This Week in Tech Episode 873 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word.
Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for TWIT this weekend. Tech great panel for you. Science fiction author. Corey doctoral is here. He's joined by Tim Stevens from CNET and from protocol.com. Oh, and Thomas lots to talk about, we'll get the guy's ideas on what Elon should do when he finally gets a hold of TWITtter. Why web 0.3 is not going that great. In fact, how the latest plan to sell, what was it? Board apes brought ether down and Corey will show us his femur. He's gonna make a walking stick out of it. It's all coming up. Next on Podcasts. You love
TWIT Intro (00:00:39):
From people. You trust this
Leo Laporte (00:00:43):
TWIT.
Leo Laporte (00:00:52):
This is TWIT this week in tech episode, 873 recorded Sunday May 1st, 2022, a little patience and a lot of Hey, this episode of this week in tech is brought to you by podium. Join more than 100,000 businesses that already use podium to streamline their customer interactions. Get started for free at podium.com/TWIT, or sign up for a paid podium account and get a free credit card reader restrictions apply and buy our crowd. Our crowd helps accredited investors invest early in pre IPO companies alongside professional venture capitalists. Join the fastest growing venture capital investment community@ourcrowd.com slash TWIT. And by Nova traditional audio conference systems can entail lots of components. Installation could take days and you might not get the mic coverage you need. That's complex expensive, but ne Reva audio is easy to install and manage no technicians required and you get true full room coverage and that's easy. Economical, learn more@nevadotcomandbyuserway.org user way is the world's number one accessibility solution. And it's committed to enabling the fundamental human right of digital accessibility for everyone. When you're ready to make your site compliant, deciding which solution to use is an easy choice. Go to user way.org/TWIT for 30% off user AI powered accessibility solution.
Leo Laporte (00:02:31):
It's time for TWIT this week in tech to show we cover the weeks tech news I had to bring in the big brains for this one. <Laugh> no one could figure out what the hell's going on with Elon Musk, TWITtter, Tim Stevens is here. Editor chief of the newly Kristin SNET cars, formerly road show. Still there still editor in chief. Great to see you, Tim.
TWIT Intro (00:02:52):
Great to see you too, li
Leo Laporte (00:02:53):
Thanks for having me on. And you, you told me you had a good winner here. We are on Mayday. So I guess the ice racing is over in upper New York state. I'm hoping.
Tim Stevens (00:03:01):
Yeah, it's been been a couple weeks since we've had had in the ice. Yeah. We're still waiting for really things. Toal we just had snow last week, so it's it's still hanging on there though. Wow.
Leo Laporte (00:03:09):
As Jonathan Colton says, no, I better not. It is on <laugh> It's may it's may no more snow to driving begins today. That's what he says. Owen Thomas is here from protocol. Hello? Owen Thomas. Yeah, he's doing the full Isaac. Good to see you.
Owen Thomas (00:03:28):
How are ya?
Leo Laporte (00:03:29):
I'm great. You're in Virginia now. Not in the, not in the bay area.
Owen Thomas (00:03:34):
My, my native land. Oh, Fairfax county, Virginia.
Leo Laporte (00:03:38):
Oh, that's horse country. Isn't it?
Owen Thomas (00:03:41):
It, it was maybe 40 years ago. It's now suburbia.
Leo Laporte (00:03:44):
Everything for me, EV all my references are at least 40 years old. So you'll forgive me for
Owen Thomas (00:03:51):
That all is forgiven
Leo Laporte (00:03:53):
Also with us, the science fiction, novelist and big thinker, Mr. Corey doctoral from pluralistic net. Always. Good to see you, Corey. Thank you for being here.
Cory Doctorow (00:04:02):
It's my pleasure. Nice to see you
Leo Laporte (00:04:04):
Too. If anybody could figure out what Elon Musk should do with TWITtter, it would be Corey doctoral.
Cory Doctorow (00:04:10):
Yeah. I, I don't think he'd like my answer, but we'll
Leo Laporte (00:04:13):
Talk. Well, let's talk. Let's talk. FF has written already TWITtter has a new owner. This is Jillian York and Jenny Gehart and Jason Kelly and David Green combining their great minds. Here's what he should do. It's pretty clear. Elon doesn't have a clue what he should do. He knows what he wants to do, but they're kind of mutually conflicting ideas. Things like get rid of spam bots and protect free speech <laugh>, which are mutual exclusive.
Cory Doctorow (00:04:46):
Yeah. You know, there's this thing that people do where when they don't know much about a complicated subject, they say it's so simple. I don't know why you're not doing it. It's really obvious that all you should do is act that I remember. I was just thinking the other day, I I read a, a book when I was a kid, a kid's book where the premise was that the protagonist had figured out how to predict the weather 10 years out. And the way that they did it is they just asked the, the meteorologist what they did to predict the weather one day out. And then they just doubled it and tripled it.
Leo Laporte (00:05:19):
<Laugh>
Cory Doctorow (00:05:20):
How they got to 10 years. And this whole thing, like, I wanna, I want to reduce the amount of people who get banned. And I also wanna ban anyone who I think is a bot is a really good example of just not really understanding what you're talking about. And I, I think, you know, the, the argument that TWITtter should have all the things that are legally allowed in America is clearly not a good plan. Well,
Leo Laporte (00:05:48):
For one thing, TWITtter, isn't just in America. That was what, that was what he told Chris Anderson in his interview at Ted was well, oh, it's easy. You just free
Cory Doctorow (00:05:57):
Speech
Leo Laporte (00:05:58):
Is not illegal. Yeah. A buy by.
Cory Doctorow (00:06:00):
Yeah. And so, you know, I think that every conversational space has some limits. And you know, it is true that like setting a limit for a hundred million people is really hard. It's even harder to do it for 3 billion, which is one of the reasons Facebook kind of sucks. Right. And, and, you know, I think a lot of people are like, the problem with Facebook is that mark Zuckerberg is the wrong person to set the conversational policies for 3 billion people speaking a thousand languages in a hundred countries. And I think the right answer is like, nobody should have that job. And, you know, America has a, an approach to this, that as someone who's not an American, but was just called up for my citizenship in interview, I'm, I'm quite fond of which is federalism, which is the idea that there's some like minimum standards that we have for, for what we want.
Cory Doctorow (00:06:45):
And then we allow, we devolve control to smaller groups of people who set their own rules, and we make it real easy to go from one group to the other. So the states can set a bunch of rules for the, that are different. I, I like living in California for example, where non-compete agreements are illegal. And you know, it's really easy to move to California, so you can move to California and you just will never be subjected to a non-compete, which is, which is good. And it's a way to find out, you know, how, how people wanna live and what works and what doesn't the laboratory of democracy. See, as they say, and, you know, allowing TWITtter users to leave TWITtter, but continue to exchange messages with it by, by having a federated system where you had people who ran their own servers, that if they met a certain standard, you know, about privacy and about certain other things, maybe boxing and so on, they could continued interchange messages. And then, you know, within their own communities, they would set up their own rules. And you might have a TWITtter community of your own. You might have a sounds
Leo Laporte (00:07:47):
Like you're describing Mastodon
Cory Doctorow (00:07:50):
It's well, the problem with Mastodon is that every everyone is already on TWITtter. And so there's a really high switching cost,
Leo Laporte (00:07:57):
Right? You have to
Cory Doctorow (00:07:58):
Delete, you have to convince all the people you wanna talk to on TWITtter to go to Mac
Leo Laporte (00:08:02):
Don't you worry that part of the problem is simply scale that if everybody who was on TWITtter went to mast on similar problems with rear their ugly heads.
Cory Doctorow (00:08:11):
If they went to one ma on server, for sure. If they went to 10,000 Mastodon servers, there would be interesting new, gnarly problems. Like, you know, is it, is it white listing or blacklist when people create a new server? What, what are the terms on which, yeah,
Leo Laporte (00:08:24):
When I created my server, I banned only, I, I did not, I did not interoperate with gab.com, which is a right wing version of Macedon and another server, which a show remain nameless, truth,
Cory Doctorow (00:08:38):
Social or something.
Leo Laporte (00:08:39):
Yeah. Well, I social's running a Macon, but are they federating? They're not federating.
Cory Doctorow (00:08:43):
I don't know if they're federating or not. You're right. I mean, if Macon's have got a really interesting moderation and
Leo Laporte (00:08:49):
Yeah, I moderate my instance.
Cory Doctorow (00:08:51):
Yeah. But as a user, so I use quad nets one, which is memo dot FFR. They're, they're the French equivalent of FF or French analog to EF F. And I like them cuz you know, they're, they stand up for your speech. Right. I thought they'd be a good place to be. And they federate with a lot of people. And I noticed that there were people who were actual Nazis in my mentions who were on servers with names like, you know, white MSA dot. Wow. So other, and I could just block the whole server. So I just, as,
Leo Laporte (00:09:20):
As an individual, you can block a, an entire server. See, that's great. Yeah.
Cory Doctorow (00:09:24):
So they, you know, that's a set of policies that I like. It's really easy for me to quit quad Annette and go to a different server. If I want a different set of policies. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and to automatically have everyone who's following me there, move their follow to somewhere else. So my switching costs are really low. You know, there's a, there's a study, a pre-print that just came out. That's gonna be presented at Kai this year. The computer human interaction conference that ick puts on about people who left WhatsApp when they changed their privacy policy in 2021 and installed signal. And there were several million people who did this and the researchers surveyed over a thousand of them to get a good representative sample. And what they found is that only about 20% managed to shift any of their conversations to signal like that is got anyone from WhatsApp that they wanted to talk to, to leave WhatsApp and move, to signal.
Cory Doctorow (00:10:13):
And of those half percent of them manage to actually delete WhatsApp and move all the conversations that matter to them to signal. So switching costs are really high. They make it really hard to leave one service. They keep other services from popping up interoperability and Federation make switching costs really low. You don't have to convince all your friends to leave. You just like literally a hundred of the people who installed signal could have immediately deleted WhatsApp because it wouldn't matter if the people they wanted to talk to had left WhatsApp because they could still talk to them from saying
Leo Laporte (00:10:45):
That's the key interoperability. Absolutely. Yeah. Tim statements, are you a TWITtter user?
Tim Stevens (00:10:53):
Yeah, I definitely am. And, and it's been an interesting week for sure. I I've definitely must a lot of followers this week, which I think is really unfortunate. And I think it's very, very early for people to be making such a drastic measure, to be, you know, deleting their accounts. So we really don't know how this is gonna shake out or even if it's gonna pass. I mean, there's still every possibility that Musk is going to just change his mind there. Fine. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:11:13):
There's one theory that Musco just walk away from this. He doesn't really, although he's so old, I think 8 billion worth of Tesla stocks since this offer, he's got to get to come up with 21 billion personally. So there's a lot more to go still. So, and he
Owen Thomas (00:11:27):
Said, he's not selling more Tesla stocks. I, he can't, I'm a little curious about the math. Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:11:34):
So Tim, your point of view is the wait and see of you. I'm gonna see what happens
Tim Stevens (00:11:40):
It is for now. And ultimately, you know, I, I think TWITtter is an important enough platform that to simply walk away is to, to basically, you know, throw up your hands into feed. If you wanna have some say in, in what happens going forward. And I think that you need to ultimately stay and, and voice your opinion on what TWITtter should be. I think Cory's got a lot of great ideas and it'd be wonderful to have some of those implemented for sure. If I could immediately step away to something like mass and have my audience come with me, then, then I probably would do that as well. But obviously that's not something that we can do. I am definitely very concerned. I mean, Musk on one day was saying he didn't wanna political. And then the next day he's tweeting out political memes, which were, were quite shortsighted in my opinion.
Tim Stevens (00:12:18):
So I, I have a lot of concerns about what that means for, you know, having someone like that at the core of the brand. Right. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to turn turn this. What I think is a very important social platform into a an untenable solution. And, and I'm often that if enough folks stay behind enough, folks are keen on having it remain what it is, which is basically an open platform for, for discussion on all subjects with reasonably okay moderation. Then I hope that we can continue to improve the situation and not not make it worse.
Leo Laporte (00:12:47):
Yeah. TWITtter is made up of the people who tweet on it, not the people who own it. So, so far. Yeah. How about you Owen? But,
Owen Thomas (00:12:55):
Well, this is, this is the insane thing. You know, Elon Musk says TWITtter has a problem because like Taylor swift isn't tweeting and that he's doing everything he can to make it as unpleasant as possible for someone like Taylor swift to be on TWITtter, by his, his stated plan.
Leo Laporte (00:13:12):
The reason those top 10 TWITtter don't tweet very much is it's a hostile environment for them. Is that what you're saying?
Owen Thomas (00:13:19):
Yeah. It's a, there's no payback. It's, it's brutal benefit. Yeah. So they, they use it as kind of one way broadcast, you know, they've got a new record that's dropping you know, there's a new music video. They tell their followers, their followers, you know, go wild for set and they don't stay to interact because there's nothing in it for them. They don't get value. Right. Has zero
Leo Laporte (00:13:44):
Plan to many people pointed this out. There are smaller communities on TWITtter, black. Twittter's the one most people use as an example where there's somewhat insular. And they are really important to the people who are members of those communities. I'm sure there are many more I'd hate to, I'd hate to lose that for those people. And I don't think anything Elon's thinking about doing is gonna make that less tenable or is it Corey? What, what are the dangers of what Elon might do?
Cory Doctorow (00:14:14):
Well, I mean, here's the thing that, that I think we should take away from this, which is that when TWITtter was run by a board of like however many, eight extremely wealthy tech people, it was not well managed to the extent that those were the eight people who had decided to sell it to Elon mosque. Right. So if you think
Leo Laporte (00:14:39):
The El he points out that none of them were real TWITtter users.
Cory Doctorow (00:14:43):
<Laugh> right. So, but if, if you think Elon Musks shouldn't be in charge of TWITtter, then per force, you shouldn't think, you should think that the people who put him in charge of TWITtter
Leo Laporte (00:14:52):
Shouldn't have been also,
Cory Doctorow (00:14:53):
Shouldn't be in charge of TWITtter. Right?
Leo Laporte (00:14:55):
Right. Well, ultimately the shareholders are who is gonna decide whether he gets it. He still has to get a shareholder vote.
Cory Doctorow (00:15:01):
Sure. That's very true. But I, I think that, you know there are lots of ways that TWITtter could become really awful. So you know, this human verification thing, there are lots of ways that it can go very wrong. Basically Musk is proposing to do in some way to gather a gigantic amount of potentially compromising personal identifying information, cuz uniquely identifying and dis aviating a hundred million people in a thousand countries are a hundred countries rather is a really big job. And it's gonna involve either government ID or biometrics or
Leo Laporte (00:15:33):
Something. He's not averse to that because Tesla gathers all the information about every drive. Sure. I remember when I had a model X order in, I felt like I shouldn't say anything about Elon because of well known blogger did say something negative about Tesla and Elon canceled his order. So yeah. He's very, he's not a free speech.
Cory Doctorow (00:15:54):
<Laugh> very capricious, right.
Leo Laporte (00:15:55):
He's capricious. That's a better word than anything. Yeah.
Cory Doctorow (00:15:58):
So, so, you know, if, if, if Musk says, well, what we should do is aggregate all this potentially sensitive person identifying information and then never leak it. He's being extremely optimistic. Right. And, and rather reckless. I about well now 15 years ago, I wrote a column where I compare personal identifying information to uranium and plutonium. Cause I grew up in Ontario where, where we mine a lot of the world's uranium. And when uranium comes outta the ground, it's pretty benign. You can actually like buy it on Amazon for so iShare projects. But once you refine it into plutonium, it's, imortal like, it will last longer than any human institution or, or built object. It is like plural potent, right? There's no amount of it. That's so small that it won't kill you. So you can't unmake it. And it is, it is infinitely toxic. And if you pile up all of that PII, it will end up kind of slithering around, within and outside of TWITtter. Like the only way to keep data from leaking is to neither retain it nor nor collect it ideally. And and that exposes a lot of people to risk. So that's just like one example of what it means to have like a, a D it show up,
Leo Laporte (00:17:14):
Well, even crosses my mind. That may be part of the, because one of the questions is what how's he gonna make any money on this? This is a huge expense. No one's ever made money on TWITtter. How does he justify this expense? Maybe the, maybe the information is the point.
Cory Doctorow (00:17:29):
Well, I think he doesn't know what he's doing. I, you know, I think that he's someone who's extreme million narcissistic, you know, I'm not trying to diagnose him at a distance, but this is the guy who, who didn't found Tesla and bought it from people who did found Tesla. And as part of the contract made them promise that they would call him a co-founder. Even though he wasn't. Yeah. That's a really weird thing. He also calls himself the chief engineer of Tesla, even though he's not an engineer at Tesla. And when you write about, if you are a, a journalist and you write about the chief engineer of Tesla, their PR department will contact you and say, you'll find that Elon is the chief engineer of Tesla, the the person you're, but is like the chief operating engineer. He's
Leo Laporte (00:18:10):
The guy does the work <laugh>
Cory Doctorow (00:18:12):
Yeah. He wears Elon wears the, like the engineer hat and gets to pull the whistle on the railroad. So he thinks he's the engineer. Right? It's it's it is really bizarre circumstance. So I don't know. I mean, he's pretty chaotic, right? He does a lot of chaotic things. I think that he he's he's got poor impulse control. I think he's a very good showman. And I think that he doesn't really know what he's getting TWITtter for. I I've heard some theories that I think are kind of plausible. Like if he has TWITtter, he can use it as like a PR vehicle for his, his other stuff. Yes. You
Leo Laporte (00:18:47):
Know, TWITtter, but not $44 billion worth.
Cory Doctorow (00:18:51):
I mean, you could do that for
Leo Laporte (00:18:52):
Free right now. Yeah. He doesn't have to buy TWITtter to do that,
Cory Doctorow (00:18:56):
But, but, you know, so here's, so here's my Elon Musk story. One day I was on TWITtter and someone retweeted Elon Musk saying, I consider myself a utopian socialist in the mode of Ian banks. So science fiction writer who's dead and I couldn't help it. And I replied and I said, I knew Ian, he was an ENT trade unionist. The national labor review board has sanctioned you like four times in the last three months. I don't think you can call yourself a utopian socialist in the mode of, of Ian banks. And we got into a really dumb argument where he said things like, well, there aren't any unions in banks' culture novels. And I said, yes, they're set on solar system size, spaceships that travel thousands of times the speed of light that have a trillion people living on that <laugh> and are piloted by superhuman AIS. And, and he said, you know, well, if, if, if Ian could have seen what my factories he'd see that it doesn't need a union either. Oh boy. And you know, there's
Leo Laporte (00:19:56):
Sort of difference. There's fighting words. <Laugh>
Cory Doctorow (00:19:58):
Difference between faster than light travel and eeking out marginal gains in the production of electric vehicles. And then he called me an enemy of humanity, I think,
Leo Laporte (00:20:07):
Oh my God.
Cory Doctorow (00:20:08):
But here's the thing that was really weird about it. That part wasn't weird, just like, oh, he's just a crank. But the part that was really weird was all the bots that follow Elon Elon to try and put him on tilt. I actually think this is a lot of it. There are, there are for sure, a hundred percent shorts who try to put Elon on tilt with bots that just troll him night and day and
Leo Laporte (00:20:29):
Vice versa. I might add he has his own bot or me.
Cory Doctorow (00:20:33):
I, that is may entirely be true. I mean, I definitely, there were a lot of like notice me SEI people in there who I don't think were bots. I think that they were, you know, sad fanboys, but that like the actual like inauthentic conduct, right? Like just hundreds of bots that showed up that I had to block before I could even read my timeline after being mentioned by Mo exactly. And I still
Leo Laporte (00:20:54):
Get them. Yeah. Yeah. I still
Cory Doctorow (00:20:55):
Get them. Like this is five years later. And I still like a couple of times a week, we'll have to block a bot that just goes through everything. Musk is every tweeted and tweets weird, horrendous, garbage to see if they can and put him on tilt. So that short positions, I think so short positions can pay maybe cuz they're just trolls, who knows. Right. Right. So I think that like some of what he's motivated by all this stuff about like we have to get rid of the bots is that he has got this unbelievably specific thing. It's like, it's like if he suddenly was like real, like he bought all of CVS because he the special shampoos used to treat hair plugs to be more, you know, prominently featured.
Leo Laporte (00:21:33):
They should have,
Cory Doctorow (00:21:33):
Cause they're really hard to find. And it's a problem for people <laugh> and it was just really, it's just a problem for him, you know?
Owen Thomas (00:21:41):
You know, Corey, I, I, I think you're really onto something there because Elon really got active on TWITtter to the like fight with Tesla short sellers. Yes. So the idea that they're, you know, they're, jitting him up, you know, like egging him on it's, it's actually pretty plausible.
Leo Laporte (00:22:00):
Is there? Yeah, I
Cory Doctorow (00:22:00):
Think it,
Leo Laporte (00:22:01):
I, I asked Corey if
Cory Doctorow (00:22:03):
Really think they make his life miserable.
Leo Laporte (00:22:05):
So maybe that's all he is trying to do is get rid of that. Yeah. Yeah. I asked Cory what Elon could do to screw TWITtter up. Let me ask you Tim Stevens, what Elon could do to make TWITtter better <laugh> and I put you in the spot didn't I, I honestly feel like, you know, they always say no, no plan survives the first encounter with the enemy. I really think that Elon's plans to free speech open the algorithm and get rid of the bots is only gonna last as long as, until he gets in the chair. And then who knows what he's gonna do? What
Tim Stevens (00:22:39):
Should he do? I mean, I think the number one thing is what Cora was talking about earlier, which would be the ability to, to take your audience with you to another platform if you want to. But since we've already covered that ground, I, I think ultimately has to be much better moderation tools and much smarter moderation as well as I, I consume TWITtter on my phone and on my desktop and and a couple other platforms as well. And as I go from one of the other, I'll actually see different sets of tweets because my phone has a different level of, of, of basically profanity filter and other filters than other platforms do, which just kind of shows weak. Twittter is at actually keeping you from seeing abusive content, even if it's light stuff. So I think if, if Musk really wants to open the flood gates and let everybody back on then ultimately they need a lot better tools to give me the power, to, to control what I wanna see and what I don't wanna see, whether it be misinformation, whether it be hate speech, whether it be whatever.
Tim Stevens (00:23:30):
As of now, depending on which platform I go to, all that stuff gets through. And I have it relatively easy compared to a lot of folks who I know who have you know, a lot of people who are saying very mean things to them. So if he's really gonna open the flood gates in the name of free speech then moderation tools need to improve significantly
Leo Laporte (00:23:48):
Tools for end users as well to, to control.
Tim Stevens (00:23:51):
Yeah, absolutely. What
Leo Laporte (00:23:52):
They see. Mike, Masnick made an excellent point of tech dirt saying Elon is essentially saying what people said at the beginning of TWITtter before they really had had it TWITtter. And he's just gonna throw out 15 years of struggling with moderating a platform like this and all the knowledge gained there. It sounds like Elon just saying no, no, no, no, you guys we, we, I got an idea. Let's, let's do it better. I don't want to go on and on about Elon, but but somebody in the charm saying somebody should defend Elon <laugh> I guess it's you Owen <laugh> defend the man. I mean, look, he created SpaceX amazing, right. Tesla has, has changed the world for electric vehicles,
Cory Doctorow (00:24:36):
Which someone else found it.
Leo Laporte (00:24:38):
I understand, but he's certainly took it. And you know, you could also make the argument, he did it with government grants, but he's taken to electric vehicles into the mainstream. Thank you, Elon. Spacex is pretty cool. They landed those two rockets like that. That was cool. They're certainly better doing better than NASA or the Russians
Cory Doctorow (00:24:58):
Using a lot of NASA technology. It
Leo Laporte (00:25:00):
Okay. Yeah. Well, you know,
Cory Doctorow (00:25:02):
They wouldn't exist without NASA the same way apple wouldn't exist without the do D
Leo Laporte (00:25:06):
You know, I, Elon is basically kind of a Steve jobs, Ian character where no, he didn't invent any of this, but he's a very, he's a master marketer.
Cory Doctorow (00:25:15):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:25:16):
Great.
Owen Thomas (00:25:16):
Yeah, absolutely. And, and, and I think as soon as Elon Musk can realize his plan to get a human to Mars, he should do it. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:25:26):
Goes, Elon go <laugh>,
Cory Doctorow (00:25:31):
You know, the last time Elon, we, we played that Penelope Scotts song about Elon Musk. Yes. that still is the thing that I, that I come back to <laugh> whenever I think about him, because she does capture that ambivalence that you're express. Yeah. About it's difficult About what he's
Leo Laporte (00:25:51):
Got. I drove a Tesla for a long time. I really love the fact that he made and I'll only drive electric vehicles from now on. I love the fact that he made that mainstream. I don't know if that's his past and his future is more chaotic or if this is just the guy all along, I, I can tell you one thing and the, both the good and the bad of TWITtter is it, it takes people like you, Corey, and, and, and <laugh> brings you out into the, into the fr ha of the modern world. And, and it's one of the reasons I stopped using TWITtter is it's almost inevitable that you get in a battle eventually and maybe say things that you regret eventually. And I don't think anybody benefits from being on TWITtter, as much as they benefit from not being on TWITtter. Maybe, maybe that's, that's what Elon will do for TWITtter. Kick us all off. I wouldn't mind that either.
Cory Doctorow (00:26:44):
I mean, I like TWITtter. I maybe that's an unpopular opinion, but I,
Leo Laporte (00:26:47):
No, it's very popular. No, no. I try to convince people how awful TWITtter is all the time and nobody
Cory Doctorow (00:26:52):
Will, but I think people on TWITtter like to talk about how much they don't like it. I can, I can name some things about TWITtter that I think should be fixed. Yeah. In terms of like content moderation and, and stuff. Yeah. I got dog piled at one point by this. It was hilarious. I wrote about, about police violence and this cop said, well, why don't you come along for a ride along? And, you know, and I'll show you what it's really like. And it was just like this kind of bad faith response to a, a pretty subtle and it, and significant argument I made. And I just, I just blocked him. And so then he quote, tweeted it, or he CA screencap the block and he had like 12,000 or 20,000 followers and said Hey, this guy hates cops. Why don't you gang up on him? And oh
Leo Laporte (00:27:32):
Lord, tell him piece
Cory Doctorow (00:27:33):
Of shit is, and then I just got like, like literally thousands of like, I want to come over to your house and kill you kind of tweets. Like, I hope the Burbank police, I hope someone murders you in Burbank and the Burbank department don't do anything about it. And I was like, yeah, this is definitely a guy I should have gone on a ride along with, because he's really proved himself to be kind. And the kinda person who I'd learned a lot from, but the point was, there was no easy way to do, to, to block it. I tried using a bunch of tools, like block together to block all of this guy's followers to just say, like, I don't, I just, if you follow doing this, like Gastly monster of a human, I just don't wanna ever hear from you. And all of those tools tripped TWITtters you are doing too much automated stuff. Filters. Yeah. Right. And, and they locked me outta my account. <Laugh> right. So that was like a, that was like a compounding failure. Like there are a bunch of things like that at you're like a TWITtter power user. I'm sure everyone's got like half a dozen of these. I
Leo Laporte (00:28:27):
Should point out you accomplished your, your goal though, because you're off TWITtter. <Laugh> that, that worked right, right. It was how you wanted to accomplish it.
Cory Doctorow (00:28:36):
Well, no, they could still reply to me. I just, and I could read it. I just couldn't block
Leo Laporte (00:28:40):
Them. Just couldn't do anything. Right.
Cory Doctorow (00:28:41):
Yeah. It just locked my account. So it was like, it was a stupid you know, it's a it's stupid edge case fail and their like moderation stuff. There are a bunch of things that I could completely see building that that would be really good. You know, one of the things that TWITtter did that I was very skeptical of, and now I'm like, oh my God, that was brilliant is hide as an option. So if someone replies to you, you can hide their reply. And so what people see when they go to your tweet, as they see there are some hidden replies, which they can click and see. And what that does is often the, like the, the worst kinds of arguments are the ones where it's just people trolling in foolish ways. And it just means that everyone ends up talking about something that's not very interesting.
Cory Doctorow (00:29:22):
Yeah. And, and, and, and also like just generates a lot more heat and light and what I can do, I think of myself as, you know, if, if I have a tweet that gets a lot of retweets. And so when I think of myself as someone who instigated a conversation and the way that I can be, you know, express my duty to that conversation to try and make it good is I can hide the stuff that I think is dumb. And the people who wanna read it can, and they can reply to it if they want. But I, unless you take an extra step, you don't see it. You're not tempted to reply to it. And the actual caliber of the conversation goes up. So if you're someone who like kicks off big, interesting TWITtter conversations, they've produced some pretty simple and innovative tools that actually make those conversations better.
Cory Doctorow (00:30:06):
Yeah. And so, you know, there's a lot of stuff on TWITtter that I, that I really rather like. And then there's a bunch of stuff that I don't like too. I, I just would like TWITtter. I just think that some of the, the, the hard TWITtter calls to make about what should, and shouldn't be permitted are calls that are much better made among small communities, right? One of the constant failure modes of TWITtter and all social media is the inability to distinguish speech from counter speech. So there's a big difference between that guy call or calling someone the N-word and saying, I can't believe I just called the N-word right. And you yet, both of those tend to trip the same filter. And so that's a, that's a really big problem, especially since people who's like, you know, burning passion in life is figuring out how to hurl racial slurs at people can have all day long to think up euphemisms for the N-word or putting, you know words and brackets to indicate Jew or whatever.
Cory Doctorow (00:31:03):
And then the people who they're actually targeting have just wanna live their lives. And so they're the ones who aren't gonna use the euphemisms and are gonna get killed by the algorithm or by the moderators who are over busy or moderating in languages. They don't speak. And, and the actual, like bad actors you're trying to catch are the ones who don't. And really the people who can just distinguished speech from counter speech are the, the people in the affected community and letting them find their own place where they can talk and set their own rules and decide what they do. And don't block is I think the only way we can answer this, it's, it's not like we have to add more pages to the three ring binder that has the moderation part policies and have enough branching if thens, that we cover all pen, potential, conversational possibilities. Right. We, we, we just need people who understand the context to, to be the ones in charge of determining what, what stays and what goes that
Leo Laporte (00:31:57):
Does not scale well, and that's really the problem. So you're saying small Masson instances, something like that.
Cory Doctorow (00:32:02):
Federates yeah. Doesn't scale it federates yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. Figuring out what to have for dinner doesn't scale, which is why we don't try and come up with a single menu plan for the whole country.
Leo Laporte (00:32:10):
<Laugh> right.
Cory Doctorow (00:32:12):
We, we, we just
Leo Laporte (00:32:14):
Jack Dorsey and the blue sky project, he was working on something that sounded like was sort of federated. Do any of, you know, what blue sky
Cory Doctorow (00:32:23):
Yeah. Was. I learned some cool about blue sky, which is that they have a 15 million endowment and no oversight from TWITtter. So it actually doesn't matter what, who runs TWITtter, blue sky gets to go on now, who, who runs TWITtter matters a lot. If blue sky makes something and TWITtter decides not to use it, right? Like that TWITtter is under no obligation to use whatever blue sky comes up with because they're, they're not part of TWITtter formally, but it also means that if TWITtter changes their mind or comes under new management, they, they, you know, they can't be hamster, at least not in their, their development work. Their rollout can obviously be hamstrung by whoever is running TWITtter. They, and it's in, it's in blue sky's mission to do a decentralized. I mean, that's the key to it, right.
Cory Doctorow (00:33:15):
They had this idea, they called an app store for moderation, which, I mean, that's an interesting way of, of phrasing it. I don't know that I don't know exactly where that fits. I'd be interested to see what they come out with when they come out with it. I knew some of the people involved when it was getting started up and they were people I thought very highly of. So, you know, I I'm, I'm glad to see blue sky kind of rolling along. The other thing we should mention is the digital market act in the European union, in the access act in the us DMA initially only affects end to Inc or messenger services. And but eventually we'll cover social media and access act will cover social media. Although not TWITtter, it's not big enough people. We talk a lot about TWITtter.
Cory Doctorow (00:33:57):
Twittter's incredibly tiny. It's a hundred million users versus 3 billion on Facebook, right? Like it's, it's not, not any of those will have laws to encourage interoperability right. To require it require it. Yeah. To say like, if someone shows up, so what it would do is it would say if TWITtter showed up at Facebook's door or mask it on, or you or me, and said, I want to interoperate, they would have to like expose an API to us that would let our users exchange messages and be in communities with Facebook users. Yeah. Unfortunately you have to have 75 billion euros of worth. And no, no. That's to that's to be mandated. Oh, that's to be mandated. Okay. Mandate, okay. Yeah. No, that's the other end of it's. So like, there's, there's a, they could go to Facebook. I see what you're saying. Yeah. Facebook come to TWITtter and say, you have to interoperate, but FA but TWITtter, but TWITtter could go to Facebook. Nice. Yeah. All right. I wanna take a little break. We we're done with the <laugh> El Elon Musk, although I really was looking forward to your story Owen and Thomas about how you got in a battle with Elon over having to refile his S one.
Owen Thomas (00:35:04):
Oh yeah. That was a saga
Cory Doctorow (00:35:06):
<Laugh>. Was that on a TWITtter stage or was that somewhere else?
Owen Thomas (00:35:10):
Well, the, the interesting thing is he's kind of in a similar pickle now in that he has been borrowing against his Tesla shares and there could be a real problem if Tesla shares keep dropping in value, but the was Tesla was trying to go public. It had a big loan from that I think was backed by the us government special bonds that, that it had issued. And one of the requirements was that Elon not not sell or give away a certain number, but his shares, well, he was in the middle of a messy contested divorce, and the divorce settlement could potentially have breached that agreement and that would've had cascading bad effects on Tesla. And he wasn't disclosing it to shareholders. Does this of familiar? Yeah. Must not making the needed disclosures. Yeah. So I reported that he made it all about, oh, this, you know, scuzzy journalist is digging into my divorce and I'm like, no one would care about your divorce. If it didn't have the risk of directly affecting your finances.
Leo Laporte (00:36:15):
So he had to write a post, given the choice. I'd rather stick a fork in my hand than write about my personal life, says Elon Musk. Unfortunately I have to thanks to you. Oh, and Thomas you, I blame you. All right.
Owen Thomas (00:36:30):
It was it was delightful fact checking that I, I, I wrote a piece. I got out my red pen <laugh> and CRO through every false claim. He made that, oh
Leo Laporte (00:36:40):
Lord. Oh
Owen Thomas (00:36:40):
Lord. So called correcting the record piece. Yes, it was, it was entertaining. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:36:45):
Let's take a little break, come back with more great panel, Tim, but we aren't. I promise you we're done with TWITtter, Tim, Tim Stevens editor in chief of the newly named SNET cars, formally roadshow. Same great content. We also thank you for being here as always from protocol, we've got Owen Thomas new place to be relatively senior editor over there. And it's great to have you a love protocol. You've been doing a great job free, which I love, although you can subscribe and get newsletters and stuff. And Cory doctor O sci-fi author, his latest attack surface doing well.
Cory Doctorow (00:37:25):
Yeah, doing very well. I, I, I mean, it's been a while since I've given a much thought I have eight books in production right now. Holy cow. So I'm kind of, I'm, I'm living as science fiction writer should in the future.
Leo Laporte (00:37:35):
Yes, you're right. Your next one I'm sure. Unauthorized per is the right now is the subject of our Stacy's book club in club TWITtter. I mentioned this before coming up later. Oh, it's our, is, did I miss it? Oh, shoot. It
Cory Doctorow (00:37:49):
Happened. Yeah. Happened. That was very exciting.
Leo Laporte (00:37:52):
So, oh, I, oh, no. Next one is termination shock. That's right. We already did authorize bread. Also
Cory Doctorow (00:37:56):
A good book. I read that book that was in Rotterdam seeing the giant dam that he wrote it about.
Leo Laporte (00:38:02):
Oh, wow. That's kind of cool. Yeah. if you're not a club TWIT, remember lots of stuff coming up Thursday, Scott Wilkinson hasn't asked me anything. The following Thursday father Robert baller with a fireside chat Stacy's book club is coming up June 16th, but that's just part of what you get in club TWIT ad free versions of all of our shows, access to the club to discord, where there is always a good conversation going on about all kinds of things and many, many animated gifs. Also <laugh> you get the TWIT plus feed with conversations from before and after the show and also shows that don't make it into the regular feeds like the untitled Linux show Stacy's book club, the GIZ, we are launching new, a new show soon. Stay tuned for that because club members pay, we are able to launch shows without advertising.
Leo Laporte (00:38:49):
That really helps us launch new shows this week in space, came out of the club. So thank you, club members, seven bucks a month club TWIT go to TWIT TV slash club TWIT. Thank you. In advance. Our show today brought to you by podium. I'll tell you what I think the, the merchants of Petaluma have discovered podium. I love it when I go to our local ice cream store. And as I'm leaving, they say, would you like to leave review on Yelp or Google? And I can click a link and leave review just like that. I get messages. Hey, we haven't seen you in a while. Would you like a discount on ice cream? Yes. it is a great way to stay in touch with your customers because text messaging is much more effective. It's what your customers want. It's kind of a habit we learned during the pandemic so much by better than playing phone tag.
Leo Laporte (00:39:36):
There aren't enough hours in the day for that. Podium makes every interaction as easy as sending a text. So everything that makes your business great can get done faster. I noticed for instance, when we need somebody to do something around the house, the one that gets the job is the one that texts me back fastest. I love that podium. Just a better way to communicate. It's a better way to do everything. You can get reviews. Yes, you can collect payments through podium. You can market to your customer's podium, makes it all as easy as pressing send you. Won't just free up more time. You'll grow your business. You'll get more done with podium. You'll close deal with customers before the competition even has a chance to call 'em back. And I know that it's a case because it happens to me all the time. Join more than 100,000 businesses that already use podium to streamline their customer interaction. Get started for free podium, P O D I U M podium.com/TWIT. If you sign up for a paid podium account, you can get a free credit card reader as well. Restrictions of live that's podium.com/TWIT. We thank him so much for supporting our show and thank you for supporting it by using that address. Podium.Com/TWIT.
Leo Laporte (00:40:52):
One more El, I said no more Elon. I should mention one more Elon story during all of this last week judge rejected Elon's bid to truncate end its settlement, his settlement with the sec. That's the one where he got in trouble for tweeting that he was taking Tesla, private funding arranged the SCC said, no, that's not true. And you can't say that. Find him 20 million find Tesla 20 million. And furthermore said that Elon and from now on <laugh> would have to have lawyers review every tweet to make sure he wasn't making illegal tweets. Elon says that's a violation of my free speech. A federal judge said, no, it's not <laugh> you cannot complain that this violates your first amendment rights. So a little, little victory, I think in this case for the S E C
Cory Doctorow (00:41:44):
Let's see. I mean the point, the point of a settlement is that it's voluntary.
Leo Laporte (00:41:47):
Yeah. We
Cory Doctorow (00:41:48):
Settle the government. Didn't him not to do it. They said, if you promise us will no longer do this, we won't punish you for this rule. You broke. And he was like, that sounds like a good deal to me. That is not a first amendment
Leo Laporte (00:41:59):
Violation. And then four years later, oh, I don't wanna do that. Sorry on
Owen Thomas (00:42:05):
Also, he's not supposed to imply that he didn't do the behavior that he agreed that he did, which is what he's saying now that, that he had the funding. Everything was fine. He didn't deceive shareholders. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:42:19):
He's back to doing it again.
Owen Thomas (00:42:21):
Yeah. This, I mean, is anyone paying attention to this pattern is, you know, in in the TWITtter boardroom, that's my question.
Leo Laporte (00:42:33):
Apparently not
Owen Thomas (00:42:33):
Heavy sigh.
Leo Laporte (00:42:34):
Apparently not. <Laugh> apparently not. The board ape metaverse is added again, <laugh> a frenzy raises millions and crashes. Ethereum people buying plots of virtual land in a still unreleased metaverse featuring board. Apes is from Ulab the creator of the board apes yacht club collection. They raised 320 million worth of cryptocurrency selling 55,000 plots of virtual land demand was so strong that the Ethereum blockchain was disrupted. I don't know. Maybe there's nothing to say about that. That story speaks for itself.
Owen Thomas (00:43:24):
Oh, I, I I've. I have so many thoughts.
Leo Laporte (00:43:27):
Thoughts thought away, Mr.
Owen Thomas (00:43:29):
If I may paraphrase Beyonce, I don't think you're ready for this crypto. I don't think you're ready for crypto. I mean, it just shows you that crypto payments networks are not ready for prime time. Like they're not ready for a serious business board, a, which has promoted the heck out of its NFTs. You know, they, they swamped the system. That's, you know, that's pretty straightforward, but wouldn't, they have thought about that. Wouldn't thought what a successful sale would look like and modeled out how that would impact gas fees. Yeah. But
Leo Laporte (00:44:02):
They didn't did gas fees go through the roof because of it.
Owen Thomas (00:44:05):
They did. And in fact, I think they I think they, if I read, read this correctly, they temporarily stopped sales on Ethereum because they saw the effect of was having
Leo Laporte (00:44:17):
Transaction costs just to min other deed NFTs. After the launch. Now the plot of land itself was worth about $5,800 of Ethereum, the, the gas fees, the fee to make that transaction $6,000 <laugh> to ether. And so of obviously that's a disruption. If you have to, it costs you more money to make the transaction than pay for the transaction.
Cory Doctorow (00:44:43):
I mean, this is a, a fractally stupid story. <Laugh> so Molly, Molly white at web three is going great. Did a pretty good, what,
Leo Laporte (00:44:51):
What a great page. God bless you, Molly. Oh, good. Yeah.
Cory Doctorow (00:44:54):
And one of the things that she points out is that they actually did very explicitly consider their auction design and whether or not it would have an impact on Ethereum's ability to press process transactions. And they discarded the Dutch auction plan, which I, I don't know if it would've been better or worse for Ethereum as a system, but they discarded it because they said it would be too hard on their network. And they explicitly chose this mechanism because they thought it would be better for, for the financial processing system underpinning it. But I mean, all of this is really awful, right? So they're selling plots of land for a game that doesn't exist and which may never exist. So it's, it's, this is very selling the Brooklyn bridge, but their whole pitch, this pitch that board apes are you know, are the Vanguard of NFTs and NFTs are the Vanguard of revitalizing the art market by decentralizing.
Cory Doctorow (00:45:47):
It is a, a really like disingenuous pitch because no one who owns a board ape could tell you who the artist was behind it. There, there are no royalties for those artists. These are works made for hire. They're the artists who did make it the primary artist as a woman of color are struggling to capitalize on any of this. They're really just faceless entities behind the, the curtain there. And so the, the, all of the promises that are made about this just are, are literal, like err, nonsense that is indefensible and, and in arguably wrong. And, you know, that's, that's, you know, a land on top of that with, we are such financial geniuses that will come up with an auction designer, a sale design that won't crash, Ethereum, that promptly crashes Ethereum. And, you know, and then on top of that, all this business about them getting docked where like a journalist went and looked up their financial filings in which these people who have a multi-billion dollar empire who are extracting hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars from investors, customers, without telling you who they are, but who had told a regulator who they were as a matter of public record, suddenly claimed to have been docked because someone looked at the public record and then threatened and harassed the journalist who did it, like, you know, that doesn't permanently disqualify you from running even a lemonade stand, let alone a media empire.
Cory Doctorow (00:47:14):
I don't know what does,
Leo Laporte (00:47:17):
Oh, there's so many things to be upset about.
Cory Doctorow (00:47:20):
No, <laugh> you sound like stop complain. Corey,
Leo Laporte (00:47:23):
Everything sucks. Yeah. It's anyway, I mean, if, if by now, if you're not, if alarm bells aren't going off, whenever you look at an NFT or, or a, a crypto transaction, you know, web three is going great. It's a great site to look at. I'll just give you some idea of, of what's what's going on out there. Web three is going great.com and my favorite feet. Sure. We mentioned this on Wednesday and TWITg is over here in the lower, right. This little tracker, which is the grift counter trademark. And as you scroll through the various articles, the grift tracker adds up. <Laugh> the amount of Grif involved. So by the time you get to the end of the page, which you probably will never get to, it's a significant a significant sum of money going on. This is if you read this, I mean, I just, I feel like this kind of says all you need to know about all of this. I am I wrong? Do you think Owen to tell people it it's just a based a speculative bubble of pyramid scam and stay away. Do you have NFTs? Are you invested heavily in crypto?
Owen Thomas (00:48:37):
I, I am a what they call a no coiner. And it's interesting.
Leo Laporte (00:48:43):
What is that? I want to be that
Owen Thomas (00:48:45):
You, you have no crypto holdings.
Leo Laporte (00:48:47):
Oh, I do have actually I have a wallet. I can't get into it. That count.
Owen Thomas (00:48:51):
That's a, that's a dough coiner.
Leo Laporte (00:48:53):
<Laugh>, that's a coiner <laugh>.
Owen Thomas (00:48:57):
But yeah, there there's some people in the crypto world who will not talk to journalists who don't hold crypto, which is bonkers. When you think about like, you know, conventional,
Leo Laporte (00:49:06):
You gotta have a dog in the hunt, otherwise your coverage right. Will be one way to <laugh>. Which is
Owen Thomas (00:49:14):
Like, not the expectation that like a Tesla reporter would hold shares of, of Tesla, for example,
Leo Laporte (00:49:21):
It's, it's exact opposite. Right? Yeah.
Owen Thomas (00:49:24):
But I, you know, I, I think that it is, I think it's fascinating that there such utopian hopes around crypto and yet the actual realities, when you dig into how many transactions they do a second what the transaction costs are that no one, no, one's actually designing these things to like work in the real world. Right. Like if you're not as good as visa or MasterCard, why are you claiming to be a payment network? Right. Why are you claiming to upend, you know, the world of transactions? It, it, it boggles my mind.
Leo Laporte (00:50:02):
Are you a, a no coiner Tim or a, or a get me
Tim Stevens (00:50:07):
Some coiner, some you mostly as an experiment, just more or less to, to kind of teach myself a little bit more about the network. So I do have some, but it's you know, a, a fraction of attention. My, my, my I think's freedom. Yeah. So that's about it. Yeah. I don't really have any, any large dogs in the game. I guess I have a few very small puppies in the game. <Laugh>. But, but ultimately, I, I tend to share your sauces on NFTs in general, Leo. I, I think that there are some legitimate applications for the technology, and I'm very interested to see where it goes, but 99% of what I see is, is basically grift and, and and pyramid schemes and, and finding that 1%, that nugget I is, is a very difficult thing. I'm curious to see what we hear from auto manufacturers all the time who are talking about doing things like parts verification on on blockchain and things like that, which that makes sense, some interesting applications where you could really validate the supply chain of a given product both in terms of, you know, for a classic, a car, making sure that everything is valid, but also in terms of making sure that your battery materials are sourced in an ethical way or as ethically as they can be anyway.
Tim Stevens (00:51:16):
So I think there's definitely some applications like that on the business side of things, but from a consumer standpoint, from a, you know, stick into the man and coming up with a new way of, of retiring, cuz 401ks are boring. That, that just really doesn't. I don't see a lot of validity there myself.
Leo Laporte (00:51:31):
There was a proposal some time ago to put VIN numbers on the blockchain. And then all auto repair shops would add entries as they did repairs to the blockchain. That seems to me a sensible use of the blockchain. It
Tim Stevens (00:51:47):
Definitely is, but it also, it seems like something that you could pretty easily do with a good old database, if you wanted to, you just needed to make it public. You know, right. I don't know that it needs to exist necessarily in the blockchain. But, but for sure there are technologies like that, which, which could make that fundamental technology behind crypto worthwhile the way three stuff. There's definitely applications there, but yeah, board apes,
Leo Laporte (00:52:08):
Not one of 'em <laugh> Corey, you, you seem like you think blockchain is not a panacea.
Cory Doctorow (00:52:13):
Tim just nailed it, which is why, what, what does the blockchain add to this? So I wrote an article about this called I think something like the inevitability of trusted third parties. So the, the, the thing is that Vince and repairs don't magically appear in the blockchain. As you said, if you were gonna have a registry of repairs in the blockchain, you would need people to enter those repairs correctly into the blockchain. Otherwise it doesn't work. So you are already trusting people to do that. So if you trust, want to do it, do we think that the problem with existing databases of vis and service that has gone on is that people change the database after it's posted? Cuz there are those databases. Last time I bought a used car, I looked up the VIN of the cars that I was looking up on them.
Cory Doctorow (00:53:01):
Or do we think that the problem is that sometimes people just don't enter the data and if they just don't enter the data, then having an imutable thing that they just don't enter the data into, doesn't make them enter the data more. And you know, more importantly, like if, if you are gonna trust, you know, when we talk about these supply chain issues, right? Like I, I just before lockdown, I was in Brussels for an event and I met someone who was, you know, very sincere about this blockchain for good project that she'd worked on run with EU money where they were trying to guarantee fair trade produce. And so they were, you know, they would track the, the, the entire life cycle of a food commodity, like a bag of flour or potato or whatever. And they put it in the blockchain and I said, so I find a potato in the grocery store. How do I know? It's the one that the blockchain is referencing and not a different potato, so, well, you just have to trust us. <Laugh> I'm like, well, that's fine. Right? Like maybe you are trustworthy in which case, why are we roasting the planet? <Laugh>
Cory Doctorow (00:53:59):
You could tell me what I need to trust you on. And even if we're not roasting the planet, why are we, you know, even if you believe that proof of stake is, is not six months away as it has been for the last five years, but actually like imminent then you know, why are we entrusting it to a system that can only process 15 transactions a second worldwide for all users? Like the Ethereum virtual computer, rather than just having it as Tim said in a database, right? If you trust someone to run the database, or if you trust someone to correctly enter things into the database, because then
Leo Laporte (00:54:33):
I don't know, that's how we've always done it. Corey, and we want to do something different, new and futuristic.
Cory Doctorow (00:54:39):
So look, append ledgers are super cool. And I, I helped write up one that you use every day without knowing it, speaking of so supply chain, every time your browser gets a certificate from the world it signs it, it gets a signed certificate. That's signed by the certificate authority that issued it. It makes a hash signs it again and uploads it to one of several, one or more of several certificate transparency servers around the world. These are, these are not a blockchain that just Merkel of trees, they're all over the place and they're pen, knee logs, and anyone who wants to can subscribe to them and see whether or not a certificate has been issued for their domain, that they didn't authorize. And this is a really powerful tool. I wrote it up for nature with the guy who led the project at Google.
Cory Doctorow (00:55:25):
Ben, Laurie, as a cryptographer, works on open SSL, a bunch of other projects. And, and it's really cool. And I do think public append ledgers have an application, but I think that the, that if we are gonna talk about trust models, right? If we're gonna say this is trustless, then it has to be trustless. And if you're gonna introduce trust, if you're gonna say there's a human Oracle who could confound the entire transact, who could break the entire transaction, you have to show why that person shouldn't just replace the cumbersome computing you're doing to get around having any human Oracles in the loop. Otherwise, it just makes sense to have that person run the server too. You, you haven't gained anything new by it
Leo Laporte (00:56:03):
As you as you point out little mathematics, don't be afraid in your piece if problem plus blockchain equals problem minus blockchain, then blockchain equals zero.
Cory Doctorow (00:56:15):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:56:16):
It's pretty pretty. It's simple. It's math.
Cory Doctorow (00:56:19):
<Laugh> yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:56:21):
The blockchain hasn't added anything to the problem.
Cory Doctorow (00:56:25):
Not in those cases anyways. Yeah. I think there may be some in which it does, but
Leo Laporte (00:56:28):
I, this, this concept of append only ledger means stuff can't be deleted from the ledger. You can only add to it. Is that the yeah,
Cory Doctorow (00:56:37):
Basically. Yeah. So you can, you can add a later record, right? You could say, well, you know, think about the, for your
Leo Laporte (00:56:42):
Twittter is an append only ledger without an edit button. No. Cause you can delete, you could
Cory Doctorow (00:56:48):
Delete. No. Think about the deed for your house, which in theory, there's actually like a piece of paper down at the right, whatever the Petaluma property registry. Right. And it's like literally a sheet of paper with all the
Leo Laporte (00:56:59):
And every
Cory Doctorow (00:56:59):
Own your house. Yeah. It, it says so at the bottom, right. So you can go back and see it so you can add to the ledger. So it doesn't mean that once you sell your house, you can never sell it again because you can append a new record to the bottom of the ledger. Right. but you know, you, in this case, you're trusting the city to, to hold the deed and not go in and erase things or move things around and so on. And, you know, basically we build institutions to make that trust work, and they're not a always great and there have been ways in which they failed us pretty grotesquely, but the way that we make those institutions work best is by taking them out of the market. Right? The thing that actually makes those things work best is when people feel unethical or normative reason to do it.
Cory Doctorow (00:57:39):
You know, the thing that keeps auditors honest is not the fear that they'll be dis discovered for cool looting. It's their code of ethics. And you know, when we, when we turn everything into a financial transaction where we just say, caveat, mTOR, if you can make $1 being the auditor and $1 and 1 cent cheating as the auditor, then you have like a moral duty to cheat. Instead of saying, you have, your duty is first not to money, but to your profession, then that's the way we keep our institutions working. You know, we can laugh at politicians who say I'm a public servant first and, and you know, here to earn a living second, but unless that's the way they feel or unless that's the way a lot of them feel the system does break down. And for me, the problem with, with the web three stuff is so much of it is grounded in the idea that we solve all of our problems by making them monitor by just assigning values and selling stuff and, and explicitly getting rid of any normative claims about what people should do. And just saying people should do whatever the smart contract allows.
Leo Laporte (00:58:37):
I think we've got design the system. I think that's that it works. That's where we are right now. And end stage capitalism if you stop worrying about
Cory Doctorow (00:58:44):
Yeah. The triumph of Hayak.
Leo Laporte (00:58:46):
Yeah. what do you think about Owen Thomas Fidelity's plan to put Bitcoin in your 401k?
Owen Thomas (00:58:57):
Think that, well, they are in hot water. Actually. We, we, we kind of called it in our piece on protocol.com because we said, Hey know, fidelity is rolling out this plan. They're catering to micro strategy, which is a software company that is places really kind of frankly, bizarre side bet on Bitcoin. It's not at all strategic to their software business, but the, the CEO Michael sailor is you know, is a Bitcoin fanatic anyway. So fidelity is making Bitcoin an option for micro strategy employees in their 401k. The problem is the, the department of labor, which oversees 401k plans said in March that they were going to investigate any fiduciary is like fidelity who put cryptocurrencies in a retirement plan. So fidelity was setting itself up for an investigation here. And they, they knew full well. They had to have seen that warning that the department
Leo Laporte (00:59:55):
Of they were applauded by, of course, a lot of, lot of what's the opposite of a no coin, a bro coin. They
Owen Thomas (01:00:01):
Were yo coin
Leo Laporte (01:00:02):
<Laugh> GOCO. They were applauded by the GOCO for making this available to people. Now the employer would have to do it, right. So I would have to, as an employer say, Hey, good news, John, you can add Bitcoin to your retirement. That doesn't seem like on the face of it. A very good idea.
Owen Thomas (01:00:22):
And that's a difference. There have been Bitcoin like Roth IRAs, and those are self-directed plans. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:00:28):
So that might not be so bad.
Owen Thomas (01:00:30):
Yeah. I mean, you can put, you can put real estate in a Roth IRA. No,
Leo Laporte (01:00:34):
That's how Peter te has has sheltered his fortune. Hasn't he?
Owen Thomas (01:00:37):
Yeah. You can, you can put private equity. You know, if you
Leo Laporte (01:00:41):
Have something I think has a chance to really appreciate you put it in after tax early in a Roth IRA, and then you don't pay any taxes on the appreciation,
Owen Thomas (01:00:52):
But that's a difference under the law, a 401k plan it's provided to you by, by your employer, right. There's an implicit kind of recommendation there of the plan. And so it's got to be more conservative. Yeah. In what it offers. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:01:06):
All right. I wanna take a little break. Gotta consider Corey's hips in all of this. <Laugh>. I love it. That he has. Is it gold plated or solid gold hip joint. It's bras bras it Schneider. So its nice and heavy.
Cory Doctorow (01:01:19):
It's going on top of this cane here.
Leo Laporte (01:01:23):
Be somebody with that. I see
Cory Doctorow (01:01:24):
A machinist to put in a screw. Yeah,
Leo Laporte (01:01:26):
That is fantastic. Oh man, I love that everybody who gets hip surgery should save the top of the femur. Get it cast in bras and make a cane out of it. You could get a
Cory Doctorow (01:01:37):
Business. I don't know why you wouldn't
Leo Laporte (01:01:38):
Right. It's obvious John. I would.
Owen Thomas (01:01:42):
But it would it offend your views of intellectual property to patent that idea because
Leo Laporte (01:01:48):
Well that's the beauty of that. Corey has made it creative, common zero. He is
Cory Doctorow (01:01:51):
Keeping away. There's a, I, I got some folks in here in Burbank who run a prop house that have a, a super high res laser scanner. Oh. To do a 1200 DPI laser scan and put it on the internet archive CC zero. So you can like at that re you can blow it up to like room size if you want
Leo Laporte (01:02:09):
<Laugh> I'm on I'm on archive.org. What should I search for Cory's
Cory Doctorow (01:02:15):
Hip it's Dr. O femur. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:02:21):
We're
Tim Stevens (01:02:21):
Gonna send that to my 3d printer right now.
Owen Thomas (01:02:23):
I, I love that band.
Leo Laporte (01:02:25):
Wait a minute. I'm sorry. My watch is about to call 9 1 1 because it thinks I fell. I did not. <Laugh> I I'm sorry. I let mean interrupt the show, but the watch was about to call 9 1 1. That's bizarre. All right, here it is. Dr. Femur. Now this is gold genomes online database. I think I got the wrong, the wrong thing. I'll have to find it later. It's on it's on the way. It's on archive.org.
Cory Doctorow (01:02:52):
Let me see doc femur internet archive.
Leo Laporte (01:02:56):
<Laugh> oh, maybe just go use Google instead. What a thought?
Cory Doctorow (01:02:59):
No that doesn't do it. Hang on. Yeah, I see it.
Tim Stevens (01:03:02):
I'll drop
Leo Laporte (01:03:02):
It in the
Cory Doctorow (01:03:02):
Chair. Oh yeah. It'll take you to a TWITtter TWITtter link, which will then take you to the internet archive.
Leo Laporte (01:03:07):
Emer.
Cory Doctorow (01:03:08):
Yeah, there you go.
Leo Laporte (01:03:09):
Okay. I've gotta see this. This is awesome. Okay.
Cory Doctorow (01:03:13):
It takes a while to load cuz they have a JavaScript 3d model thing. So it's gonna, unless you've got a very fast com it might take a while to load.
Leo Laporte (01:03:21):
Oh
Cory Doctorow (01:03:21):
Well, but if you don't look not tweet, you can see some stills of it as well.
Leo Laporte (01:03:24):
Okay. That's cool. There it is on TWITtter. Look at that,
Cory Doctorow (01:03:27):
That weird thing that looks like a volcano coming off. That's the one tendon that they have to sever.
Leo Laporte (01:03:32):
Oh, Yik
Cory Doctorow (01:03:32):
To to
Leo Laporte (01:03:34):
Did you sand that down or
Cory Doctorow (01:03:36):
I did. I got it. A little sanded down. Not all the way down. I wanted to preserve it as like a memento ma there <laugh> but I got most of it taken off <laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:03:45):
Oh my God. I love it. Thank you Corey. For being here, it's always a pleasure to have you on Tim Stevens. Great to have you. And of course Owen Thomas, our show today brought to you by our crowd all around the world. Tech companies are innovating and driving returns for investors, but you might wonder, you know, I've got my savings. I've been, I've been doing well. Well, how do I get involved? How do I get some deal flow? Cuz I'd like to get in on the, on the, on the, on the, on this exciting investment train. Well, our crowd is a venture capital firm, analyzes companies all across the global private market, selecting those with the greatest growth potential, but then they do something different instead of just putting their money in and sitting back to enjoy. They allow you to participate as well.
Leo Laporte (01:04:33):
Now this is, this is how you get into a something that's not public yet. Hasn't had an exit. This is really early, but that's the idea. Our identifies innovators. So you can invest when the growth potential is the greatest from personalized medicine to robotics, to cyber security, by the way, that is a hot field right now companies spend 150 billion annually on cyber security. I'm not surprised our crowd is the fastest growing venture capital investment community. Now to do this, you have to be an accredited investor. This is not for everyone. So go to our crowd.com/TWIT. Once you enter the country that you're in, you could find out what the rules are for accredited investors, and then you can participate. I should also mention the minimum investment is $10,000. So again, this is not for everybody, but if you've got your money, you know, for your retirement put away and you've got all your, you're doing all the right things and you wanna have a little kind of fun finding out, you know, participating.
Leo Laporte (01:05:32):
This is a great thing to do by the way, it's free to join our crowd. So you can get the reports. You can get the information and then decide on your own. Our crowds accredited investors have already invested a billion dollars more in growing tech companies. 21 of their portfolio companies are unicorns already. Many of our crowds members have benefited from over 50 IPOs or sale exits of portfolio companies. You can get in a single go company deal for as little as $10,000. Our crowd also has funds the minimum investment. There is $50,000 and again, investment terms will vary depending on where you are investing. So go to our crowd.com/TWIT, enter your country as an example, though, of some of the deals. And you'll see these all. Once you join, you can see all sorts of deals you can invest in Satero. This is kind of cool.
Leo Laporte (01:06:19):
They've invented a patented approach to data protection that eliminates the gaps of traditional methods securing any data asset, whether it's on premier in the cloud, they already have as a customer. One of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, S O T E R O. But how do you get in our crowd.com/TWIT explore Satter's potential. Join our crowd for free@orcrowd.com slash TWIT join the fastest growing venture capital investment community. Our crowd.com/TWIT O U R C R O wd.com/i, I, you know, I approve everybody. We, we do ads for, and I, I thought this is, I like this company because for years I've sat on the sidelines and watched people like Kevin Rose, get all this Jason call, get all this deal flow investor early on TWITtter and Facebook. And I'm thinking here I am, I'm sitting here now. I can't do it. Cuz I'm covering the company. And I I I'm I'm with Owen here. I, I'm not gonna invest in anything that we're covering, but I thought this is a shame that only certain people get access to all this information. I think this is democratizing. I like it. That our crowd is doing this. So we're really happy to have him on the show. Our crowd.com/TWIT Corey's femur is still loading you're right. My computer is not fast enough. <Laugh>
Cory Doctorow (01:07:42):
Well, it's a 1200 DPI model. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:07:45):
Nice.
Cory Doctorow (01:07:45):
So if it were like a low re it would load right away.
Leo Laporte (01:07:48):
Dr. O femur public domain mark, 1.0, hip hip replacement, anatomy, arthritis, hip capsule, and femur. Nice. You had this Kaiser. They did it. So you could get that's good to know. They do the the coming in from the front thing there.
Cory Doctorow (01:08:04):
Yeah. They do the interior approach and they were really so they, they, it was funny because they didn't know how to deal with it. My surgeon and his team didn't know how to deal with it, but apparently it's pretty common cuz the, what actually happens is you just tell them and the pathologist saves it instead of instead of putting it in the incinerator, after they look at it. Nice. And my folks who came down to help with the postop recovery just drove down to Kaiser the next day and went to the path pathologist who gave it to them in a Tupperware. And he said, oh, we do this all, all day long. Oh. So I it's just the orthopedics. Department's not used to it. I think a lot of women save their placenta's for example.
Leo Laporte (01:08:39):
Sure. I know that.
Cory Doctorow (01:08:40):
Yeah. So yeah, it was, I mean, why not? Right. <laugh> well, I wish I had the foresight to save the other one about
Leo Laporte (01:08:46):
How much freezer space you have, I guess. Do they this is indelicate. Do they clean it first?
Cory Doctorow (01:08:52):
No. Well they, they, it gets wiped and back team before you before they operate on it, right. It gets it like, well it's in situ they,
Leo Laporte (01:09:00):
They cover it in, but did you have to then put it in a solution to, is
Cory Doctorow (01:09:05):
I ha it is. No, it doesn't have any wet stuff on it. It has
Cory Doctorow (01:09:10):
It does have marrow inside of it. Oh
Leo Laporte (01:09:12):
Yeah, sure.
Cory Doctorow (01:09:13):
What I, what I'm going to do
Leo Laporte (01:09:15):
Up real though. I wouldn't hesitate.
Cory Doctorow (01:09:18):
Yeah. Well now let's come back from the castor. I'm gonna soak it in a peroxide solution and solution. Then I'm debating, you can dip it in mop and glow to preserve it. That's a, that's a pretty common way of doing it. I found the website for
Leo Laporte (01:09:30):
Mopping, really?
Cory Doctorow (01:09:34):
So I'm thinking about doing that. What I really would like to do is preserve it in like a methanol or ethanol rather on the back of our bar, we built this very alive backyard,
Leo Laporte (01:09:43):
Tiki bar. Yeah.
Cory Doctorow (01:09:44):
Having it float there, get
Leo Laporte (01:09:45):
One of those Frankenstein style jars that you can just have a floating in. Yeah. There's
Cory Doctorow (01:09:51):
The sour toe. There's a bar in Dawson city in Yukon, in the Yukon where it's funny. I a train, not to say the Ukraine that now I don't say the Yukon
Leo Laporte (01:09:59):
<Laugh>
Cory Doctorow (01:10:02):
That in, in the Yukon, there's this bar that you know is a prospector's bar. And then someone gave them his amputated, frost and toe and they kept it on a, in a jar of alcohol in the back of the bar. Sure. And if you were drunk enough, you could order a sour toe and they would put the toe in a shot and you'd do the, and inevitably someone drank the toe. <Laugh> God. Then one of their regulars, Wied them, his toe when he died. So it's back on the menu. <Laugh>, we're thinking he might offer, you know, the sour femur in like a low ball glass in the, in our bar.
Leo Laporte (01:10:31):
Well I don't, I don't think that was in the John Maru poem that I heard of the sour to sour or to verse, but maybe they should add that you were talking about how there's a public record at the county seat of everybody who's ever owned your house. There's a lot of public records and there are companies out there who go around, send people to the county seats, record them and put 'em online so that a lot of people are quite shocked to learn. If you search for or information about yourself, you could find the home you own. You could find a lot of information. This is kind of a historic and historic problem. You can go to companies like Spokeo and say, take me down. But there's so many of them. I, you could easily miss a few. It's easy.
Leo Laporte (01:11:13):
In other words, to docs someone or docs yourself, Google has announced that they are going to allow people to remove at least the Google search result for personally identifiable information from Google search. I think this is a, a good move. There is a lot of different kinds of information, obviously. Governmental ID numbers, bank, account numbers, credit card numbers, pictures of your handwritten signature ID docs, like your driver's license or passport, highly personal restricted and official records like medical records, personal contact info, including your address, phone number, an email address or confidential login numbers. This is from a Google blog post on Wednesday. If you wanna know more you can Google, there's always had a set of policies to do this, but it sounds like this is a, a little bit easier to do thoughts anybody. I, I think it's a Tim Stevens you've ever done a search for yourself on Spokeo and been horrified.
Tim Stevens (01:12:20):
I have not actually, but yeah, I definitely think this is a positive move. It'll make it easier for people to take a first step to, to keeping, you know, the basics of your information being easily found. I guess to me, I think this is kinda like putting a cheap padlock on something that you wanna keep secure. It'll keep the honest people from, from getting in there, but anybody who wants in, they're gonna find a way they'll cut the padlock off. So you know, that information will still be out there obviously, and will be not that hard to find for people who know how to find it. But it will at least keep people from who are only gonna take the the, the, the most basic steps and trying to find that information, it'll keep them from finding it easily. So I think that's a good thing.
Leo Laporte (01:12:57):
Yeah. Why put it in the Google search results as Google points out, it doesn't take it off the net. You still have to go and you should go to the site if you can to get it removed. Anyway
Cory Doctorow (01:13:10):
I have a horror story about this. Do you, from when we moved to back to California from the UK, you know, we had a half container and the customs broker requires your passport. So I sent them a copy of my passport and they put that with the way bill on the outside of the container. And there are people who do market research at the port of Los Angeles. Oh
Leo Laporte (01:13:32):
No. Who
Cory Doctorow (01:13:33):
Write down all transcribe all the all the way bills. They just stand
Leo Laporte (01:13:37):
There, writing it down.
Cory Doctorow (01:13:39):
Yeah. So they're public records, right? And so one day someone I, one day, for some reason, I put my passport number into Google. I think I was just having kind of paranoid moment. And I found literally hundreds of websites that had my passport number and my home address linked together, cuz that's where the container was being delivered. So I actually have not used my home address for deliveries, except for things like shipping containers for about 15, 20 years now I rent a post box down the road because I've had problems with stalkers and weirdos and whatever. And yet there's some things like you cannot have your shipping container dropped off at the post box, a mile away. You know, you, you still have to get at home. And I never got rid of them all. We moved and my passport expired. Like that's, that's why I'm now safe
Leo Laporte (01:14:29):
Cow. We're
Cory Doctorow (01:14:30):
Right. And it's pretty bad. I, I have a a Google alert for my name and address and whenever it pops up in a public search result, I, I go and ask the company to take it down. I do worry that if Google alerts were to leak well, then that would expose a lot of my information. But if Google were to leak, could expose a lot of my information. Anyway. So far
Leo Laporte (01:14:50):
To my know, Google has never had a breach. They're pretty good at protecting your information. Well,
Cory Doctorow (01:14:56):
No, no, they were, I mean, they were breached by the Chinese government.
Leo Laporte (01:14:58):
Oh, well that's different. <Laugh>
Cory Doctorow (01:15:00):
Ben, Ben Bo the guy that I co-wrote that paper for nature for, he ran the, the forensics on the Chinese state hack.
Leo Laporte (01:15:07):
Holy cow. Yeah. When was that? And Google
Cory Doctorow (01:15:10):
News get breached all the of time. I just don't. I, and Google's had a bunch of insider attacks
Leo Laporte (01:15:15):
Through their own, through their own errors
Cory Doctorow (01:15:17):
Or yeah. And then Google's had a bunch of insider attacks. Oh, they
Leo Laporte (01:15:20):
Have,
Cory Doctorow (01:15:21):
Yeah. Where they've just had like people following around mostly it's dudes creeping on women.
Leo Laporte (01:15:26):
Oh my God. All
Cory Doctorow (01:15:27):
Right. I mean, a lot of these companies have a, Google's got actually pretty good internal CIS controls and forensics. As I understand it, there was an amazing piece and wired about how Amazon, in order to enable the agility of its teams has no had no controls over making whole copies of all of their user and or merchant data. And literally thousands of them were floating around within the company. Every team had its own local copy and there was no tracking and no forensics. They have tons of insider attacks. They had people who were like selling to merchants, how their rivals products were, were performing. And they had people were creeping on customers. And so on. Amazon's another one that I think a lot of people get delivered to their home. And even if they have a mailbox because, you know, it's you order heavy things for it. Oh
Leo Laporte (01:16:13):
Yeah.
Cory Doctorow (01:16:14):
And so, you know, and what's the point of paying for prime and next day delivery. If you have it delivered to a mailbox that you then have to drive to and you only go to once a day,
Leo Laporte (01:16:22):
Right? Yeah. I have a post office box for the same reasons, Cory, but I'm afraid my OPSEC is not great. I have so much stuff delivered at home. It's probably
Cory Doctorow (01:16:29):
You put your name, you can do the, put your name into, into Google with dress, put an alert up. That's it's not a terrible plan. Like I've, I've, I've the only reason I'm talking about it in public is I've mentioned it to a bunch of security experts and none of them were like, you're doing what that's crazy. Don't do that. <Laugh> I know a security researcher, who's a, a at a high risk. He writes a lot about Carters Eastern European Carters. He's had like heroin sent to his home by Carters who then called the police. He's been swatted. And he, when he bought a home registered an LLC out of state and then bought the house with his LLC. So that it's, there's,
Leo Laporte (01:17:08):
It's not recorded. The deed recording just says that that there's another state LLC that owns it. So you put in the search terms, not just your name, you'd put your full address in the search term, your, your home address. Yeah. Okay. I'm gonna do that. And then you get all the results. You can even get it as an RSS feed. So you just put it in your feet here and, and watch the fun happen right in front of your very, very eyes. We thought that Spotify might suffer because of Joe Rogan, not so much Spotify's quarterly results are out, even though they kicked off one and a half million premium users in Russia due to the invasion of Ukraine, even though the Joe Rogan controversy caused a lot of high profile people to say, well, I'm abandoning Spotify. In the first quarter of this year, Spotify gained 2 million premium subscribers. So you subtract the one and a half million for Russia and you gained 2 million, 16 million ad supported subscribers. Spotify is a juggernaut, which scares me a little bit because I feel like they're a little bit hostile to a free and open podcast ecosystem. They,
Owen Thomas (01:18:22):
You know, Leo I've, I've got a musician friend. Yeah. And he says just a couple years ago, his, you know, streaming checks were pretty evenly distributed. You'd get some from apple music, some from Amazon, some from Spotify. And he said in recent months, it is really consolidated to Spotify. Spotify is, yeah. What is paying his bills?
Leo Laporte (01:18:46):
I, you know, I look at my kids, I have apple music. I have Google YouTube news. I have a lot of choices and there could be on my family plan. They don't, they want Spotify. Everybody wants Spotify. That's that's kind of depressing. Okay. Okay. Data from fake legal requests has been used to short minors sexually from alphabet, from apple, from Facebook. Essentially what happens is the bad guys, the stalkers, the creeps pose as law enforcement and send emergency requests to these companies snaps also in their TWITtters in there discords in there, these are fraudulent legal requests, and then they use the data to, you know, do their bad guy things. Any thoughts? Just it's all of these things are just, okay. So, no, I mean, I got stuff to say, but I just, I don't wanna, I wanted to let other folks have a chance there. <Laugh> very kind of you Alex Stamos says, I know emergency data requests get used for real life-threatening emergencies every day, but it's tragic that this mechanism is also being abused to sexually exploit children. He's former chief security officer at Facebook. I don't know what you can do about this. That's the problem?
Cory Doctorow (01:20:18):
Well, I mean, there is an argument that getting a warrant is really hard and that's probably true in some places we know it's not true in other places. So in some cases, these extraordinary data requests are really about a very minor amount of, of labor saving you know, and it produces an enormous risk. So you're, you know, you've got two different risks you're weighing, right? One is that you have these companies that are billions of users and have incredibly intimate and powerful pictures of our lives that can be used to re do enormous harm to us. And we create a system that is very easy to breach. I think there's something like 16,000, maybe 1600 us police departments. So there's just no way they're gonna be able to identify all the different police emails and so on. And in fact, a lot of the, the forged requests came from real police emails, cuz the websites were had known vulnerabilities and they were able to open a shell and take over accounts or create new accounts.
Cory Doctorow (01:21:14):
A lot of this was done by children who attacked other children. So it's like, we're not talking about a, a high degree of security here that was being breached, right. This is really like a very beginner level script kind of security defect that we are we're, backstopping this very powerful bypass with. And then against that you have the security risks of making the police get a warrant. And cuz warrants are a lot harder to forge, right? Warrants like warrants are a lot more recognizable and standardized than you know, the, the, like an, an, a casual email from a, a cop that just says, you know, there's a, there's a bomb on the bus and it'll go off if it drops under 40 miles an hour and I need to get into Sandra Bullock's email. Right. And and, and you just have to kind of curious the
Leo Laporte (01:22:01):
Specific, by the way. <Laugh>
Cory Doctorow (01:22:03):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:22:04):
Well,
Cory Doctorow (01:22:06):
We, we, we Torontonians, we stick together, so we're like, we're like this. So yeah, the, the, the I guess the, the, I think that the security trade off is a bad one. And I think the companies,
Leo Laporte (01:22:20):
The companies could say no, by the way, they, they are not legally obligated. If it's not signed by a judge, if it's not a legal warrant, but they think
Cory Doctorow (01:22:26):
Blood will be on their hands. Right. Right. So cops are only,
Leo Laporte (01:22:28):
That's the worst it could happen is that later there's a press conference saying, well you know, we went to apple and they wouldn't give us this information. And as a result, a child has died. That's, that's what they don't want to have happen.
Cory Doctorow (01:22:40):
And, and, you know, we could, we could make it if we could, if we could show that it's actually too hard to get a warrant, we could make it easier to get a warrant. I'm not convinced it's too hard to get warrant. I think there is supposed to be some due process there. And I, and I don't think that judges are like, you know, unduly skeptical of cops requests for, for warrants. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:23:01):
Make it, not make it, make it be the judge's decision, not the not apples or snaps or Facebooks, make a, make a, wake a judge up, say, your honor, I, we need this information. We need it now sign this. I don't think that's unfair or unreasonable to ask that. I agree.
Cory Doctorow (01:23:15):
Yeah. I, I mean, again, it will introduce a new security risk, which is the risk that it will take a little longer and there might be some emergencies that are harmed. But what seeing is the visible side of the security risk here, and it's only the visible side. We don't know about the invisible side. Right? Like if your bank account gets cleaned out and you never find out why maybe it's because someone got the information needed to socially engineer your bank by doing one of these requests and you never found out about
Leo Laporte (01:23:43):
It. Right. Oh, so it's not just social media sites. A bank probably is also,
Cory Doctorow (01:23:48):
Well, maybe, but I think the bank would probably say no, but when you call up the bank and say, hi, this is Corey doctoral. And here are all the things you need to know to verify that I'm me, all of which were taken from my private account information called from Google and Facebook and whatever. Right. I can, if you can break into my Gmail and get at my all my correspondence with my bank manager, and you can say, Hey, Fred, this is Corey. Remember last week when we were talking about the hot dog cookout. Well, anyway, funniest thing, I dropped my ATM card in the toilet and you know, I'm, I'm on my way to the airport. I'm sending my kid over now, could you just give him another ATM card? Right? Like if you, if you like, there's a lot of, of, of social engineering attacks, right? And, and semi-automated social engineering attacks where people are doing things like, like getting your password reset questions. So they're never talking to a human, they're just finding out what your first street was or whatever. There's a lot of that that is never solved. We don't know where the source came from. So we have no way to know how widespread this is. And I'll remind you. The only reason we found out about this is because literal children had, had started to use this on mass primarily to sexually exploit other children.
Leo Laporte (01:25:01):
Good Lord.
Cory Doctorow (01:25:02):
And so there might have been other more sophisticated attacker who just like kept it on the DL. Yeah. And who might still be doing it. Right. And we would never know.
Leo Laporte (01:25:12):
Yeah. Yikes. All right, I'm gonna save this one. We're gonna take a little break. I'm gonna save this one. All of you can join in. I have a feeling the science fiction author might have something to say, scientists astronomers are about to tell aliens where we are. <Laugh> for years, decades, we've been listening for sounds of extraterrestrial intelligence, radio signals and the like, but there are some astronomers who think, you know, maybe we ought to be sending signals out, trying to contact these folks directly. Maybe we ought take this into our own hands. What could possibly go wrong? Well, there are a few people who think it's not such a good idea. We'll get to that in just a moment. Tim Stevens is here formerly roadshow. Now CNET cars, is it CNET cars.com.
Cory Doctorow (01:26:04):
It is cnet.com/cars,
Leo Laporte (01:26:06):
Much better than one 800 CNET cars.com. That
Cory Doctorow (01:26:09):
Still works too.
Leo Laporte (01:26:10):
No, no. <Laugh> no, it doesn't. <Laugh> Owen Thomas from pro proto protocol.com. That's right. Yeah. Gotta get it right. Great to have you. And of course, Corey doctor's latest book. Well, what is your latest book? Is it the Posey book now?
Cory Doctorow (01:26:29):
No, it's how to destroy surveillance capitalism. But the next book, which is coming in September is choke point capitalism, which is the book about with wrote with Rebecca Gilan. Oh, yes. About the creative labor markets. Can't be solved just by adding more copy. Why you need a bunch of other stuff like antitrust and contracting rules and transparency and accounting and all that other stuff.
Leo Laporte (01:26:49):
Yes. We talked about that last time. That sounds really, really good. Our show today brought to you by Neva. Speaking of sounding good. If you are bringing people back into the office, you're starting to use the huddle room, the conference room to you have people, but you also have people still at home. And if you're still relying on that crappy little thing in the middle of the table, you know, those people at home, aren't hearing what's going on, they're dialed out, cuz it's Bo it's impossible to understand. Or maybe you went to a big, expensive AV company and got a complicated system with speakers and microphones and wires and DS peas everywhere. And they have to come in every time and calibrate the darn thing. And there is a third way, a much better way. It's Neva, Neva as patented. Their microphone missed technology.
Leo Laporte (01:27:39):
That means all you have to do is put in what looks like a speaker bar in your conference room, big room, maybe two of them it's got integrated microphones. It, it, the microphone missed technology on that. Speaker fills a room with thousands of virtual microphones so that there are no dead zones. Everyone could be hurt clearly everywhere in the room, no matter which way they're facing. If they're social distancing, if they're, if it it's a classroom participants could just move around and talk naturally in the space and remote students can still hear and exactly what's going on. It is a revolution in meeting room technology, and it couldn't come at a better time. You don't have to have any any technicians. In fact, you could install this yourself. If you ever installed a sound bar, it's easy. Third minute, DIY job, continuous audio calibration means your rooms are instantly and always ready with optimized audio.
Leo Laporte (01:28:33):
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Cory Doctorow (01:29:56):
I think so. Well it's certainly, I mean, the plot's very complicated to three body problems. You can lose a quite complex plotter, but that's certainly a plot element of it
Leo Laporte (01:30:04):
At the beginning. Anyway they're gonna beam a signal of radio pulses over broth, broad swath of sky. They'll be on and off like the ones and zeros of digital information. The message is called the beacon in the galaxy. The first thing they'll do is send prime numbers, presuming that math is universal and mathematical operators, then the biochemistry of life, human forms <laugh> and then the controversial part, the Earth's location, <laugh> at a timestamp. They're sending the message toward a group of millions of stars near the center of the galaxy 10 to 20,000 light years from earth. Now the only good thing is it'll take him 10 to 20,000 years to get this, and I'm gonna hope it's gonna take him at least this long to come back. So we don't have to worry too much about this, but still theoretically <laugh>. Is it a bad idea to say, Hey guys, come on over let's let's let's let's together. Let's talk. Corey, you must, do you think about alien life first contact, things like that in any of your books? I can't remember. You're not that kind of sci-fi author. I don't think oh, you're muted.
Cory Doctorow (01:31:19):
Sorry. I thought Kim Stanley Robinson's book Aurora did a really good job of this. Sorry. Had my mic off there. I, I only think about it as a literary device. I think that the distances are really big. They're kind of buzz kill big. Yeah, because they're
Leo Laporte (01:31:33):
20,000 yeah.
Cory Doctorow (01:31:34):
To go, well, no, that's 20,000 years at the speed of light.
Leo Laporte (01:31:38):
Right.
Cory Doctorow (01:31:38):
Right. Anything that comes back is not gonna come back at the speed of light or any appreciable fraction of it. So, so we are talking about like significantly longer than like behaviorally modern humans have existed at a point in which like it's, it's just very, very, very far away.
Leo Laporte (01:31:57):
Yeah.
Cory Doctorow (01:31:58):
And so I think that it's like, these are interesting thought experiments, but and it's not like they're so far away that like our light cone doesn't intersect with them so that we can never in fact influence each other. They
Leo Laporte (01:32:09):
Might be watching. I love Lucy right now. Well, no, they're left to wait about 9,550 years from now. But yeah.
Cory Doctorow (01:32:17):
I just don't think we're gonna make contact per se. Like, I don't think we're gonna have a two way exchange. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:32:22):
It's the fairy paradox.
Cory Doctorow (01:32:25):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:32:27):
Any thoughts? Owen, are you a sci-fi fan?
Owen Thomas (01:32:30):
I am actually it's kind of fun. I'm saying with my brother and he, he kind of has our childhood sci-fi collection. Oh,
Leo Laporte (01:32:38):
That's cool. Oh, a
Owen Thomas (01:32:39):
Nice, yeah. So like visiting the wall of Pineland is you know, that's really back a lot of memories. Yeah. yeah, I think I, I, you know, I don't know. I think that doesn't our atmosphere kind of radiate enough information to interested aliens. Yeah. That like, Hey, there's a nice, you see oxygen, you know, oxygenated planet with water and you know,
Leo Laporte (01:33:05):
And I love Lucy.
Owen Thomas (01:33:06):
Yeah. I mean, I think, I think that we've detected planets that might be able to sustain life. So if at our level of technology, we can do that. If there's an alien out there with, you know, sophisticated technology, they've probably spotted a
Leo Laporte (01:33:20):
So very famous.
Owen Thomas (01:33:21):
I think they're worrying about nothing
Leo Laporte (01:33:22):
Very famously Stephen Hawking about 10 years ago said you know, intelligent aliens could be rapacious, marauders, roaming, the cosmos in search of resources to plunder and planets to conquer and colonize. So maybe we shouldn't be announcing our address maybe, and, and see is the other problem. Maybe they're not so far away, but they could still intercept the message and and maybe come visit us. You know, and I'm not gonna worry about it right now. Not yet.
Cory Doctorow (01:33:57):
Yeah. Like I would really worry about climate change.
Leo Laporte (01:34:00):
That's a more concerning think
Cory Doctorow (01:34:02):
About aliens. Yeah. Like think what, what an amazing thing it would be if our race could endure long enough for aliens to come and wipe us out
Leo Laporte (01:34:09):
10,000, there you go. We're doing our best to make sure we can't.
Cory Doctorow (01:34:13):
It would mean we gotten an extra 10,000 years above the current odds.
Leo Laporte (01:34:19):
Excellent. Excellent point. Let's see. Netflix had a very bad, no good earnings report I should do. I'm gonna, you know, it's funny I avoid this, but I probably should go through all of the earnings this week because it was kind of an interesting mixed bag. The worst news was Netflix announcing on Tuesday that actually, it was a week ago, Tuesday, that for the first time in a decade, they'd lost subscribers, you know, 200,000 here, 200,000, there doesn't sound too bad. The stock market punished them 35% lost more than 50 billion in the day, immediately after it's actually continued to drop. Since Netflix has started laying off people as if like the whole thing is folding up and going home, Netflix did forecast, they'd lose another 2 million subscribers over the next three months. So that may be what some of this, but didn't have a great two years with pandemic. Can they, yeah, go ahead,
Tim Stevens (01:35:21):
Tim. I think if anything, as if we needed another indicator of just how speculative the market is right now. Yeah. This was a pretty good one. Netflix has a kind of not great quarter, you know, some bad news. And everyone just drops. It immediately stock drops 35, 40%, something like that. Yeah. I, I think that shows how much people are really looking for big continual gains and, and, and ultimately, yeah, it does point to the fact that Netflix and disrupted the industry they're way out ahead. And now a lot of other competitors have caught up and there are so many options on the market that it is not sustainable for most people. So I know quite a few people, myself included who are kind of floating between and streaming services. They'll, they'll go here for a month or two and then jump over somewhere else for a while. And it used to be the Netflix was that one, that one service that you needed to have on 12 months out of the year, but that's not really the case anymore. There are, are compelling options from other services. And Netflix there's
Leo Laporte (01:36:15):
CNN plus who needs
Tim Stevens (01:36:19):
Yeah. Some better than others, for
Leo Laporte (01:36:21):
Sure. Whoops.
Cory Doctorow (01:36:23):
You know, and, and I think that internally at, at Netflix, you have to remember that the execs themselves are heavily compensated with stock, right? And so this stuff really matters to them, right. But also you have to remember that they're recruiting an extremely tight labor markets for especially for technical staff and executive staff and that they get an enormous discount on their wage bill provided that they can convince people that taking compensation in stock is a good idea because it'll go up and up and up. And if it doesn't, then you have to pay cash. Right? There's a reason that Facebook has, has failed in its engineer, recruiting numbers for the last three years, like significantly, I think by about a third of it's because engineers don't believe that the Facebook shares that they're getting are gonna blow up the way the shares that they might get from somewhere else might be. And so Facebook's cash basis gets materially worse. Every time their share price goes down, then investors go, oh, well with a bad cash cash basis, we should sell our shares. And then the share price goes down and there, and they're in a, a kind of destructive spiral.
Leo Laporte (01:37:29):
That's probably why it's important to pay attention to quarterly results. I mean, I don't care what the stock market says about a company. I don't think it, it necessarily jobs with how the company's gonna do, but it does materially impact their ability to acquire talent. And in fact, that's one reason taking TWITtter, private might not be a really great strategy long term for
Tim Stevens (01:37:50):
Twittter. Yeah. I was just gonna say, I know we said the word done talking about TWITtter, but there's a lot of reasons why a lot of employees at TWITtter are unhappy with this. And, and there's definitely expected to be a lot of losses within TWITtter if this deal goes through. And that's one of the main reasons that that conversation has been hugely based on, on stock. And certainly there are ways to provide similar proxies for, for private companies, but certainly nothing as visible or as seemingly attractive to, to new employees as the good old stock option. And if that's not on the table anymore, how is TWITtter gonna continue to, to hire good people? I think for some reason that might actually be something that Musk is looking forward to because one of the things he wants us to do is, is cut staff, this cut costs, but in the long run that's gonna make it really hard for them to recruit to talented engineers and keep them yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:38:34):
Alpha, but in a similar situation, YouTube ad revenue didn't go down. This is a, this is another stock market thing. It just didn't go up as dramatically. <Laugh>. So that's considered a loss from the point of view, the stock market growth slowing dramatically on YouTube, a revenue. I think the, you know, they only, it only grew, it only grew 14%, only 6.8, 7 billion last quarter, but wall street wanted and hoped for more. And that's gonna impact Google's ability to acquire talent. Maybe one of the reasons Google announced at the same time that they were gonna spend $70 billion to buy back stock, which puts them second in tech sphere, apples buying the most stock back. Apple's a big believer in stack stock repurchases, then alphabet, then Facebook in 2021. I'm curious what you think Owen about stock buybacks? Is that a, a healthy thing for a company to do? Makes, makes shareholders happy. I guess it probably makes employees happy cuz it raises the stock value.
Owen Thomas (01:39:43):
So there there's kind of two schools of thought one is that a stock buyback is just sign that you do not know how to take that cash and invest it in new things that are going to grow fast.
Leo Laporte (01:39:56):
That's yeah. That's $70 billion as they couldn't spend an R and D for instance.
Owen Thomas (01:39:59):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And you know, or buying things like YouTube, which they only paid 1.6, 5 billion for and you know, invested more money in it along the ways. But I think that's been a great deal for them overall recent hiccups aside the counter argument, and this is more of a technical thing is when these companies are paying employees in stock, they're issuing new shares all the time to kind of satisfy that compensation,
Leo Laporte (01:40:26):
That dilutes the stock,
Owen Thomas (01:40:27):
Right. That dilutes the stock. So to keep the kind of you know, the number of shares, outstanding level, you know, in whatever range you want you need to buy back stock, Ah, because other, you know, otherwise, yeah. It just, you know, the, the share account keeps inflating.
Leo Laporte (01:40:46):
Google had strong growth according to Sendar PCHA in Google search and cloud revenue. He also said the pixel six was the best selling pixel phone, which doesn't say anything <laugh> at all, given how poorly the pixels have sold. In the past alphabet has 163,000 employees of 17% year over a year. So they, I say,
Cory Doctorow (01:41:12):
I like my pixel sex.
Leo Laporte (01:41:14):
It's
Cory Doctorow (01:41:14):
A, it's a good phone. It's fine.
Leo Laporte (01:41:16):
Yeah.
Cory Doctorow (01:41:17):
I think that one of the things that, that it's
Leo Laporte (01:41:19):
Not sexy, that's why it doesn't sell. It's not dead sexy. No.
Cory Doctorow (01:41:23):
Yeah. It's it's it is the, I just, I want a boring phone. I want a phone that just works every day, which more or less the pixel six does. Yeah. I switch to it after I drop my old phone in water and killed it. And so this is the first time I've done a phone upgrade in a long time without having a backup, cuz I don't do cloud backups cuz I don't trust the cloud. So I had to manually reassemble this phone and I'm getting all of the alerts that I'd already said yes to. And it's literally like whatever 15 years of, of Android use alerts that I'm getting. And it's so
Leo Laporte (01:41:53):
Wait a minute, wait a minute. You're telling me that in the, in the past, your phone has been set no alerts, but now that you have a new phone, all the old alerts are coming back. It doesn't start from now.
Cory Doctorow (01:42:05):
No, no, no. I mean things like tool tips.
Leo Laporte (01:42:08):
Oh and all the, all that stuff you hadn't seen ever. Yeah,
Cory Doctorow (01:42:11):
Yeah, yeah. And stuff where like I think in the, they since eliminated from the UI the ability to turn off certain kinds of nags. So like somehow I had Spotify configured before so that it wouldn't ask me to turn on Bluetooth. Every time I turned it on to quote, improve service <laugh> cause I don't want Spotify to know where I am. I don't want they're using it for location services. Right. I, I, you know, I use Spotify cuz I have the no Mike Sonos, one systems, the non spying ones and you have to use something like Spotify for it. So I have it, I pay for it and I, I don't wanna be nagged to turn on this thing. And all there is, is like maybe later there's not a never asked. And some there used to be somewhere in the UI, a setting that persisted when I migrated between phones that let you turn that off. And that setting is gone. The ability to make that setting is gone. And so now I just get the nag every time I turn on Spotify, which, you know, it's just the last thing I want. It's really annoying.
Leo Laporte (01:43:12):
The other, I
Cory Doctorow (01:43:13):
Think the thing you're identifying here is that share prices tumble partly because of the speculation effect. I think that's absolutely right. And partly because of bad surprises, right? It, it's not just that like Google didn't Google didn't grow as fast as they had before. It's that Google didn't grow as fast as they predicted. And I think this ties into the speculation question because when you're speculating, you're just getting ING on the future. And you're like, who sounds like they know what they talk about? What they're talking about? Well, pinch high sounds like he knows what he's talking about last seven years, he's told us it will grow this much and it grew that much. And then he doesn't, you're like, oh, maybe he just got lucky. I better sell some of my stock because you know, he's just pulling numbers out of his butt as it turns out.
Cory Doctorow (01:43:56):
And he doesn't know what he's talking about. And, and next year the earnings could be anything they could be, you know, double and they could be half who knows, cuz clearly he doesn't know what he's doing. He's, he's lost his crystal ball, you know? And I think that's, that's what stamp peds investors out of company out of these big tech stocks when they fail, because they're, as, as you said, you know, their fundamentals are terrible, right? For, for at least for TWITtter and you know, Netflix and stuff, their fundamentals. Aren't great. And so, you know, the, all of their value is people buying the stock and the expectation that people will buy the stock. And that's entirely driven by confidence in whether or not yeah. Are, are, you know, baby nos dos, who've got their own little crystal ball that can tell you how their company will perform next year.
Leo Laporte (01:44:39):
Typically apple does very well by, it seems like sandbagging, always saying, oh, we're not gonna do that well. And then outperforming the analyst predictions and then everybody goes, see, they're even better than we thought you would think analysts would start, start to catch on to this sandbagging. But apparently they never do apple revenue grew 9% year over year in the quarter. They sold a lot of max. In fact, they, one of the stats that stood out to me is 50% of the new max were sold to people who had never owned a Macintosh before. That's very for the Macintosh brand, but apple shares did go down because Luca mare apple CFO warned about supply constraints. He says, could hurt sales between four and $8 billion. The shutdown in Shanghai, particularly hard on apple actually a lot of companies. And, and in fact, I think pat Gelsinger at Intel said, don't expect this chip shortage to ease up until 2025. That, that that's starting to hit the bottom line too. You can't make it. You can't sell 'em.
Cory Doctorow (01:45:50):
I think the markets are gonna start responding to the threat of the digital markets act and the access act as well.
Leo Laporte (01:45:57):
The oh, interesting. Yeah. In a positive or negative way.
Cory Doctorow (01:46:00):
Oh, in a negative way, cuz it's gonna be bad for their profits. It's gonna be good for, it's gonna be good for the world. I it's just not gonna be good for their profits. It's like the idea is to, you know, reduce their monopoly rent extraction by making it easier to switch. We were just talking about switching costs, right. If right. If you can leave iMessage, you know, without losing the whatever color triangle that you get when you're on iMessage and not an iOS user,
Leo Laporte (01:46:25):
I believe it's a I believe it's a B what? Your blue triangle and then it's green. If you're Android. I can't remember now. Right.
Cory Doctorow (01:46:31):
It's a Blit black turtleneck.
Cory Doctorow (01:46:35):
If you're and, and, and, and it all, the, all the stuff comes out in the Elizabeth Holmes's voice <laugh>
Cory Doctorow (01:46:42):
Yeah. I, I mean, I, I just think that that's gonna, that's gonna hurt, hurt him. And also the app store bills are gonna be particularly hard on apple. Yeah. They're just gonna have to, there's gonna be other app stores, right. And you know, apple, like their argument is so weird that apple users don't want this, like, who is going to use this, if not apple users, it's not like the alternate app store is gonna be a big hit among Android users, cuz they won't be able to install those apps. It's literally what they're saying is like you, you, aren't an apple user, you are a bad apple user you're you're like Steve jobs and you're holding the phone wrong. You're you know, you're buying your apps from the wrong story. You're trusting the wrong people. It's a very weird argument. Yeah.
Owen Thomas (01:47:24):
But I think, I think the reality is going to be that very few people actually use
Leo Laporte (01:47:28):
No that's
Owen Thomas (01:47:29):
Right. App stores.
Leo Laporte (01:47:30):
That's right.
Owen Thomas (01:47:30):
It's gonna be too much work. It's gonna be confusing.
Leo Laporte (01:47:33):
I just wanna buy it with my fingerprint or my face. I don't want to do anything more. I don't wanna think about it. In fact that
Owen Thomas (01:47:40):
Yeah. Is apple going to be forced to open up all of those, you know, access points and APIs, like you're not gonna have the same smoothness.
Leo Laporte (01:47:47):
No apple will make sure you don't. The other day I paid with my apple watch for a burrito and I told my daughter, I said, I feel like I'm not even paying for this at all. Like it's just free. Apple's paying, that's what it's called. Apple pay. Apple will pay. And the psychology of it is dramatic. When you eat, take out that friction of actually opening your billfold and pulling money out, <affirmative> people buy more stuff. I'm convinced of it. It just gets easier and easier.
Owen Thomas (01:48:15):
Leo, have you heard the story about Steve jobs at the apple cafe max cafeteria?
Leo Laporte (01:48:20):
No.
Owen Thomas (01:48:22):
So like many CEOs Steve jobs took a $1 a year salary. Right? So whenever he had a guest and took them out to CA cafe max, he would offer to pay and get really insistent that that he pay because it was deducted from his paycheck. And because it was just $1 a year, he'd basically get the pizza or whatever they were buying for free <laugh> for free <laugh> and he's worth billion. That is just
Leo Laporte (01:48:48):
Cheap escape, man. That he
Owen Thomas (01:48:49):
Just, he loves getting free that from his own company,
Leo Laporte (01:48:53):
From my own company. Yeah. I mean, ultimately, well, I don't, that's ridiculous. That's nuts. Snap is making this I, what could possibly go wrong with this? Snap is making a little flying drone called the pixie that can do selfies. When you can't ask somebody to take a video for you available in the us and France for 230 bucks, fortunately it's expensive. So I don't expect to see a lot of them around there's no controller, no SD card. I don't even know how it could possibly work. There are four preconfigured flight paths. So I get, guess you turn it on. You say float orbit or follow press, the button pixie takes off. When you wanna stop recording you, you catch the drone, which may not be easy, but you catch it, put your hand below it and it just lands in your hand. I think this sounds kind of cool. Actually
Owen Thomas (01:49:51):
There was a company, I think it was called Lilly that promised something like this and it turned out that their demo video was completely fake.
Leo Laporte (01:50:00):
Oh, I remember that. Yeah. Yeah.
Owen Thomas (01:50:03):
I think snap has a little more at stake. So they
Leo Laporte (01:50:06):
Saying very clearly on this video created with pixie. So you better, you better believe. That's kind of an interesting idea. I guess five to eight flights on a single charged it's got a replaceable battery. Doesn't weigh very much about three ounces, four ounces. They did a skywriting campaign, a over my house yesterday. Oh really? For this thing. Yeah. I was, I, I, I there's an Olympic pool across the street that I swim in every day. Cause I got, you know, bad, bad back, bad joints. And I was on my back and I looked up at the sky and it was one of those planes that does the it does like dot matrix printing where it just shoots a puff of cloud and it makes a matrix of letters and it was like use pixie. It's awesome. Something like that. Wow. take it with pixie. Well, let me buy one. Interestingly, it's gonna take 16 to 17 weeks. <Laugh> to get here. I mean, I'll have it in time for Christmas. That's the other thing the supply chain is, I mean, it, we're getting used to seeing things like that now. Oh yeah. You'll get,
Owen Thomas (01:51:10):
This is us. This is going to be devastating for, in, for influencer boyfriends. So all those boyfriends who are photographing those candid moments of their influencer,
Leo Laporte (01:51:23):
They're outta work. They are,
Owen Thomas (01:51:24):
They are out of work.
Leo Laporte (01:51:25):
I've been replaced by a pixie. That's right. Isn't there, wasn't there a whole account Instagram account about the, the, the boyfriends who have to take pictures. So August 22nd, I will get my pixie. And and I'll tell you all about it.
Owen Thomas (01:51:42):
And you'll fire your influencer boyfriend.
Leo Laporte (01:51:44):
I will fire my influencer boyfriend. He's gone. He's history. Get ready. I wanna know if you can use it on, on not snap. Like if you give them 200 and whatever dollars for this thing. Oh, I'm sure you have to snap. And then they decide you're a spamer and kill your account. Do you now own like a 200 and something dollar brick? See, this is, this is how Corey thinks ladies and gentlemen, this is why he's such a bitter, unhappy human being. <Laugh> just, just, just enjoy the consumer society as it was intended. Well, this is what happened with people who bought, you know, Facebook's Facebook. Yeah, right? The, the, the, the quest. I don't have a quest cuz I don't have a Facebook account and I'm not gonna create one just so I can get a quest. And you're right. If you, for some reason got booted off of Facebook, your quest would stop working. That's crazy. And you know, back to Elon and his weird business plans, like imagine if your switching cost, if you left Facebook was a bunch of proprietary hardware that you bought that would only work with. Or if you left TWITtter, rather it was a bunch of proprietary hardware that only worked with TWITtter, right?
Cory Doctorow (01:52:44):
So someone buys, snap and says, oh, we've got a certain fraction of our users that have sunk 200 bucks into being a, a snap user. We can probably charge them, you know, X dollars before. They're like I, I guess I'll give up that $200 investment. And if we keep it below there, we can just melt them for it. And the more stuff we sell the, and that's locked to our platform. The more we can mistreat them before they
Leo Laporte (01:53:08):
Leave, I fell for it. Oh, well I think I have a snap account. I'm not sure.
Cory Doctorow (01:53:17):
You've been PERMA
Leo Laporte (01:53:18):
Band. I probably have Fort worth the first city in the us to mine. Bitcoin it's installed three Bitcoin mining rigs in the basement, in the it room, the climate controlled information technology wing, which is probably just a room, a Fort worth city hall. The minors will be hosted on a private network to minimize the security risk. Three Bitmain, an minor S nine minor rings will run. Mining rigs will run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Fort worth mayor standing in front of them. She says, it's a gold mine. We're gonna be rich or not. She said, they say that the, the mining rigs use as much energy as a household vacuum cleaner. I don't think there's gonna be a lot of Bitcoin flowing from that by Bitcoin mining rig. I think they're about 20 years
Cory Doctorow (01:54:13):
Too
Leo Laporte (01:54:13):
Late too. Rich. Yeah. Go get rich on
Cory Doctorow (01:54:16):
This. Good to see our mayors laying in their strategic beanie baby reserves.
Leo Laporte (01:54:19):
<Laugh> against
Cory Doctorow (01:54:20):
Future economic and volatility.
Leo Laporte (01:54:23):
I'm planning, I'm planning for the future. Let's see. Okay. Let's take a little break and then we will have a couple of fun ones to wrap it up. Tiktok, the number one app worldwide in the first quarter of 2022. Congratulations. TikTok. Are anybody Curry or is there some reason to fear are our new Chinese over Lords with TikTok? Is there any thing to worry about there?
Cory Doctorow (01:54:48):
I mean, I think that they, they are definitely supplying information to the Chinese state on the basis of lawful requests. And maybe even in the sloppy way that we talked about before,
Leo Laporte (01:55:01):
I'm
Cory Doctorow (01:55:01):
Sure there's an equivalent for TikTok something more interesting. There's a, there's a little European group called algorithm. Suppose they're they're data scientists who crowdsource gathering information about how the recommender algorithms work and they started it just to sort of figure it out. So you install like a, a browser plugin, depending on which services you use. There's one for TikTok, one for YouTube's, one for porn hub, one for Amazon and one for Facebook. And it just, it just feeds randomized data into this analytical platform. And one of the reports they wrote was on how TikTok is performing in Russia right now. And they said, it's just, it's created like a little pocket universe in which,
Leo Laporte (01:55:39):
Because they banned TikTok banned
Cory Doctorow (01:55:42):
Russian Yeah. New videos from Russia, but the existing VI. So all that's circulating on Russian TikTok right now
Leo Laporte (01:55:50):
Is from Russia. You can't put new video into Russia. Yeah. Right.
Cory Doctorow (01:55:54):
Pre they're pre-and videos about how Russia is defending itself against Nazis in new Ukraine. Oh, nice. So it's a completely alternate universe. And you know, that that's, that's something that, that algorithms exposed was able to do was able to learn by, by mining these algorithms. I, you know, I think that there are pocket universes of all kinds. You know what Eli Paris are called the filter bubble. Although that term gets thrown all around a lot these days. I think that there's, there's a lot of these little pocket universes that created by recommender algorithms. Some of them are super benign. You know, if you like start in joinery and carpentry, you will find your way into the pocket universe of Japanese nail list, joinery and carpentry. And from there that's really cool. Applies further, you know? Yeah. Really specific kinds. That's awesome. That's the kind of esoterica I'm here for all day. Yeah. But some of them are, are less benign. Right?
Leo Laporte (01:56:46):
Well, I just hope Elon doesn't ever buy Reddit. That's all. Cuz that's how I learn about things like that.
Leo Laporte (01:56:52):
I don't imagine he would, let's take a little break and our final add of the day, we have a few more stories. We can wrap it up with our great panel. I want you to go to TWIT.tv, our website, and take a look. Let me just do it real quickly at something we've got at the bottom of this at the very bottom here, there's a little accessibility icon. This is from user way. And this is the sweetest thing. User ways are sponsor of this segment. This is the sweetest way to make the site more approachable, more accessible to everybody. If you click that button, you'll get an accessibility menu. You can also hit control. You allows you to change the contrast to highlight links, make text bigger, change the text, spacing, a dyslexia friendly font and a lot more accessibility settings. This is one of the ways user way makes websites easier to access.
Leo Laporte (01:57:44):
All of the world user way is a truly exciting company. Every website, according to the law, without exception has to be accessible. It's that's that's one of the features of the ADA user way is an AI powered solution that enforces those web content accessibility guidelines, the Wang eyelines easily in a matter of seconds, user way, AI can do more than an entire team of developers could do in months. It's just one line of JavaScript. It may seem overwhelming when you first figure out that you need to make your website accessible or want to make your website accessible user way solutions, make it easy, simple cost active. You can even use their free scanning tool@userway.org to see if your website is ADA compliant and user way works with some of the biggest websites in the world. So if you have a giant enterprise grade website with thousands of pages, they even have a managed solution where their team can handle everything for you.
Leo Laporte (01:58:45):
User ways, AI and machine learning solutions, power accessibility for over a million websites, including TWIT, including Coca-Cola and Disney and eBay and FedEx. And now these enterprise level accessibility tools are available to small and medium businesses as well. Of course, as you grow, they can grow with you. It is now the leading accessibility solution in the market. 61% of the market. The biggest in the world, I'll give you some examples. Motley fool, you know, Motley fool, financial news and investment advisor had 1,911 pages on their website. They were getting 20 million page use a month. They had designed the site smart. They were already structured for accessibility, but that was a lot of work for their dev team spending a lot of time, keeping it updated to the standards cuz the standards change. So they added user way as an extra layer of accessibility to make sure their browsing experience was accessible to everyone.
Leo Laporte (01:59:38):
That's what we've done. We, we, we make sure our site was accessible, but by adding that user way button, we just make it a little bit nicer for people with accessibility issues for years, user way has been on the cutting edge, creating innovative technologies for accessibility that push the envelope of what's possible with AI and machine learning and computer vision. That's one of the ways they auto generate alt tags for images. They actually have. They can write image descriptions for you with their computer vision. They remediate complex nav menus ensure that all the popups are accessible, fix vague link violations, fix any broken links. They can make sure that your website supports the full accessibility layer that all web browsers offer or including the use of accessible colors while remaining true to your brand. And you'll get a detailed report of everything that was fixed on your website works with everything WordPress. Yes. Shopify Wix site core. Yes, SharePoint. And of course with your own hand coded site, that's how we're doing it. Let user way help your business meet its compliance goals and improve the experience for your users. The voice of Siri, Susan Bennett has a message about user way, sir.
Susan Bennett (02:00:50):
Hi, I'm Susan Bennett. The original voice of Siri. You won't hear me say something like this too often. I'm sorry. I don't understand what you're looking for, but every day that's what the internet is like for millions of people with disabilities user way fixes all of that with just one line of code.
Leo Laporte (02:01:11):
It's pretty amazing. One line of code does it all. And our web engineer Patrick will test testify to that. It was a very easy fix for him to make to our site user way, can make any website fully accessible, ADA compliant with the user way. Everyone who visits your site can browse seamlessly can customize it to fit your needs. It's a great way to show your brand's commitment to millions of people with disabilities. You wanna make your site accessible. I know you do well. Here's an easy way to do it. User way.org/TWIT. You'll get 30% off user way's AI powered accessibility solution, 30% off user way.org/TWIT user way, making the internet accessible for everyone user way.org/TWIT. And if you get a chance, go to the TWIT website and click that it in the lower, right. That's pretty amazing. Even frankly, I, you know, I'm an old guy. I like the bigger text. I like that. You can move the widget. You can hide it. It's a great solution user way. We thank you for your support and for this great accessibility menu on our site. If you wanna try it to couple of final stories before, oh, before we go to that though, I forgot. We've got a great little mini video about this week on TWIT watch,
Dick (02:02:29):
There was a pep com event, an in person pep com event. It's actually great for the press. It is cause they
Leo Laporte (02:02:37):
Feed us <laugh>
Dick (02:02:38):
Yes, yes. But
Leo Laporte (02:02:39):
First time I ever saw a chocolate fountain was at a pep com showcase,
Dick (02:02:43):
But it wasn't for sale or you would've had,
Leo Laporte (02:02:46):
But you could dip anything into it and then eat it.
Dick (02:02:48):
<Laugh> doesn't work. Go with a cell phone. Don't worry. No,
Leo Laporte (02:02:51):
I tried. No. Yeah.
Jim Cutler (02:02:53):
Previously on tech news, weekly
Jason (02:02:57):
Nap has a new gadget that it's announcing officially. It's not a, another pair of spectacles for your face. It's a camera in the sky
Jim Cutler (02:03:08):
IOS today
Dick (02:03:09):
Coming up on iOS today, Rosemary orchard. And I have a special guest because we are going all in on shortcuts. So what does that mean? Of course it means Matthew Cale joining us
Jim Cutler (02:03:21):
All about Android,
Jason (02:03:22):
Android 13 beta one is out. This is the first beta of Android 13 that doesn't require you to, you know, jump through hurdles in order to install it. I did this and my device got white to
Jim Cutler (02:03:37):
It. Oh, nice. Technology. Isn't always pretty, but we are.
Leo Laporte (02:03:41):
Okay. So don't, I'm glad he said that. I won't be installing Android 13 on my pixel six, not just yet. Couple of I didn't finish all of the quarterly results. Met meta first quarter pretty successful generated revenue of $695 million. Oh, I'm sorry. That's wrong. 27.2 billion. That makes more sense. But they did have a loss on their they call it the Facebook reality labs, the meta verse of 10.2 billion on revenue of 2.3 billion. But, but they, he knew that they, in fact they estimated would lose about 10 billion a year for some time until the metaverse actually happened. But the stock market liked the results. Meta stock went up, meta employees happy Amazon didn't have a great quarter. Microsoft did have a good quarter. Actually the most interesting story from my point of view of Microsoft is about half of its revenue came from cloud. Microsoft has become a cloud company. Are you surprised Tim you've been covering my, you know, a tech business for some years, Microsoft basically is pivoted into a cloud company.
Tim Stevens (02:05:04):
Yeah. A services company, for sure. And that's definitely been something that a lot of people were predicting that they would have to do a decade ago and were concerned about, you know, with operating system revenue really declining and ultimately going away, how are they to be able to continue any level of growth and, and they've done a remarkable job in being able to, to maintain that going forward. I, I'm pretty impressed actually at how well they've, they've managed to make that pivot because it's not an easy one. We've seen companies like IBM do it in the past with some degrees of success. And from Microsoft to, to, to go from a really a, a larger consumer facing company with some business stuff who really pivot to being hugely business services related yeah. MIS impressive
Leo Laporte (02:05:42):
Azure, 49% growth in the quarter. Yeah, it is very impressive. The, the number of companies that have not made that kind of pivot you know, huge in fact the number that have are it's very rare, so good, good job. I think Satya Adella deserves a lot of credit for that. Hollywood's fight against VPNs turns ugly. Now film companies are accusing VPNs of enabling illegal activity. It's not just copyright infringement anymore. I'm sure. Corey has something to say about Hollywood's against express VPN <laugh>.
Cory Doctorow (02:06:21):
I mean, I've been, I've been involved with this fight for a long time. It doesn't surprise me. I think that, you know, the, the unwillingness to acknowledge how many powerful and useful things VPNs do and the insistence VPN that there's some magical way that you can design a VPN that only lets the good content through and not the bad content is pretty nonsensical. And you know, we are now at the end of the, the copyright experiment and it's been pretty much, I think definitively proved that the best way to fight piracy is to offer people content in useful rappers. That's easy to get at a reasonable price
Leo Laporte (02:07:06):
Without DRM.
Cory Doctorow (02:07:08):
Yeah. Well, without DRM and without, I mean their big thing is release windows. They wanna do regional release windows. I understand that I have an American publisher of a British publisher. I know what that's like, but you know, like the expecting the entire or world to arrange itself to your shareholders convenience and when they fail to do so, accusing them a felony contempt of business model, it's not an adult posture, it's it is a, a, like a, there's no word for it, but childish as a way of thinking about how the world should work. Oh, and now they're saying VPNs are responsible for hacking stalking bomb, threats, political assassinations, child porn. They said that about P2P. They said, they said, that's right. You downloaded MP3. Yeah. And it's gonna have a, it's gonna have a virus and the MP3, it's like, that's not how MP3s, you know, you do you buddy.
Cory Doctorow (02:07:57):
And and you know, and then the virus in the MP3 would have your bank account hacked. You said an interesting thing though. We are at the end of the copyright wars, do you think that's the case that companies are realizing that I know music industries abandoned it, the thing that we're fighting over these days is automated filters. That's what they really want. So they, they, they just want YouTube style content ID filters for all platforms, and then they want it to be set up so that like they feed the filter with the things that are prohibited. So no one else gets to feed it and block their stuff, but they get to block your stuff. And that what they get to do is replace all limitations and exceptions to copyright, which are super important. And just as big a part of copyright as the exclusive rights part with a kind of Fiat system where it's like, it's only fair use if we say it is.
Cory Doctorow (02:08:47):
And since the whole point of fair use is all the things you can do, if they, it without permission that just effectively eliminates fair use and, you know, know the it's, it's part of the extremely selective view that the entertainment industry has always taken of copyright. You know, you see Disney Marvel now fighting the original Marvel creators, including the errors of, of Stan Lee who are trying to exercise a bedrock of American copyright, which is the termination, right, which is after 30 years, you can claw back the works to rights to your work and, and you can sell 'em to someone else. And they're basically arguing that, that they shouldn't have to respect copyright it's it's never been about respecting artists' rights. It's always been about finding ways to secure commercial advantage. So you're
Owen Thomas (02:09:30):
It doesn't go ahead. Oh, sorry. Doesn't streaming kind of make the, the old fashioned file series and era copyright arguments irrelevant because you know, really you're talking about not user generated content like YouTube, where there are questions about the rights, but, you know, it's just a package of content that Netflix gives you they've licensed it or created it. And practically speaking, no, one's trying to like rabbit and downloaded it's too much. Yeah.
Cory Doctorow (02:10:00):
Well,
Owen Thomas (02:10:00):
It's, there's a,
Cory Doctorow (02:10:02):
I mean, everyone can, who can afford Netflix has an Netflix account. And, you know, they, we talked earlier about how some people are, you know, looking at the number of accounts they have every month and going, oh, no one wants to offer a bundle. And Disney decided to do this thing where they took everything out of Netflix and whatever. And then they bought all the media account companies. So now have to have D plus, and it's all kind of a mess. And, you know, like the, the single biggest thing that drives people to password sharing and, and, and downloading on Torrance is when the packages of available aren't well,
Leo Laporte (02:10:33):
Array and convenient and efficient for them. And as soon as it's convenient and efficient and well ADE, most of those people give it up. And the ones who don't are super price sensitive and they weren't gonna give you any money. Anyway, I think that's right. I think that's right. Which is one of the reasons I think Netflix is smart with their password sharing strategy, which is instead of saying to the person who isn't buying Netflix, but is using my password. We're gonna cut you off. They just say to me, it's a couple extra bucks, just pay it. <Laugh> pay, pay for your kids. Come on. And that's a, you know, that's not a hard thing to exceed to. And it's a, I think a much smarter way of, of dealing with the problem. Yeah. final story, cuz I know we want to get everybody outta here on time, but I do want to give a, a pat on the back to our good friend and regular contributor.
Leo Laporte (02:11:24):
Christina Warren featured an NPR this week because she apparently collects memorabilia from defunct companies, companies that hardly ever made it move pass. There she is in a movie pass t-shirt she recently got a pop socket for CNN. Plus she's looking for the holy grail though, if you can help her out, which is any Theranose swag at all, she would very much like that. There she is wearing a fire festival. <Laugh> t-shirt she's still pursuing her. So called white whale, which is Theranos. Anybody get, oh, oh, there's Enron and Enron pad. Where'd you get that? Corey that's my friend, Christopher Brown, the Austin science fiction writer and lawyer who one day sent me like a letter or a package or something. And in, it was a pad of Enron paper. <Laugh> so real. That's not, that's not. Oh yeah, no, that's actual on stationary. Can't use that. Yeah. Whenever, whenever I write to my Congressman, I write on, on stationary. They listen, they sit up and take notice. Oh
Owen Thomas (02:12:25):
Anyway, you, you know that Elizabeth Holmes's father worked at worked at Enron.
Leo Laporte (02:12:30):
No. Oh, that's amazing. Well, it all comes around. Doesn't it. Oh, and thank you so much for being here. Protocol. Great publication is part of my regular daily news beat check protocol.com senior editor. And you don't charge a thing. I don't understand it, but you don't even have ads, do you?
Owen Thomas (02:12:52):
Oh no, we do. Oh, you do. Maybe you've got a blocker.
Leo Laporte (02:12:55):
Let me turn that ad blocker off for you. But
Owen Thomas (02:12:59):
We do appreciate your, your time and signing up for our fine, fine newsletters, including FinTech which I oversee in source code, which I occasionally contribute to. There
Leo Laporte (02:13:10):
You go. Yeah. You may have ads, but they're not intrusive. I can, I, there it's a really great publication and it course that's where Megan Moroni works. So we like it for that reason too. Thank you, Owen. Great to have you on our stage this
Owen Thomas (02:13:23):
Week. My pleasure
Leo Laporte (02:13:24):
Also Tim Stevens. He's the car guy, the editor in chief at CNET cars. Anything going on at S CNET cars? You wanna talk about plug?
Tim Stevens (02:13:33):
Yeah, actually I'm heading down to Texas on Tuesday this week to drive the F150 lightning for the first time. So we'll be driving Ford's first EV truck. The impressions are gonna be under Barbara for a little while, but we'll have that up on the site in the next couple of weeks. So you can see what it's like to actually drive and even actually tow some things with Ford's electric
Leo Laporte (02:13:49):
Truck first drive. I know president Biden got to drive it, but that's the only person he did ever.
Tim Stevens (02:13:56):
Yeah. He got a heck of an exclusive there. So kudos to him. He's got good journalism shops. Obviously.
Leo Laporte (02:14:00):
I hope he was barcode. I hope he had signed the DNA. <Laugh> no, I'm very interested in that. In fact, I think Jerry our marketing director, our CMO is put an order in, but you now, if you're ordering now, are they gonna start shipping soon?
Tim Stevens (02:14:15):
They are. They're in production. In fact, they've just increased production. They just finally gave us the, the actual final horsepower figures and everything else. They are in the factory coming on now. But if you haven't put your order in now, you'll you certainly won't get one until next year. Yeah,
Leo Laporte (02:14:26):
He's waiting until next year. That's the truck that you can plug your house into
Tim Stevens (02:14:30):
<Laugh> again. It's or watch some other things
Leo Laporte (02:14:32):
Too. Nice feature cnet.com/cars. Right?
Tim Stevens (02:14:38):
You
Leo Laporte (02:14:38):
Got it. All right. Thanks for being here. Tim. Cory doctoral science fiction, author blogger. His blog is now@pluralistic.net. Highly recommend subscribing to the newsletter. It's a must read. And if you wanna know more about his books, crap, hound.com is the place to go. I hope your hips are feeling better. Anything thank you. Anything you wanna mention by the way, regular user AMAST on you just did a, like a eighties tweet thread or toot thread. I should say.
Cory Doctorow (02:15:07):
I, I do my I, all of the things that I post on pluralistic also show up at the same as a TWITtter thread, I'm mastered on thread, a Tumblr post, a medium post, a discourse post, an RSS feed and a newsletter. So they all
Leo Laporte (02:15:20):
Go, how do you do that? What do you use to do that
Cory Doctorow (02:15:23):
Manually?
Leo Laporte (02:15:24):
No, no.
Tim Stevens (02:15:25):
Yep.
Cory Doctorow (02:15:27):
You know that scene in Batman, one of the Batman movies where the penguin is being played by Danny DeVito and he, he accuses Christopher walk of having done something bad. And Christopher Walken says I couldn't have possibly done it. And if I had I would've, shreded the evidence and the penguin pulls out this sheet of paper. That's just got thousands of pieces of tape on it. And he says, all it took was little patience and a lot of
Leo Laporte (02:15:48):
Tape. <Laugh>, that's
Cory Doctorow (02:15:49):
Kinda how my workflow works.
Leo Laporte (02:15:52):
Holy cow, pluralistic. He's on the Mamo, France FFR server, M a OT DotR here. He is right here. Great picture of you too. That's great, Corey. You, and is that these tubes? What are they, what is that a picture of
Cory Doctorow (02:16:07):
That's from the computer history museum. The, the last outta town trip I took before lockdown nice was to the computer history museum. And I got to the, is that they're secret warehouse full of incredibly valuable, weird, old junk. Nice. There's a lot of good pictures of it in my flicker stream, all CC by. So you, I shall check it out using commercially if you need to illustrate something.
Leo Laporte (02:16:24):
Corey, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks Owen. Thank you. Thanks. Tim always great to have all three of you on. We do TWIT every Sunday around about two Pacific, 2 35 30 Eastern. That would be 2130 UTC. So you can watch us live. If you want@livedotTWIT.tv, there's also live audio streams there. If you're watching live chat with us, live at our free community IRC server irc.TWIT.you just a browser will work, but if you have an IRC client that's even better, of course you can always chat with our discord with all the other club TWIT members. If you're a member of club TWIT after the fact on demand versions of this show available@TWIT.tv, there's a YouTube channel and you can also subscribe, been your favorite podcast client. Please leave us a five star review. Let the world know about one of the longest running technology shows. Now in our 18th year, that's a that's, that's a grown, a full grown podcast. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time. Another TWIT is in the can!
