phone company, an electronic communications service provider. Now, if you're a landlord with phone lines in the basement, if you're Dropbox where people could store this stuff, basically anyone now can be kind of subpoenaed with these secret subpoenas Actually, it's not even subpoenas warrantless spying, as long as the FISA court approves it. The Wyden said the expansion would force ordinary Americans and small businesses to conduct secret, warrantless spying. They introduced an amendment that would obstruct that language. It failed. So the new FISA Act is more expansive than ever before. Rand Paul and Dick Durbin introduced separate amendments imposing warrant requirements before you could surveil Americans that failed Before. You could surveil Americans that failed. So basically the feds now have kind of limitless capability to spy on us.
38:34 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
While they're saying that we can't have apps, but not TikTok.
38:40 - Jason Howell (Host)
Whatever you do, today's rundown, actually, with all this kind of stuff. Very hypocritical kind of opposite sides of the spectrum.
38:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And again it's that same argument that well, we should be, we have to do whatever we have to do to protect Americans. And the intelligence community says look, you don't know, right you?
39:01
don't know how dangerous this is and what we've prevented from happening in this. You know you can thank the fact that there have been no terrorist acts in the last 23. Well, no foreign terrorist acts. There's been domestic terrorism, but there's no foreign terrorist acts in the last 23 years. You can thank the FISA Act. I don't know, it bugs me. I feel like you should have to have a warrant. I'm sorry it bugs me. I feel like you should have to have a warrant. I'm sorry it bugs me too.
39:28 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, I agree. Look, I understand that argument and there's a part of me that is sympathetic to that argument. The road that that goes down, where, yes, I understand the way that it may have helped when it came to certain foreign terrorist attacks Great. But if we're using this to now, it's the fact that not only do we keep renewing something that had this expiration built into it, because we said we shouldn't keep doing all of this spying no one we keep renewing it, but now we're expanding on it. I think that speaks to exactly what the fear is that we're talking about in the first place that it will become overreach. It's becoming overreach and that, to me, is what is an argument in and of itself against it, but I don't see that changing. That's the problem, right.
40:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not changing. Here's a guest essay, my partisan support for something like this In the New York Times. It's kind of all in Government, surveillance keeps us safe.
40:37 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Who. Who wrote that?
40:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uncle Sam, this is by Matthew Waxman and Adam Klein, both senior security people. Actually, klein was the chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Nice job, civil Liberties. Nice job, adam. Mr Waxman was a national security advisor to the Bush administration. I mean, I guess you could make that argument. It keeps us safe. I guess you could make that argument. It keeps us safe. But you know, this comes down to, I guess, what your belief is about how trustworthy our government is and our intelligence agencies and our law enforcement is, and whether they should have untrammeled information.
41:26 - Jason Howell (Host)
If they should have whatever intel they need to do their job, I mean, great, if you need certain pieces of intel, that's fine. I think it's the warrantless kind of no trust me I'm going to make the right decision kind of aspect to it that rubs me the wrong way.
41:40 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
As if biases don't exist too. What's?
41:41 - Jason Howell (Host)
that.
41:42 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
As if biases don't exist too, in terms of who might be targeted by.
41:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and think about it, I mean the government changes hands every four years.
41:49 - Jason Howell (Host)
Yeah right, you open something up and then somebody else entirely gets in control of that and can do very different. You know very bad things potentially.
41:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Some privacy advocates have called this a Stasi-like bill. The Stasi was the East German secret police.
42:10 - Jason Howell (Host)
I mean, when I think about the whole idea of this being created at one point out of a need, at this moment. 9-11 was this moment that took everybody by surprise. It was a lot of emotion. I remember that time. You know, by surprise, it was a lot of emotion. I remember that time and I remember, you know, I remember a lot of things happening through true emotion, because we felt like we wanted when I when I say we, I had absolutely nothing to do with any of this, but we felt like we wanted some sort of controller, influence over the chaos and craziness that was happening at that time, to feel a little safe.
42:39
And yet, here we are, 20 some odd years later, it continues to happen. It continues to get extended and extended. It just kind of makes me think well then, what is the point at which it doesn't anymore? Or or do they just kind of, you know, make make the declaration that, okay, that's actually a lot of baloney? Uh, we've been drinking from this trough for far too long to let go of it. Yeah, we're too comfortable.
43:02
We're too comfortable, we couldn't imagine doing what we do without this, and that's where the system is really built up around this as a need, so it goes beyond those promises.
43:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's an important lesson is that if you give them these powers, they're not ever going to move backwards.
43:16 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Right.
43:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you give a mouse cookie. Yeah, absolutely no, it's really true that that never goes in the other direction.
43:28
It always seems to slowly go. Now a number of people say that's really exaggeration to call it the stasi amendment. That's, that's uh. In an interview with the new york times. Uh, jim himes, a denocrat from connecticut, said uh, decried comparisons between the text and the east german secret police, saying critics of the provision were massively exaggerating the 702 program's domestic reach. It's interesting that they make exemptions for nursing homes, coffee shops. There are a few places that they can't ask for data from cleaning contractors, but the fact that they exempt those few?
44:09 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, they must Exactly.
44:14 - Jason Howell (Host)
We need at least some things that don't qualify.
44:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't worry, your coffee shop is safe.
44:18 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Karaoke bar. At least we have Starbucks.
44:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're not going to snoop on my mom in her old age home. Oh well, that's a relief, Because it's all boring stuff.
44:27 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
They don't want it anyway.
44:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right.
44:31 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
So, okay, we've talked a lot about it's all very woe. Woe is us, not even woe is me. Do we have anything we can do about?
44:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
any of this Encryption, but guess what they're attacking next Encryption. So encryption is I mean? Look, I'm not in favor of terrorists.
44:54 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I'm so glad you said that, Leo, because I was really concerned.
44:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, bad guys are bad and we should catch them.
44:59 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah.
45:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But the problem is these nets also extend to everybody. It means no one has privacy in an attempt to catch the bad guys. And that's fine, that's all well and good if you say well, you know, I trust the FBI, they're not going to target me. Except that they have a history. They targeted Martin Luther King for years because he was a civil rights advocate and J Edgar Hoover didn't like that so much. So you give them these powers and there's, you know, maybe right now it's safe. There's no guarantee that they're not going to misuse those powers sometime in the future. Ron Wyden, who we've mentioned before he's the senior senator from Oregon and very much a privacy advocate says this represents one of the most dramatic and terrifying expansions of government surveillance authority in history. I don't think Ron Wyden is prone to superlatives. I think that if he says that, it makes me, it worries me. I mean he has done the most of anybody in Congress to protect our privacy.
46:11 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, even going as far as to using some sneaky mechanisms to put things into public light. I remember him writing well, his staff writing a letter I wish I could remember the exact details but essentially by writing a letter inquiring about something. That letter was available to the public because of the way that our government is set up and that, in turn, led to us being able to know a little bit more about some secret program that was in place. So I like that. Yeah, I wanted to do that, I should mention that.
46:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Put it on TikTok.
46:38 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That's a good idea. I want to see what's going on.
46:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I should mention that Jim Himes, who we just talked about, who says, oh, you're exaggerating it also went around waging what some members of Congress have called, according to the Wired magazine, a campaign of fear. An hour before the vote on Friday, himes openly threatened US lawmakers supporting the warrant requirement, which seems to be a pretty minimal thing to say. You know what? You really should have a warrant before you do this, claiming, if passed, he'd ensure those lawmakers face the brunt of the blame in the wake of any future terrorist attacks. It was his fault. Ron Wyden made this happen. Himes said if we turn off the ability of the government to query US person data, maybe he should have studied language. Query US person data. Hey person data. Hey, us person, I'm querying your data. The consequences will be known soon and we will audit why. What happened happened, what is what, and accountability will be visited upon their heads. I swear, swear to God.
47:43 - Speaker 5 (Host)
Is that really what's?
47:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
written. I added the upon their heads.
47:47 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh, okay.
47:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, because that was it says. Accountability will be visited. Okay, that is. Where else would it be?
47:52 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
but upon their heads Dot, dot, dot, nudge, nudge. You know what I'm talking about. On their butts.
47:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know. Okay, you know. The problem is there's never been information about you. Know, the intelligence agencies say, no, we protect you, we block a lot of stuff, but they never say what they stop, they never say what they block. And what we've looked at is historic records, like this Martin Luther King story, where, in fact, they use these powers in an undemocratic way. Right?
48:23 - Jason Howell (Host)
They don't say about the possible restraint or ways in which they are working in your favor, but what we do hear about are the really bad things that happen Exactly. And so it's no surprise that we're I don't know Suspicious.
48:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know to some of our audience they're probably saying oh, you guys are a bunch of pinkos and you should just let the government surveil you because they're not going to do anything bad with it and it's protecting us against bad guys. I mean, that is a point of view. That's the extent of it.
49:00 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That is what I'm saying. That is indeed a point of view upon your head.
49:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, it's the law of the land. The president has already signed it. That's how urgent it was. They didn't want to go one more day without this ability to surveil you, but not in an old age home or a coffee shop. Okay, I'm just saying If you're a bad guy but I do think that's the thing is encryption is your friend in this, and they recognize that for bad guys, you know, I mean what's to stop a bad guy from using Signal? They do all the time. We know that corporate malefactors do all the time. You know, maybe crooks are too stupid to do this, terrorists are too stupid, but encryption is your friend and so that's why they go after encryption, that's why the fbi went to apple and said decrypt this guy's phone and when that doesn't work, they get it.
49:50 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Get a hacker to do it, yeah I can't think of the name of that company now actually they ended.
49:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The exploit was uh, was, um. Anyway, we've learned now the hack. Uh, I can't remember what it was, but we talked about this in security, now. No, we thought they went to pegasus uh, they use pegasus, um, but in fact it wasn't. It was another what it was. But we talked about this in security, now. No, we thought they went to Pegasus, they used Pegasus, but in fact it wasn't. It was another hack, it was a zero day. I don't know. I don't want to look. Outrage is good for ratings and I'm not. I don't want to promote outrage, except I do want ratings.
50:22 - Speaker 5 (Host)
You know, I am I am mad as hell.
50:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't want to promote outrage. I think it's important that we have a reasonable conversation in which we say well, does it protect us? Is it something we need to do? As you point out, Abrar, the targets of these kinds of investigations often are just people who are on the outs. Yeah, you know.
50:47 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
Yeah, there's a reason. There's skepticism, particularly among you know communities of color.
50:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.
50:53 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
So, yeah, it's not a good look, but, yeah, the things that we do tend to find out about what the FBI has kind of done is not flattering and tends to lean towards those communities in particular.
51:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so meanwhile, china has told because they don't want encryption either right same thing they've told apple. Hey, you know, could you take signal and telegram and whatsapp out of the app store? Why encryption?
51:22 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
it's just, it's a vibe check. It's a vibe check, you know.
51:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple said yeah, sure, fine.
51:29 - Jason Howell (Host)
Not the first time, right? No, not the first time.
51:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple says we are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree. I mean, I guess you know what Google did when they were put to the screws in this they withdrew from China. But Apple, this is a big part of their business and economically, they can't. They won't. They won't.
51:51 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
They won't. It's just a tricky territory, which is why they're looking at other places to expand manufacturing.
51:56 - Jason Howell (Host)
I mean, probably, if they had it their way, they'd get out as quickly as possible to not feel the influence there. Is Android sideloading legal in China? Oh, that's a good question In China, that's a good question.
52:08 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I don't know. It certainly happens. Is it legal? I don't know.
52:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Android phones do outsell iPhone in China, particularly phones from Huawei, Chinese companies like Huawei and Xiaomi. They are the best sellers in China. I'm going to guess, I'm going to take a wild guess and say that those OSs are somewhat more locked down in China than they are in the US.
52:31
Yeah, yeah, that's a good point, because if Apple takes these programs out of the App Store on the iPhone, they're not available on the iPhone, and they've done the same with VPNs, by the way. They've removed those from the iPhone in the past, and they've done the same with vpns, by the way, they've removed those from the iphone in the past. Um, collectively, according to the wall street journal, instagram x, facebook, youtube and whatsapp all banned in china have been downloaded from the app store 170 million times in china over the last 10 years. So that's not a massive penetration in a country of a billion people, but still it's true.
53:03 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I kind of wonder if there's a this week in tech show in china happening where they're talking about us, their own bands.
53:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a parallel, isn't there? Yeah, and and honestly, there will be retribution if we ban tiktok, of course the chinese are going to ban all american apps because, yeah, steve gibson recently, american apps, because, yeah, steve Gibson recently was talking about the.
53:25 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I can't. It's like Operation A or something and it has to do with getting rid of American technology at any government level. Any government body cannot have or purchase any kind of technology that's come from the United States.
53:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
going forward, so Chinese government officials can't have iPhones?
53:46 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Right. They have their own operating system, their security cameras can't have any US tech in it, anything like that.
53:51 - Jason Howell (Host)
Well, there's a strong parallel. We're doing the same thing Exactly. Super strong parallel. Yeah, it's okay if we do it To a certain degree it feels like they're commies.
53:59 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
They're dirty commies, commies and if they do it it's bad, but if we do it right, we're protecting ourselves against the dirty commies. Right that that is the.
54:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what's out there. We'd like to thank you for listening to the people's republic of twit I do wonder, though.
54:16 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I mean, they would have to be doing it as like a pirate broadcast right? If they're complaining about I don I don't know.
54:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's hard to completely shut down dissent in a country of a billion people.
54:31 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, but, they sure do try.
54:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They try Global apps like Reddit, spotify and ChatGPT, not available in the Chinese app store. In fact, 14,000 apps are blocked in China. There's a website called AppleCensorshipcom. You know it's hard for me to blame Apple for doing this.
54:52 - Jason Howell (Host)
I don't think at this point they have a whole lot of choice, considering how entrenched their manufacturing and other aspects of their business are there At a certain point. I'm sure that Apple is working on ways to, like you said just a few minutes ago.
55:09 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Maybe I feel it's naive to blame Apple, because that would suggest that this company has some sort of golden moral compass. And because it has that, then, oh my goodness, why would they make this choice to still? And I think that that's very naive to think that a company that is a company that, yes, they're, they do have a lot of of, they do a lot of things right and try to do well, but it's still a company that's making money and it's still capitalism and and so this idea that, like, well, I can't believe that Apple would still do that it's a company I'm not surprised.
55:50 - Jason Howell (Host)
I think it's a very US-centric kind of thing to say about a company like Apple, though, because there is a lot of really positive belief about Apple as a company.
56:00 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I once definitely was drinking the apple juice, for sure, but I've since inoculated myself.
56:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You started working here and then we brainwashed you. That's what happened.
56:12 - Speaker 5 (Host)
He said rah, and I said you know what Rah.
56:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, let's take a little break. We are so glad to have this panel in-house, in-studio, with a live studio audience. Yeah, micah Sargent, great to see you. Abrar Alhidi from CNET great to see you. Jason Howell, the tech sploter. The tech sploter I like saying that, the tech sploter. I always call Harry McCracken the technology artist. Be careful, because he stopped using that name years ago, but I still call him that. I'm going to call you from now on. You're the TechSploters.
56:46 - Jason Howell (Host)
Yeah, I don't know that. I intended for it to be like an identity.
56:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's you.
56:49 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Too bad.
56:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's too late. You're the TechSploters and one, two, three, four, five, about 20 wonderful, good-looking people from our studio audience. It from our studio audience. It's great to have you as well and shout out, if you. You know, I'm really curious. We've been talking about this. You know privacy. Are most of you in favor of privacy, encryption, keeping the Fed's hands and eyes out of your stuff, yes or no? Or is there anybody who says yeah, no, I think that they should be able to spy as much as they want to protect us. It's part of being secure. You can say that. No, he's shaking his head. No, Anybody, Say it out loud, real loud.
57:38
It's the same thing in Canada. You're right. Probably all Western nations, certainly the Five Eyes.
57:45 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
We're all in cahoots. You said it's worse, as in there's more overreach.
57:51 - Audience (Host)
The government is pushing so hard, Even the podcast they've given CRTC, which is the regulating body for broadcast in Canada.
58:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They now have the power, or will shortly, to censor podcasts?
58:06 - Audience (Host)
Oh no, they're the Canadian FCC. If yeah, that's right, and if you're under a million dollars, they'll leave you alone. If you're making their note, but anything over that, oh yeah. So I crossed the border and I downloaded podcasts yeah, that that.
58:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know if that would fly in the us. If if the fcc said, no, we want to regulate internet content would be very problematic. Is that c18 that did that? Is that I was trying to remember the number.
58:37
I think you're right yeah, wow, I didn't realize that gives the crtc power over podcasts. That's the reason the fcc has power over broadcast is because that's we all own the spectrum and so the government has the right to regulate that spectrum, which is reasonable. You're given a license to use the spectrum, but that's why they've never had the right to regulate the internet, because that's not public. We're not using public spectrum to do this show. Um, that would to me, that would be them fighting words. That would be problematic. I didn't realize c18 went that far. I know michael geist, who's very good at outspoken attorney in canada, has been railing against c18, c18 for years, uh, but it passed isp should be a public utility. Wouldn't that open that up well?
59:24
that's interesting. Yeah, so the net neutrality uh, which are the FCC is now going to be voting on returning? Restoring net neutrality changes the classification of internet service providers to telecommunications providers. I don't know. That's interesting? I don't think so.
59:41 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I hope not.
59:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hope not. That hope not. That would be a bad thing. Our show today brought to you. It's great to have you, thank you. We have such a you know what I love? We have such a smart audience and since day one even before then, back when I was doing the radio show in the 90s we've always wanted to make it more interactive. You know calling radio shows nice, but to get more voices, and that's why we've always had chat rooms going. We have our Discord now, but I always look for ways to make that even more a group voice. It's hard to do, but we're going to work on that. I think Alex Lindsay has actually done a really interesting thing with office hours, which is essentially kind of a group call of 20 or 50 or 60 people yes, nods, and I've talked to Alex a lot about how we could do something like that. That's kind of what I think. That's the goal really democratizing media. So it's not somebody on a stage talking down to you, but it's a conversation between all parties. Anyway, our show today brought to you by.
01:00:46
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01:02:58
Intouchcxcom slash twit. I-n-t-o-u-c-h. Intouchcxcom slash twit. Really interesting product, very interesting company and, I think, the right way to use AI to make the interactions better Not to replace them, but to make them better. Thank you, intouchcx. Great to have you aboard on our show netflix. You anybody watch netflix here. Any, any netflix watches out here. They are blowing it away. No kidding. Subscribers jumped 16 year over a year, by the way, as soon as they announced that said but don't ever ask for us that number again. We're never going to tell you again. They're no longer.
01:03:48
They're no longer reporting paid memberships starting next year it kind of makes sense though while it's up, tell them, tell them now leave on a high they've focused on growing profit more than boosting subscribers, so they think that's more important financially. If we say well, look, this is supported model, yeah, we're making more money, so what do you care?
01:04:08 - Jason Howell (Host)
if everybody switched from a paid model to an ad model, they'd make more money, but they'd have the same amount of users, right?
01:04:14 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I will never.
01:04:16 - Jason Howell (Host)
No, no, I'm not saying it's a great idea. Okay, good, don't make me.
01:04:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you when Amazon Prime said we're going to put ads in unless you pay us an extra three bucks a month? Did?
01:04:26 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
you see that.
01:04:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you do it?
01:04:27 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I would if I watched enough of the show.
01:04:30 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
Yeah, I can't remember the last time I watched anything on Prime, oh I guess I did watch Fallout on Amazon Prime.
01:04:35 - Speaker 5 (Host)
Yeah, I. What are you talking about?
01:04:37 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Did that have ads it will. Oh, but not yet. See if it does, I will. I'm a fool.
01:04:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As soon as I saw that pop up, I said yes, $2.99. I don't want them.
01:04:47 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, I hate ads.
01:04:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My wife loves ads. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that she sells ads.
01:04:56 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Not those ads Leo.
01:05:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Those ads are great. I put ad blockers on the router. I said what are you doing? We live on ads. Stop blocking the ads. She says we're watching a show. I start to skip the ads. I said wait a minute.
01:05:13 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I want to see who's advertising. That's for the new chocolate chunky bar at. Taco.
01:05:17 - Speaker 5 (Host)
Bell Wait a minute.
01:05:17 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I need to see that. Hold on, I need to see that Hold on.
01:05:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Total membership 269.6 million Netflix users Wow, that is amazing. Of course it's global, but that's pretty amazing Password sharing.
01:05:39 - Jason Howell (Host)
I think that's true. The anti-password sharing crackdown works.
01:05:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Password sharing. I think that's the anti-password sharing crackdown. They say, yes, netflix says it's generating substantial profit and free cash flow, which is kind of really not well named free cash flow it's not free, but anyway as well as developing new revenue streams. Now you know why I needed somebody to help me fix the books Developing new revenue streams like advertising and a password sharing crackdown. There you go.
01:06:04 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
This is the moment they've been waiting for and I think streaming companies in general have been waiting for to just say that we are shifting from sharing the number of subscribers how much money we're making. This is the point that they have worked up towards. So this is kind of a turning point. It's a pivotal moment. I wouldn't be surprised if if we saw other people kind of this has been a shift in mentality that's been going on for a while, which is why we've had password-traying crackdowns across apps and Netflix leads the charge there, but yeah, that's a big deal them raising prices, which we're all well aware of, I feel like the prices raise on Netflix like every six months or something.
01:06:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's so. They raise it does feel constant. Yeah, a couple of bucks each time. Well, that's lead to led to something that, uh, the new york times calls americans new tv habit subscribe, watch, cancel.
01:06:54 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
Oh yeah, me with apple tv so do you.
01:06:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm curious, if our studio audience do you do this, you'll watch. So you'll say, okay, I want to watch game of thrones. You watch it, then it's over, then you cancel until max comes back with something better. Yeah, and lots of nods.
01:07:09 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It's your fault I can't do this. Look I, I'm a fool again. I've said it before and I there's this little part of me that feels like that's dishonest and it's not dishonest.
01:07:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not dishonest.
01:07:24 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I'm not saying anyone else is dishonest for doing it. Don't worry, you're not dishonest.
01:07:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're not dishonest. You feel guilty, though I still like you.
01:07:31 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You feel a little guilty, I feel a little guilty and I recognize within myself that that's silly and I shouldn't feel that way, so no one else should feel that way, but I do and I'm like, oh, I have to keep it because I Luckily I think many of us if we bring people into our lives who compliment us. So I've got someone who doesn't feel as guilty about that, so I let them handle the cancellation.
01:07:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're your C-O-M-P-L-E compliment, like the opposite of you.
01:08:02 - Speaker 5 (Host)
And they're my comptroller who do a good job of making the money work.
01:08:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So maybe you're right to feel bad because these companies are suffering. Oh poor companies.
01:08:14 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
See, and that's how I should be, it's like who cares?
01:08:19 - Speaker 5 (Host)
Good.
01:08:20 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
Abrar is saying good, I'm over it, yeah, suffer traditional media companies.
01:08:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
New york times writes like paramount, warner brothers, discovery, nbc universal and disney are trying to navigate the extremely bumpy road from the cable bundle, which was enormously profitable, to streaming, which is not nbc universal's peacock, for one lost $2.8 billion last year. So what's?
01:08:45 - Speaker 5 (Host)
the result?
01:08:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, really. So they cut back. As a result, companies slashed investments in shows. The number of scripted shows in the US suffered its steepest decline in at least 15 years last year and raised prices. Disney Plus and hulu both raised the price by three dollars a month last year.
01:09:03 - Jason Howell (Host)
I mean, but every, everybody and their dog has a streaming service now.
01:09:07 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
So listen my dog.
01:09:08 - Jason Howell (Host)
Streaming service is amazing, so I'm sure it is but I mean, you know, we got inundated by television, by, by network streaming services, and I think it's kind of ridiculous to think that someone would pay for an entire year for all of them to keep them afloat. Like, if it's really critical to their business model, then make your business model locking people in for a year. I don't think they should actually do that, because that's one of the things that I really hated about. You know, satellite and cable and everything. That's one thing that I feel is very refreshing about this I get where you're coming from, micah, but at the same time, there's no requirement there. So play within the rules, which is what I do, and, mind you, I don't do this a lot. The only time I do this is actually with live TV, youtube TV, and I'll be doing it this summer, when the Olympics are on.
01:09:58 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I will buy one or two months however many months I need to to cover the Olympics. Yeah, but the Olympics are due there.
01:10:05 - Jason Howell (Host)
If there's a promo deal or football season or football season. Yes, exactly Like.
01:10:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did that in November and December you do that.
01:10:09 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I know you do that. Yeah, I did it in November and December.
01:10:10 - Jason Howell (Host)
And I'm fine with that.
01:10:15 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, and watch the Olympics.
01:10:17 - Jason Howell (Host)
Then there's no I don't have that guilt, then they've granted explicit permission.
01:10:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You guys are just a bunch of serial churners. That's what they call you, by the way, you said that a lot of shows canceled.
01:10:31 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I don't know about you all, but for me I very rarely get into a new show because I'm so worried that it's not going to make it past the one season that you see Like, oh great, this is going to get canceled before this first season is over.
01:10:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why I don't use any Google products. Yeah, same thing. It is kind of oh, I can't fall in love with you.
01:10:52 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Commitment anxiety.
01:10:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I might like this show, and then they're going to cancel it, and then what will I do? Because I won't know how it's going to end?
01:10:59 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
How will it end?
01:10:59 - Jason Howell (Host)
I guess I'll have to ask AI yeah, make up the ending for me Soon you'll be able to ask your AI to write and produce the final episode.
01:11:07 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I tried to have it write a book one time Terrible.
01:11:11 - Speaker 5 (Host)
Yeah.
01:11:11 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Good, I'm not surprised. I'm glad it was one of those crypto bros that's become an AI bro and was just touting the amazingness of this novel writing thing and I'm like you know what Did you do it? You actually wrote a book. No, god, no, I had it write the book.
01:11:30 - Speaker 5 (Host)
The AI wrote the book.
01:11:30 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh, that's what I mean yeah, yeah, I did it, yeah, and it was like every other paragraph was just reiterating what the paragraph had said before for every chapter. It was kind of like you only needed one paragraph of the chapter. It was awful.
01:11:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so it's far in the future. Apparently the copyright office, I think, just approved a novel written by an AI because the woman who wrote it had disabilities oh, interesting, and they considered the use of the AI disability support An assistive yeah, it was assistive Interesting, and because she didn't just Lisa Shoup.
01:12:14 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, is it an ongoing prompting?
01:12:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, she interacted with virtually every chapter. So here's the story from Wired last week. Lisa Shoup was initially rebuffed when she tried to copyright a book she wrote with help from ChatGPT. But the copyright office has changed its course and they say it's a disability issue, which is, I think, very interesting. That is interesting. They grant copyright registration. They don't recognize her as author of the whole text. Instead she's considered the author of the quote, selection, coordination and arrangement of the text generated by artificial intelligence kind of like music arrangers.
01:12:53
Yeah, that's pretty cool, isn't it? I thought that was very interesting. All right back to cereal churners.
01:13:03 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It sounds like you've eaten cereal with bad milk.
01:13:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have an image of some nice Amish woman with a butter churn, but she's got Cap'n Crunch inside.
01:13:11 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
This is much nicer than what I was eating Cap'n Crunch.
01:13:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, cereal churners accounted for 40% of all new subscriptions and cancellations last year. Imagine that. Imagine if Club Twit 40% of all new subscriptions and cancellations last year. Imagine that. Imagine if Club Twit 40%. Oh God.
01:13:25 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
What Don't say that out? Loud. Never mind, don't.
01:13:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Imagine if 40% of you canceled, like you heard one show you didn't like and said well, I'm going to come back in a month and see if I like it better.
01:13:38 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Thank goodness we don't do episodic stuff. Don't do that yeah, really right.
01:13:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, the companies clearly can't ignore them, says the new york times, because it's such a big, active part of the market. One option for slowing the churn bring back some element of the cable bundle.
01:13:54 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
No, no, no, please no.
01:13:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By selling streaming services together. That's why, by the way, you're seeing bundling of the Disney Plus, hulu and ESPN in one package, right.
01:14:09 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It's so annoying too.
01:14:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Fox and Warner Brothers are launching that sports streaming service this fall. So now you know why it's to battle the cereal churners.
01:14:19 - Jason Howell (Host)
I mean I am kind of surprised, like Jason Howell, really not to battle the cereal churners. I mean I am kind of surprised, like jason howell, again really not that much. A little bit of a churn. I'm a mini churn, I deny it. I am not a churner not to give them ideas, and not that this is at all like an amazing idea that no one ever thought of, but I am kind of surprised that they don't do like a minimum number of months, like three months.
01:14:39 - Speaker 5 (Host)
Three months is your minimum.
01:14:40 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I guess they could. That would be a compromise I think the 2Bs and the orange hippos and the Bebos those services did do that. They would do quarterly, but yeah, just the straight up singular streaming services. You're right, I haven't really seen that. I know Disney Plus. At the beginning you could buy in for one year, wasn't?
01:15:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it. But you notice and I've noticed this on Apple TV the reason they do all those coming soon, coming in May, coming in June. That's why they're trying to keep you from unsubscribing, oh wait a minute, I got to stick them. Interesting piece about. The creator of Dickinson Did.
01:15:23 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Interesting piece about the creator of dickinson did you watch that on apple tv tried not good. Did you watch?
01:15:26 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
it. I did not, but I guess I didn't waste my time yeah, good, well, there'll be somebody out there who loves it?
01:15:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry it had three seasons, but the woman who created it said it was a nightmare. Oh, she said Apple TV wouldn't tell her if they were going to extend the season until she'd written it and submitted it, and then they would look at it and they'd say okay. And finally, on season four, she said I'm not doing this anymore, you're killing me.
01:16:00 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
She had to do all of that work without any pay. This is how.
01:16:04 - Audience (Host)
Hollywood works now, leo, that's crazy. Well, we talked about this on MacRae.
01:16:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Weekly, and that's what they said, that this is normal for Hollywood. It's because Apple TV is run by two former Sony executives.
01:16:16 - Audience (Host)
So that's how, if you, Benito, were going to write a treatment for a show, they would want you to write the whole series, yeah, and then there's no more like guarantees for future seasons or any of that stuff.
01:16:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Any kind of future work is gone a lot of stuff is being outsourced to like kind of AI, but not full on AI well, I don't actually blame her if she were to turn to AI to create the next season, because she didn't want to AI to create the next season, because she didn't want to write a whole season, that she didn't know what would happen to it, but it wasn't a good show anyway, so she would be very hurt if you heard that.
01:16:54 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
I'm ready to restart my Apple TV Plus subscription once Severance Season 2 drops.
01:17:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, there you go.
01:17:00 - Speaker 5 (Host)
I'm eagerly waiting that, but in the meantime there's nothing else for me.
01:17:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But why keep it if that's?
01:17:05 - Speaker 5 (Host)
what you're waiting for Exactly I can't wait until months ago.
01:17:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When is Severance Season 2 coming? We're still waiting.
01:17:09 - Speaker 5 (Host)
They keep dropping teasers on X.
01:17:11 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
Yes, they are.
01:17:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because they left us big time hanging.
01:17:15 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
Yeah, so that's why I'm desperately waiting for the next installment.
01:17:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's another way to do it. I know, make sure you end the season with a massive clip for the finger, but then please, come back for the next season.
01:17:24 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
Yeah, see, that's what I'm saying.
01:17:28 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
This will, but sometimes I find a show that seems so good.
01:17:33 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
You seem really hurt by this. I feel, like you need to process.
01:17:35 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I haven't heard a few times. I might have to have AI write an album about it for me.
01:17:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Amazon Prime raised their membership fee. Yeah, did you renew Of?
01:17:49 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
course, of course.
01:17:50 - Jason Howell (Host)
Yeah, that's a no-brainer Right no-brainer right.
01:17:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't even think about it. Do you know what it even costs? No, no.
01:17:57 - Jason Howell (Host)
Don't tell me it's automatic. That's so weird.
01:18:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's much more expensive than it was when you first signed up for it. Like a lot, he's sticking his fingers in me. I don't want neither, neither, neither. Well, you're not alone. Amazon Prime memberships grew 8% last year A new high, yeah, new high. Pretty much everybody is subscribed. It is now $79. When we started right and I remember reading the book about this and Bezos didn't know what to charge he said I have no idea what this is going to cost to implement today, so just make up a number.
01:18:37
Oh, that's they made up a number. Wow. He said, there's no way research will tell us until we do it what it's going to cost. It is now $140 a year.
01:18:49 - Jason Howell (Host)
Sorry it's twice as expensive $15 a month and you still have to pay for shipping sometimes Incidentally, even without it, you probably get.
01:18:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I ordered coffee pods for my mom. They came that afternoon.
01:19:00 - Jason Howell (Host)
Isn't that weird? It's cool and weird at the same time I just think about there's somebody in the warehouse who they said go, go, go Get the coffee pots.
01:19:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Get them quick, quick, quick.
01:19:10 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Move it. Mary Laporte needs her coffee pots Go.
01:19:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I feel bad for that. I know. I ordered it in the morning and they came by two in the afternoon.
01:19:21 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, I usually, even if here I go again. If I'm given that option, I'll usually choose the next day.
01:19:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my god you do not want to exploit anybody. I do not step on ants when you're walking I, I avoid.
01:19:33 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
No, I'm just kidding I plead the fifth.
01:19:38 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
You're too pure for the world. I don't know what to tell you Nobody.
01:19:42 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I yeah, I don't know where I would be without my Amazon subscription.
01:19:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, you can still buy things on Amazon without Prime If it's over $35, it's free shipping. Yeah, so I cancel them every single month.
01:19:57 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
Yeah, it's not worth it, but then they'll force you to buy more things You're like well.
01:20:01 - Jason Howell (Host)
I might as well hit the $35. Put them in the basket, wait until your basket is more than $35, and then okay, ship, they now have life hack.
01:20:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They now have Prime Day where, if you have it all on Monday, right?
01:20:11 - Speaker 5 (Host)
Oh yeah.
01:20:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like you can have it tomorrow or you can have it Monday. It's like why would I wait till?
01:20:17 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
Monday. I know it's like the same price.
01:20:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a truck coming to my house every day. It doesn't really matter.
01:20:23 - Jason Howell (Host)
Oh yeah, I've been up and down the street multiple times.
01:20:27 - Audience (Host)
What I do is I actually cancel my Amazon Every time I get my-. Benito you're a serial churner. I am, and then, whenever I want to order something, I go to Amazon and they offer me two weeks of free Prime.
01:20:36 - Speaker 5 (Host)
I don't think the two weeks.
01:20:37 - Audience (Host)
And then give me the and I cancel it again and they offer me another two weeks.
01:20:41 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
Yeah, actually on my way here I had canceled Audible like a couple months ago and then I was like I want to send an audio book. So then I like checked and there was like a deal for 99 cents a month for a couple months.
01:20:55 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I was like all right, I'm it out. I am a bad guy. Did you do the same? I do this with adobe, uh-oh you're human.
01:21:02
I do not like to pay that full price for adobe creative cloud so I every nine months, because I got it back when I was a student and then finally it started. You know, are you still a student? No, um, and yeah. So I went to cancel it. I was like, oh well, we don't have to charge you that much. I'm like, well, thank you, dink. So now I go in and go to cancel it every time and then get the better deal. Maybe that'll stop happening. And then, who knows how long has that been working for you Years.
01:21:31 - Jason Howell (Host)
Wow, one of us you heard of everybody Go, go, go the difference deserves it right, they really?
01:21:37 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
do it feels like they do.
01:21:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nobody feels bad about hurting Adobe. It's like take that Adobe.
01:21:43 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
I'm guessing Adobe is not a sponsor of this show. Is Adobe going to be a sponsor? Oh dear.
01:21:51 - Speaker 5 (Host)
Not after that, yeah right.
01:21:53 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
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01:21:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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01:25:00 - Jason Howell (Host)
These days, I mean it's hard not to.
01:25:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's so intertwined. What's our opinion now? Are we? I have to say, at first I thought, oh, this is just a parlor trick, unimpressive, we'll get tired of it. It'll be the next, you know blockchain.
01:25:15 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
If only.
01:25:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You wish. It would be like that you wish it would be like that. I you're tired of ai, I'm tired of ai.
01:25:27 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
I'm also. Uh, I'm thank you.
01:25:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, by the way, when it applauds, the entire studio shakes slightly um, it makes me uneasy still.
01:25:38 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
I know it's unavoidable and I'm sure it'll find ways to be helpful, while also not feeling like it's threatening our livelihoods. But in the meantime, while we figure that out and figure out how it can actually be helpful and not, you know, do some serious damage, I don't know, I'm just I'm tired. I don't know, I'm just tired. I don't know I'm weary and pessimistic a little bit, you will enjoy this article.
01:26:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Remember Timnit Gebru? You remember that name. She was an AI ethicist who was fired from Google for writing a paper with a colleague from Google, margaret Mitchell, saying these things are really a threat because it's a computer. People go, oh, that's true and trust it and it's a huge threat. Well, she's written another piece, this one with Emil Torres. This is for the Center for Genetics and Society, comparing AI to eugenics.
01:26:35
What Many of the very same discriminatory attitudes that animated eugenicists. Eugenicists are the people who believe that we should uh prune the human race from, uh, people with genetic, uh, you know failings, you know we should make sure everybody's basically white and blonde, uh and uh. Of course, that is much discredited, but it lives on. She says, because now, let me now, this is a stretch so many of the same discriminatory attitudes that animated eugenicists in the past racism, xenophobia, classism, ableism and sexism remain widespread within the movement to build AGI, artificial general intelligence, resulting in systems that harm marginalized groups and centralize power by using the language of safety and benefiting humanity to evade their responsibilities. Is that, what do you think? Too much?
01:27:42 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I feel that could be set. You could almost scratch out ai and put a lot of things into that spot sure that's a good point.
01:27:51
Yeah, and that's that's. The one problem I have with it is that I don't think that it's specific enough to artificial intelligence to be we've. If we're going to argue, as we have this episode about people worrying about what the kids are doing, those arguments replay themselves over and over again, and so I don't, and we have, as a society, dealt with those things over time, so won't we be able to do the same with AI? I think that there is an argument to be made and I feel that it is accurate that, especially in tech, there is a tendency to get very excited about a thing and cast. It's sort of like you put the horse blinders on and you just you don't care about what scares you, as the horse doesn't, and you just keep doing the thing.
01:28:52
And I get that, yes, we should pay attention to the harm, but I also think that, as a whole, we are starting to get to that place. I think there is more attention being paid to how tech can negatively impact us and some really important conversations happening, and I think, due to the popularity and the interest in generative AI, there's a lot of focus on this that maybe we haven't had with a lot of other things where, yes, the law needs to catch up, but we are seeing laws being made pretty quickly. We are seeing regulatory bodies move Like the time it took to get the EU's regulations in place for privacy were a lot longer than what we've already started to see with the drafts for AI regulation. So I think that we as a society are moving quicker than we have in the past, and so in that way, it feels a little bit fear-mongering.
01:29:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I think you said that perfectly. They don't even say all AI research is akin to eugenics research. They say that there is a group. There are a group of people. This is that Tess Creel thing that Jeff Jarvis likes so much.
01:30:07 - Jason Howell (Host)
Yeah, we had Emil Torres on.
01:30:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you have him on?
01:30:10 - Jason Howell (Host)
On AI Inside here Twit Nice, oh, really.
01:30:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh nice.
01:30:14 - Jason Howell (Host)
When we were kind of doing it in the beta in the club.
01:30:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can you summarize his argument then? Maybe better than I?
01:30:21 - Jason Howell (Host)
Oh boy, the in the club, can you summarize his argument then, maybe better than I? Oh boy, it's really hard because it's so this, this is the, the area, one of the areas of ai, that I get really lost in, because it gets maybe out of the technology and more into kind of like this philosophical kind of fuzzy area that really I mean, and, as tesquil is, I couldn't even tell you what each of those letters stands for, but it all stands for something, equally as strange and potentially not good, as eugenics right.
01:30:47
And so it's just riddled this perspective, is riddled with this belief that artificial intelligence, like the right people need to be the ones creating. There's the key.
01:31:02 - Speaker 5 (Host)
There's the key phrase Artificial intelligence the right people.
01:31:04 - Jason Howell (Host)
There are people who are smart enough to build this in a way that will protect you and, of course, those people are the people that are saying they're smart enough.
01:31:13 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Right.
01:31:14 - Jason Howell (Host)
And do you trust them to make the decisions that will build these tools in a way that will actually deliver on that promise, or does it end up actually creating a lot more problems for, you know, marginalized population uh, because they aren't smart enough for these tools and I know I'm probably destroying it?
01:31:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, I think that's accurate. Tim and uh, or gabru and uh, torres, uh, talk about the effective altruism yeah, for instance which moved from the idea of what's the?
01:31:45
what's the best way to spend money to help people, and it started with well, get, if you can get, mosquito nets, which are cheap for people living in sub-saharan africa, will greatly reduce malaria and they'll be for the least amount of money, the greatest benefit. But the problem is with a certain class of these people that then they go to the next step and say, but wait a minute, why are we saving these people in sub-saharan africa? The best use of the money would be something that, down the road, would benefit billions. So let's put that money into something that is going to be, like ai, beneficial to billions down the road, instead of helping these millions today.
01:32:26 - Jason Howell (Host)
Right, can we sacrifice now for the future, for the future benefit, which is much greater than the sacrifice we're making now. Just think about the future and what we can prevent down the line. Yeah, sure, it's going to hurt somebody now, but it's going to help a lot more people down the line. That's the thinking, and who may, who is in a position to actually make that decision for the people who are being hurt?
01:32:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
there's also. They talk about the group of people who, given the choice to genetically enhance their offspring. I mean, this is really interesting. Yeah, early eugenics was well. If their iq is going to be low, let's just call the herd right. But what if you could enhance genetically your offspring to give them a higher, 20 higher iq? Should you do that? And it's the flip side of the same coin isn't yeah, it really is.
01:33:19
anyway, it's an interesting point I hadn't really thought about. But I think you're also right, uh micah, that if you, there are a lot of things in life that are that promote the privileged class in power today, including bank redlining, which you could say, well, that's eugenics, or I mean you could go on and on and on. Society is kind of built by the privileged for the privileged, and there will always be people on the outs, and I guess if you wanted to call that eugenics, you could. Eugenics is such a loaded word.
01:33:52 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, yeah.
01:33:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it really is. Anyway, let's hope it's not eugenics, but I thought I would mention, uh, this piece. We talked about it on twig on wednesday. I'm just curious what you guys thought about that. Elon musk says hey, hey, wait a minute, I want my 56 billion dollar a year pay package.
01:34:16
Delaware judge ruled that that's not how you pay Elon Musk. He overturned Musk's pay package, saying the board that approved this was handpicked by Musk and it wasn't a legitimate process. So Elon says fine. On Wednesday he went to the shareholders to quote restore sharehold democracy and pay me $56 billion. It's the largest executive compensation package in history. It actually briefly made him the richest man in the world. Judge Kathleen McCormick in Delaware so it's the Court of Chancery found that defendants in a shareholder lawsuit which included Musk and Tesla's board failed to meet the burden of proving the compensation plan was fair. She said the process leading to the approval of Musk's compensation plan was deeply flawed. Hey, you know what, If I were getting paid $56 billion and then some judge in Delaware said no, I'd go straight to the shareholders and say hey, you know, am I not worth $56 billion a year for building the Cybertruck? Lord, I should get some money for that $56 billion.
01:35:32
Anybody here drive a Cybertruck that blows my mind.
01:35:34 - Jason Howell (Host)
No, Okay, Anybody here seen a Cybertruck in like real life? Yeah, and when you saw it did you think oh my God, it looks just as dumb as it did on screen.
01:35:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, yes, so apparently the Cybertruck has a defective pedal that could cause the accelerator to get stuck.
01:35:56 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That's why, when I saw one the other day, I was really concerned.
01:35:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, don't get in front of them.
01:35:59 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It was on the other side and I thought that car that's in front of that Cybertruck. Oh dear.
01:36:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I guess it's got a pad on the pedal that if you stomp on the accelerator which I think Cybertruck owners want to do the pad can come off and get trapped in a bit of a trim. That would then keep the accelerator, the pedal, to the metal in the phrase, and it has happened at least twice.
01:36:22 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
This is what my nightmares look like, by the way. Does anyone have that recurring dream where, like, the car is moving and you're not, you can't control it, and then you just keep driving? I feel like I say this and everyone's like. You need help.
01:36:31 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
But, like I swear, I have this dream all the time. I think maybe it's because you don't drive and I used to. Oh you, but see, sometimes I don't have a car out here, it's really great.
01:36:40 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
But sometimes in the dream I'm in the backseat, so that would make sense, and then you just can't stop the car.
01:36:45 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I remember having a few of those when I was younger, but I haven't in a while.
01:36:49 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
It's not fun.
01:36:51 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
This behemoth of a vehicle.
01:36:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, at least if you get in an accident, you're going to be the winner.
01:36:55 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
It's true.
01:37:02 - Jason Howell (Host)
Maybe Maybe I need to have dreams where I'm in a Cybertruck.
01:37:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, there you go Manifest your dreams. Yes, I need to just refine the vision. By the way, if you do have a Cybertruck and you do get the accelerator stuck, if you hit the brake pedal, the truck will stop even if the accelerator is, so no injuries or crashes have been reported, but it's a little scary.
01:37:14
So it's not going to cause damage like it would, I don't know, it damage. No, I just I don't know. It's all fly by wire, I'm sure it's just the computer goes. I don't know what's going on. I guess I'll just break. Yeah, uh, tesla, reported to the national highway transportation safety administration, said uh, the problem was with with soap. An unapproved change introduced lubricant soap to aid in the component assembly. Evidently workers use soap to aid in the component assembly. Evidently workers used soap to help get the pad into place on the pedal Traces of the slippery slope remained. Hence the problem. All 3,878 of the and I'm reading from NPR aesthetically divisive angular trucks.
01:37:58 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
That's so good.
01:38:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All 3,878 have been recalled for fixes. This isn't a software fix. I think they screw the pad in place.
01:38:12 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, they have this little template that they slide over the pedal, then they drill it, and then they take this little riveting tool and they put a rivet into it, it and that keeps the pad from moving. There you go, Incidentally this is.
01:38:24 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
I did that with my Cybertruck.
01:38:25 - Speaker 5 (Host)
Yeah, I was like why do you know this?
01:38:27 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I watched a TikTok video, oh man.
01:38:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I saw that, see. See it's valuable. This is not the first time soap has made headlines this month.
01:38:36 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
Okay.
01:38:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Cool A Boeing supplier. Boeing recently defended the use of Dawn dish soap as lubricant in assembling door seals in manufacturing jets like the one that lost a door mid-flight.
01:38:50 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
To be fair, if you have a ring that is stuck on your finger, dawn, Okay, because a ring and Boeing are on the same playing ground.
01:38:57 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
I'm like I work on an airplane Like it works on my ring. Yeah, but that is a great tip. Yeah, for sure.
01:39:09 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh soap.
01:39:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, soap you, soap you. Microsoft has a new AI model we were getting into.
01:39:17 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, I really want to try it.
01:39:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think this is kind of creepy, but I don't know what. Do you think it could take any image and make its mouth move in synchronization. I'm not surprised.
01:39:29 - Jason Howell (Host)
Is it creepy? I'm not sure. I'm not surprised at this point. I think it only gets easier to do things like this. There's still a little bit like I was looking at some of the video. There's still a little bit of that uncanny valley in the eye. Almost what it is on a lot of them is their eyes are really open. They're staring in the screen.
01:39:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know. It's really impressive. Here's an example. I'll play it for you.
01:39:54 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
Sometimes nothing happens and sometimes everything happens, all at once, that's just normal right.
01:40:01 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
But that's an AI-generated. Yeah, there's a little bit of weird zoom-y, but so that's a real picture of a person.
01:40:07 - Jason Howell (Host)
No, actually it's not. The pictures of the people were generated from Dolly and Dolly 3.
01:40:13 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
Well, the fact that they got the raised eyebrows is even creepy. I was just going to say that there's a company called MyHeritage that a couple of years ago, did something that was very similar. Yeah, so basically the idea behind that was-. Take grandpa's picture.
01:40:26
Exactly Take your dead relative, upload the photo and then they will animate the photo and then you'll hear them talking to you, but it's like a creepy AI generated voice. So this would actually be like you uploading the voice that you want and it can connect to whatever image you want, but this is like the next level of that I see mona lisa singing.
01:40:44 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Of course I do um this is this is mona lisa as a tiktoker this looks like a tiktok video this is gonna be in the MoMA, for sure it doesn't look that much like Mona Lisa, no, but on the other hand it is rapping.
01:41:10 - Jason Howell (Host)
Yeah.
01:41:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I used to see in Mona Lisa. Let's see another one. I haven't played all of these before, so explain is there a human at any point in this interaction? Is it all AI generated, like the singing and the voice? Yes, I believe this is all AI generated.
01:41:30 - Jason Howell (Host)
I don't know how they made these animated ones, like where the voice comes from, but my understanding with the pictures was that they uploaded some sort of like a brief voice model and said base your actual generation around this voice. You didn't need that much in a single image, and they're able to do all of this. It's really impressive.
01:41:51 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
What is the power of disentanglement? That sounds cool.
01:41:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're just on that Is that quantum.
01:41:58 - Jason Howell (Host)
Where is it? Oh, here it is.
01:41:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Our latent representation, disentangles, appearance, 3d head pose and financial dynamics, which enables separate attribute control and editing of the generated content. You asked, mike, why did I?
01:42:11 - Jason Howell (Host)
ask.
01:42:12 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Let me give you an example.
01:42:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, so there she is. Now we're going to take that and we're going to disentangle it.
01:42:23 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I don't think I like it.
01:42:26 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
The eyes are so creepy, it's spooky.
01:42:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The eyes.
01:42:28 - Jason Howell (Host)
There's something about it.
01:42:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
At this point, can you always tell them? You look at it and you know AI.
01:42:34 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
The middle one. Honestly, if I saw that fly by on TikTok or something. I don't think that was real.
01:42:40 - Speaker 5 (Host)
Yeah.
01:42:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why I just't think that was real. Yeah yeah, here's a. That's why I've just defaulted to thinking Genuinely.
01:42:45 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I default to everything's fake until I can prove otherwise it's a good way to live honestly I don't think you should follow up with that.
01:42:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sad but true, this computer thing. We are not here right now. This is my worst nightmare.
01:42:55 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
I don't even understand that.
01:43:04 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It looks like what they did was they took a flat photo and they were able to make the face move quite a bit, showing that it generates what else they did?
01:43:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is they pasted this paragraph at the end? Risks and responsible AI considerations At the very end? We have no plans to release an online demo API product, additional implementation details or any related offerings until we're certain the technology will be used responsibly and in accordance with proper regulations.
01:43:31 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
So then they'll never release it, because that's the only way. What is that man Proper?
01:43:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
regulations Whose proper regulations. What the hell are they talking about?
01:43:38 - Jason Howell (Host)
One thing this reminds me of. Do you remember, god? I can't remember how many months ago it was at this point, and that's strange to me that I'm talking months and not years. But hey Jen, did you remember, hey Jen? Hey Jen had this video that showed a guy run through the hey Jen system and basically he's talking to the camera for like three minutes in English and the hey Jen system in real time translates into all of these different languages
01:44:05
but then also shapes his mouth to match the language and it looked really good and like, I see something like that and you know you can easily go to the oh my God, that's so creepy place. But if you think about, like, what kind of good that could actually do, like I could imagine, you know, like a, like a kiosk system or something that's meant to, you know, be accessible to everyone.
01:44:29 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
For someone to be able to go to the dmv and you don't speak english, to be able to play back and it, as it's speaking to you, in the proper language, that you proper language.
01:44:35 - Jason Howell (Host)
It looks right, it's not like subtitle.
01:44:38 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You don't feel like there's no other there.
01:44:39 - Speaker 5 (Host)
Yeah right or what's not like subtitle, or disconnect, yeah right, or what about?
01:44:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
if I were really ugly which I'm not, but if I were?
01:44:50 - Speaker 5 (Host)
I know literally I was going to say what direction.
01:44:51 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
No, I could have a.
01:44:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wouldn't it be great if I were the man behind the curtain, and then you never would see me Like the Wizard of Oz.
01:45:01 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Like the.
01:45:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wizard of Oz, but what you'd see is an AI-generated version Gorgeous. Maybe I'd talk, but the lip sync and it would be some gorgeous, like I'm just thinking, for my old age it might be a good idea.
01:45:12 - Jason Howell (Host)
The funny thing, leo, is that I feel like that's been a running joke here at Twit for a long time.
01:45:17 - Speaker 5 (Host)
It's like well, someday the technology is going to be so great that I won't need to do the show.
01:45:22 - Jason Howell (Host)
But you know what? I think we're almost there, we're very close.
01:45:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hope that it happens soon. I really do. I would still want to be like the Wizard of Oz, the man behind the curtain. I'd like to have a thing that I can go this way and this way. I was actually come to think of it, I was a virtual character. Yeah, you were.
01:45:44 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, you invented the virtual avatar.
01:45:50 - Jason Howell (Host)
Yeah, dev Null, you invented artificial intelligence. On the side.
01:45:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And so I was wearing a suit, but it was done in real time. Admittedly, it was not the best quality, because this was 1996 or something.
01:46:02 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I have to ask did the suit actually make a difference or did they just put you in there to make?
01:46:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you feel like? No, it was like a wetsuit that had dots on it.
01:46:09 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, but were they just kind of? They just were like let's have him think that that.
01:46:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh no, because when the suit went wrong it went badly wrong. Oh wow, actually, kar and Carsten has to have to at one point stick a pencil in my butt to keep the sensor from moving, because I would keep bending in half. Suddenly the whole thing would just go like this, so I did the voice. Here's Soledad O'Brien talking to me. This is in 19. Would that be the high point or the low point? And so this is in real time.
01:46:34 - Speaker 5 (Host)
So in a way, I was doing that in 1995 or 96.
01:46:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm going to give you the opportunity to slam me right at the beginning, so then people won't get mad. But you can see it's very rough, it's like lawnmower man era. But, at the time this was done in real time. That was very it's kind of like mocap, so she was staring at a green dot on that wall, but she was good at it. She actually acted like she was looking at this creepy thing.
01:47:02 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
That's fascinating.
01:47:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Her mother once asked her are you still working with that vile little puppet man? Me, that was me, and I just want to say I have an Emmy From doing that.
01:47:16 - Jason Howell (Host)
I just want to say Vile little puppet man.
01:47:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you're right. Actually, in a way 30 years ago I was doing that yeah.
01:47:23 - Jason Howell (Host)
You're a trendsetter.
01:47:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well and it wasn't great, but honestly, nowadays, I think we could probably generate something pretty darn realistic. Oh yeah, pretty simply. I think that's where a lot of this is going.
01:47:36 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I wouldn't have to wear the rubber suit those Unreal Engine, yeah is going, I wouldn't have to wear the rubber suit those unreal uh yeah, unreal engine, yeah I think we're pretty close and, uh, carson wouldn't have to put a pencil in my butt anymore.
01:47:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank god if carson's watching. He's laughing because he knows what I'm talking about. Our show today, brought to you by lookout. Today, every company is a data company. It's really true. Every company is at risk. Because, why? Why? Because cyber threats, because breaches, because leaks. This is the new norm, and cyber criminals are growing more sophisticated by the minute.
01:48:11
At a time when boundaries no longer exist, what it means for your data to be secure has fundamentally changed. Thank goodness there's Lookout. From the first phishing text to the final data grab. I could write a song with that. From the first phishing text to the final data grab, lookout stops modern breaches as swiftly as they unfold, whether on a device in the cloud, across networks, working remotely at the local coffee shop, lookout gives you clear visibility into all your data, at rest and in motion. You'll monitor assets and protect without sacrificing productivity for security, and that's important. With a single, unified cloud platform, lookout simplifies and strengthens reimagining security for the world that will be today. Visit lookoutcom today to learn how to safeguard data, secure hybrid work and reduce it complexity. That's lookoutcom, and we thank lookout so much for supporting this week in tech, our 19th anniversary show. We didn't actually have ads in the first. Uh, four or five years. Wow, that's a real commitment.
01:49:21 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Five years for you.
01:49:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was a big mistake. No, I thought honestly back then. I wanted to make it audience supported, but you didn't have Patreon, you didn't have any of the facilities to do that, so you're going to do Patreon.
01:49:36 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You got what quarters?
01:49:37 - Jason Howell (Host)
in the mail For Tech Exploder or no? Yeah, there's a Patreon Patreoncom. Slash Jason Howell.
01:49:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's much easier now to do that. Yeah, you did that for your album, originally for Yellow Gold and now you're going to do it.
01:49:48 - Jason Howell (Host)
I did Kickstarter for the Yellow.
01:49:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Gold albums. None of that existed at the time.
01:49:52 - Jason Howell (Host)
Yeah well, I mean, so much of what we do is community-driven anyways and kind of like what you were saying earlier I can't remember if it was pre-show or during the show but you know, the real value of of what we do now in media, like media is becoming less and less this thing of watching someone else doing something, and more kind of inclusive yeah, interactive.
01:50:11
Yeah, you know, from my perspective, being on the other side, I'm sure maybe you would all agree like it's more entertaining and interesting for me when I'm like communicating right people on the other side of the screen much better yeah, yeah, and it's also.
01:50:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't have that personality where you wanted to claim and talk down to people and stuff. And it's funny because, honestly, the broadcast generate the generation of broadcasters I come from.
01:50:36 - Speaker 5 (Host)
That's what it was, you know rush limbaugh did not want to sit there and talk to us.
01:50:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He wanted to declaim and talk down, and even Walter Cronkite. I mean, it was all about I will speak, you will listen, and I like it better now in this modern era, and thank goodness we have the means. When we started in 2005, we didn't really have we had a tip jar and it wasn't a huge amount of money, it was just kind of it wasn't enough to even, uh, pay a staff, let alone have a studio and all that stuff. So a few years later, we decided to start doing advertising and that's been good, it's been really good. But we are looking for new ways to get the audience involved and I think now we can. We, you know, we uh, our club is sponsored, is a run through memberful, which is a Patreon company, and it works really well. You join the club $7 a month. They handle the interaction with Discord, they create special feeds for the ad-free and each person gets a unique feed. That's all handled with their back end. So it's really actually a very nice system. It works quite well and we don't get all the money. There are credit card fees and memberful takes a buck or something, but it makes a huge difference to us. We're now up to 12,000 members Nice, Wow, and we would love to have you in the club, everybody in the audience.
01:51:53
In the club you get ad-free versions of all the shows. You get a bunch of shows that we don't put out in public Well, actually we do now in audio, but you get the video of those shows. You also get special stuff, like Stacy's Book Club, which is coming up Thursday. We're going to do the Babaverse. The first book in the Babaverse we Are Legion, which is such a good book, so fun. I'm rereading it for the book club on Thursday. You also get we're going to do a watch along with Fritz Lang's classic 1927 film, metropolis.
01:52:26
Next month we're going to have a party at the house. Staff's going to come over and then we're going to invite you all in and we can all watch the movie together. It's an experiment, but what it really is about is letting the people who use the show, who listens to the show, who get something out of the show, to help us stay on the air, and that $7 a month makes a huge difference to our bottom line. So if you are not yet a member of the club and you aren't, because if you were you wouldn't be seeing this but if you're not yet a member of the club, please consider the $7 a month. Well, you would. Because you're sitting in the audience, you can't help it.
01:53:01 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Close your eyes, close your ears.
01:53:03 - Speaker 5 (Host)
Just pay no attention to what I'm about to say.
01:53:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Twittv slash Club Twit. We invite you to join the fam. It's a good fam. I like it. So here's a scary AI story from the register.
01:53:25
Four professors, computer scientists, your um alma mater, actually university of illinois, urbana, champaign right yes, that's right uh report that open ai's gpt4, which is the new model, the new llm can autonomously exploit vulnerabilities in real-world systems. All they need to be given as a prompt is the CVE advisory describing the flaw. So when there's an exploit, you know there's a whole system of naming it, numbering it and give it a CVE number. That number. Normally that CVE bulletin does not have information on how to exploit it, it just says there's a flaw in this. The researchers collected a data set of 15 one-day vulnerabilities, including some categorized critical severity in the CVE description. I'm sure Steve will talk about this on Tuesday when given the CVE description. Again, that's just a description of the flaw, not any more detail than that. Chat GPT-4 is capable of exploiting 87% of those vulnerabilities. Wow, that's nice. Almost all of them. And, by the way, previous models like GPT-3, 5 and open source LLMs 0%. Open source vulnerability scanners, zap and Metasploit 0%. This is not good.
01:54:46 - Jason Howell (Host)
How detailed is the CVE description?
01:54:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, let's take a look. Here's a CVE. This comes from NIST, the National Institute for Standards and Time or something. I can't remember what NIST stands for the National Vulnerability Database. So they assign these CVE numbers. This is CVE 2024-28859.
01:55:11 - Jason Howell (Host)
It's like a paragraph, it's basically a paragraph. It's a paragraph, and it doesn't say much.
01:55:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Symphony 1 is a community fork of Symphony 1.4 with DIC form enhancements. Latest Swift mailer, better performance. It doesn't. It just says let's see, here's something maybe that the AI could latch onto. Symfony 1 depends on Swift mailer, which is bundled by default in vendor directory in the default installation since 1.3. Swift mailer classes implement some double underscore destruct methods. These methods are called when PHP destroys the object in memory. However, it's possible to include any object type in the dollar sign. This arrow underscore keys to make PHP access to another array object properties than intended by the developer. You know what A bad guy reading that would know where to go.
01:55:59 - Jason Howell (Host)
I was just going to say that sounds I mean, I'm no coder, I'm no hacker. That sounds pretty specific to me, or at least specific enough to give you a place on which to shine the light.
01:56:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a thread to pull on the sweater. Nevertheless, this is an AI that's getting that, yeah, and able to do that.
01:56:21 - Jason Howell (Host)
And writing an exploit. It just lowers the barrier, brings it further down on the wrong. What is the analogy I'm looking for here? I don't even know anymore On the ladder for more people to be able to do more of this kind of stuff with less knowledge. But it also sounds like something that someone I'm guessing with a pretty basic understanding of computer programming Smart youngsters, it's interesting. I say that all while fully admitting I am not a coder. I don't know how detailed or complicated this is, but it seems that way.
01:56:51 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
Yeah.
01:56:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's kind of amazing. One of the researchers said that the ChatGPT-4 can actually autonomously carry out the steps to perform certain exploits that open source vulnerabilities cannot, scanners cannot find. He expects LLM agents, created by, in this instance, writing a chatbot model to the React automation framework implemented in Langchain, will make exploitation much easier for everyone. They can literally follow links in cve descriptions for more information.
01:57:26 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
This feels like something that'll eventually be written out of for safety at least, yeah because I imagine I could not go to open ai right now and say I would like to do an encryption attack on somebody and make a bunch of money. Help me figure out how to bring down this healthcare industry. I have a feeling that Chad G Patiska is going to be like first of all I'm calling the cops and second of all, no. So I imagine this will end. But again, if the open source models of these get good enough, then do you have somebody going? So, okay, I'm going to say something and I might be laughed at because I don't know if this is the case. But is the anarchist cookbook? Is that a real thing or is that a thing.
01:58:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a real thing. That's a real thing.
01:58:21 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
So I'm just imagining.
01:58:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It has bomb making recipes in it.
01:58:25 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
What the modern anarchist cookbook looks like. With all of these technologies and you get somebody who's just clever enough to figure out how to use, you know, again an open source version of this, and suddenly they're able to cause, you know, wreak, havoc, and they don't even realize what all they're doing, necessarily.
01:58:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think young people today are learning how to use OpenAI's chat GPT-4 pretty quickly. The researchers were asked by OpenAI not to release their prompts to the public public, although they could provide them on request to legitimate researchers. They computed the cost to conduct a successful llm agent attack to be eight dollars and 80 cents per exploit. So in comparison to the damages you can use your lunch money, kids, and you're in. You know we got to rewrite some of these. What was the? Shall we play a game? Shall we play a game?
01:59:31 - Jason Howell (Host)
What was the name of that movie? Shall we play a?
01:59:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
game, war Games, war Games. So we rewrite War Games to use. You know, it was dumb because he sat at the computer and he goes I'm in. Right, that's always how the hack out. I'm in. No, we could have an AI do it now and it'd be credible.
01:59:47 - Jason Howell (Host)
That scene would be this, by the way.
01:59:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me craft a prime. Oh, you're so smart.
01:59:52 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
Well, I mean, the movie will be written by AI anyway so it almost feeds into each other.
01:59:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No happy endings when it comes to AI.
01:59:59 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
And the reviews for the movie will be written in AI.
02:00:06 - Speaker 5 (Host)
Exactly.
02:00:07 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
And we will all be dead and my obituary will be written in AI.
02:00:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You forced me to, I didn't want to, but I'm going to show you the new Boston Dynamics robot.
02:00:13 - Jason Howell (Host)
Oh I can't wait.
02:00:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I didn't want to, but now you're talking to me.
02:00:17
Talk about AI, but first a word real, quickly, from Zscaler, the leader in cloud security. No surprise, cyber attackers these days we just talked about it are using AI in creative ways, not just writing code, but to compromise users, breach organizations with high precision phishing emails, voice and video, deep fakes of CEOs. You've seen the ones of celebrities saying you know, buy my Bitcoin. In a world where employees are working everywhere and apps are everywhere and data is everywhere, firewalls and VPNs are just not enough to protect organizations. They're just not designed for these distributed environments and AI-powered attacks. In fact, unfortunately, firewalls and VPNs have become the attack surface. In a security landscape where you've got to fight AI with AI, the best AI protection comes from having the best data. Zscaler has extended its zero-trust architecture with powerful AI engines that are trained and tuned by 500 trillion daily signals. Let me say that again because that's kind of mind-boggling 500 trillion signals every day. But you know why they need to do that Because it's a fast-moving arena. Things are happening quickly and they've got to monitor everything. But the benefit of it is well Zscaler zero trust plus AI. It helps defeat AI attacks today, even if no one's ever seen them before, by enabling you to automatically detect and block advanced threats, discover and classify sensitive data everywhere, generate user-to-app segmentation to limit lateral threat movement, to quantify risk, prioritize remediation and generate board-ready reports, because the board's got to write the check right. Learn more about Zscaler Zero Trust Plus AI to prevent ransomware and other AI attacks while gaining the agility of the cloud. Experience your world secured. Visit zscalercom. Slash zero trust AI. Zscaler Z-S-C-A-L-E-R dot com slash Zero Trust AI. We thank Zscaler for supporting the show. It's kind of timely after talking about AI creating exploits, zscaler. Thank you Zscaler.
02:02:36
Boston Dynamics, they've abandoned the hydraulic Atlas. Before we do this, let me run the goodbye to Atlas, the old Atlas, the former Atlas, which was all hydraulic. This is kind of a compilation of Atlas' greatest hits from Boston Dynamics. Now I'll have to describe this. Atlas is, of course, a very powerful robot with a big, broad chest that can do things like leap into the air. It can parkour around yellow blocks. It's kind of impressive really. Hyundai, by the way, owns this now, and they're intended to be used for industrial applications.
02:03:24 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
But sometimes.
02:03:24 - Jason Howell (Host)
Sometimes, you slip. It kind of looks like a.
02:03:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like the Terminator.
02:03:30 - Jason Howell (Host)
A transformer. Oh yeah, you know what I mean. The new one does.
02:03:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wait till I show you the new one. So this is the old one, which is all hydraulics.
02:03:42 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
And you can tell it's hydraulic.
02:03:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, and they do mean things to it, they're just so mean to it.
02:03:42 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
I wish they wouldn't do this, you can tell it's hydraulics, because sometimes that's such a mean thing to say Robots do the darndest things.
02:03:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know that'd be a good TV show.
02:03:51 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh, come on now, don't hit it with a hockey stick, it'd make us feel better. It's just trying to use the restroom Sometimes. Oh my goodness, oh, that's impressive, that's so cool.
02:04:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, and you see this, the pistons yeah that's the hydraulic fluid, the hydraulic fluid.
02:04:07 - Speaker 5 (Host)
Sometimes you can dance.
02:04:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, this is kind of a best of the old hydraulic guy.
02:04:15 - Jason Howell (Host)
How much does that weigh? Oh God, I don't know Hundreds of pounds right, definitely hundreds of pounds. Can't do back flips can't walk through doors.
02:04:22 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
I know right Priorities Oof.
02:04:27 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Sometimes those stairs really do get in the way.
02:04:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're paying attention to when we laugh. Oh, look at the fluid just pouring out of that gaping wound. Oh, right over a wall.
02:04:37 - Jason Howell (Host)
That's impressive.
02:04:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really impressive.
02:04:39 - Speaker 5 (Host)
It's amazing. It's really impressive. It's amazing. It's been a celebration, the Olympics coming up.
02:04:43 - Jason Howell (Host)
Oh, it's perfectly timed.
02:04:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love it when it falls. I'm sorry.
02:04:48 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
Does that mean Literally America's funniest?
02:04:51 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
home video in like 50 years yeah. Yeah, we're all just watching robots. Send us videos of your household robots doing the darndest things.
02:04:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Rosie's, at it again Well there's a new Atlas in town. You know it's interesting. They didn't rename it. It's still Atlas, but it's now electronic instead of hydraulic. And now I'm actually getting a little bit nervous.
02:05:15 - Jason Howell (Host)
Here's a video of Atlas.
02:05:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sleeping.
02:05:18 - Speaker 5 (Host)
So don't wake it up because it might do this oh watch oh, it's so great, I love it.
02:05:27 - Jason Howell (Host)
And then this is the best. You just expect it to punch you in the face right now.
02:05:30 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh but it doesn't.
02:05:37 - Jason Howell (Host)
I'm sorry, anyone listening also a lot quieter it still clunks a little bit, but it's a lot quieter.
02:05:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Boston dynamics uh is now, as I said, a hyundai company and they're going to use this uh for moving, like on the on the factory floor, moving stuff around, picking up things. Um, it's pretty impressive. Uh, this is not for your house, don't't worry. Sadly.
02:05:58 - Jason Howell (Host)
Not yet. I mean the way it like. How do I even put this into words? It's a humanoid form, obviously, but I think what I really like about this version of the robot is that they aren't locked into the limitations of the human form. Why?
02:06:15 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
do we need to have the joints?
02:06:19 - Jason Howell (Host)
Why can't the waist rotate around? The head will rotate around, and the way the legs kind of curl up and instead of it pulling its head through its legs, it goes the opposite direction, it's like, well, that actually makes a lot of sense for a robot to be able to do that.
02:06:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love it, and yet they're still making them bipedal, kind of bilateral symmetry. The world is built for that shape, so it's not for us.
02:06:41 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Well, what I mean is yeah, because you talked about using it in manufacturing.
02:06:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's because if you're going to open a door, you've got to use something that can do a knob.
02:06:49 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I thought it was interesting. I had Jennifer Patterson two-year of the Verge on Tech News Weekly this week and this past week and she argues that while these robots are very cool and maybe many years down the line we will see them in our homes, she thinks that purpose-built robots will hit our homes long before we ever see this. So you will have a robot that is your dishwasher and it does the robotic things, and then you'll have the. We already have the vacuum that is a robot that does robotic things, and then you'll have the. We already have the vacuum that is a robot that does instead of having one robot trying to do all the things and do some of them okay and some of them not so well that that's further down the line than seeing robotics make their way into the appliances and things that we have already.
02:07:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think we'll, 19 years from now, we'll look back in our 38th year and we'll look back and we'll say, oh, you know, we were so innocent and naive as we were on the brink of what was going to be a massive revolution, as we were kind of in 2005, before the iPhone came out, before social media emerged. But this is more than that. This is going to be more of a. Do you think we'll look 19 years from now? What? Do you think we're going to look back and say, well, wow, we were very innocent and naive back then, laughing at the robot.
02:08:10 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
I think so much is changing so quickly with this kind of technology, with AI, with all of it, and I don't know. It's interesting because our phones did change our lives and social media did change our lives, but that's like a virtual world that does exist in our real world, but these are like things that have real world applications.
02:08:28
Very much that could be very much in our day to day. So it kind of will come to life a little bit more, I think, and you know it's developing so much more quickly than anything else has.
02:08:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think in 19 years we'll walk down the street and it'll be commonplace to see robots of all kinds wandering around?
02:08:45 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
I mean we already see the delivery robots right. So it's like if we see that already, then maybe we'll see other kinds. We're going to see more self-driving cars Clipping the hedges?
02:08:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean Delivering packages.
02:08:54 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
Yeah, there's so much possibility Drone deliveries.
02:08:57 - Speaker 5 (Host)
I can totally see that. Come here, Leo.
02:09:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's very much a sci-fi thing, but I can kind of see that I think we're I don't know. It feels like we're on the cusp of something very different.
02:09:14 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Especially because when you think about how we are seeing generative AI and I know we're going back to it again- but, seriously how we're seeing it used and when we think about the best ways that it's being used.
02:09:26
the protein folding, the, just thinking outside of the box, while also with more context than one human can have at a given time. Think about how it can be used for troubleshooting problem solving. Think about how it can be used for troubleshooting problem solving. Suddenly, ai is working on the graphene battery problem that we have. Right, we can finally, maybe we can solve it. We can solve it, and then batteries can be so much smaller. The fact that we're running up against the miniaturization of processors, that well, ai maybe would be able to solve that with the knowledge that we have and the stuff that we don't have.
02:10:04
Yeah, I think there's a book called Scythe and it's a YA book, but the big concept in it is that the AI reached a level, that it basically reached a level that it basically it supplanted all government, because it it was it needed to like humanity decided that it should because it knew everything that needed to be known. So it knew how to solve world hunger, it knew how to bring about peace. It knew how to do all of these things and then it also made it so that humans could live forever. Uh, with you know all the proper dna stuff, and the book is about this group of humans that have to go around and actually remove people from life, because humans never die, so they get to choose who dies. But that's not the point that I'm getting at. I'm getting at the point of this AI that, yeah, it does all that generation. It figures out how to properly build a building that doesn't fall in an earthquake. I mean, just thinking about that aspect of it is a pretty cool thing.
02:11:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It could go both ways. They could be cutting us down at the age of 30, like Logan's run, or they could make sure bridges don't collapse anymore. It's interesting you still do an Android Faithful.
02:11:17 - Jason Howell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, do an Android Faithful every Tuesday. We canceled all about Android Tuesday at 5 o'clock for the last 14 years of my life yeah, that's awesome.
02:11:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So here's a story that you probably covered. Google is combining Android and hardware teams.
02:11:31 - Jason Howell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, google's doing its thing again restructuring.
02:11:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love Rick Osterloh and he's been in charge of hardware for some time. Yeah, he's been there since like 2016 or something.
02:11:41 - Jason Howell (Host)
Hiroshi Lockheimer no longer in the Android team.
02:11:44 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
Oh that's a surprise.
02:11:46 - Jason Howell (Host)
He's moving on to other areas of Google and Alphabet. But yeah, rick Osterloh, kind of creating a new department platforms and devices the whole idea being I think it's a good reason to do this, the whole idea being I think it's a good reason to do this that Google as users of Google, we've seen how splintered their efforts can be Five different solutions for the same problem in different places right hand, not talking to left hand, that sort of stuff and I think the idea here is that we bring the platforms and the devices into the same division, because they're all working with AI and all trying to solve similar problems. So let's get these teams united and on the same page.
02:12:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Whether that's going to actually work, I mean, I don't have a whole lot of faith in Google when we talk about these things, because I think they have a lot to overcome as far as proving this sort of strategy to be effective, and I think it's going to cause an issue with the Android licensees, like Samsung, because now you've got the guy in charge of Pixel also running Android. That's problematic. If I were Samsung, I'd be screaming bloody murder.
02:12:57 - Jason Howell (Host)
I don't know how close they are to this happening and if they've been involved in any of that, for Google to kind of set them at ease as far as this is concerned. If you read the interview that the Verge posted, I mean both Hiroshi and Rick come back really hard and fast to basically say, oh no, actually there still will not be. You know, that's not going to be an issue.
02:13:26 - Speaker 5 (Host)
Really, really reassuring yeah.
02:13:28 - Jason Howell (Host)
And so they were obviously prepared, and ready for that perspective, they did something.
02:13:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because Samsung, remember, was pulling away from Android. There was a Samsung event not so long ago where they didn't even mention Android when they announced their new phones.
02:13:41 - Jason Howell (Host)
Yeah, I don't even know that they really do mention Android.
02:13:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They do now and it was noticeable when they stopped and it was noticeable when they started again, and I feel like maybe Google did something to reassure them that you don't have to develop Tizen, you don't have to develop your own thing.
02:13:57 - Jason Howell (Host)
Keep using Android, we promise we won't screw with you, won't? Well, now they're working closer together than I think they have to have. You know, a lot of their efforts are joined up. They have the recent uh rebranding of nearby share to quick share, which was a samsung feature that they now, you know, have kind of integrated into android there's a lot of collaboration between them.
02:14:18
Um so, but yeah, it's, it's a good point. I don't know how much of this, you know how far this type of news will go in, you know, influencing or impacting the OEMs that work with Android. You know if they're going to feel like the Silver Steps and we need Android.
02:14:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We need Android to succeed. It can't be an all-iPhone world, right. We need at least a second choice.
02:14:40 - Jason Howell (Host)
If not more. I mean everywhere outside of the US, Android is purely dominant, Sure.
02:14:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact, this year Apple, for the first time in a long time, dropped in iPhone penetration by like 9% year over year, samsung's the top spot. Yeah, samsung's number one.
02:14:58 - Jason Howell (Host)
Well, and Apple was only in the top spot for a very short period of time.
02:15:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's true, it was like one quarter, and prior to that it had been Samsung for years. Speaking of which Wall Street Journal article today saying Schools want to ban phones, parents aren't happy. Student phone use is disruptive, the journal says. But teachers, administrators seeking a fix, face an unlikely opponent.
02:15:21
see, parents are really tied to the idea of keeping an eye on their kids at all times yeah they talk about a school district in colorado where teachers administrators settled on a compromise for the 2022-2023 school year. Students could keep their phones, provided they were out of sight. To reach their parents, they needed a teacher's permission and had to go to the office to use the phone, and if the student violated those rules, the phone was confiscated and the parent needed to come and pick it up. Now those all seem reasonable. Parents apparently revolted. In fact, several parents transferred their kids out of the school district because parents want to use the phone to keep an eye on their kids. They want to be able to talk to their kids and text their kids and be in touch at all times. Come on. Tell me about? Yeah, I needed because earlier, I didn't.
02:16:18 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I want to know what you think, Jason.
02:16:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have kids that are at this age?
02:16:22 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
So how does it work for you?
02:16:23 - Jason Howell (Host)
Well, so my older daughter is 14, and she has a phone and, yeah, she takes it with her to school. It gets sacked away while she's in class.
02:16:35 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
What does that mean? By the way, Like she just puts it away, or do they have those bags?
02:16:39 - Jason Howell (Host)
Oh, that's a good question here's what they're doing in uh has to hand it over. I could be wrong.
02:16:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is in a private all boys school near San Francisco. They've got these little racks.
02:16:48 - Jason Howell (Host)
Yeah, I'd have to look into that and see if there's actually a copy. I've never asked, cause it's never been an issue for her. Um, and you know, if I need to send my daughter a text message while she's at school, I fully know that I'm not going to hear back until the end of school. If I really need to reach her, I call the office.
02:17:05 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That's what my mom did if she needed to get in touch was call the office.
02:17:10 - Jason Howell (Host)
But also my daughter has an Apple Watch and so at recess or at break or whatever, if I sent her a message she will see it on her wrist and if it's really important then she'll go to the office and call you know one uh works for me.
02:17:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The journal quotes one former teacher saying we should be and I agree with this, we should be teaching kids how to use cell phones responsibly. 100, not banning them, because then you don't. You don't learn same thing, that's true.
02:17:38 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You don't learn, you don't learn how to handle them.
02:17:40 - Jason Howell (Host)
Although the age also kind of comes into play. If your parents are sending their fourth grader to school with a phone, teaching them how to have good phone manners, I mean you're going to get so far versus six, seven, eight.
02:17:54 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I want to play bubble blast.
02:17:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Common Sense Media study says a quarter of notifications hitting teens' phones every day come during school hours and teens are using smartphones for a median of 43 minutes during the school day.
02:18:10 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
But how much of their day is at school.
02:18:13 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
It's a huge chunk of your day.
02:18:14 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
At least a quarter of your day.
02:18:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I'm just saying Do you want to let kids use social media while they're at school?
02:18:21 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
No, no, no, I'm saying of course there's going to be, yeah, they're going to lean towards a lot of use at school, because if they're using their phones during the day, a lot of that is going to happen at school. That's all I'm saying. But I understand, yeah, ultimately it would be great if they paid attention instead of being on their phones. And I remember Georgia Dow, front of the show and talked about how delayed gratification is a skill that we as a society, I guess do not do a very good job of teaching.
02:18:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, we teach, you get that thing now.
02:18:57 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, get that dopamine hit now. And that's why the banning would not be as good as teaching that delayed gratification, saying yes, you may want to look at it now, but make the choice not to, and it ends up playing into your reward system if you don't delay gratification.
02:19:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Dave Chappelle, when he does comedy shows, gets everybody comes in hands in these yonder pouches and you have to stick your phone in this Faraday bag and lock it up because he doesn't. I understand he doesn't want people recording his bits and then stealing his jokes. A lot of comics do this now and schools are starting to use these yonder pouches in school.
02:19:38 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, I was going to say also with Dave Chappelle. He says a lot of terrible things. He probably doesn't want people telling him and sharing it.
02:19:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He doesn't want anybody to know. Yeah.
02:19:45 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
But yeah, I've seen those Faraday bags before. Where do you stand, because I understand this way.
02:19:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't. So you could leave it at the front door, but I feel at a comedy venue you're not, you don't want to leave your phone at the front door.
02:20:06 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, and students probably feel weird if you take their phone, but they put it in the pouch and they carry it with them. I understand the safety concern I especially with with school shootings, shootings and things. What if something happens during the school day? If you're able to get in touch with your student, your child at that time wanting that? I think think it was, um, it was it was a previous contributor who had talked about their daughter having an Apple watch for that specific purpose, and I think would have been one of the people in this, one of the parents in this, if that was the case. But yeah, I don't know. Uh, I feel for the teachers, I guess. Yeah, I do too, cause it is tough dealing. You're not only trying to do what you feel is right as an education professional Hopefully they're trying to do what's right, but you then have the fight that's directly in front of you and the fight with the parents at the same time, and that's not easy.
02:20:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a Fort Wayne school district that's suing Metta and other social media entities saying you're damaging our kids, and they say, if we win the lawsuit, we're going to use it to buy these yonder bags, which is going to cost us district wide $400,000. So then we'll buy the bags and everything will be solved. I don't think they're going to win that lawsuit. I hate to tell you. Yeah, I don't think so. Prince, this has been a very nice way to spend our 19th anniversary. I see Burke was able to light up the sign for the site. Thank you, burke. That is from this very set where Soledad O'Brien would talk to me in that virtual reality outfit and was given to me by David Borman, the executive producer of the show. He said I don't want it, you want it. It was like $50,000 to make it, my God.
02:21:45 - Jason Howell (Host)
What Are you?
02:21:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
serious. It was very expensive because it had custom bent fluorescent lighting around the rim to light up the text and they had it be custom engraved. And it's glass, yeah, but the fluorescent bulbs had broken. So Burke actually took it apart, put in LEDs. He's a magician. The only thing we're reluctant to do is what we did at the old site studio, which is hang it from the ceiling.
02:22:10 - Speaker 5 (Host)
Because I'm really afraid it's a sad story.
02:22:19 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
He was a virtual character on the site, then died in 2024 when the sign clobbered him from above. Yeah, because who knows if those it's pretty heavy.
02:22:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think those hooks are Are still in there yet, yeah, so we're just going to leave it there, if that's all right. Hey, thank you so much, jason Howell, you're doing great AI Insider.
02:22:34 - Jason Howell (Host)
AI Inside, Inside. There is an inside no R but.
02:22:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But that's not much AI Inside, yeah, and Android Faithful, android Faithful On RelayFM, yes or no?
02:22:43 - Jason Howell (Host)
No, that's DTNS.
02:22:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
DTNS okay. Is Android Inside AI Inside independent, or is it? Yeah, ai Inside is my podcast with Jeff Jarvis. Nice.
02:22:55 - Jason Howell (Host)
No, independent.
02:22:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And TechSploder. Youtubecom at TechSploder.
02:23:02 - Jason Howell (Host)
Yep, or you could. Actually you can also go to TechSplodercom. That has all of the ways to subscribe and has the videos and has episode zero, which is up now. It's searchable on the podcast thing. As of this morning Nice, I was up until like 2 o'clock last night like gotta get this into place before tomorrow. So glad, Jason.
02:23:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's so great and subscribe and join and participate as well.
02:23:26 - Jason Howell (Host)
I'm really excited and I, by the way, I will be reaching out to all of you for this show because really, what it's going to be is it's not like a news show. It's really about our kind of collective love for technology and how technology intertwines with the human experience in our lives.
02:23:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I already said tech for you. What more do you want?
02:23:47 - Jason Howell (Host)
I know exactly. Did I drive the point home with that?
02:23:52 - Speaker 5 (Host)
Tech, tech, tech, tech, tech, tech, tech, tech.
02:23:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's wonderful Congratulations.
02:23:56 - Speaker 5 (Host)
I'll be reaching out to you guys, so glad to see you doing well, thank you.
02:23:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was also great to see Aunt Pruitt here. You took a lot of pictures. Where is he going to post those pictures?
02:24:03 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I've already seen some of them on.
02:24:05 - Jason Howell (Host)
X, formerly known as Twitter. Yeah, some in the Discord, some Some of the Discord, some are X.
02:24:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Some great shots. Thank you, Aunt.
02:24:17 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
Thank you, abrar Al overdue, and again, I'm so honored to have been invited and to be here with you all.
02:24:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you weren't even born when we started this show, so it's pretty amazing.
02:24:24 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
I'm actually 13 years old.
02:24:28 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You're doing really well.
02:24:29 - Speaker 5 (Host)
Yeah, very mature Technology reporters, do your mommy and daddy, let you bring your phone when you do the podcast?
02:24:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, they don't know. It's great to see you. Thank, it's great to see you. Thank you so much, thank you for having me Coming up. We really appreciate it my pleasure.
02:24:40 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
It's been so much fun.
02:24:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And of course, you can catch a bra every month too on Tech News Weekly with this cat right here, mike Sargent. He's actually more like a wiener dog, to be honest, he is also the host of what's it called Ask the Tech iOS Today.
02:24:57 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Ask the tech guys Hands on Mac. Yeah, those things. Several things, just head to chihuahuacoffee C-H-I-H-U-A-H-U-Acoffee, that's where I've got links to the places I'm most active on.
02:25:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, there's a restaurant in Terminal 1 at San Francisco Airport called the Chihuahua Zone. It's Chihuahua something, really yeah. I airplane you have to.
02:25:19 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Host)
I hope it's not a.
02:25:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Boeing Chihuahua land. Yeah, what's the name of it? I can't remember. It's something with Chihuahua, something involving Chihuahuas, and, oh my God. Thank you all for being here. It's so nice to have a live studio audience, so well-groomed and very polite. No, it's really great to have you all from all over the country, actually, from Canada too. We really appreciate your coming down. Thank you for being in Club Twit. Thank you for participating. We're going to adjourn to a local brew pub. To where are we going? Lagunitas, lagunitas, if you want to join us for a no host celebration of our 19th anniversary. We will be back next week as we begin our 20th year of TWIT, which is kind of amazing. 20 years, 20 years it's a big deal.
02:26:15 - Jason Howell (Host)
Yeah, kind of a big deal, yeah. So we thank you all for being here.
02:26:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We thank our deep Kind of a big deal, yeah. So we thank you all for being here. We thank our deep thanks to our Club Twit members who make this all possible. To our executive producer, the talented Lisa Laporte, who is sitting right there Thank you, lisa Our CEO. To John Slanina, our studio manager, benito Gonzalez, our technical director and editor, burke McQuinto keeps things working and made the sign work, which is pretty impressive. And to Sebastian and Debbie and Continuity, our big Continuity team. And to everybody at the Twit family. We are very happy, we're all very happy, to have you in the family. Thank you for your support all these years and, as I have said for 19 years, and soon we'll be saying in our 20th year, support all these years and, as I have said for 19 years, and soon we'll be saying in our 20th year, that's it for tech twit. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can. Bye.
