TWiT 1013: Calamari in Crisis - Touching the Sun, Fake Spotify Artists, Banished Words
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It's time for Twit This Week in Tech. We have a great panel for you. Stacey Higginbotham is here. Richard Campbell is here. And from TechCrunch, Anthony Ha. Of course, we're going to talk about what to expect at CES this year. Of course, Stacey is all about IoT. We'll talk about matter. We'll talk about AI. And then the banned words of 2025, words we never want to hear again. All that and more coming up next on Twit. ♪

Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWIT. This is TWIT. This Week in Tech. Episode 1013. Recorded Sunday, January 5th, 2025. Calamari in Crisis. It's time for TWIT This Week in Tech, the show we cover the week's

Tech news, brand new year, brand new news, and a lovely panel assembled for your delectation. Stacey Agobotham is here, longtime host of This Week in Google. She still does Stacey's Book Club in our club, and she's now a policy fellow at Consumer Reports, where she just wrote a lovely piece on why all IoT devices should have updatable firmware. They should have an expiration date. Yeah? Yeah, that's my 2025...

like big thing. That's all I'm going to talk about next year. Well, actually, we brought you here to talk about matter because you're also a home or at least you do. I'll talk about that, too. Do you still do IOT stuff? You don't do Stacey on IOT. You don't do the website. Do you pay attention to it? Oh, yeah, I totally pay attention to it. It's like still my job to pay attention to it. But most of my time is like cybersecurity and then IOT devices. I know it's weird. There's plenty to talk about in that area. Goodness knows.

Wonderful to see you again. We had a fun book club a couple of weeks ago, and we are now voting on the next book. But I gave everybody plenty of time to vote. So if you're in Club Twit, go to the Stacey's Book Club section and you can look at the four books. Who's winning? Oh, I haven't checked. I should check. Well, I'll check. I always save a credit on Audible so that I can get the book.

If I haven't read it yet. I can never find where the poll gets. So the hum by these are the various things. Hum by Helen Phillips. Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson. The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain by

which sounds a little bit like the cook the thief and her lover by sophia samatar and orbital by samantha harvey 13 days left to vote i have orbital in my stack to go to mexico oh yeah you're going to read it yeah yeah on paper too just because she who must be obeyed suggested i'd read something on paper that's richard you should read it on paper i i listened to it

And I felt it was so literary and possibly beautiful. And I missed a lot of that beauty because right now it's doing a lot. I normally read on a Kindle, but actually read on paper papers, paper papers, really. That's Richard Campbell. You may remember him from windows weekly run his radio. And from the last episode of twit, it's great to see feeling a little fixturist here. Leo, we liked you so much. We brought you back. Great to see you. Actually. Yeah, we had Paris as inked in, but she's not feeling well. So,

Thank you, Richard, for filling in at the last moment. We appreciate it. Also here from TechCrunch, he's their weekend editor, Anthony Ha. Good to see you, Anthony. Thanks for having me back. I'm excited. Are you in San Francisco? Where are you located? No, I'm in New York. I'm filming in my beautiful Harlem apartment. It is beautiful. That's why I asked, because San Francisco is famous for what they call the railroad apartments, where it's narrow but long.

And it looks like you're in a railroad room, narrow but long. Yeah, my apartment is like that too. And there was definitely a period in 2020 where we would experiment with different Zoom setups. And it would either look like I was in the longest apartment, like the apartment where there was all depth or no depth.

And ultimately I just gave up on having a good setup and I just, I like this spot and you know, that's how it is. - I think every Zoom backdrop should have a, what do they call that? Convergence point in perspective. It should have that. I can't remember what the name. - That's what I'm here for. The vanishing point. - Vanishing point. - There we go, yeah. - That's even better. Every room should have a vanishing point. I like that.

Is that where the gravity well sits? Yeah, that's the black hole. Did you see now, because they've been looking at black holes, they think there is no dark matter, that time is variable.

And that explains the lumpiness in the universe. Wait, when did this happen? Just the other day. I literally just read the paper like this weekend. Actually, there was a study a few years ago that indicated maybe this was the case and they've done some more work. And now they're pretty convinced that...

It's a very good theory. And it's an old one. It's been around for 20 years. This idea that applying general relativity, including mass in your time calculations when you get to extreme numbers, means that between the galaxies and then in the void,

Expansion is much faster than where gravity is present. It slows expansion. And that actually, when you start adding up those numbers, gets awfully close to the dark energy offset. It matches what we, yeah, but the dark energy was just something made up. Just like dark matter, they're all fabrications to solve for problems. Right. In the case of dark matter, it's like, and 70% of everything is something we don't know. And they're saying this new model fits a little bit better than the dark matter model.

model, which is very good. And you know what? I'm surprised they didn't come up with this sooner because that makes sense. We know that mass slows time, right? Yeah, that's good science. It just, once you figure it out, it makes sense. You're like, oh. That's right. That's a good point. But until the James Webb Space Telescope, you couldn't measure it well enough to prove it. And so this is a fallout of the third wave of the JWST measurements that started to be precise enough to say, hey, this might be correct.

Some science projects are really good. Yeah. That's a good science project. We create new senses for our civilization. Isn't that amazing? Measure things.

Back to the somewhat less interesting CES. It starts tonight with CES Unveiled, the Consumer Electronics Show's official kind of mini show, and then tomorrow is Pepcom and Showstoppers, and then the doors open Tuesday or Wednesday, Stacey? You were looking up the schedule. Oh.

None of us are there. That's the key point. And Anthony, you kind of succinctly put it succinctly. I'm now senior enough. I don't have to go. I don't know if I use those exact words. Okay. Uh,

Yeah, I don't have to go anymore, which is nice. TechCrunch has a huge team there. It's always a little bit miserable, but it's also a great... Usually, I mean, it's always a mixed bag. It gets exciting because there's always new stuff and it's always such a grind because there's so much trash there.

You know, so Lisa and I have a kind of ongoing debate. It's expensive for us to go because we have to bring stuff and, you know, it's tens of thousands of dollars. So we haven't gone since before COVID. The last CES I went to was January 2020. And I'm kind of of the opinion, you don't really see a lot of important stuff there. Am I wrong on that? I think, okay, look, it is a grind. And I will say last year I went and I didn't have to cover anything. And that was like the best CES I ever had. Cause like,

You just get to walk around and be like, oh my God, that looks so cool. So I think...

There are two, like, it's easy to be like, oh, it's a grind. It's not a lot of cool stuff. You can probably cover it better from far away. And that is true. But hidden inside some of the techier booths, if you go to like Qualcomm's booth or even Intel's booth, you go to like these weird Eureka Park booths, you can actually see the future of technology. And I'm not paid by Gary Shapiro.

at all but head of the Consumer Electronics Association yeah you can you can see trends and things emerging very early on and it's a great time as a reporter to talk to people in ways that they normally won't talk to you so you know you can casually have conversations and learn more in like 10 minutes than you could in like a

30-minute interview with a PR person involved, right? You may not be able to quote it. I mean, you actually totally could. Like, I loved it. I mean, I hated it, but I also loved it. Well, and certainly if you're covering IoT and home automation... Even if you're covering, I mean, I feel like... TVs, for sure. Yeah. But what else? I mean...

The last time I was there in 2020, there were a lot of things to make food, like bread makers, but then there was yolk. Don't look at the finished technology. Look at the building. That was my mistake. Yeah. Go to the chip guys. Go to the satellite guys. Go to anybody. You see what they're pitching to their customers that will be in your devices in three to five years, maybe. Because there will be, there always is at CES kind of a trend. There will be this year a lot of CES,

stuff with unnecessary AI glued into it. Right. That'll be the thing. Like CES this year, like I'm not going to say, okay, ignore it if it has AI, but yes, everything's going to have a thin wash of AI the same way it used to have a thin wash of like

Madam A. Or blockchain. Or blockchain or whatever. You can just safely, you can't ignore it as a journalist, but as someone who cares about technology, you can totally ignore all that. And you can say, okay, if everybody's doing AI, let's talk about energy savings because that's a big, huge problem in cost center. So let's go talk to the chip guys about how they're

how people are tweaking silicon to make that run more efficiently are there cool cooling technologies that you can find that's where you go yeah yeah i agree that would be that would be of more interest but you see you are an actual reporter and capable of digging deeper i am a superficial guy and i go there and i see the robot that delivers toilet paper rolls and think i never want to come back here again i don't and all the local news by the way

They go to the events on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday with their camera crews. They do an interview with the first thing they see in the door, which one year was the haptic fork. Remember that? The buzzing fork. And then the last time I was there-

what that's a real tool oh no that's for people who have uh stability issues yeah yeah but no this wasn't for that this was a this was a haptic feedback fork it's like it's gonna do a diet right yeah it was dopey and then and then the last time i was there kohler had a robot that would bring you a roll of toilet paper if you ran out which not was never intended as a product it was a

it was really about getting the local TV crews to do a bit on it and then you get some publicity so that's why I kind of have a nervous and negative reaction to but you're you're of course as always Stacy I feel chastened you're right we should celebrate sorry I just I feel like um

The worst excesses of the tech industry are shown there. But then, of course, there are people who are doing important work. You're right. And you're totally, you are also right, Leo. The worst excesses of the tech industry are there. How did, can I ask you a question though on a technical thing? How did you get the CR and Consumer Reports to flip around?

That's amazing. It was backwards the last time. It was, but I manually flipped it. Oh, you did really? I have a Kohler robot back there. Did it bring you a roll of toilet paper? Well, exactly. It's like toilet paper. Actually, that would be one of the things that you would go there. And I'm sure so would Anthony and Richard and say, Hey, all this AI is nice, but who's going to pay for the power? Hmm.

There was a story this week in Bloomberg that said AI is using so much power, it's degrading the grid. The headline, AI needs so much power, it's making yours worse. What people don't realize is that, you know, am I showing the wrong screen or is that? Yeah, that was my fault. My bad. Okay. The AI data centers are distorting

Now, Richard, you're going to have to explain this because you're the autodidact. They're distorting the normal flow of electricity. And so there's a map that shows you where there is brownouts in effect from these AIs, which cause damage to home appliances, especially in areas like Chicago and Dater Center Alley and Nova, North Virginia, where distorted power readings are way above normal.

The problem here, and it'll get resolved, is that the data centers aren't reporting their consumption dynamically back to the power system because their consumption levels are hard to measure. They're not like regular humans. Well, and also we have a dumb grid, right? They've talked for years about making a smart grid. The grid's getting smarter, but major power consumers like...

An aluminum smelter is a great example of this massive consumer of electricity. And they actually converse with the power company before they crank up the inductors for exactly that reason. It's hundreds of megawatts and you'll knock the grid over. And here you've got these data centers in neighborhoods and their consumption behavior is unusual. It's kind of symmetrical, but it does has its own peaks. It was the same all the time. It wouldn't be a problem, but it's not.

And it doesn't follow the normal shape of humans, which is more power consumed during the day, less at night. And so the impact on the grid is that it sags the cycle rate. Normally we're running at 60 hertz.

so when you overload the grid before it actually trips it'll drop down to 59 you know 59 is actually a disaster 50 you know 59.6 is bad enough and that can damage certain coils and certain it also gives you a good excuse for being late for work if you have an older electric clock because the older electric clocks used the 60 hertz per second for their timing and if it's off the clocks get off i think modern clocks are a little bit more sophisticated than that but

I have an IoT device that can help for protecting your home appliances and could report your fluctuations back if you would like. This comes from a company called Whisker Labs. They have sensors. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So, so they have, you were a data source in this Stacy, probably I was a hundred. Well, my power doesn't go out for this, but yeah, it doesn't have to go out. It's that's the thing. It's, you know, we're used to brownouts or blackouts, but bad harmonics may not be visible to you until your refrigerator fries. It is visible to me because I have a ting. They alert me. Aha.

So you have one of these whisker devices on your... Uh-huh. It's a Ting. We've talked about it on prior shows. It's...

It's called Ting. You plug it in. It's $50 a year. Or if you have certain insurance companies, they actually pay for it because it's designed to detect. Oh, they say it's for electrical fires. Yeah, they detect. But they also can detect problems with your power coming into your house. Not just what it detects issues with your power throughout your house and coming into your house. And since I do my own wiring, I like God.

That sounds bad. That kind of wiring. I have an electrician if I'm going to like, you know, swap out my electrical panel. I have this vision of you walking around in rubber boots. No, just like when I'm replacing like light switches. Yeah, yeah. They're always doing that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the ting, does the ting... So I'm looking for something central. Is there something you could put centrally on your...

A system that would then monitor the whole system or does this have to go in each outlet? No, no. Ting just goes, it just sits on one outlet in your home. Oh, okay. Oh, that's cool. It's just tracking it though. It will let you know if there's an issue, but it doesn't stop anything. It's not like a breaker. Yeah, but it'll let you know. That's the point. It lets you know. It's like, hey, by the way, your power is really yucky. It's a hundred bucks. Yeah.

It's $100 now. Yeah. Well, it comes with something called a fire prevention service. I don't know what that is. Oh, it's if they detect problems, they actually call you and pay for an electrician to come out. Oh, nice. All right. I'm going to buy one. $100 not to have a fire. Sounds good. It's one kind of fire.

don't worry there's other fires yeah i was like just so you know like don't like you may still have a fire i mean i i shouldn't have candles on my christmas tree is that what you're saying yeah i was like your christmas tree if it's still there probably would go up it's probably time to get rid of it cooking with grease clean your grease traps yeah i i that was one of my instagram purchases during the break i bought a blanket that you throw over your grease fire

Fireman Dan recommended it. So I thought, well, I can't, that's gotta be good. Do you clean your grease traps? Cause that's a, what's a grease trap. I mean, we don't have those things that are, you know, those, okay. You do know. I'm teasing anyway. So yeah. So, but you think Richard, that this is a short-term problem that we're going to fix this. Yeah. I think what you're going to see is a mandate now for, for these data centers to start reporting their intended consumption.

in real time back to the power grid and lots of real issue lots of new data centers going online courts uh had about to only get weirder Leo because now this is where you get why is Microsoft releasing Three Mile Island reactor one and and Amazon is talking to new scale and like what's really happening is the tech Giants just are going to put their own power on and I'm very likely going to make excess they're going to sell back to the grip ah

Well, they've already spent in between January and August of 2024, Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Amazon spent $125 billion on AI data centers, according to JP Morgan. And that's probably just the tip of the iceberg, right? That's just those four. And I'm sure there'll be lots more to come. And let's hope they're building them with appropriate harmonic controls. Yeah.

something reporting that with fire blankets I don't know something they need something maybe they should have a ting in every one of them well I'm sure they do quality of their power is very important which is one of the reasons they're stressing the harmonics of the rest of the grid right

So it's a reporting issue or is it a filtering issue? No, I suspect this isn't it. If you can warn the grid that you're about to increase consumption, you know what your real time consumption is, the grid can respond. Right. But like I said, this is a normal industrial problem. Major power consumers normally report into the grid when they're going to increase their demand meaningfully.

And the idea that we now have enough data centers that run in the megawatt class, like they should qualify, should be getting into that reporting mechanism. So that will come. But again, the relationship between the tech giants and the power industry is about to get really convoluted if they start producing their own power as well. Yeah, I know our local power company, which is not government run as a private business, government regulated private business, Pacific Gas and Electric, doesn't like us

They forbade us from putting too many solar panels. They didn't want us to compete with them. You can only put enough solar panels on your roof to accommodate your own projected needs. You couldn't put more power back into the grid. This is an issue that's even bigger in Australia, and it's got more to do with destabilizing the grid.

right oh really it's not about money no the power power doesn't flow symmetrically it can't go back up the transformer the same way it came down and so what does happen when there's so much residential solar and in places like Sydney they're close to 25 percent uh they'll actually blow um transformers off the poles because they're putting too much power back in is that the jump down from yeah like voltage yeah

And so now the requirement in New South Wales, which is where this region has the largest problems, is that you can only put solar on if the power company has the option to disconnect you on demand. Oh, interesting. So if they're having grid destabilization, they just pop you off the feedback loop. Right. They stop that problem. Oh, see, and I thought it was just a greedy corporation trying to

keep us from competing with them. Well, there are ways to, aren't there? I mean, there's technologies that we're not investing in that can allow for that two-way flow if we decide we want it. We just, that requires billion. I mean, that requires upgrading the distribution grid all the way down to like transformers all the way back to like the big, I don't know what they're called in the power world.

I think of them as CLECs. I bet Richard does. If your transformer is like a D-SLAM, what is the big station that you see that would be like a CLEC? It's basically along the same line. There's this idea of doing community electricity. So natively, those panels aren't putting out good house power anyway. They have to step down. And so if you could feed them into a community management tool so they could be pushed onto the grid and can be pushed to any of the houses,

and then are stepped down at point of use, you get a lot more flexibility. So community power source is a really interesting idea because now you can build a reasonable size wind turbine in that mix as well or two. And you would have batteries and power conditioning. Yeah, primarily for conditioning, but just for stability sake. But it's just, you know, the solar on that roof is a real easy solve, especially a place in California to get you off the grid. It's not a good way to support the grid.

okay that's good to know i didn't even know that you were an expert on this richard but i knew that you i knew that you would know you know i've done this the guy you go to whatever the question is he's barred local ai basically this is just a set of talks i've done on energy i know you're an expert yeah and so i specifically did a study for new south wales and we went over all the power production in new south wales and that's why i was completely up to speed on how they're compensating for the solar utilization interesting

They've now asked me to do Victoria as well. So now I'm going to do the state of Victoria next, this spring. It's nice to have a smart person on the show, isn't it, Stacey? Fellow smart person? Yes. Get a lot of smart people on the show, Leo. It's good to have three smart people on the show. I'm the one. I'm pretty sure Anthony is smart too. I know you are. That's why you're on. That's why I always say this is the Weeks Tech News Network.

covered by the smartest people I always feel awkward when there's someone who actually knows things on the show yeah it's always good it's always good and to be clear I'm not in the business I'm like what am I doing here no no no no no no no you know something tell us what you're an expert in Anthony oh nothing I mean I guess I'm really good at a trivia at like naming the years that movies came out and I can always tell you a year a movie came out so

- You know, I have a little Rolodex of people and their expertise. So I'm gonna, Richard's got eight cards in there, but I'm gonna add to your card. - That's the one line in my card. - It's okay because on Windows Weekly, our Richard's co-host on Windows Weekly, Paul Thorat's only expertise is Call of Duty. So it's perfect. You know, one thing is good. That's all you really need. - That's my one thing. - What else are we excited about at CES? Is there anything else we're expecting?

You were excited about Matter? Well, I think, should this not be a coming out party for Matter? I know. So the idea was Google, Apple, Twitter.

A bunch of others with the Zigbee Alliance involved. A few of the big players in home automation realized that having a tower of Babel with each of them speaking a different language, Samsung with its smart things, was not a good idea. That there should be some unified standards so that a homeowner

can instead of having 15 hubs to control all the different devices have uh something like Apple's home kit or or Google's home to to control it right and matter was a a consortium of these companies to try to solve this problem but in their first specification they didn't seem to solve much did they Stacy no they well

I mean, it was the first thing. Yeah, the first go-round. And what they promised was like a lot. But yeah, no, it was terrible. So is Matter 2.0 coming out at CES? I believe it is, right? I believe...

Maybe. I don't know about that. I truly don't. Sorry. I'm like, is the official Matter 2.0 coming out? Maybe it's 3.0. I don't know. I got the impression that Matter was going to matter a little more this year. They are doing, yes. They are doing more stuff. It is two years. They planned a six-month break.

kind of cycle for updates. I just don't know if we're at 2.0 or 2.1 or that that's the media I've not covered, but matter it's uses wifi and thread. And so what's happened is a lot of the really terrible things that matter was bad at was because thread didn't, wasn't really good at them. And that was a Google radio technology, right?

Thread. Yes. Thread was, yes. Thread was Tony Fidel pushed that way back in the day. Yeah. But they, they all added to like the, the thread consortium has not just Google. It's, it's an open consortium with lots of people in it for lots of companies. So they're fixing thread, which will then in turn fix matter. And presumably the biggest, the biggest complaints that we've had about thread have been fixed in thread. Right.

Good. And Thread is in a lot of devices, including a number of Apple devices. Yes. And Amazon's been putting them, I believe, in their Amazon Echo. Thread is just, it runs on top of the Zigbee protocol. So if you have a Zigbee radio, well, it runs across, sorry, not the Zigbee. It runs across 802.15.4. I always mess that one up, which is the...

at the mac and fi layer that's what zigbee is that a wi-fi standard um or no no 802.15 802.11 is wi-fi oh okay right um anyway so yeah but it is an ieee standard right well the underlying mac and file layer those those radio layers the silicon lighters generally speaking i always think that ces is best at home theater stuff

There's always, when you go in the main hall at the beginning and they open the doors and everybody flows in, there's always a giant crowd.

i think it's panasonic does it right anthony with the giant tvs yeah the arch of tvs i know what you're talking about i don't know who does it yeah um maybe it's lg maybe it's lg didn't they do the transparent one last year so yeah huge walls it's a and then and then and then all the tv guys are in one kind of sony is sony's in the back but there's lg and panasonic they're all there

And usually you go there to see what's new in TVs, but we haven't seen since QD OLED a couple of years ago, a lot of progress in new TV standards. We're still waiting for micro OLED to kind of take off. I don't think you go to CES for TVs. I feel like TVs are such an ulcer. Oh, okay. I'm like...

You go to CES for TV. I haven't been since 2020. You know why? Because Scott Wilkinson, who does our home theater geek show, is famous for bringing a pedometer and walking miles and miles at CES to see all the TVs. In 2020, we walked along with him. It was very fun. You can go back on YouTube and see it.

But there hasn't been a lot of new stuff since then. Discord's reminding us that HDMI 2.2 comes out at CEF. Oh, thank God. I've been 2.1 has been such a discipline. How many different standards for one kind of cable can there be?

1.4A, 1.4B, 2.1-- That's DisplayPort. That's a different thing. Oh, OK. But it probably gets you 8K at 120 or 144, though, is what that does. I think that was the key, right? It's more bandwidth across these HDMI cables, and now they can do 8K. So 2.1A, Keith512 is saying 80 gigabytes a second, which is all the gigabytes. That's a lot of gigabytes.

I guess enough for 8K. One of my first CESs was one of the years of 3D TV and just, you know, caught my first CES. Oh, yeah, there was a big... It was like, this is going to be it, 3D TV. That was a revolution, yeah. And remember, I mean, for a while, everybody thought mixed reality, VR, was going to be the big thing. That was a couple of years ago.

That's why I don't get too excited about new technologies emerging in CES. But I will be, just for you, I will be excited about HDMI 2.2. Just for you. There's one thing we take from this series. Who's producing an 8K? Nobody wants an 8K. 8K at this point is really, I think, for VR more than anything else because...

unless you're sitting that close to the screen you're not going to see the pixels on a 4K well more saintly who's recording anything right well that's what I'm saying yeah I'm like well in Japan you know all of these standards emerged in Japan at first right yeah but I'll tell you you know when they get accepted when the NFL implements them that's right and NFL is I'm sorry to say barely HD yeah

So they're still fighting for 4K because bandwidth problems. Right. It's just a lot of data to haul around. I have to say, though, occasionally I'll get a 4K game on my YouTube TV. I paid extra for that. And it really does look fantastic to see 4K. Not great for motion yet. Is that why all of our TVs come with motion smoothing turned on? Yeah, that's right. Because that is...

staying in hotels over the holidays i was like oh isn't it awful and you can't get like it's made of plastic inside a hotel room you can't their tvs have are running their special proprietary software so you can't access the individual tv channel or i can't turn it off yeah i was like oh my god just give me your settings i remember when uh the hobbit was came out and uh and uh as you know

he's very much peter jackson's very much into high frame rate high resolution high frame rate he was pushing the 4k 120 and even higher and somebody said yeah i saw it in 4k 120 and it looked like gandalf got his staff at wizards r us it looked like it was made out of resin which it probably was right that's the problem you know you gotta all the props have to be upgraded all the makeup has to be upgraded

I don't think the makeup can be. Nobody looked good enough for 1080p. That's right. I remember doing live with Regis and Kelly back in the day, and Kelly had just started doing a sitcom in 4K. And so they brought in her makeup artist, and they were airbrushing the makeup on you. They just said, sit back, go like this. And they go...

with the airbrush they did that only lasted once they didn't they didn't keep doing that asus is going to showcase a 6k 216 pixels per inch television the pro art 30 32 qcv but again yeah where's the content but that's always the problem isn't it

maybe this is uh maybe this is a more for uh computers that might be that might be actually what we're looking at this looks like a computer monitor yeah icons smaller than your fingernail yeah would you yeah yeah that's why we have to double the pixels yeah i got 216 ppi but i gotta run it 200 to see it everything

Exactly. So what's, what have you gained? What have I gained? What have you gained? Although I will say that I felt the same way about 4k where I was just like, this is ridiculous. And then now, like, if I try to watch a 1080p thing on my TV, I'm like, Oh, Oh, this, this looks so, you know, old fashioned and dinky and, and, you know, everything should be 4k now. So maybe that's how we're going to feel about 8k next or six or whatever. It, it, it, you do, you do get the habit, don't you? Of, of, and everything is just super crisp and,

It feels like you're looking through a window. Not my windows. My windows are very dirty. But I think that also underlines that for me, I like that Stacey has a serious purpose at CES. For me, it's actually fun because it becomes this graveyard of abandoned technologies, of futures that never pan out. And I think that's just as interesting as the futures that do pan out. I'm with you, Anthony. I rock around CES looking at all the stuff that's going to amount to nothing. Yeah. Yeah.

Because, I mean, and I always try to warn people that we'll probably do a C I should warn everybody. We'll do a CES show next weekend. I'm sure father Robert will bring a bunch of crap back as he always does from CES. And, uh, he gets so excited, you know, about the six speaker system and that kind of thing. But, uh,

almost always these are things that aren't even necessarily going to be in production unless enough dealers order it in January so that they could sell it in December. So you're looking at stuff that even if it's a success won't be out till the end of the year.

And in many cases, never gets made because there wasn't enough interest. So it's a very speculative show. But if you know that, it's kind of fun to go see it. Yeah. I wonder how many companies are showing up at CES with like six months worth of ramp left. Right. Like either CES goes well or we're done. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. I've seen it. What was it? You remember the speaker system that was able to do 3D modeling to shape the sound to your ears? And it won all the awards at CES a few years ago. It was huge. Six months later, they're out of business. Yeah. I think you're right. I think they probably had a very limited runway. They had burned everything to get to that point. They spent a huge amount of money on CES. They obviously had the right PR teams. They ran all the awards. They did all the things. They just didn't get the...

they were going to need or they just didn't. Maybe they did and they couldn't build it. They couldn't get the credit. I was going to say they probably had the interest, but then they couldn't get...

I mean, it costs money to fulfill those big sales. Like if Best Buy is like, I would love to have you in the store. All right. Let me give you from last year. Now we need 50,000 units. Exactly. And we need three months. Get going. And yeah, this is going to rest my case here. This is last year's Wired Magazine's Best of CES 2024. The Vivo at Home UTI Diagnostic Kit.

There you go. The Eureka dual washing bot and the Adobe Edge camera. Okay. So the UTI tracking kit, those are available now and their costs have gone down considerably in the last two years. So there is a market for that. Yeah.

Yes, there's a huge market for that. Okay, so maybe that wasn't so bad. Maybe that wasn't so bad. Did you buy the Eureka dual washing bot? I don't know what that is. It's a... I don't know what that is.

in the pedestal there it is of your washing machine oh so it pulls the water from the washing machine so you don't have to plummet so then you've got basically the roomba plus washing capabilities that's you that's right the robot mops dirty water tank drains into the same pipe as a washing machine so that's you won't see something like that for like five more years because that's something they're showing as a concept that then gets picked up and like the

Think how often people replace their washing machines, but that's not a terrible concept. It's an interesting idea. Here's the Adobe edge camera. Maybe they shipped that. That's the abode. Oh, nevermind. I a little dyslexia here. I'm sorry. I think it was an intentional. I think that was an intentional confusion. They did there. Maybe. So is the abode out there? Is it good? It's got a crazy wifi range. The wired says.

Did they do Wi-Fi Halo? Is that was that? Yes. Like nifty. Yes. Oh, Wi-Fi Halo is never going to happen. It has a mile of wireless range. Yeah. I don't know. They may have produced it, but I don't know if people are. Well, this is 2024 last year. They are still for sale. Oh, there you go. Yeah. Along with their security system. Transportation. And I'm sure we'll see it again in CES this year is the.

Helic personal drone VTOLs, first vertical takeoff landing. Most of which are now bankrupt. Supernal EVTOL SA2, and they're bankrupt. It was from Hyundai. I don't know if this one's bankrupt. You see every year at CES, you see these. Yeah.

Not in the sky, but it was Hyundai's concept vehicle. So there's never meant to be produced. How about the Milo action communicator? This is all from last year. I'm just pointing out that. Oh, those are real. Those are real. Okay. Well, Milo is real again. Oh, I remember this. It was a walkie talkie, but it doesn't. It's like a really stupid, simple, like you can only call one person. Yeah. I think it's designed to just, it's like a walkie talkie that does. I think he uses like a hands-free. Yeah.

still for sale 225 dollars yeah there you go bet they're selling like hotcakes they might be that's actually a pretty good niche if you can uh the milo berry red is out of stock in fact all of them are out of stock yeah because that's the end that's the end right there

Somebody has taken the website down. Anyway, I don't want to belabor this. But I appreciate your thinking there, Stacy, that it's the concepts. Look for breakthrough concepts, not breakthrough products. I think that's smart. Someday your robot vacuum will be living under your washing machine.

That's not, I mean, that may not be the way it goes, but it's valuable to have people thinking and offering things quite sensible. Yeah. And that's why I like the show. Cause you can like see that and be like, you can test that concept out and be like, okay, if that's going to work, what needs to come into place? So why didn't you go this year, Stacy?

Because technically I'm not a reporter anymore. Oh yeah. This isn't, but doesn't consumer reports have a presence of some kind? I would imagine. They do. And I could have gone and justified it, but I, you know what? I went to Istanbul. I went to Philadelphia. I did all this DC travel. I'm, I'm. And on the whole, you'd rather be in Philadelphia, wouldn't you? Yeah.

all right right i do take a little i like istanbul we're gonna take a little break uh you're watching this week in tech first show of a brand new year uh and some interesting topics still to come i promise you uh we including uh the the closest to the sun we've ever gotten

Richard Campbell is here from Windows Weekly and Run As Radio, our official polymath of the Twit Network. Anthony Ha, weekend editor for TechCrunch. Great to see you as always, Anthony. And Stacey Higginbotham from Consumer Reports, where she is a policy fellow and longtime friend of the network. Our show today brought to you by Zip Recruiter, another longtime friend of the network, longtime sponsor. It's a brand new year, 2025.

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The Parker probe, you suggested this as a story, Richard. I think you're right. This is kind of the big thing. It happened on, what, was it Christmas Day? Christmas Eve. Yeah, it was the closest approach. The Parker solar probe. Now, when I say it got within 3.86 million miles of the sun's surface, you might say, well, that's not that close. Yeah.

It's really close, isn't it? Well, yeah. Considering how far are we from the sun? We're 150 million kilometers from the sun. Right. It got awfully close. It's the closest we've gotten anything. And it survived it, too, which is interesting. Yeah. And we're now a week after that event. So we are finally getting telemetry back from it because while it was doing that, it was too close to actually send any data test. It was on the wrong side.

Now it's come swung back around. So it was heavily armored, I guess, to survive the heat. But you know, you don't need a lot of solar panels. Just a little bit is enough. It got really 6.1 million kilometers, got really close. This was the 22nd time it actually made a close approach. And this is moving at 190 kilometers a second, which... That makes it the fastest...

human-made object ever. - Yeah, that's moving. It's weird to think in terms of getting closer to the sun means going really, really fast, but that's what happens. - Well, but if you've ever put your hand in a flame, you realize speed is of the essence, isn't it? You don't want to spend a lot of time there in that hot environment. - Yeah, well, and it's not just that, it's just that the gravitational effects are so easy to make, it accelerates it excessively.

So, yeah, so they have to, I would imagine...

they're kind of glancing off of... Yeah, they're skimming through the corona of the sun. And hoping to have enough speed not to get trapped. Well, they definitely do. It's actually really hard to be able to slow down enough to actually impact the sun. That whole trope of just throw it into the sun turns out a really difficult thing to do. You can't? Yeah, you couldn't get your speed right enough to actually get in there. You'll just get slingshot around and thrown back out. Even if you aim right at the middle? Yeah, it's just not that easy to aim at the middle. You've got to really...

You can burn a lot of delta V to do that. So...

uh so this is this is a pretty big deal I guess they said it's a remarkable machine and it's doing its job brilliant yeah like you know not every one of them works out as well as this one did but it did a fantastic job in what NASA calls a hyper close regime Parker cut through plumes of plasma still connected to the sun and close enough to pass inside a solar eruption NASA said it's like a surfer diving under a crashing ocean wave

500 times the hottest summer day we can witness on Earth. What are we looking for? We're trying to understand why the corona is much hotter than the interior of the sun. We're trying to understand the plasma regime. The behavior of the protons at this energy level is weird. We don't really understand all the magnetic effects. So we're just trying to measure.

And what kind of instruments does Parker have? Do you know? Most of the electromagnetic, because that's the main thing that they're dealing with there. It's just a huge level of field. They're not like, they don't have a little scoop to capture some plasma. No, you could scoop once, but you're not going to have a scoop for very long after that. And we're not bringing anything back, right? This is not coming back to the earth again. So they're just taking measurements and sending it back. They're sending telemetry back. That's exactly right. Very amazing. Yeah, it's a great,

great mission yeah um also uh related to that we're gonna have a new director of nasa come a couple of weeks from now presuming it's confirmed right yeah i have a feeling he will because he first of all he's an astronaut right well jared eisenman is a kind of astronaut he has paid to go into space a couple of times

he that's more than i've done well you know uh one way to spend your money uh he is probably he rode of course on a spacex vehicle so he's twice twice only and and has done a spacewalk which that's puts him in very rarefied atmosphere a few hundred people have ever done that right jared isaac's isaacman he's a tech billionaire yeah but with a four is his company

What is Ship 4 do? Transaction processing. Okay. So nothing associated with space. Nope. No, but then he's got a side business providing...

uh adversarial flying for Air Forces so he owns his own Air Force because things oh that's right right and a4s a bunch of other aircraft so you provide services for I forgot about that I imagine this is this is of of the various Trump nominees probably the least controversial

he has his own Air Force yeah yes this implies that it's for defense or for something as opposed to like he has a collection of planes he's gotten past the collection of planes has a has a crew of pilots and flies adversarial flight services for Air Forces they do training Air Force training okay so he's like a mercenary with his own so far he hasn't taken any missions so far he flies unarmed against other countries Air Forces normally probably beats them too but that's part of their training process so

That's actually super cool. I wanted the distinction. I was like, Air Force versus just own a lot of cool places. I always keep a matrix of which tech billionaire is closest to being Dr. No. And like owning your own Air Force. He's not in a mountain, but he's close. He would only be the fourth. He would only be the fourth NASA administrator of 15 who has actually been in space. Yeah.

I think the only question would be if he would, and this might be a question for Jeff Bezos, who was competing with Elon Musk with his Blue Origin, is if he would favor SpaceX because both of those trips to space and the spacewalk were in SpaceX's Starship.

I don't think that's the only question, but that's a question. Yeah. In the end, a NASA administrator's job primarily is to manage the bureaucracy of NASA. And to go to Congress and say, give us money, right? I mean, getting funding has got to be. Is a tech billionaire used to running a startup from the top of the stack well-equipped for the negotiations that are required? I would say so. I would say not. No. Okay. They're kind of used to saying, this is what we're going to do when people do it.

And it's not the environment you're in anymore. Yeah. There is definitely a sense in a lot of these appointments where people are like, oh, well, this person has actual experience doing X, Y, Z. And I'm kind of like, yeah, but when you're at the top. Administrators are different. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and the current Bill Nelson, the current administrator, did fly in space also. He flew on the shuttle. But he also spent most of his time at NASA as an administrator. Right.

So, you know, he makes kind of makes sense as the NASA administrator because he's most of his experience has been dealing with bureaucracy. Bezos did not have anything to say about Isaacsman's nomination, according to CNN. I mean, if he's going to become the NASA administrator and you're Jeff Bezos, you probably don't want to piss him off. So that's true, too. I don't have anything to say. That's a good point. Interestingly, and not unrelatedly, Elon Musk.

has said, let's not go to the moon. NASA, of course, has been working to go to the moon. He says, let's go straight to Mars.

Now, he also has the current contract for the Lunar Lander, so I don't know what he... It's a strange thing to say, yeah. NASA's planning to go to the moon with the Artemis mission, and the Lunar Lander is made by SpaceX. It's actually, the Lunar mission is kind of a beast of many backs, right? I mean, they've got, Boeing is involved, I mean, a bunch of companies are involved in this. The backup Lunar Lander, the alternative besides the SpaceX one, is Blue Origin. Ah, okay. So...

So the human landing system is from SpaceX. They also supply food, cargo, and other logistics services to a lunar gateway in orbit around the moon. Why would Elon privately, according to Wired, Elon has been critical of NASA's plans, suggesting the Artemis program has been moving too slowly. I don't think a lot of people would disagree with him on that. And is too reliant on contractors'

who seek cost plus government contracts and are less interested in delivering results. That's actually a consensus opinion, I think. Right? Well, and NASA has for many years tried to push these non-cost plus contracts, these performance contracts. That's how COTS, the resupply of the space station, is done. That's how Crew Dragon and Starliner were supposed to be done. But you do have these institutions that are built around cost plus contracting contracts.

especially when you're doing truly innovative stuff. The James Webb Space Telescope was a cost plus deal. Why? They were only going to make one. Nobody really knew how much it was going to cost. Right. Now, admittedly, there were folks with you wasn't going to be a billion dollars when they originally said a billion dollars. But it turns out if you spend a billion dollars, it's hard to cancel it after that. Yeah. You kind of in for a penny, in for a billion. Yeah. Or eight as the case. Eight. Eight.

Christmas day worked Elon uh posted on X quote the Artemis architecture is extremely inefficient as it is a jobs maximizing program and that by the way is probably the case that's what Congress does right not a results maximizing program something entirely new is needed then the following Thursday the next day he said no we're going straight to Mars the moon is a distraction

Now, admittedly, these are just tweets, so they don't necessarily have the power of policy. Although I think it takes on a lot more weight now than maybe it would have taken a year ago. And I think one of the things, the wide piece that you guys linked to in the show prep pointed out was that part of the context here is this is kind of the first time

i mean i haven't followed this closely but it seems like this is the first time that elon has really been so open and criticizing a nasa program right and and so before like oh he wants to stay on nasa's good side and now he feels confident that you know the person right nasa and that person's boss are both going to be buddies of his and so he can say whatever he wants the wired says although musk is not directing u.s space policy he certainly has a meaningful say in what happens

It's good to be the first buddy. That's a cool thing. I can't imagine, though, that Artemis would just be canceled, as you said, and for a couple of billion. It's kind of hard to withdraw, especially since Congress has to do authorize tens of billions, tens of billions. And arguably, NASA has attempted to drop Artemis going all the way back to the Constellation program. And the Congress keeps putting it back into the budget because they set the budget.

Trump created the Artemis program at his last presidency, although he was probably never happy. He was calling for, Wired says, a major course correction at NASA. Mike Pence said in 2019, I call on NASA to adopt new policies and embrace a new mindset. If our current contractors can't meet this objective, then we will find ones that will. So this has been something that's been going on at least since 2019. Are we not concerned about

So having the geopolitical factors at play with India and China landing on the dark side of the moon, access to water, access to mineral rights, things like that on the moon. Well, don't you? I think you said this before the show, Richard. Don't you need the moon to go to Mars? Well, there's a few cases. The silly part about going to Mars is what we already know from the International Space Station.

The fastest we can get humans to Mars, about six months. And we routinely put humans on the space station for six months at a time. They exercise two and a half hours a day every day to slow the rate of bone loss. And when they return to the Earth, they can't walk. They can't stand. In fact, it takes almost a year of rehabilitation to get your balance back and your eyes to recover, for your whole body to recover to be functional. So you're going to fly a group of folks to Mars in free fall.

for six months then they're gonna arrive on mars there's nobody there to help them we need artificial gravity now that means creating a spinning structure which we've can do but have never done it's so funny because every single sci-fi show ever has a centrifugal thing that creates gravity we've never never done it do we know how to do it or is it is that sci-fi

That's sci-fi. But did you read the book A City on Mars? Richard, I'm sure you did. Yes. Yes. So not only are there the technical issues that they just like demolish pretty utterly, then they go into the exciting psychological issues and the reproductive issues and all of the other like...

it is an amazing book for it like I I just like giving it to people when they're like we should go to Mars and I'm like read this are you sure Mars is not the kind of place you want to raise a kid is that what you're saying like Mars is not the place you want it like I mean as a woman I think about all the like drama that happens in Antarctica and I'm like there's no way you would send people up there that aren't yeah and you can get people out of Antarctica in a few days

- Right. If you had to, you can. - Well, and it's the thing is the route back from Mars is measured in a year plus. So no. - Wait a minute, it takes six months to get there, but it takes a year plus to get back? - Well, you either wait a year and a half to get a six month winter to come back. - Oh. - Or you take what's called a Mars cycler orbit, and then it takes a year and a half to get back. - This is the crux of the Martian. - Yeah. - So it's really, it's a, that's right. I did read that. Yeah. So it's really a one way trip is.

in all likelihood. Yeah. Unless you can grow potatoes. Then we could talk about we've never built a life support system that lasts more than a few weeks without external inputs. You know, we don't, we're not ready. I remember Daniel Suarez told me also that the, or maybe it was Andy Weir actually, that the Martian soil is deadly to humans. It's got perchlorates in it. They can be removed permanently.

When Andy wrote that book, they didn't know there were perchlorates in it. They know now. It's treatable, but yes, it's very dangerous. And it also means no spaces inside the hab. Like that's not a thing. Are those the perks that are around every dry cleaners in the United States as well? Yeah.

your suit will be clean but you'll be dead yeah is what you're saying don't don't inject that stuff the ones that the epa just literally like two weeks ago was finally like oh yeah those are real bad so so that's interesting when we when he wrote the martian we didn't even know there were perchlorides in the regular report back but we doubt now know there's perchlorides in the regolith so the regolith he told me was so fine that he inhaled it you would die instantly anyway yeah

But now there's also the issue. There's nothing to inhale. There's also the issue with the poison. Yeah, the issue here is that you go out in your spacesuit, then you go into an airlock and take the suit off, and it's on the outside of the suit. It's on the suit. That's right. You can't get rid of it. Yeah. So there's a huge set of problems here. And the moon is an excellent place to practice a lot of this.

And as well as just learning how well do we function in one sixth of G? You know, is that more sustainable? Because it's a lot easier to build a rotating structure if we don't have to put out whole G. Is Elon's notion of being an extraplanetary species pie in the sky, as it were, as it were?

I mean, that's really what he wants, right? That's what he's saying. We need to get off the earth. We need to be a multi-planetary species. It's pie in the sky in the sense that it's not something that we can do the way we're like...

It's not a short-term solution to what is a very real problem that we should be solving, right? It feels like a cop-out. And I think this, just like going into space initially launched a bunch of new technologies, I don't think it's crazy to test this and put research dollars towards this sort of thing. But I do think it's crazy thinking that Elon Musk is going to have him or his children be on Mars. Timeline's pretty impractical. But when are we ever expected Elon to have good time? Yeah.

I mean, although, I mean, you know, if it means if he's one of the first, then I assume he's probably not coming back. So, you know, make of that what you want. I mean, we could send him to Mars. Yeah. He also has a timeline that's insane. Like it's five years off or something. I mean. But I think to Stacy's point also, like it is.

I think that these are worthwhile goals, but I think part of the implication sometimes is like, anyway, that'll solve our problems. And like, you know, I think I forget exactly when this was, but I think around the same time, Elon was also, you know, posting stuff on X about how we didn't have to worry about climate change anymore. And that was just going to get taken care of by technology. And so like, you know, if, yeah, like that's,

bad and not true and his his whole cadre of test creel believers like Mark Andreessen also believe AI is going to solve all of this that you know we're technology is going to work us out of all these problems and somehow will magically solve everything really think they think that you don't think they believe it they're just saying it

I mean, if they do, they're absolutely not self-aware in, I feel like they're, they are, they have smarts. So I feel like they must be aware that like,

you cannot burn down everything in the pursuit of something that you hope may save you. Right. Like, which is kind of where we are right now. I feel like they're just like, well, we're going to burn down everything because it's going to be great for us right now. And do you think it's a, yeah, it's a cynical point of view that really we just want to maximize our current wealth. And so we're telling everybody a fairy tale that will be good for us.

Yeah, hi, this is Benito. Like, the thing is that we actually know how to solve this. We just don't want to.

Yeah. We have the means. I mean, is it sucky to, yes, it is completely sucky, but we kind of have to, I mean, you've read Kim Stanley Robinson's really incredibly boring climate change novel where he discusses all the crazy things. Yes. Amazing first chapter. And then the rest of it is a policy proposal. Yeah. I mean, I, I, as a policy walk, I like, I was like, this is cool, but this is not really the novel I thought it was going to be. Yeah.

uh i should mention molly white had a really good piece a couple of days ago about elon musk's war on wikipedia maybe you saw his uh his tweets i'm gonna call them tweets because i think that's what people think of them as uh his ex posts uh on christmas eve uh stop donating to wikipedia he said over the following week the world's richest man

unleashed a barrage of attacks aimed at convincing his 200 million twitter followers to boycott the wikimedia foundation the non-profit supporting the volunteer maintained wikipedia project i mean my opinion wikipedia is the greatest thing that the internet has produced i mean we'd also point out that by saying that wikipedia raised a record amount of money good good job maybe that was people's response was uh elon doesn't like it i should probably support it yeah

um I think one of the things Elon's really been pushing is you shouldn't get your news from anybody else other than X um he also said uh he retweeted uh somebody who said Wikimedia blows 50 million dollars on wokeness turned out to be completely false which is also a misunderstanding of what's going on so um

That hurts my feelings, and it definitely hurts Molly White's feelings because she is a longtime Wikipedia editor besides being one of the coolest people alive. The creator of Web3 is going just great, which is a wonderful website. She was upset by this, demonstrated that the information they were quoting was wrong, and

Musk's recent Twitter rampage reveals a man with a grudge against Wikipedia looking for anything to support his position regardless of accuracy.

what's interesting is back in 2017 Elon tweeted I love Wikipedia just gets better over time and happy birthday Wikipedia in 2021 so glad you exist so something happened there's like this arc that these people go through basically like yeah okay special K is that it okay we can't we can't

No, I think it's a pill. I think he took a red pill. Whatever the red pill, whatever's in the red pill, he got it. I mean, like, look, all of these, I mean, Trump is the same way. Something happened. The fact that we, I mean, I don't know what to do. We cover it and draw attention to it and validate it? Or do we ignore it? Yeah, maybe I shouldn't even mention the tweets because what does it mean, right? I mean, everyone should donate to Wikipedia. Yeah, I do.

because I think, as I said, it is one of the greatest creations of the internet. - And I mean, it donated just recently when a certain billionaire sent out a message. - That is kind of ironic. That is kind of ironic. All right, let's take a little break. We have more to talk about. In fact, the TikTok ban, this is a story that just keeps on giving. We've got the latest on that, and I think we will probably cover it in more detail

in a week because the Supreme Court is going to be hearing oral arguments in five days, but we'll get to that in just a little bit. Great panel for you. Smart people. Anthony Ha is here from TechCrunch. The wonderful Richard Campbell from .NET Rocks and Run as Radio and of course Windows Weekly.

and our dear friend, Stacey Higginbotham, now Policy Fellow at Consumer Reports. Great to have all three of you for our first show of the year. Nice to kick off. There's usually not a lot of news this time of year. Actually, I'm surprised there's so much to talk about. But it's nice to kick off the year with some smart people and a good conversation. So thanks for being here. Our show today brought to you by Delete Me. This is a service we have used

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I can tell you it works. Join deleteme.com slash twit. We thank him so much for supporting this week in tech. Richard, you were funny. He said, I hope we're not going to talk about TikTok today. I don't blame you. It's kind of an endless story. January 19th, two weeks from today, TikTok, Congress has said, should either be sold to a U.S. entity or we will shut it down.

TikTok, of course, has gone back and forth. They've appealed and so forth. And finally, just before we broke for the holidays, the Supreme Court agreed to review the case. Oral arguments are on the 10th, and presumably they're doing this in a rushed manner so that they can weigh in by the 19th. President Trump has asked, actually, his incoming administration filed a amicus brief

asking the Supreme Court to pause the TikTok ban. He says he wants to see a negotiated resolution. We've talked about this for, it feels like years on the show and a different, it's interesting. Everybody has some seems to have a different opinion. You know, I admit a conflict of interest because my son's got his, you know, business started on TikTok. It was really valuable to him. But so I like TikTok for that reason as a creator,

Kathy Gellis, who's our expert on law, she's a lawyer and also is admitted to the Supreme Court and files briefs regularly on subjects like this, says it's a First Amendment issue. The government cannot ban TikTok.

But there is a history of this. I mean, Cepheus, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., just told Nippon Steel they could not buy U.S. steel. So there is a tradition in this country for our own national security. We can prevent foreign entities from owning companies in the U.S.,

I don't know what the Supreme Court will do. We will have Kathy on. She might be on next week, she might be on the week after, but she will be, or maybe she's gonna be on Twig to discuss the oral arguments, 'cause you can't always tell from oral arguments. - Yeah, she's gonna be on the Twig the week after the-- - The week after, so a week from Wednesday, she'll be on This Week in Google to talk about the oral arguments. I imagine that President Trump asking the Supreme Court, "Give me some time," will carry some weight.

He has said he has a he was the one, by the way, who said we've got to ban TikTok. They're a national security problem. In the last in the last time he was president, he now says he has a warm spot in his heart, which may have something to do with the fact that Andy Yass, a giant donor to his campaign and the Republican Party in general, has something like a 15 percent stake in TikTok. And Yass met with President-elect Trump shortly before Trump said, I have a warm spot in my heart.

But Andy Yaz also stands to make a lot of money if they sell it to an American. I would think so, right? Yeah. It's Jeff Yaz, right? Jeff, not Andy. Sorry. I was thinking of Andy Yassi, the CEO. I confused them. Yes, you're right. Thank you, Jeff Yaz. Anthony, where do you come down on this? Does TikTok pose the grave national security threat that the Biden Justice Department says it does? I mean, I feel like

I could imagine that there maybe is some evidence that hasn't been released to the public that paints TikTok as a bigger threat than we've seen. I think from like what is available publicly, I feel like it definitely feels a little bit overblown and feels like TikTok has become sort of like the receptacle for all this kind of general panic about social media and propaganda. And so...

It's yeah, it's weird because I feel like the TikTok thing, like you were saying, is people fall differently and it's not along sort of traditional political lines. And so I think Trump's reasons for opposing the TikTok ban are probably really self-serving. But I also am opposed to the TikTok ban. Yeah, for other reasons. For other reasons. Yeah. You know, if there is evidence that it's a problem, I don't think there's a problem with banning it.

I mean, Kathy Gellis argued very strongly a couple of twits ago that there is a very strong constitutional argument against banning it. It's a First Amendment argument. The people who are on TikTok, American citizens, speech would be

you know, hampered. Although my son has moved to Instagram like everybody else. It's funny advertising. The goal is not to ban it. The goal is to get it U S owned. Right. Right. And it's just the threat to try and persuade him. Okay. But, but I think that part of it has been that there was this, that, that has, and that's fair, right? It's the law is not a ban. It's, it's sort of a sell or ban law. But I think then that's also a way to sort of make it go down easier. Cause I think that a lot of the politicians supporting it were like, Oh no, no, no, no, this isn't,

This isn't a ban. TikTok will continue to be available. It's just going to be under U.S. ownership. But then it's not a lot of discussion, a scenario of bite dance, whether or not from pressure from the Chinese government was like, yeah, we're not interested. Bye. The government. Yeah. The Chinese government says we won't sell. And.

And furthermore, will forbid TikTok from selling the algorithm, which I mean, if you don't sell the algorithm, what have you bought? I don't know. And if we just make U.S. own it, like a U.S. owner owns it, but you don't deal with like the back end infrastructure and code. And I know they're going to host it there. But if you're using, you know, the code that they use to build the mobile app, are you going to redo, basically recreate TikTok from a U.S. perspective? Yeah.

And I bring this up because I've been somewhat radicalized about the Chinese and the cybersecurity threats and efforts that they have been making to infiltrate like the Treasury really deep into like crazy. Like the more I'm like, oh, man, that is like super nefarious. We don't have anything like they're in our phone system. Yeah, they just exfiltrated. What was it? 300 documents from the Treasury Department. Yeah. The beyond. Yeah. So this is a problem.

Yeah. So there is there is possibly a national security threat here that is valid. We don't have proof of it. We may never get proof of it. I don't really think we got great proof around Huawei, for example, but we. It's generally accepted that Huawei's networking gear is a threat. Every country in the West is removing it now.

but as a people we have not seen proof now there could be actual proof and like china we're actually looking right now at or the us government is looking at tp-link routers for example yeah they're just banned though or thinking about banning those right there they've subpoenaed them and that's an interesting case because actually tp-link switched their ownership structure and they have u.s owners there there are brothers who created the company and they

they created a U.S entity to sell gear in the U.S that is owned by one of the brothers that's interesting still in China they make them in China but then everything's made in China right um that's interesting because TP like is the number one router brand in the United States by far

Yeah. It's the one Wirecutter has been recommending for years. Yes. See, our number one pick is that. So I said it. I was like, guys, guess what my next big project for 2025 is, y'all? What? Router security. Oh, good. Good. Is there a way to make TP-Link routers safe? Well, we don't know if it's unsafe. That's the hard part. Like, yes, there is. You can disconnect it from the Internet.

Yeah, but that's not much of a router, is it? I have a beautiful router that does nothing. I have a great paperweight. I read the security analysis paper from the UK group that studied the Huawei gear. And their point was the software was so apparently intentionally convoluted.

So complex that they could not be certain that there wasn't telemetry being sent back to China, that there wasn't a kill switches and so forth. But they couldn't find them, but they couldn't prove they weren't there. Well, there's also the threat that a firmware update could suddenly introduce those kinds of.

Yeah, we don't know if there are backdoors. And the other thing is China was caught trying to build backdoor, like participating in the 3GPP standards group to build a backdoor into... Great. I think it was 5G. At least they went through a standards body. I'm just happy to hear that. I mean, so like there is definitely...

China is also doing its darndest to... They have... Oh, is it Blue Star? Is that what it's called? It's Starfield. They've got their own version of Bluetooth that they're pushing, for example. So if you think about what's happening there and the separation of the tech stacks between- Starflash. What's it called? Starflash. Starflash. Sorry. I was like, that's a very spooky thing. I mean...

Spooky in the traditional like quantum sense, like you just don't know, is it? Isn't it like, but by the time we know we're probably going to be hosed. So I, yeah, that's how I feel. So you've got this problem here where we have plenty of evidence that they've tried this in a lot of other folks, other places. And now we're looking at the position of a bunch of other, their other products and going, Hmm, what are the consequences that this is happening here?

And the consequences are bad. Significant. Now, interestingly, the way the Chinese state-sponsored hackers breached the Treasury Department was they went through a security tool the Treasury Department used for its own security. So they didn't actually breach the Treasury Department. Well, they did, but they did it using something called Beyond Trust. Effectively, a supply chain hack.

Go after one of the vendors that really should have been more robust than this. And then they had a remote support product. And Beyond Trust said a limited number of customers were involved. Just happens one of them was the United States Treasury Department.

um that's that's so that's the point though is it doesn't have to be a first party attack it could be a supply chain attack well in tick tock's interesting because you have so many people using it so if you know that like the daughter of the U.S president I mean right what uh is on tick tock Ella what's her name like you can start determining things about like

where people are in space where do they go just by having this app on their phone but then the reasonable thing would be and the government has to some degree done this uh ban these apps on phones uh of government officials and uh military and so forth right i mean everybody's running their own servers and has their own phones because they don't think i mean like are you going to tell your teenage kid not to have a phone running yeah if you're the vice president of the

That's going to go over. Sorry, kid. Canadian government devices are not allowed to run tech talk. So they've right. Most I would think that that's a reasonable precaution and legal. No, no issue of challenging their.

Do you do it to all the staff? Do you do it? I mean, like, yeah. How far do you go down? How far do you go down this chain? Because like, well, isn't this a generally a problem with business in general is BYOD, right? Is you can't you start to be a problem because you can't control your employees bringing in their laptops and phones. Yeah. BYD is sort of fallen by the wayside for exactly that problem. It's like it was so difficult to make BYD mobile devices work with business safely and appropriately that it became cheaper to just give them a phone.

The iPhone was the original sin. The Apple, it was the Apple in the garden. Oh my God. But who was the serpent? President Xi. Yeah. Oh no, I'm sorry. He's Winnie the Pooh. Oh, now we just got banned in China. I'm sorry. Well done. Oh, Lisa, I apologize. Anyway, you know, this is a hard one, isn't it? Because we don't have the information.

And unfortunately, the level of trust people have now with their government has kind of gone close to zero. So, you know, if a senator comes out and says, well, I've seen the paperwork and TikTok is a nightmare, nobody credits it. And it's also hard because we haven't divorced the legitimate security concerns from just straight up racism.

So it's very hard to talk about this. Or xenophobia. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Without like appealing to the basis, jingoistic impulses of people. And that's, that's awful. Like,

right my feeling is that i think there's a lot of legitimate concerns and also a lot of the people who are most enthusiastic about the ban are doing it in bad faith reasons whether that's because they're racist or because they think it'll be good for their business or some combination of the two it sure benefits mark zuckerberg's business if tick tock gets banned instagram gets it all right which is one of the things that trump brings up and he doesn't like by the way he doesn't like mark zuckerberg currently

Although Mark Zuckerberg is doing everything he can to convince Trump that he likes him. He's giving him money. He's changed. Just give him money. He'll be fine. He'll come around. He'll have a warm spot in a minute. It'll be easy. It is pretty easy. He just may pay a little bit more than the other people. I need to put a chart up of tech executives, who's in and who's out. We need a whole... There's only in and unknown. Yeah.

State of California has, or a judge in the state of California has blocked the law that protects kids from social media. It was supposed to take effect on Wednesday. Federal judge Tuesday said you cannot enforce the Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act, or POCSMA. Finding it infringes what? First Amendment rights for tech companies.

um however it wasn't a complete win for uh the tech companies um one of the things that was in there was a requirement that uh kids not be able to use social media between what it was at eight uh midnight and six a.m and during school hours between 8 a.m and 3 p.m that actually uh

violated First Amendment. So he said, you cannot prohibit companies from sending push notifications to miners' phones during those hours. No. However, oh, and you can't say how many miners are on the platforms. You can't demand that.

However, he did reject the request for an injunction of provisions for parental controls and restrictions on personalized feeds. Actually, I think that's, I agree with him, right? I think it's appropriate to say to Instagram, for instance, you have to provide parental controls. And I'm not sure about restrictions on personalized feeds. That's a little bit- Parental controls come into play as being a problem for kids who are in households where their parents don't like-

If you're like LGBTQIA and your parents are not. Yeah, but what are you going to do? I mean, we have a long history of parents getting to choose what happens to their kids. Admittedly, that's problematic. What? Are you saying our laws in efforts to do this sort of thing are maybe inconsistent? The judge recognized the need to protect children from the effects of social media, which I'm not sure I agree with, but

but he found that the law was not properly tailored because it wasn't inclusive enough of different notification types so it really is kind of a technicality so it almost feels like a punt just sort of kicked it back yeah it's kind of a more we'll try again yeah yeah I think so well it seemed like and you mentioned the the the algorithmic thing and that seems to be like the one thing that is sort of sliding through and and that

it seems like people are focusing on that. Well, you can try to, you know, stop that from happening. And on some level, maybe that, I mean, not a lawyer, that's like, it seems like the judge was okay with that, but

Is that just sort of a proxy for like, is that really going to fix anything? I think was sort of the subtext of the way you said it, Leo, which I do think, you know, a lot of the algorithmic stuff is pretty harmful, but obviously it's not going to solve all these problems in as much as they need to be solved. I think I've changed my tune on this. I was one of the people who said, oh, the problem is algorithms, whatever, whether it's YouTube's recommendation algorithm or the algorithmic feed on YouTube.

you know, Instagram, that the algorithm is the problem. But the problem really is you have to have some algorithms, a purely chronological feed or no recommendations at all is not, nobody wants that. When people are given a choice between an algorithmic feed and a chronological feed, they almost always choose the algorithmic feed in the long run.

yeah I mean I think I mean blue sky is sort of testing out whether or not you know you can how big you can get and to what extent people will stick to chronological if you emphasize that um but there's all that Jeff Jarvis's uh contention is there's always an algorithm so it's kind of hard it's you're you're slicing it I mean there's always an editor right there's an algorithm in the New York Times are you saying the New York Times you just put all the stories on the front page no

I think there is, and we haven't figured out how to do this or even how to talk about it because we hate nuance, but...

Understanding, like, I have a pretty good sense of how the New York Times picks its stories. And for example, they're editing. I have a pretty good sense. Well, and they're a publication. So they're publishing their own stories. Well, and they're publishing it for everybody, right? So like, it is deeply harmful to have- You don't see something different than your kid. That's a good point. Yeah. A very private, heavily focused algorithm that is designed to maximize-

to benefit a company, right? So maybe it's maximizing engagement. Maybe it's designed to make you want to buy, you know, like there, you can think about, so those are probably the factors. One that it's, it's highly personalized and no one else can test and see what's happening. Right. So you don't know that someone's behaving poorly, right? You don't know if the algorithm is grooming someone or whatever, and that it's designed like the New York times, uh,

Yes, they want to make money, but they still have this like goal to inform people. They have this like weird journalistic ethos they're still living with. Well, don't yet. Let's maybe I made a mistake. I shouldn't have said the New York Times. Let's say Taboola. But I think it's a it's a nice example in the sense that like that is. We don't we don't hate algorithms, I think, is what I'm kind of saying. We don't want curation. We want some curation.

I think we'd like human curation though, too. Like that's something that we've lost a lot. A human programs, the algorithms, it's all human cure curation. Yeah. But human. Well, I mean, think about reinforcement learning for learning how to play go. For example, if you're, instead of learning how to play go, you're designing for engagement or profits, right? If that's your reinforcement mechanism, then you don't care what you're sending the kids or, or,

Well, you do care. It's just you're sending what they need to to make the most money. Right. You're not cared about the consequences of what actually happens to those people. Well, that's capitalism. We're a capitalist society, isn't it? And the algorithm for capitalism is make the most money. We also don't allow you to put formaldehyde in milk just because it preserves it. And there's lots of laws about how we advertise to children, right? That's true, too. They're much less effective. But yes, they are. They are being gutted.

And I do think there is definitely a problem. Like kids see some really upsetting stuff and you see these stories and I'm like, I would like there not to be dead kids as a result of like being shown certain types of content. Like I don't care how much money Facebook makes off. So this is. This is hard. I agree. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But I don't even think we're talking about it in the right way yet. That's what's challenging. We're not figuring out how to think about it yet. Well, and experts in child development, like Candace Hodgers, have said we're focusing on the wrong thing. And by doing so, we're going to ignore the things that can make a difference. Yeah.

It's often the case, right, with legislatures that they pick something that's easy and popular that doesn't fix it, but everybody's happy. And by doing so, they really make the problem worse because they funnel all the attention and money into the wrong thing. I think a lot of them try to do. I've become a little less cynical about that. I think there's a lot of effort to do the right thing. I think there is a lot of money going towards money.

scare tactics like stifling innovation and things like that, that even the basic populist thinks. Again, I don't think we're talking, and I don't think the media is serving people correctly. Anyway, if I were writing a book, I would spend my next 10 years thinking about writing this book because I think it's a real...

what would you what would it be like what the media should be doing or what do you want to it's not just the media it's it's like how how we understand what technology is doing to our society what we want as a society right and then how to frame that issue so we can actually effectively regulate around it and right now there's so much money going into stopping that from happening that yeah

Money from big tech that doesn't want to be regulated at all. They don't want to be regulated, but it's not just big tech. It's also like private equity firms. There's a lot of money in keeping things regulated.

the way they are the firearms industry you know yeah yeah yeah well oil and gas industry right I mean we made this business where people didn't have to pay for internet services by collecting their information it turned out we could make a ton of money from collecting and using that yeah we kind of blew it didn't we yeah I wish honestly honestly who's the we making all the ton of money not us yeah just tech Giants yeah I you know

it's probably the case that if we really thought about it we might have designed the internet differently I asked Tim Berners-Lee once uh or no I'm sorry it was um uh Vint Cerf once what he would have done differently when he created tcpip said I would have built encryption in but we didn't know yeah didn't need it was it it was didn't need it then just universities yeah a bunch of scientists talking to each other um that's the problem and you know

It's a little hard after the fact, as we've learned with encryption, to add it. Yeah, the counter argument, but if you had put it in in the beginning, you probably wouldn't have succeeded because it would have been too complicated to use and it wouldn't have gotten the wide adoption because it was simple to use. It got the wide adoption and now you have the problem. If everybody who used email was forced to use PGP, there would be no email. Yeah. You know, you don't get to that critical mass part. Yeah. All right, let's take a little break. More to come. You're watching the first show of the...

New Year. We're so glad you're here. And I hope you had a good holiday and a good break. I have to say two weeks without doing shows. At first, I thought this is great. And then I kind of missed it. So I'm glad to be back. I hope you're glad to have us back here. Our show today, we have a great panel and I'm really thrilled to have Anthony Hoff from TechCrunch.com.

uh from consumer reports stacy higginbotham and our very own mr know it all richard campbell i just watched the 39 steps richard uh and that the plot of it is there's a guy who memorizes 50 facts every day and you can ask him any question and he will answer the question and so the spies used him to memorize the secret plans

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fleet oil tanker this is another case of undersea cables being cut this time finland seized uh this shadow fleet oil tanker it was like like previously it was dragging its anchor uh and it cut the estlink 2 subsea electricity cable so it wasn't internet it was electricity in the gulf of finland tankers registered in the cook islands but carries oil from russia to egypt

Finland said they believe the vessel's anchor, which they did not find on the ship, was cutting the cables. This is not the first time this has happened. Not even the first time in that area.

that's right we're two uh undersea cables cut by a Chinese container ship connecting Finland and Estonia right the Swedes boarded that one and then the Chinese showed up and pretty quickly after that they were on back on their way again yeah yeah last year a Chinese container ship cut a gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia this is a new form of warfare in a way isn't it infrastructure warfare

So you made a good point. This tanker is full of oil. It is. And it's a poorly maintained ship, right? These are ships that are not running in the public register. They don't have AIS indicators or they turn them off.

There's been four of them have broken up and sunk in the Black Sea recently. Oh, dear. So there's a lot of oil spills going on in the Black Sea. This is all a side effect of the war and Russia being outside of normal trade chains, so they have to keep their stuff secret. And so these ships are not good ships. And, yeah, you don't lose an anchor. That's weird. That's a lot of money. It's an expensive thing to lose. Yeah.

it's uh it definitely seems and you're also seeing it with gps like the fact that they're turning out the gps yeah trackers yeah for i mean it's making and jamming them yes it's making global trade just dangerous these uh yeah that's right because if you're a ship and you're using gps and suddenly you don't know where the hell you are that's problematic

I mean, it's a nice reminder that we depend a lot on laws. It's kind of like every time I drive on our streets, I'm like, I'm really just relying on the people around me to behave the way I expect them to behave. And for a long time we have, but we're kind of, it feels like that is less true perhaps now. And we talk about this on Twig, and I'm sorry, you're not on Twig anymore. We loved having you, but we talk about this a lot.

It's not just laws, it's norms. Because not everything is regulated by a law, but there are norms of behavior that we just expect as civil society that we're going to, you know, behave. And yet no one still puts on their headphones when they're in public. There are a lot of ports that won't allow these ships in, right? Yeah. The reason that you get a place like Egypt where they're getting a bargain on that oil.

and so they'll uh they'll tolerate these these shadow ships if they couldn't land anywhere they wouldn't be around but the shadow fleets grown immensely since the ukraine war started well it isn't there a chinese the the chinese shadow fleet just isn't just destroying like internet and electricity cables it's also like

delivering like the majority of like calamari to the US isn't it yeah the the dark fishing fleet yeah wait a minute slow down hold on what calamari you mean squid yeah yep there's unregulated fishing being done extensively it's not even just the Chinese you know the Canadians were up in arms about

ships in the in the restricted cod zones like they the there's a lot of malfeasance going on in uh in marine these days because there's far less enforcement than there used to be there used to be a time where if you didn't have a registered ship like you would be boarded by a coast guard right and uh you know the thing bad things would happen like the fins are doing the right thing they're holding the ship which means it's not going to deliver oil and you know time is money in these scenarios

Yeah. And of course, the other side effect of this is Estonia has to make up for the electricity. It's not getting from Finland now by buying it from Russia. Well, probably Belarus. Yes.

that's close enough close enough but I want to know more about calamari should should I not be eating calamari Stacy is this uh is this unregulated calamari or is this uh black market calamari what are we talking here oh it's it's calamari from all I mean it's calamari that you find in like legit places um so I love fried calamari should I stop eating this

i stopped eating octopus because i found out they're smart oh yeah i had to stop eating octopus yeah it felt bad after my octopus friend i thought i'm not gonna eat that let me find let me find you a definitive article that will help you because i

piece on it a couple of years ago so it's it's it's calamari it's harvesting calamari in areas that are protected or over harvesting it they're over harvesting or doing it in but in your right i mean other countries do this too it they were shining a light on chinese ships okay well they have by far the biggest fleet it's like 500 ships it's massive

Yeah. It's a fishing fleet. Fishing fleet. Yeah. And factory ships like they're, they're not just catching the calamari. They're cleaning and processing and flash freezing them into packages that look like any other package and then mixing them with the regular supply. Oh, the New Yorker had an article, the squid, squid fleet. Wow. This is, this is a focus on it's a film. Oh, that's an article about a film. Here's an article. Calamari in crisis. Yeah.

I wow calamari uh apparently the the the calamari fishery in Rhode Island is in deep trouble I know we don't get Dungeness crab anymore at Christmas time in California because it's been overfished and they're trying to build well that's a climate change thing is it like yeah because you get plenty of it in Oregon it's just you can't get it down here as well as well as overfishing too yeah there's overfishing but we also like the I can't

Yeah. The water got real warm with all the heat waves up here and it makes it hard for them to breathe. We're about to lose all of our apples, too. Now that I could live without calamari, but I can't live with your cosmic crisps. They're in danger, man. Well, I got to have apple pie. You may remember that there was a there's been a battle over the last couple of administrations over net neutrality.

Under Trump, I believe, the FCC decided that Internet service providers could not be regulated. It was a law passed by Congress. Congress did. Congress actually, in one of their budget acts, did the, I think it was the Restoring Internet Freedom Act. The idea is that an Internet service provider should be agnostic about the kind of traffic it's carrying and shouldn't.

favor Netflix, let's say, because Netflix gives it money over Amazon Prime because Amazon doesn't give it money. And so that net content on the internet should be neutral. And Comcast shouldn't favor NBCU, which it still owns. Right. So it's been kind of back and forth. The Biden administration made restoring internet neutrality a priority because

In 2021, he signed an executive order encouraging the FCC to reinstate the rules. They did, but the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the Sixth Circuit, has said the FCC doesn't have the authority to do so. Obama implemented it in 2015. Trump repealed it in 2017. Biden brought it back. But the court says that it's up to Congress to decide this.

yeah it was it was the lopez loper bright loper right that's i was like not lopez sorry loper bright is what they cited this is the deference to government agencies this is like yeah this is the reversing of the chevron it's like a chevron deference yeah is what people tend to know it as yeah yeah it was a pretty brutal opinion

Well, and low-per-brite is going to come down like Citizens United. This is one of the underminings of the mechanisms that have allowed experts to help protect us. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I understand that there are people who think that government bureaucracies over-regulate or overreach, but...

as we've learned first of all Congress doesn't have the bandwidth to regulate everything that needs to be regulated and secondly they often don't have the expertise and and they're and the courts are even worse frankly um and and so yeah this is this is bad news go ahead I'm sorry I didn't mean to interrupt you no I was just gonna say Congress can't do anything because they're so stuck with all of their

But let me ask this question because, you know, I remember under the Obama FCC, they introduced this concept of net neutrality by defining, I think by defining internet service providers as telecommunications providers. So they were regulated by titles.

It goes all the way back to 1995 and not Michael, Michael Powell, who it's not Colin Powell. He was the general. Colin Powell's son. Michael Powell. No, no. Michael Powell. Yeah. So this was actually Bush's original FCC. They were like, hey, we should we should. He created the first principles of net neutrality. This was actually done under a Republican FCC. And it wasn't an issue until 1995. I mean, but as soon as you started seeing.

for instance, zero rating where your phone company says, we're not going to charge you for it. It became an issue in like 1996, 97. And that was a big deal because we saw the telecoms suddenly realize that the services running over their pipes were going to make a lot of money. So you had Ed Whitaker, who at the time was the CEO of AT&T, SBC. I think it was SBC as he was the CEO before it merged.

And he was like, look, we're not going to have dumb pipes. Everybody's going to pay us. You're going to pay us and the content company. They want to get it both ways. That's right. They want Netflix to give them money and us to get to Netflix. Because they were like, we own this infrastructure. I mean, he knew he was a monopoly, basically. And so then it started becoming an issue, especially, and it became an issue with Skype originally. And it was because tiny little companies

Like a tiny little ISP in like Madison, Wisconsin was like, we're blocking Skype. We offer telephone service. That's right. Yes. And so suddenly the FCC was like, what? No, no, you can't block all these cool money-making internet services like Skype. And then it became a thing. And it became a thing...

It just became more and more of a thing as more and more services started competing with like over the top television was the, when it became like a real big thing. And that was back in like 20, 2010, 2010. Um,

Yeah, sorry, I've covered this for 15 years. - I know, this is an ongoing, but here's my question. And I'm a big supporter of net neutrality. I have been, I mean, really outspoken. I think this is obviously at least abstractly the right thing. But at the same time, once those were repealed in 2017, did we see suddenly all sorts of negative impacts of not having those rules?

It's been seven years without net neutrality. Has it been a problem? I don't know. One, there have been states that have repealed it. Two, I think a lot of companies have been on the better behavior. Also, there are consent decrees in place. There were consent decrees in place governing. So maybe we don't need the FCC to regulate this. Yeah.

I would argue that now that it is definitively up to Congress, we probably will soon see things. And we're probably going to see it first at zero rating. So what you're going to see is like what Timo tried to do with Spotify. Right. And people love zero rating because it gives them stuff for free. Right. Consumers think it's great. They don't understand that what it does is it means Spotify is the winner and

because they're nothing new will come up nothing new unless they can pay at t right well it's a hard argument but that's what i would look for it is conceivable here's this is the story from reuters the trump administration is unlikely to appeal the decision but net neutrality advocates which by the way include amazon apple alphabet and meta could seek review by the supreme court the problem is this is the same supreme court that threw out chevron deference

so I mean it seems pretty clear in fact the Sixth Circuit said this is because of the loper Bright decision uh the FCC doesn't have that Authority only Congress has that Authority the Supreme Court said so so I can't imagine a Supreme Court appeal will have uh any well impact on this this yeah yeah

but Stacy you were saying that there are specific states that do have net neutrality protections in place is that right yes Washington state allows for net has a yeah let me see what I want to say they're like 10 California does yeah that's what I was wondering yeah yeah so if big states like California and Washington have those rules that in some way protects us because even if you live in New Jersey

AT&T is not going to do something to New Jersey that it can't do in California or no. California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, New York, Maine, all have enacted net neutrality legislation. Montana's governor did issue a net neutrality executive order, as did California.

I don't know if that's Vermont or New Hampshire. It's Vermont. Sorry. I was like, I'm looking at an unlabeled map of New England. I'm like, eh. It's the one on the left. Okay, good. Yeah, it's the one next to New York. And Rhode Island. I'm impressed that you were able to do that without labels on the states. You did very well.

It still comes down to enforcement, right? Like the upside to a federal law is then you have federal enforcement that covers the whole area. Yeah, it's very difficult to do a state-by-state thing. And violations of net neutrality are difficult to detect. It's easy if they're marketing a zero rate, but there's lots of more insidious things that are harder to measure. Right.

Yeah. I mean, look at peering. I have to, like, if I want to, when I was writing those stories about like peering issues. It's hard to explain, isn't it? Yeah. It's hard to explain. And that's only sort of tangentially. It's like their way around net neutrality was what peering was, but I had to run like trace routes on all of my. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's a lot of work. Fortunately, they're the big tech companies are the ones who want net neutrality because they want a pipeline to you as a customer.

And they don't want these gatekeepers to get in the way. Oh, maybe not in the longterm. I think they just, they don't want to fight in another room. They just don't want another fight with each other in another like place, you know, like they're already fighting each other in so many places. They don't want another one.

But, you know, you've talked about net neutrality before because you grew up in the Philippines where there were no net neutrality rules. Yes, there's no net neutrality there. So, you know, when you get your phone planned, it comes with like unlimited access to Facebook because, you know, it doesn't count against your data. It's free. Stuff like that, you know. Yeah. What is the impact of that?

Well, one thing is like the internet in the Philippines to a lot of people is just Facebook. It's Facebook. That's one of them. And I'm sure WhatsApp has a leg up on any other messaging platform. That's not true, actually. Actually, in the Philippines, it's Viber for some weird reason. Viber? Yeah. It's a Rakuten project. I didn't even know they were still around. Wow. Wow.

maybe viber has some deals possibly yeah how many there are a lot of carriers in the philippines i think yes um there's two majors and then uh then some smaller ones okay uh let's take a little break a few more stories including the words that lake superior state university say should never be uttered in 2025.

but first a word from zscaler zscaler is the leader in cloud security you know enterprises spend a lot of money on firewalls on vpns

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Once you connect users to the network, they can go all over. And that allows data loss via encrypted traffic that you can't see and other leakage paths.

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ai cyber attacks zero trust is such a good way to do this z-scaler very interesting uh study in uh harper's magazine it's i think uh an excerpt from a book liz pelly is about to publish about spotify

and i don't use spotify so you tell me if this matches if you ask your experience if you ask for a type of music not i want to hear music from the rolling stones but you say i want to hear some focus music or relaxing music much of the stuff you'll get in the playlist is phony musicians um cheap fake artists pelly writes offerings

created by Spotify. Now, Spotify told the music press the reports were quote categorically untrue. Full stop. The company is not creating its own fake artist tracks, but it did stop short of saying it's adding these to the playlists and you can see it for yourself. Articles about this from NPR and the Guardian started to stir up some interests. Journalists scrutinized the music of some of the artists they suspected to be fake.

Before the year was out, a music writer named David Turner used analytics data to illustrate how Spotify's ambient chill playlist had largely been wiped of known artists like Brian Emo and Bibio and John Hopkins. Music replaced by tracks from something called Epidemic Sound, a Swedish company that offers production music, subscription-based production music.

the stock music you'd hear in the backgrounds of advertisements or tv shows and so forth of course why would spotify do this so they don't have to pay royalties to the record companies like brian eno's record company uh this is a story that's been kind of brewing for some time and is now really becoming

and more of a story. I don't use Spotify. Anthony, are you a Spotify? You seem like you look like a Spotify user. I don't know what that means, but I am a Spotify user. I know it. See? If every year I sort of like feel more grudging about the fact that I still use Spotify. Have you noticed that these kind of...

ambient sound playlists are filled with weird stuff? I remember reading about this when there were some other reports. I don't know exactly when it was. But there have been other reports in the last few years. And I think, first, I was like, who even uses Spotify in this way? But then I did notice over Christmas, I don't have Christmas albums saved in Spotify. So you just type in Christmas music and then try to find something. You get music. In that case, you're not looking for totally generic chum. Exactly.

But you do, like, you know, probably which cover of Winter Wonderland you're listening to, you don't necessarily care too much about. You don't care. This is Peli writes, according to a source close to the company, this is in Harper's Magazine, Spotify's own internal research showed many users don't come to the platform to listen to specific artists or albums. They're looking for a soundtrack. They're looking for wallpaper, a study playlist, a dinner vibes, right? Yeah.

And as a result, the thinking seemed to be, she writes, why pay full price royalties if users are only half listening? Not even that. It's background music. Yeah, it's wallpaper. I mean, it's not like Spotify is paying artists that much money as it is. Hey, anything, you know, they're very, very profitable.

um yeah you know it's called the first time profitable like this year were they the CEO of Spotify has made more money than any musician ever ever oh yeah well yeah Daniel Eck has definitely but that's not cash money that's the value of the stock and like it could well that's the problem for Spotify is they're always hanging by a thread because the music industry

could cut that thread so they've always looked at ways to get beyond the big three record companies right uh and this is one of the ways you call it the perfect fit content program they started this in 2017 according to Liz Peli as one of the company's new bets to achieve profitability she talked to former employees

who said, yeah, this is what we did. Editors were soon encouraged by higher ups with increasing persistence to add PFC content to certain playlists. So there was in fact, according to this story in Harper's, an increasing pressure to start putting this stuff in there. Spotify denies the staffers were encouraged to add PFC to playlists and that playlist editors were discontented with the program.

By 2023, several hundred playlists were being monitored by the team responsible for PFC. 150 of those, including ambient relaxation, deep focus, 100% lounge, bossa nova dinner, cocktail jazz, deep sleep, morning stretch, and detox, were nearly entirely made up of PFC, these phony things.

Yeah, it's the jazz that really pisses me off about this because there's so much good jazz out there. There's already so much of that. Right. Like you don't need the slop. You don't need the AI slop jazz. Ask for it by name though, I think not genre, right? That's probably one way to avoid this. Yeah, you get, when you search for, like if I search for the blues, for example, the first row I get is like,

actual blues music. It's like playlists that are blues standards, blues classics, and they're real. And then there's a modern blues. And if you look in there, those are actual blues artists. But then you get moods and moments. Yeah, there you go. Those are like, I look through some of those and I'm like, no. Some of these people may be actual artists that I don't recognize. So, I would have to go through and scan them individually. But there are some that look suspicious. Yeah.

But if nobody complains, they're going to keep doing it. Yeah. And I don't think I mean, I think people like my favorite, my child's favorite genre of music is like lo-fi hip hop beats. Yeah. And all of that is is just and they don't care who made them. Right. It's slop. It's wallpaper.

That and Tchaikovsky. So there is a large. Well, that's not wallpaper. That's good stuff. Well, I mean, but what I'm saying is for my child, those are equivalent because they're just background noise. Right. And I kind of I think they should probably be transparent. Maybe. I mean, I don't know. Should we be transparent about it?

Daniel Ack in a 2023 conference call noted the boom in AI-generated content could be, quote, great culturally and allow Spotify to, quote, grow engagement and revenue.

Well, and I think it's worth underlining that it's not just these artists, right? That there's AI content is sort of like spreading throughout Spotify. I mean, beyond Spotify too, but certainly within Spotify, like one thing I have noticed is all these genre and time period playlists that I used to listen to and they used to be sort of just the standard Spotify playlist. Now they really are touting, "Oh, this is personalized for you."

And then the whole year in review, Spotify wrapped last year. I love that. I think that's cool. It's a cool idea. Right. But then what happened, I guess, was I didn't even bother listening to it because it just sounded so horrible. They did an AI-generated podcast of people discussing your favorite songs. And people were just like, this sucks. That's probably that Notebook LM stuff.

Yeah, and it sounds just like me, which doesn't make me any happier. Yeah, I got an email that somebody said it sounds just like me. It's just generic podcaster sound. You know, Anthony's hinting at the future. The future is you will have a mood bot.

It simply plays music of whatever mood you want by generating it on the fly from a generative AI data. I mean, really, the only people who are harmed by this are our actual performing artists. Well, I think we're every human who doesn't get to listen to actually human generated. Yeah. Like, I mean, if I I used to hate Brian, you know.

But I don't know. I flipped a switch when I turned like 35 or something. And all of a sudden I was like, music for airports is my jam. That's a great... Isn't that a great album? I love it. You know, mode on. Yeah. So...

Oh, oh, sorry. Brian's calling. Right. Yeah. He's like, thanks, Stacy. But like, I otherwise would have never have gotten that. And if I got like some sort of AI generated slop, it's unclear. You can't love that artist because it doesn't exist. So.

It's just right. And if you don't have a you know, and if you just have more and more A.S. making the music industry more and more unsustainable, then the quality is just going to get worse for everyone. But this happened before. This is music from the 70s. It is like people hate music. Exactly. And I think it's going to happen again. Right. Like, I think you're going to have exactly that period of this is new ways to lower the cost of music.

it makes perfect sense to me that there will be an opportunity to create a brand around human music only. Right. For sure. And other kinds of content too. Like you'll have sort of like, I think you're already seeing a wave of human created things only. Yeah. I think a lot of podcasts are going to be created that way too.

I think part of the, I think you're right that like this kind of, it's well, part of what it speaks to is that music serves a lot of different functions. And sometimes it is about this like incredible creativity, human connection. Sometimes it is just like, I want noise while I'm writing a blog post. But, and the, but it also, yeah, it like,

There has been other like sort of filler music before. I guess part of the anger here is because there's this sense of a shrinking pot and then Spotify is taking more of the pot itself through this mechanism that makes, I suspect, musicians particularly. Leave Kenny G alone. Would you pay? How dare you, sir? An extra two or three dollars a month for only human people in your Spotify playlist? Spotify might agree to that. Absolutely.

So this is an excerpt from the book which comes out this month. Liz Pelly, P-E-L-L-Y, the author of Mood Machine, The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. This excerpt is from Harper's Magazine. It will be published in January by One Signal Publishers. It's funny. It's been it's sort of a scandal.

But also, most of the time people go, yeah, I thought that was probably what was going on. I thought that was what was happening. The Amazon alkaline battery of music, right? Exactly. Exactly. Are Amazon batteries no good?

No, they're the same. They're the same. Probably manufactured in the same plant in China for crying out loud. It's just they don't cover on them. But it's Amazon recognizing that you just wanted a battery. I just need a battery. So we'll sell you ours so we can keep that 25 cents a battery. Yeah. If you own a VW, you may be VW, Audi or a Skoda or a seat. If you own an EV from those companies, 800,000 EV owners

Data was leaked, including their movements. CarScoops writes, "From home to brothels. An unprotected, misconfigured cloud storage." How many times have we heard about misconfigured S3 buckets?

- It's unfortunate they cited EVs on this because, well, this is a problem with any data set. - I do think EVs collect more data though, don't they? About the driver and what's going on. - They collect sensitive data if you think of location data is sensitive. - Well, for instance, when that Cybertruck blew up in front of the Trump Hotel, Tesla knew everything about its movements.

you know but we already do tesla had that and actually yeah it's not a surprise yeah and i hope tesla protects it better than audi vw does let's put it that way tesla got in trouble several years ago for not sharing it with the customer and the customer wanted it to prove that they didn't like speed and like either red light cam or it was parking tickets or something and tesla was like nobody gets that data

Yeah. But we do have a little God mode here in the company where we can watch you. I just bought a mini. This is related to this sort of an EV mini countryman. Oh, the new countryman. Yeah. Lisa has the mini Cooper. She loves it, but it doesn't have any range. Yours probably has some decent range. It has okay range. But I had to go through at the dealership, six screens of privacy settings. Yeah. And what was really interesting to me is the,

Most of them I couldn't turn off because I wanted the navigation functions, which totally makes sense, but is also like, you know, hopefully many BMW mini is not storing these in an unsecured AWS server. It's a nice car. I like that countryman. Did you replace your Tesla with it? I did. Oh, nice. Good. It's kind of embarrassing to be driving a Tesla these days.

It was a 2014 Tesla. Oh, that's okay. It was time. It was vintage. Not as embarrassing as driving a Cybertruck. That would be embarrassing. There's somebody in Petaluma who owns one. Every time I see it, I go. People are driven by the search for better. But when it comes to hiring, the best way to search for a candidate isn't to search at all.

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uh lake superior state university has been doing this since 1976 publishing a list of words that should no longer ever ever be used this is their 2025 banished words list are you ready cringe game changer era that might have to do with taylor swift more than anything else dropped dropped why can't we use dropped

oh like a book dropped or my album dropped or beyonce's latest drop yeah let's not do that i y k y k if you know you know they don't like that acronym sorry not sorry that should have been dropped three years ago drop it no more skibbity what the hell does skibbity mean no one knows

This viral word may have resonated with a younger crowd, but for many, it's just noise. Agatha from Denmark explains, by the way, they get international people on this.

Nobody cares about a skibbity toilet, skibbity fizz, or skibbity Ohio phantom tax. At this point, nobody even knows what it means, and it just annoys people. Skibbity is exactly the thing. Did they just call up grandmas and ask them what they think about the language? All right, Benito, young person, explain. What is a skibbity? It's nothing. It's actually the thing that kids use to piss off old people. That's all it really is. Oh. It's the word that pisses off old people. That's why we should drop it. It's working. It's working. Agatha hates it.

A hundred percent. Is it possible to be overenthusiastic about retiring the phrase a hundred percent? Absolutely. It's overuse has left no room for nuance or doubt. Right. This is a hundred percent. Now it's like a hundred thousand percent. Yeah, right. You can't even say it anymore. You have to say a hundred one percent, a hundred ten percent, two thousand percent.

Oh, by the way, Pretty Fly for a Psy guy or cis guy has filled us in on the origination of Skibity in our Club Twit Discord. This is why you join the club for valuable information like this. Skibity originated as a dance song by the Russian rave band Little Big released in 2018.

Yeah, it's a part of, it's a remix culture thing. It's like this song that they put it on this video and then it became this viral thing. And then there was a YouTube series, Skibbity Toilet. Yeah, this is all your bass belonged to us 20 years later. Oh, okay. Well, I like all your bass. Don't ban that. That's a good one. Finally, in the top 10, utilize, I agree. Just use, use. Do not utilize, utilize. And period, as in,

I have had enough of this list, period.

The top 10 banished words. I can't believe they've actually gotten people to write about this for this many years. This is the dumbest thing I have seen. I'm so sorry. I'm like, why don't I just talk to, I don't know, my grandpa? What should we ban, grandpa? Well, you see, you got to understand, I'm that age. So that's why I like this. Don't be that guy, man. You young people make up words. I'm not that.

Not that young. My brother. In my day, it was 23. Public domain day, January 1st, 2025. A bunch of works from 1929 are open to all sound recordings from 1924 because it's a hundred years. A lot of, a lot of great novels, music, books, plays, movies,

Let's see some of the sound recordings. I can play these now. I can play George Gershwin playing the clarinet in Rhapsody in Blue. It's a little scratchy because it's from 1924. Go ahead. Take me down, YouTube. That's one of my favorite pieces. Movies. The Marx Brothers' Coconuts is now in. That was their first feature film is now in the public domain.

The Skeleton Dance, Walt Disney. Very famous. Yeah, I love the Skeleton Dance. There is some Mickey Mouse stuff. In fact, the first spoken Mickey Mouse animations, 12 animations are now public domain, including the Carnival Kid, which was Mickey's first talking appearance.

Are you excited? I saw somebody on social media pointed out that it's worth emphasizing that this is public domain in the United States. So, you know, don't necessarily try to make money off of Mickey Mouse cartoons in Europe. You may get into trouble. We're going to get taken down in Estonia. Damn it. I knew it. Bitcoin is now old enough to drink. The very first Bitcoin block was mined January 3rd, 2009 by, of course, Bitcoin.

satoshi nakamoto the genesis block happy birthday bitcoin hold it up to drive it's only 16 years oh yeah i can't well it drinks in some countries what's the drinking age in canada yeah it depends on the province but 18 18 or 19. okay you got drive sorry yeah don't drink bitcoin go home bitcoin you're drunk

And finally, the end of the QR code, I mean, the end of the barcode, apparently QR codes are preferable and barcodes will be gradually over the next couple of years replaced by QR codes. They contain more data. They do. In fact, a lot more data you can put in a QR code things faster.

uh you know like where it was manufactured the data manufacturer the best buy date all of that stuff but i also want to cure codes are always i'm stealing your thunder stacy you're going to same place you go you're the professional here what no you what's wrong with qr codes what they go they automatically go to the cloud it means we now have telemetry every time we scan a code you mean i can't wait a minute if i scan a qr code that has to go to the cloud

Yeah, it checks. It goes, it says, hey, this means what? And then that data, like, okay. And what I was actually going to say is... It's not on device? No, how could it be on device? Your device doesn't have access to the data that the QR code is indicative of. Oh, I thought the QR code had the data. It's just a URL. Yeah.

And I thought this is what I was going to say. People can easily hack them by placing stickers over QR codes. And if barcodes are replaced by QR codes, if they're not printed on the package, that is dodgy. Couldn't you do that with a barcode? No.

A barcode doesn't take you to a website, though. Well, I mean, QR code is just data. But usually that data, the normal scanning device is your phone. And if it sees a URL, it's a URL. Yeah. So it could. So, OK, so I thought it would be like a barcode where there would be data encoded. And that is true. It's just think about the normal mechanism for QR. Normally it's a URL. It comes. It ends up being a URL.

And so it definitely has more data into it. But yeah, all of these things have problems. The barcodes have these problems too. People hack barcodes all the time. GS1, which is the international nonprofit that maintains the global standard for barcodes. Who are they when they're at home? Who is this cabal of barcode experts?

So they did this a couple of years ago. They started this process several years. I actually met with someone at CES, like the one right after COVID talking about this very issue. And this was always their goal. So here it is. CES Tech. By the end of 2027, says Renaud de Balboa, the president and chief of GS1. By the end of 2027, we have defined an ambition to

I don't even know what that means. Like the concepts of a plan. We have the concepts of a plan. I love defining ambitions. It's not even ambition. We have defined an ambition that by the end of 2027, all retailers in the world will be able to read those next generation barcodes. We think it's doable.

- Well, and anything that can read a QR code can read a barcode. So there's not really any incentive to phase anything out just to push folks to buy the new scanners that can read QR codes. - What is your objection to QR codes, Stacy, besides the fact that they go to the cloud?

Well, that they can be that people replace what is the actual one with something that will lead you someplace malicious. But that's because you are processed on your phone. Right. There was actually just a brand new hack that bypassed protections that were used.

I can't remember the details of that because there have been like 50 brand new hacks over the last two weeks. But there was one that was like pretty terrible and I can't remember what it bypassed. A hack of the QR code? Hold on. There's so many. There's so many. I know. I know. Here's an article on Medium. It bypasses browser isolation. Oh, that's a good one. Which is important. Yeah.

And here's an article from 2011, why the QR code is failing. I think that did not age well. That was like that guy who said Bluetooth was not going to do anything. Yeah. Obviously, we just had to find the use case, which was COVID and restaurants. From 2011. Menus? Yeah. Yeah.

So the stickers would be the number one way of doing that. But you could do that with a barcode, but it wouldn't. Okay. But it would just have different information. Okay. Right. It doesn't actually. Yeah. And they'll just be an escalation of encryption games here. So the barcodes that the that the that the

the grocery store are putting on their things will have a code so that when they, if somebody tries to replace it, when they scan them, it's like, that's not our UQR. Yeah. Right. They must do that already. Well, and you could also, I mean, like if a bar, if it's printed on the package, that is more likely to be secure than like what happens today is people will, I mean, you actually see it. This happens in Seattle quite often actually is you will scan. If you scan a QR code on like a poster on a telephone pole, you,

It's even odds that you'll get like some, if not malicious, then just a teasing website. That's like YouTube is you'll get Rick rolled. Yeah. But Joe says no more QR code menus because COVID is over and it's time to bring back actual menus. Do you agree? I love the QR code menus in Japan because in Japan, really? Yeah. Cause you scan it to give you the English menu.

Oh, that's a good idea. I've also seen QR menus where you could say, hey, just show me the vegan options or just show me no gluten. Like as soon as you have a digital menu, you can do cool things. Oh, OK. They've had ingredient lists and cooking methodologies. Just most most QR menus lead to a PDF file. And that is hell. Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, this has been a lovely time. Thank you for kicking off the year in style.

Richard Campbell, we'll see you right back here on Wednesday for Windows Weekly. And of course, every week, two podcasts a week with Carl Franklin. He does .NET Rocks and he does Run As Radio. They're all at runasradio.com. And he is officially Canadian. And at some point, I want you to tell us about the Canadian-Denmark Whiskey War. The Hans Island Battles, yes. It's a great story. I don't know where. I read about that just the other day. I thought, I got to ask Richard about that.

Bless you, Rich. It's great to see you. Thank you for two weeks in a row now. That's a new record. Thank you. I appreciate it. Great to see you. Thank you, Stacey Higginbotham. Especially thank you for the work you do at Consumer Reports to make the world better for all of us. You're going to be all about router security this year. This is the year of router security. Router security and end-of-life support for your IoT devices. Right on. Or rather, telling you about it.

so you'll have a sell-by date on all your iot devices basically yeah this is not going to work in seven years an expiration date well it was not it's called a minimum guaranteed support time frame it's the worst naming minimum guaranteed support time frame dates were just banned in california because they don't actually mean anything really oh yeah they confuse the heck out of people oh they do

We're going to do another coffee segment. And one thing I learned from Mark Prince, the coffee geek is it's the roast date that you want to look at, not the sell by date, the roasted date. Of course, if you're eating calamari, don't all bets are off. Thank you, Stacey. It's great to see you. We'll do the book club in about a month. If you're a member of the club, go vote. There are four excellent books and it's neck and neck between Orbit and another one. So it's really you guys.

i think you don't want to what do you want to do what did you skew the vote what do you want to what do you want to read i just i thought that orbital would be a hard sell for people and apparently not it's it's leading right now okay go uh if you're a club member uh go vote and if you're not a club member join the club

it's only seven bucks a month makes a big difference for us in the our bottom line but it also gives you great benefits like stacy's book club and ad free versions of all the shows you can find out more at twitter.tv club twitter anthony ha

weekend editor you took the is the weekend over for you now officially uh I think that if something crazy happened it would still be my responsibility I think I would have an excuse that I was on the show um but talking about the news and back in the back we've got a bunch of CES reporters on the ground right now I mean off the hook yeah nothing's gonna happen today it's a CES day

It's great to have you on. Thank you, Anthony. Really appreciate it. At Original Content is his podcast. What's that all about? I think actually I realized at Original Content was the handle on Twitter, but then we made them. We were now on mostly on Instagram. So we're at Original Content pod on Instagram and it's reviewing all the new streaming shows. You know, can I do the new season of Squid Game next? We've never needed you more. There are there's so much content.

And I can't watch it all. I need to know what I should watch. That's the idea behind the podcast? Squid Game, really?

Squid Game. Yeah, it's back. I know. Yeah. Squid theme on this episode, but it's back. Second season not as good, but that's okay. And the first season was so incredible. Yes. All right. I'm looking forward to Severance coming back in a week. That's going to be good. Oh, yes. Yes. I got to know what happens. They better say, because I'll be mad if they lost. They just keep stringing us on. That'd be mad. Originalcontentpodcast.com.

if you're if you're this is the audio program you're looking for thank you anthony thank you richard thank you stacy thanks to all of you for joining us it's good to have you back for a brand new year i think this is going to be i didn't ask you all this i should have asked you this what the big story of 2025 will be i think we'd all agree it's going to be ai right yes right

Certainly the investment into it, whether or not. Richard says he hopes not. How many years in a row? Sorry, Richard. Yeah, but this is the year AI gets smart. Sure, it was last year. They said that last year. Oh, it was last year. No. I think we're going to, the big story this year will be massive infrastructure failure in the United States. Oh, that's good. You have bridges coming down and stuff like that. Oh,

oh man that's not sure if it's climate change if it's cyber security if it's corruption that just totally destroys the whole agencies that but like the above infrastructure failure that's my vote I hope I'm wrong I hope I'm right and you're wrong thank you Stacy uh on that up note we do a little Mary Sunshine we do a tweak by the way on Wednesday a week from Wednesday was gonna we're going to talk about the Supreme Court in Tick Tock

But all the shows begin up again. This is the first show of a brand new year. We do TWiT every Sunday afternoon, 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern, 2200 UTC. You can watch us live on eight different platforms. If you're a club member, you get exclusive behind the velvet rope access in our club TWiT discord. But you can also watch us on YouTube, youtube.com/twit/live.

twitch.tv/twit. We're on Twitch as well. We're on x.com. Easy to find us because we're usually the number one show on X because there's not a whole lot of other stuff going on. So just go to your front page. You'll probably see us there. What else? Kik, LinkedIn, Facebook,

And TikTok, at least for two more weeks. So watch us live if you want to, but you don't have to because, of course, it's a podcast. So you can download the shows from our website. There's audio or video at twit.tv. You can watch a YouTube channel dedicated to This Week in Tech. YouTube.com slash twit has links to all of our shows. Each of them has their own YouTube channel.

which is good for sharing. Like if there's a little clip about calamari you want to share, you could just take that and send that off to your calamari loving friend. Or you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That's the pro tip. That way you'll get it automatically the minute we're done every week, just in time for your Monday morning commute. Thank you, Stacey, Anthony, Richard. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We will see you next week. This is, by the way, this is a big year for a twit. This is our

This is completing our 20th year, beginning our 21st year. 20 years in podcasting. That's the equivalent of, I don't know what. In dog years, it's 140, but it's got to be more than that in podcast years. Thank you all for being here. We'll see you next time. And as I have said for the last 20 years, another twit is in the can. Bye-bye.

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