TWiT 1014: Just Say It's Capitalism - CES 2025, Meta News, Newag DRM
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It's time for Twit This Week in Tech. Oh, oh, make some time for this episode. We've got one of our best panels ever. Father Robert Balasera is here. The Digital Jesuit from Consumer Reports, Nicholas DeLeon. And Cory Doctorow with his brand new book. We have lots to talk about. Of course, a CES post-mortem. Maybe mortem is the right term, too. We'll talk about the big hack.

Turns out pretty much all of the apps you use on your phone are leaking your location to data brokers. And Cory Doctorow explains why we need a privacy law. Bad. It's all coming up next on TWIT. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWIT.

This is TWIT, This Week in Tech, episode 1014, recorded Sunday, January 12th, 2025. Just say it's capitalism. It's time for TWIT, This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. And there has been a little bit of tech news. Father Robert Ballester has been

is back from ces he is of course our very own digital Jesuit actually you're not back you're still in uh in the Vatican as you said for another month I'm on parent duty oh good for you well love to your folks uh and I hope they do okay um we just put one of ours in uh hospice so I know how it is yeah uh anyway it's great to see you we will get all your ces report

report you're still editing the uh the clips which we will put up when they many clips many and actually some interesting stuff you know I have to get by this this basic negativity I have because I've seen it before because for some people this is amazing technology that that made its way over to Vegas okay well I'm gonna be the guy you have to talk out of skepticism also Nicholas de Leon is here from Consumer Reports he's their senior electronics reporter did they send you to Las Vegas uh

No, I asked. I basically asked not to go this year. I went last year. I try to go like every other year. That's good. Kind of the cadence. We sent a bunch of folks, but I stayed home.

uh here in arizona so yeah yeah and i see that stacy higginbotham printed out a cr for you as well that's nice do they send those out when you when you start working for some reports they give you a little uh then they send they sent that one to me i think during the pandemic at some point for like yeah because things like this like little media appearances and stuff yeah hey look who else is here it's really great to see cory doctorow from pluralistic.net

The bezel.org, although there's a new book and we will, we, well, let's plug it. You got it right there. I don't have it yet. Picks and shovels. It's a Marty Hench mystery from the eighties, the early eighties, the era of the weird PC.

uh and I'll point out that I also have an EFF back there oh you do so okay it's lost in the noise I have the traditional podcaster uh color bars because my my uh my pixu has died so I'm supposed to be a clock for people who who miss the clock it's uh it's 224. you could just do your timing from there

Nice. So where should we start? We can either do Facebook or CES, which would make you happier. Let's start with CES and we'll do Facebook a little later. I'm not, I have to say I'm like, I'm with Nicholas going every year seems a lot to me. I haven't been since COVID. And it seems like there's a, you know, there's always going to be new TVs. There's going to be a lot of concept stuff.

But is there something, and today, this year, of course, it was AI everywhere, right? What did you see that was good, that was important?

Yeah, that's about it. Yeah. So, I mean, look, look, every year we can tease a couple of interesting things out of CES, but I was just, I was speaking to Benito before we started the show and we could have replayed the package I created for last year and it would be exactly the same as the package I create for this year because it's EVs.

It's AI, some new screens, and then the rest of it. And the rest of it wasn't really great. In fact, some of the biggest motion that I saw at CES came before the actual show started. It was during the press days. Sony announced some new partnerships. They announced that their new vehicle, their collaboration with Honda, which is, by the way, 90,000 dollar car is crap. Oh, really? It's Sony is doing a grand experiment.

to see who will pay ninety thousand dollars for a forty thousand dollar EV with a PlayStation that's that's that's probably the best way I noticed that Nicholas has a stuffed PS3 controller on his sofa well PS5 but yes all right so maybe maybe you're the one

90,000 feels a little expensive. I remember I'm pretty sure I saw the Sony concept car at CES last year as well. Maybe it was a different model or whatever. But I...

I don't altogether hate the idea of a Sony EV. That's kind of interesting, but not for $90,000. Remember, $90,000 starting. If you want it in any usable trim, you're looking at $110,000, $120,000. And for that $90,000, you get terrible range. You get a terrible power system. It does not charge as quickly as like a Tesla or even a Nissan Leaf. You get styling that

I think they want it to be futuristic. It's got a dash wide screen where you can put up the different apps that you want to run. But other than that, it's not a great car. I mean, it's an okay car. It's a decent EV, but again, it's like a $40,000 EV, but they think you're going to pay more because it's Sony Honda.

not so much yeah maybe like 1990 when sony was still like yeah it's not the brand it used to be oh no by the way leo you're gonna love this because their big announcement was all of these features like driver assist and self-parking it's absolutely free for three years yeah first three years yeah that's the new this i think it's inevitable we're gonna see subscription cars i mean

Everybody wants to do it. The only reason there's such a thing as a subscription car is that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it illegal to reverse engineer it and just make a mod that lets you turn that subscription into something you own. If we had functional markets for this stuff, the way these guys who claim to be capitalists say that they want, then the fact that you could buy a $1,200 a year subscription to your accelerator pedal

would prompt someone to make a $200 mod that just gives you your accelerator pedal. Right. Reverse engineer it. But you can't because that would be wrong. And actually, on the EV panel that they had on Monday, one of the speakers, she did this thing about-- because it was a question and answer. And someone in the audience said, what do you think about the trend towards subscription everything? It seems as if EV manufacturers are adopting what the software industry has done. Everything is now as a service.

and there was so many ways she could have answered the question the way she answered it was I think consumers are getting used to it and they actually like it I'm like whoa that's like the one wrong answer wow yeah they actually like it we like spending money why not more money for simple basic services like car seat heaters that BMW tried actually your boss is right

That's the official mode of discourse. That's right. Actually, your boss is right. You do like this. Actually, the other EV trend is if you went to the West Hall, which is where most of the EVs were located,

it was china china and korea this is the next question i was going to ask because it used to be the fun thing at ces was to go to the hall where all the international especially chinese crazy stuff was but now given that we're going to probably see 60 tariffs uh with china in the next couple of months and that you know china may not be the easiest country to buy something from in the next couple of months

you still saw a lot of Chinese presence there huh oh yeah because remember it's an international show oh yeah that's true it's only the U.S that won't be able to get it exactly and when you looked at the Chinese offerings yes okay we could make lots of fun about how Chinese vehicles have developed over the years and there's some safety concerns that have to be addressed but the vehicles that they brought

looked good yeah they looked really really good and they had models like an ev minivan with chairs that swivel around that started at thirty thousand dollars so it's sort of it's sort of like okay well you can get a luxury ev from Honda or from Sony or from Tesla or you could buy an ev for everybody why are Chinese cars less expensive are they subsidized by the government or are they legitimately less expensive I know the market and yes wants them to be less expensive right I mean you can't

I mean, at least three of the companies were either state or heavily backed by the state. So there's a lot of subsidy there. They're in deployment method. They're all in startup method. So they're trying to get a customer base starting in China.

um so they're trying to force out Tesla they they want right Tesla to no longer be the status symbol for EV luxury and they might actually have it but also ironically with with Elon Musk in the government it looks like Tesla might lose his government subsidies with along with all the other EV manufacturers which is pretty hysterical really weird uh but he also I think is lobbying hard and Trump has said this to ban Chinese vehicles in the United States

I'd heard that Chinese vehicles are also shorter range. Oh, interesting. They enjoy lots and lots of advantages because a shorter range car has a smaller battery. It doesn't weigh as much. Lots of other things in the material bill become cheaper. And given that the very large majority of the trips that most people take

are quite short range. You know, this is, we have, we have a car with a 200 mile EV range, uh, which turns out not to be as useful as we thought it would be. Like it's not enough to get us to San Diego and it's way more than we need to get to like Anaheim. So we ended up renting a car when we go, you know, if we go skiing or something, we'll rent a car.

We don't we don't try and get anywhere in our 200 mile EV. And we paid a substantial premium versus, say, 150 mile EV to get that to get that 200 miles. And, you know, honestly, if I had it to do over again, I would get a 50 mile EV. It's the number one complaint I hear from Americans about EVs is the range.

And yeah, we have a 90 mile an hour Mini Cooper, 90 miles range Mini Cooper. That's fine for getting around. Where are they going? I mean, sure. Some people have very long commutes and that is a legitimate thing, but it's common. Statistically, they don't have long commutes. Statistically, their commute is not longer than the range of a bottom of the barrel EV and the savings are gigantic. Yeah.

to drive one of those. Well, then I neglected to ask you before we go on. You're okay, right? You're in the LA area. I know. Yeah, we're not in the bit that's on fire. The Hollywood Hills fire was close, but it's out. And, you know, there's more winds coming. And a lot of the stuff that's on fire that's upwind of us is super toxic. Not just the houses, but there's like a lot of industrial sites that have burned. And so we're masking up out of doors. We're running our HEPA filters. Yeah.

Been there. We did that in the fires up here. I know how you feel. It's awful. My kid's school was shut last week and my wife's office. I swim in the pool across the street for pain control and that was shut all week. But they all say that they're reopening tomorrow, but the winds are going to kick up again tomorrow and last till Wednesday. So it could get bad again.

Our deepest condolences. I should have started the show with this and I completely spaced it out. Thankfully, we don't need any condolences, but there are lots of people who do. Well, Kevin Rose is one. Kevin is fine and Daria is fine. Their kids and Toaster the Dog is fine, but they were burned out of their home in Pacific Palisades, which they just built.

My wife took a load of non perishables and PPE and medical supplies and water to the Rose Bowl yesterday. And I guess if anyone is within sound of this voice, and you've got things to donate that they've got all the clothes they need, but everything else they're short on, and they're collecting it at the Rose Bowl.

Yeah, the two big Jesuit schools, Loyola and Loyola Marymount have opened up their doors and they're taking in people who just need a place to stay. They're making sure they're clothed and fed. So it's bad. I think we lost one of our communities and then my family, two of our family members lost their houses. So it's big. I mean, the area that's already been burned is bigger than the entire city of San Francisco. Yeah. So, I mean, it's not small. Yeah. Yeah.

just uh horrific um so you know all we can say once again you know hang in there uh and we have a phrase here sonoma strong after several years of fires we're going to have another very very dry january and february which puts us also at risk and uh it's it's really a scary thing because you're not safe so uh uh

We're just thinking of you and Kevin. It is weird that January is now fire season. Yeah. That doesn't seem right, does it? Right? I mean, that's not normal. That's not okay. Yeah. I think we probably have, and I don't know, but I imagine we have a few listeners who are also displaced.

I'd be surprised if there weren't. I mean, the evacuation zones were quite large, much larger, obviously, than the zones that burned. I've been using WatchDuty ever since our fires up here, and I know that a lot of people in the Southland also recognize the value of WatchDuty. I think they are a nonprofit as well. ScooterX says you can support them with donations as well. So this is a very useful resource.

uh, tool for keeping an eye on. It's actually what the firefighters, uh, use to keep an eye on, uh, what's going on. Um, and it is a nonprofit. So donate if you can, everybody needs it. Over a million people downloaded watch duty in the last couple of days. I would imagine most of them in the Los Angeles basin.

ah all right back to the toy store way to bring the show down Leo I'm sorry I apologize for not you know

Let's talk about carbon intensive, semi-disposable electronics. I agree. Yes. If you bought it, you can toss it. And that's the real thing to remember. America. You never have to keep those. America. America. Oh, beautiful. You sent me, Corey, a great link. The Worst in Show Awards, worstinshowces.com.

uh i'm this looks like an eff uh joint but it's you know it's the leaders of it are the repair coalition and and i fix it but consumer reports uh and per i see stacy stacy higginbotham on environmental impact kyle ween's usually a judge for this and i had to buy out this year because i had a busy schedule i haven't even had a chance to watch the videos yet but

uh, you know, having judged it, that's pretty rigorous criteria. You can see, I actually have a worst in show word up there on my shelf. Uh, it's, uh, we don't actually send them to the companies. We asked them if they want them or none of them. I also see you have a mug that I think maybe Posey made saying best of. So that's good. You got both. Best dad, best dad. Oh, good. You are, you're the best dad. Absolutely. Yeah.

So what did they yet name the worst in show? Oh, yeah, they have. But I haven't seen it. It's in the videos. So you got to watch a video. Yeah. Yeah. They my favorite category is who asked for this? Yeah.

that's half of ces yeah who did ask for this last year i did this for bmw when they put heads up displays with like ads on your windscreen oh yeah yeah yeah yeah there's stacy participating in that these are the judges um

yeah it's uh I mean especially at in you know I mean this does tie into the fires especially in an era where the climate is uh is going downhill thanks to consumption of oil products and then and of course there's going to be people listening to this show we're going to just turn it off turn it off because they say how dare you

um i think it's the the it's a pretty good that it's happening it's not jewish space lasers it's not governor newscombe it's called climate change and now as a jew i have to say it might be jewish space like you'd like to take credit but no you don't get to corey you don't get to uh i mean everyone talks about the jewish space lasers no one talks about the jesuit space lasers yeah i mean ours are way more powerful much more sophisticated

You're going to, yes, drink, Nicholas. I agree. On that worst of list, it would not be a complete list unless it includes that it was at the Samsung booth, their AI refrigerator.

I don't know. I've not looked through the video yet. I don't know who on this year. I mean, if there was ever a product that didn't need AI, that's it. The way that they were trying to sell it is, Oh, the AI has cameras so it can see what's fresh and what's not. And I'm like, Oh, what?

They've been talking about a refrigerator that would order your groceries for years. Yeah, I know. They never work. And Samsung, by the way, is famous for selling a refrigerator with an internet browser in the door that doesn't work anymore because they don't keep it up to date. The Samsung booth this year was probably the best booth

microcosm of what's wrong with CES. It was huge. It was glitzy. It was bright. There was a lot of blinky things and there was nothing of substance in there. Half the booth was just hype, not actual product, but, oh, wouldn't it be nice if we did this and this and this?

and that's like the worst of ces it's like look actually show me something rather than trying to get me excited about something that might or might not happen in five years Cindy Cone who is of course nominated a in order to suck in bathtub and their money

That's why when I polled my coworkers at EFF about the worst in show for CES for 2025, they suggested the increasing trend of smart infant products. Oh, God, those were everywhere. Parents, those were everywhere. If you read the comments often end up traumatizing those new parents. Yes, because you think you're put your baby in the robot.

The robot. And the worst thing is not only is the robot not really doing a good job of caring for your baby, it's collecting all the information it possibly can. Yep. Mm-hmm.

They had a baby monitor. They said the selling point was, oh, and it stores all your audio and video safely in the cloud. I'm like, no, no, no, don't do that. Safe? Are you kidding me? In the cloud. It's safe. It's safely in the cloud. What are you talking about? We store this data safely in this package we've made out of Saran Wrap.

Nathan Proctor, who is with the Public Interest Resource Group, nominated the product. Who asked for this? Ever wondered why your washing machine couldn't make phone calls? No.

Now with their new bespoke AI appliances, you won't have to worry about keeping your pocket-sized phone on you to take phone calls. I missed this one. Your fridge or oven can handle those duties instead. This sounds like the Samsung. According to their press release, it's a bold step forward in realizing its screens everywhere vision.

Now, considering Samsung's well-litigated patent... This is the one you were talking about, Corey. This might be appealing vision to their... That's the winner in who asked for this. I won't keep playing it because I don't want to take away views from them. Go to worstinshowces.com. Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of EFF on Privacy.

Paul Roberts, who is a founder of SecuRepairs on security. Stacey Higginbotham from Consumer Reports on Environmental Impact. Kyle Weems of iFixit on repairability. Nathan Proctor from PIRG with my favorite category, who asked for this. And I will leave a cliffhanger overall worst in show from the executive director of repair.org, Gay Gordon Byrne.

i can only imagine if the samsung is not the worst in the show if the bassinet that spies on your baby's not the worst in the show what could it be this is the show that has seen the debut of laparoscopic sex toys so oh what do you mean no incisions what are you talking about no a dildo with a camera on the end of it oh

They used to call that teledildonics. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no. That's remote operating a dildo. This is a leaky Wi-Fi enabled camera. Oh, no, no, no, no. In your most intimate moments. Oh, no. It's all password is password, password. At least change it to password one, two, three, four. No one guesses that. Admin, admin. Come on. There must have been something you saw that is world changing, Father Robert.

- No. Okay, there was a few things that I thought were interesting. Vasco probably- - You know, in years past, when we had a studio, you would bring a trunk full of garbage to put on the table to show off

What would you have brought this time since you can't? - Oh, I still have the trunk full of garbage. It's just none of it I really wanna show. Okay, there's a few that are interesting. There's a couple of constant glucose monitors, the CGMs. - Yeah, I'm excited about that, although I'm still waiting for non-invasive, right? I have type two diabetes and I would certainly love to have something like that in a watch. - They have that and that will actually be in the packages I'm putting together. There's a company that is in the last stage of FDA approval. And so they said within a quarter.

And it's a scanner that uses near IR. It's non-invasive, no prick, no nothing. It's basically just put your hand under there. And it worked because I had a scan with that. And then I did one of the pinpricks and the numbers matched up. So that's decent. That's pretty exciting. That's world changing. Interface with an insulin pump though?

no so this one was just they probably could because they're all hard to get FDA approval on that yeah imagine you can get de novo approval for something that does you you know that's how the Apple watch stuff works because right they don't want somebody to rely on this

you know that could be problematic especially if it's got an insulin pump attached to it imagine the security concerns no it's not to it's not to make an insulin pump it's one to the other to do a closed loop right there's a lot of t1 parents of t1 diabetics are really interested in this because very hard to monitor a toddler's glucose well right and so you know i have a good friend i have a good friend with t1 diabetes and uh

but her daughter rather has to do it and exactly right it's very difficult and plus they they've run out of places to put the monitor because you know you try to move them around and uh you know they yeah it would be nice to have a non-invasive system of some kind would be fantastic one that i don't like big money because there are millions of type two diabetics

And then many, many others would like to know ahead of time. Pre-diabetic. Elon Musk's next spouse, I think, was shown. This is the robot girlfriend, Aria. Oh. They call her a companion. A companion. Delightful companion. So they finally figured out how to get around the ban on booth babes. They make them out of rubber. That is actually horrific. The uncanny...

the uncanny valley i like the way the camera followed you on that one corey that's good i have one of these dumb ai cameras i know i love it i love it but that's what you need it for the face palm you can't get it you can't get away no um yeah real uncanny valley on this uh it was horrible it was i went down there i didn't even want to film it yeah

just lots of robots tons of robots for everything from pets to robots that actually the most useful robot was at the uh zte booth it might have been uh it was a robot another chinese company that is not allowed to import into the exactly that was something that was actually useful dishes it would automatically take dishes out of the sink give them a rinse and put them in the dishwasher and turn it on i'm like okay that i could see you being useful but but really

A human could just, instead of putting them in the sink, put them into the dishwasher. I see you have never met my daughter. Oh, yeah. What was I thinking? Teenagers. We forgot. Yeah.

is she a teenager she is 16 she's going to university next year because she started oh my goodness when she was born yeah wasn't that long ago it goes so fast doesn't it Corey yeah it's pretty amazing she's had some pre-acceptances she's thinking about the University of Hawaii nice great I lived there for two years

Did you major in pineapple studies? That's what we're hoping. I didn't. I was actually, I was one of the ministers at the chapel that was at the edge. Is it in Oahu? Oahu. Yeah. Is it North Shore? Because then you could major in surfing. Yeah. She's really interested in environmental studies and environmental economics. Oh, perfect. I bet you it's a great environmental study. Yes. Yeah.

Actually, their environmental studies program, especially their oceanographic studies program is second to none. I mean, they will actually take you on some of the research vessels that go out of Hawaii and you can do research that way. It's quite nice. That would be so awesome. Hono studies. I would do that in a heartbeat. I love it.

Anything else to say about CES before we move on from this tawdry topic? Something that was useful, specifically in my situation when I'm dealing with elderly people, there's a company from Canada called, is it Humans in Motion?

They brought out an exoskeleton that is production. You can actually buy it today. And the woman doing the demonstration was paraplegic and she was walking around. She was interesting. Yeah. So it's got enough of the smarts that it will steady you and it will not accept any input that would make you fall over.

so you know with my with my father and Parkinson's and his inability to move around I mean this is something he could actually use this has been long promised uh yeah yeah of course often with Mech Warriors but I think this would really be incredible wouldn't it be amazing well a lot of times when they show this tech they show that it could be used to like help

warehouse workers you know because it actually actually adds up things yeah this is stability this is purely I want to give motion back to someone who doesn't have motion anymore and it's Canadian I love it nice people they're nice people yeah Corey I hope you never have to wear this but it's nice to know it's there

Yeah. I mean, if it's a subject you're interested in, my friend Liz Henry is a crypt tech person. She uses a wheelchair and she's really into open source hardware for assistive devices. A lot of user maintainable stuff. That's obviously a really major thing. You may have seen this year. There was a big story about a jockey who had broken his back in a horseback riding accident and who relied on an exoskeleton to

for many things. I mean, for mobility, but also to avoid like bed sores and blood clots. And there's a tiny piece of bent metal that holds the battery in the cage. It's a watch battery for the remote.

and it got metal fatigue and stopped working and the manufacturer said well this $100,000 exoskeleton is now five years old so we've end of life debt and we won't give you the bit of bent metal you can spend the rest of your life in bed or find another $100,000 and it took a big public name and shame campaign for them to agree to repair the remote so that he could get out of bed again

They did fix it though. I remember reading that story. That's good. I'm glad they fixed it. We made a big stink. Yeah. Horrific. But that's in a nutshell. Let me see if I can find her site. Uh, Liz Henry, uh, has a real emphasis on maintainability. Uh,

And I mean, if you just type Liz Henry into the search engineer choice, you'll find it. But she's also she's got small grants, sort of $3,000 ish grants for people who are doing early stage crypt tech development and can help you out with that stuff. Yeah. Bookmaniac.org. That's her. Yeah. Yeah. So somewhere in there, there will be something about her crypt tech work.

interesting she's a at Mozilla yeah only the bug master at Mozilla now senior Firefox release manager and she is partners with Danny O'Brien my former colleague at EFF who's I'm the godfather of his daughter but he's the guy who also coined the term life hacking yeah and she was a developer for blog her oh you know it's funny how the good people all mesh somehow in some interesting way that's great

All right. How about some good news, Leo? Yeah. So the representative from OpenAI, she was part of the AARP had a huge section of the Venetian Innovation Pavilion.

And yes, they brought up. We can't quite get there from the LVCC, but that was nice of them. Exactly. But it wasn't just the tech. By the way, I am in the AARP, and I am well old enough to be in there. So I'm not mocking anybody that's.

Because one of the topics that they brought up was the education of the elderly and safeguards so that the new generation of deep fakes and AI scam calls don't affect them. Oh, can you imagine? Yeah. So there was this big call. She was like, look, we need companies to help us with this because we know it's a problem and we're enabling it and we don't know how to not enable it. Yeah. So that was interesting. A little admission from an up and coming company that their product is being used for wrong. Yeah.

That's interesting. AARP are getting on the forefront of this stuff. I was at a hearing for the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. They have a rule that will effectively ban data brokers that they're finalizing, and they were collecting data stories. And one of them was from the AARP. And you can buy as an ad target seniors with dementia. Great. Are you kidding me? Yeah.

You know, and also like the Pentagon talking about ad targeting for service people with gambling problems. And also notoriously Facebook was advertising to or was was offering teenagers with depression as an ad targeting body. Right.

What is the status of that regulation? Is that going to happen before January 20th? I don't know if they'll finalize it before January 20th. You'd like to hope that there'd be continuity. I don't know if Rohit Chopra is going to step down or not. I haven't followed that. But the interesting thing about the CFPB is there was a Supreme Court case about their authority to do rulemaking.

The, you know, there's been a lot of erosion of the authority of the executive agency. Yeah. And it was a nine to zero unanimous decision that the CFPB has good rulemaking authority. So in theory they can do it. And Chopra is a powerhouse. He's made so many amazing rules. There's been such a flurry that the people who stayed into the bitter end, uh,

Khan at the FTC and Chopra at the CFPB have introduced just a flurry of rules, investigations, cases. And I think what they're doing is saying to their successors, you know, like the, the, the ball is in your court. Now you get to decide, like, these are things that materially negatively affect Americans where the government can step in and make a huge positive difference to their lives. Are you going to, are you going to rise to the challenge or are you going to let Americans suffer? And, you know,

there's been some bipartisan support for some of these enforcement so maybe we'll see at least Congress has had the devil of a time creating a federal privacy law but yeah if you could do it 1988

The last consumer privacy law we ever had was one that bans video store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you have. Thank goodness. Thank goodness we've been protected there. You don't have to worry about your video rental. I do worry about the CFPB, however. I think that it's on the chopping block for sure. I think that's probably right. Yeah. Yeah.

I ordered two AI devices from the CES pile. The B, which is a B-A-I, is a B-E like a bumblebee that you wear on your wrist, listens to everything that's going on. But does, I think it's illegal because it will provide you with a text transcript, which means it is recording it.

So it's violating two-party recording laws. That's not a great start to the device. Yeah. And then there's another one that doesn't... Let me see if I can find the picture. You put on your temple. It looks like a giant pearl that you stick on your temple. And then it just gives you notes. It doesn't necessarily record. It just says...

Oh, and the reason you wear it in your temple, this is snake oil. It can monitor your brain waves. So instead of having to say, you know, hey, Omi, you just think and the Omi will...

Do something. You don't think so, Corey? It's not going to work? The only is taking notes. Why did I buy this? Why did I buy this? This is so expensive. Why did I buy this? Why, oh, why, oh, why? And then the ladies in the background are kind of laughing at him. They are. They're mocking him. They are mocking him, aren't they? They are.

but he's cute even if he has a pearl stuck to his temple he's so dumb and what they're saying is do you remember when we thought Google Glass was the stupidest thing people would put on their face yeah so I did order both of these um they weren't very expensive I mean I think they make their money on the monthly subscription so um this one makes a little more sense these are I did not order these these are earbuds with AI but I mean I think Apple's gonna give us those at some point so right

The voice cloning stuff was pretty cool. There's at least two different translator companies that not only do they do a decent job of translating from one language to another, but they will translate you into another language using your voice, which I'm like, okay, that's decent. I think Google's promised that with Gemini so that we can make podcasts that

In fact, I've even seen them. They have the lip sync and everything in a different language in your voice. I think that's pretty cool. That'll happen. And at that point, we'll start offering our shows in other languages, languages I don't speak. If you're going to do that, though, you really need to cut down. We have to cut down our use of idioms because idioms don't translate well into other languages.

Mama, I don't know. I'll think of an idiom in a moment. Why does that man keep talking about horses and bonds? What's going on? I just ran into this because in my I've got an enshitification book that I turned in to my editor at Forestry Room. We're going through edits and I use the phrase they're getting worked like government mules. Oh, yeah.

which my editor had never encountered. And he was like, I don't understand this, this simile. And I think we should replace it with one that's more obvious. And I'm like, it's, but it's idiom. It's very old. There are many variations. They beat you like a government mule. They worked you like a government mule. They rang you like a government mule.

That's what I thought. Yeah. Let me give you an example. Not too long ago, I was working on a project with a very –

important religious leader. And the idiom that he used was one from Venezuela. And the translation in English is something like, when the chicken sees the pot boiling, it might as well jump in. Which we can kind of get that. It's like, well, when it's a done deal, it's a done deal, right? But when Ehi translated that into Italian, the translation was something along the lines of,

The chicken gets mad because it's being murdered. And it's like, whoa, what? That sounds like Apple notifications to me. Exactly. So not always. Not always. It's a hit or miss thing. And yeah, there's a Central American idiom. Tengo solo mi tripa. There's a fox in my tripe. Exactly. It means I've got a stomachache. And then siento como un perro envenenado. I feel like a poisoned dog, which means I'm hungover. Yeah, I'll use that.

mama, why does the, why does the podcast keep talking about moods and dogs? Uh, let's pause, uh, for a moment and talk about something, um, more commercially, uh, interesting. And then we will continue with a great panel. Corey doctor is here. Nicholas D Leon is just enjoying his beverage. Go ahead. Yeah. I actually wanted to ask before we jump ahead, uh, was CES always this silly? Was it always this high? Oh, that's a good question. I remember reading, uh,

One of my favorite magazines as a kid was Sound and Vision magazine, which is like a home theater magazine. And you'd always read the dispatches of like, you know, all this new TV tech plasma on the horizon. I don't remember them really like dunking on too much stuff. Like just seems to be what people do now. So did it just become kind of like a parody of itself or was it always, I don't know. It changed with Apple. Okay. And while T-SAT, while Leo does the ad. Yeah.

No, the whole idea was, so when Apple started doing their new Jobsian release cycles, they were releasing all the way throughout the year. CES used to be the time where the last four months of the year, all of the new tech releases were held in secret because they wanted something for the show.

And so when the show actually came around, there was a reason for the hype because this was really stuff no one had ever seen before. And you had to explain it. So it made sense. Once they started copying Apple's year long release cycle where there was nothing being held back, it was always on their own time. And they had to hype up stuff that either they had already released, was already ready or might be ready in the future that there was nothing saved up.

So I'd say probably for the last 15 years is what you're talking about where CES, the hype scale has gone so far off the range because they don't have anything held in the backup.

and the big companies don't even go anymore so that right takes some of the seriousness Microsoft's not there Intel's not there I mean they're actually they are but they are off the strip they're in sweets yeah they're in sweets because it's cheaper for them and they get much better effect yeah Apple doesn't need to go to CES that's silly they don't even need but they didn't even need Macworld Expo anymore right yeah they killed Macworld Expo Robert I forgot speaking of silly you used to have a thing that told you you had to go pee did that ever work

You brought that back from CES a few years ago, I remember. It did. It did. It did. It did. Okay. It was called the D-Link and it totally worked. It went around your bladder and you got a little app on your phone that would tell you because it was like a little- Time to pay. It was a sonogram. So it would tell you how full your bladder is. Well, that's useful. It will-

The idea was they were going to sell it in nursing homes. I'm sorry? Yeah, okay. That makes sense. Yeah. So for people who have lost the ability to know when they need to go to the bathroom, they could – Which is a horrific thing. And also in a nursing station. Yeah. You could tell which of your patients are having trouble. They just released a new version this year. They had a very small table. No one was there, but they've shrunk it and they've made it much easier to use. Good. Sell there. That's not silly. That's serious. That's not silly. All right.

Anything else you'd like to know, Nicholas? I'm just trying to think of an IP address joke to make with this, and I can't think of any. Something about IP addresses. Health over IP. What is the IP address? Yeah. CES IP, something like that. All right.

we really do have to take a break so you all can do whatever you need to do father robert balacera is here the digital jesuit great to have you jesus his app is jesuitpilgrimage.app which i didn't know see i asked you about some other projects you said well we don't take risk we don't take credit in the church for that because it's a big team

But you do take credit for this, and I didn't realize it because you did it yourself. Yeah, I got bored, made something. And I had to register a name for the app when I bought the license to develop from Apple. Is it on iOS? It's on iOS. It's on Android. And soon it will be coming to the Palm OS. Which means I can put it on my LG TV. That's good. Also, Nicholas DeLeon, who is the senior technology reporter, electronics reporter.

for the Consumer Reports geez you think the senior electronics reporter for Consumer Reports would go to the Consumer Electronics Show but no Nicholas is too senior for that that's how you know somebody's senior when they can go yeah not this year well it's fun I like CES I I've been to many of them I always like party it's a fun show it is very you know depending upon your role it's like a ton of work it's not just like a fun

you're going it's much more fun when you're not reporting when you're just going I would imagine so yeah I've done that actually the one thing I did wish I had gone to see I guess the Delta used the sphere for its keynote and they used it to good effect that big giant sphere inside has a is a giant projector and they sounded like it looked like and you know what they announced

that Delta was no longer partnering with Lyft and they were now partnering with Uber that was their announcement they bought they they rented the sphere for a day put up tons of decorations invited the press and I'm sure offered them poo-poos and that's it no it was worth it to go in the sphere this is also thing creators got very excited because they also announced they were going to start putting some creator content in their uh seat back Entertainment

yeah that was a waste but the sphere was cool the sphere was very did you get to go did you get to see it of course yeah I'm so jealous that I wish I'd seen yeah I bet Cory Doctorow also here his new book is coming out February 18th picks and shovels now it could be two things it could be about infrastructure or it could be about uh Levi's

It's about grifters. Why am I not on the camera? What has happened to my camera? The AI decided the book was more interesting. I hate to tell you, Corey. It's about grifters. So it's Martin Hench, my forensic accountant. It's his first adventure in Silicon Valley. Love it. In the early 80s, he drops out of a CS program at MIT because he's too busy programming computers to go to class. Ends up becoming a CPA, follows his roommate out to San Francisco looking for golds.

And his first job is working for a weird PC company. And this was the golden era of weird PCs. Oh, yeah. Making a weird PC. Halt and catch fire era, right? Yeah, the halt and catch fire. Exactly that era. And the weird PC company he works for is called Fidelity Computing. And it sounds like a joke. It's run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest, and an Orthodox rabbi. But the joke is that it's a faith-selling multi-level marketing scam. And they are preying on their parishioners.

And he very quickly realizes he's working for the bad guys when they hire him to destroy a rival firm that was founded by three people who've left the firm. One is a nun who's fallen in with liberation theology Marxists in Central America. One is an Orthodox woman who's been kicked out of her family because she's gay. And one is a...

A Mormon woman who's left the church over its opposition to the opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. And so he he joins with them and they get into a trade war with this with this weird PC company, which very quickly becomes a shooting war because it turns out that these guys aren't just scammers. They're mobbed up.

And so it's a high-tension, high-stakes mafia thriller. Are there any chase scenes? So it's a documentary. There's nothing you mentioned that I haven't seen in the church. So Jello Biafra is in it. This is the era when he's running for mayor. The Dead Kennedys. Yeah, yeah. They're doing Unix shell programming on $80,000 workstations. This is awesome.

hands soldering their own floppy drives and doing all kinds of fun things. And it's, it's a real, it's like a version of the startup narrative that's, that's built around the, the busting the grift instead of like faking it till you make it. Love,

Love that. Let's bust the grift. Stephen Levy said nice things about it. Stephen Fry wrote a long... He sent me a page of love notes to the book. It's had great early notes. All these computer historians, Claire Evans, who wrote Broadband, and Stephen Levy, as I said, John Markoff. Were you around in that era? I was a PC kid.

Yeah. So you were a kid, but you were into it. I was a modem using PC. My dad was a computer science teacher. So we had terminals in the house in the 70s and then an Apple two plus in 79. And I would say that like I didn't have lowercase letters for four years because we could either use a modem or a 80 column card.

And there was no way I was taking my modem out of my computer. So I was just, I had 40 columns of all capital letters that I could dial up BBSs. Wow. That's great. And I was running those BBSs. Yeah, we can hang. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good memories.

I can't wait to read it. I tried to buy it and they said, no, February 18th, but there is a Kickstarter. You go to the Kickstarter and that's... martinhench.com. I will redirect you to it. Oh, good. martinhench.com. And as with all my books, I've done my own audio book for this. So because Audible won't carry any of my books because they're DRM free, I have to make my own audio books.

and sell them myself. And so the way that I recoup the substantial cost of hiring Will Wheaton and getting a professional studio and a great editor is by pre-selling a whole ton of them on the Kickstarter, as well as hardcovers and eBooks and so on. And if there's a tech scam that you really like from the last 40 years and you're feeling very spendy, you can commission a short story

about Martin Hentz busting that scam. Oh, that's brilliant. It's not cheap, but it's cool. This is Corey's version of Cameo. He won't do a video for you, but he will write a short story for you. What's the link again? I'm going to get that right now. MartinHentz.com.com. P-N-C-H.

I'm scrolling down because I want this. Let Corey write a book for you. I just got to tell you, Leo, it's $10,000. Okay. But, you know, I wouldn't mind a short story written by Corey. There it is. Commission of Marty...

I had a couple of these from a Kickstarter I did for a little brother novel, and I wrote those. They came out this year. They came out really well. Oh, nice. And I'm one story away from having enough little brother stories to do a short story collection. I'm probably going to do that next year. Very cool. Some really nice, as you said, Stephen Levy, Stephen Fry, John Scalzi all love the book. This is a must.

martinhench.com especially if i mean if you listen to the show i'm sure you're a fan of that era if you didn't live it at least you know of it you had me at gun toting nun yeah that's that does it for me i'm in

It's your fantasy, isn't it? martinh.com All right. Now, I've tried to go to a commercial now for half an hour. I keep talking to you guys because you're interesting. Darn it. Darn you. But we will be back with more and the interesting stuff will continue. I promise. Our show today brought to you by

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Get started for free and get six free months of the team plan. coda.io/twit. Thank you, Coda, for your support of This Week in Tech. And you support us when you go to that address so they know you saw it here, coda.io/twit. We are actually seeing a little bit of the B-roll from CES that Father Robert was

you're gonna edit up uh your your thoughts and your comments and give us a little mini tour oh yeah I'm doing a couple of different versions I want to do like ces in 60 seconds and then do a longer version yeah that's probably all I could tolerate 60 yeah 60 seconds pretty much gives you everything you need to know about my feet hurt just looking at that video it well I I okay 200 136 steps how

How many miles is that? Too many. Especially since I'm carrying around the equivalent of a Tesla on my torso. And why do you do this? Is just for fun? Penance. Mostly penance. Penance. No, I mean, look, CES. Six Calvaries and a cover and two CESs, right? That's it. I have been going to CES for decades. Same thing with DEF CON. And so, yes, right now I think it's horrible and it's terrible and I never want to go back to CES because I got nothing out of it this year.

give me six months and I'll feel different because every once in a while something wonderful happens at CES something something incredible something fantastic something very cool uh just I haven't seen it the last two years you're basically explaining why people have a second child every once in a while every once in a while

notice Corey has one just one yeah that's that is fair that is fair I had two and uh the second by the way is opening his restaurant in New York City in a couple days and I invite you all to go to Salt Hanks on bleaker Street uh on the uh in the West Village it's in the former slutty vegan slot right next to John's pizza when does it open

Well, you know, with restaurant openings, but he's hoping to open in the spring, early summer. They're going to do a soft open, right? A soft open first. You will hear a lot about it on our shows because I will be all excited and I'll be going out to New York and we might even do a show for you.

February 26th, we're doing a book event at the Strand with John Hodgman, but it sounds like it won't be open. Oh, how fun. Yeah, it's going to be great. I've got great tour interlocutors. Ken Liu, Charlie Jane Anders, Will Wheaton, Dan Savage, John Hodgman, Peter Sagal. It's going to be really fun. That's fun. Is it Sagal or Sagal? Sagal. From Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Yeah, I thought it was Sagal. No, Sagal. It's Sagal? Okay. Yeah, I know who he is. I love him. Yeah.

um by the way we were speaking of Defcon oh uh and uh Corey sent me this uh toot from Jeremiah Kimmelman at journa.host thinking of Aaron Schwartz today and I'm stuck on this photo this is a photo we've showed before this is a a class of

uh people at uh Y Combinator about I don't know was this 15 years ago something like that you see a young Sam Altman who still looks the same age by the way standing right next to a very young Aaron Schwartz yeah America's uh what do they call him boy he's yeah the internet's own boy wonderful Brian nappenberg documentary yeah yeah uh and and and I think the point uh Jeremiah's making is actually really interesting he says

He and the guy next to him, OpenAI's Sam Altman, each scraped thousands of documents. Remember, Aaron Schwartz got in trouble with the Computer Fraud Act for downloading documents

uh uh papers we paid for scientific papers that the charge was that he was allowed to download them but he wasn't allowed to write a script to do it and on that basis they charged him with 13 felonies and threatened him with 35 years in prison yeah and he took his life as a result uh so jeremiah says thinking of uh aaron schwartz day stuck on this photo he and open ai ceo sam altman each scraped thousands of documents one did it to make knowledge free for all

While the other did it to make money through probabilistic plagiarism, the USDOJ only came after one of them. The other is feted by tech bros and executives. Thank you so much, Aaron, for RSS, for Markdown, for Creative Commons, and more. I'm sorry our society failed you. That is...

That is very poignant and very true. Yeah. Yesterday was the anniversary of Aaron's death. It was, it was a rough time. I will say that no one, Aaron never told anyone why he downloaded those documents to my knowledge. He might've been planning to make them available, but he had previously done something else where he'd scraped the whole purpose of law review articles and then compared the, the, the,

kind of publications that academic lawyers did before and after their departments got giant donations from oil companies to see whether they started arguing that oil companies shouldn't have liability for climate change and unsurprisingly they did and so it's not it's not beyond the you

the possibility that Aaron was scraping all of those JSTOR articles to do some kind of big textual analysis. He might not have intended to republish them. If he had, I would have supported him, but we don't even know why. We don't even know why. He was at MIT, right? He was at Harvard. He had an account. He was at MIT, and he was allowed to be there. He was allowed to use their Wi-Fi, and when he was on their Wi-Fi, he was allowed to access JSTOR. All of those were things that he was permitted to do.

But rather than click the links one at a time when he accessed JSTOR, he wrote a little script that refers to it. As one does. And that was a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a law that Ronald Reagan passed in a panic after watching War Games in 1986. Oh, my God. Because the computer said, we can't do anything about this stuff.

because there's not enough laws for it. You need to make a law. And so Reagan signed, well, he whipped his Congress to pass the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and then he signed it.

in 1986. It's a ridiculously broad law. It's been narrowed recently through a Supreme Court case called Van Buren, but it's still way too broad. And it basically says you can't exceed your authorization on a computer. And so what the prosecution argued here was that Aaron was authorized to access every file that he accessed, but he wasn't authorized to access them with a script. And so he exceeded his authorization.

They just tried to use that in Georgia, was it three years ago? Because somebody, they said, oh, somebody breached our security and they got addresses for all of our state employees because they hit F11. Because it was included in all the comments of the HTML page. And they were saying, oh, well, that's... And then it was struck down. So...

Obviously, something has changed, but I did not know the backstory about why Ronald Reagan did that. That's crazy. The CPA was absurdly broad. So we had a client who was using the iPad version of the AT&T billing app.

And he looked at the URL it was loading and it just ended in a serial number. And he was like, is that a globally unique number? Is that a serial number? So he added one to it and he was looking at someone else's billing data. And he realized that he could enumerate several million AT&T clients, billing data, their personal home addresses, financial data, and so on. And he published that AT&T had this leak and he was actually criminally convicted and went to prison. And we ran his appeal and,

Because we did not want that precedent being set. Our own Randall Schwartz, who for a long time hosted Floss Weekly, was convicted under the CFAA for three felony counts and five years probation. He did get the felonies expunged, thank goodness. But still.

And he never did. It was the same. It was very similar. He said he was working at Intel, and he said, trying to help Intel by revealing a problem in their security. They didn't like it too much. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, there's a broad sense among vendors that bad news about their company should be theirs to time and release. And that if they don't think this bad news should be in the public eye, then no one should be able to say it. I mean, there might be circumstances in which certain bad news might not be something that you'd want to publish right away. I'm thinking of things like Heartbleed, where maybe you want to wait for a patch to be pushed.

But vendors whose stock prices go down when the bad news is published are not the people who should be the custodians of the decision about when bad news can be published. They are not neutral arbiters of that question. And they routinely and continuously make bad choices. Well, I thought that that had been somewhat fixed by laws requiring them to reveal breaches. Don't they have to at this point? That's breaches. That's not vulns. Ah, okay.

Yeah, you can hide the vulnerabilities. So if you've got a continuous glucose monitor and you've hooked it up to your insulin pump to make a closed loop artificial pancreas, and there's a volume that allows you to wirelessly dump all the insulin into your bloodstream all at once, as there have been many of for Medtronic's pumps, you might want to know about that, right? Because someone can kill you where you stand.

with like a little Wi-Fi device and that might be something that you enters into your consideration before you buy that device or use it or wear it in public or whatever. And the idea that the firm gets to decide who, when you get to know that is I think very bad.

Well, that brings us to this story. Train hackers! You gave us the New Mag DRM disclosure. What's that all about? So this is this gang of hackers in Poland called Dragon Sector. That's the name of their capture the flag team. And they got a call from a state train operator saying, we bought these trains from Nowak. It's a Polish word. So the W is a V, pronounced as a V. Nowak.

It's been new VOG. And we put out the maintenance contract to tender and VOG was not the best bidder. So we have someone else. But every time we take it in for service or bring it to the depot or just park it, it's the trains brick themselves and we can't unbrick them. We think something weird is happening. So they went and they looked at the firmware and it had been booby trapped.

Nuvog had logic bombed its own trains. So if the train entered a geo-fenced area that included a third-party service depot, or if it was stationary for a certain amount of time, or if there was a third-party component that was installed in the loco, then the train would brick itself.

In other words, they wanted to prevent somebody from taking it to a third-party repair facility. That's right. They wanted to prevent their customers from using these third-party repair depots that had won the competitive tender for maintenance service on these trains.

Uh, and so they revealed all kinds of crazy things, you know, so they went into this, it turns out that there was like a way to override it where you would go into the toilet, uh, in one cabin and then like lock and unlock the door twice and then press the emergency call. And the train would be down, down, left, right, left, right. Yeah. Okay. They found out that the, um, that there was a guy, uh,

There's another state-owned train company that every time they took their train to this one station just on the track,

it would freeze, it would brick itself. Like it would literally stop on the track filled with passengers and just stop dead. Right. And when they decompiled the software, they saw that the geolocation rectangle for a nearby service depot had been sloppily drawn and included a little section of track. And so that track was like booby trapped.

It turned out that this third-party train company had never revealed this because what they ended up doing was removing the GPSs from their trains. Hey, that works. We fixed it. They presented this at CCC, which is the Chaos Communications Congress, which is held in Germany every year. And it's the most hardcore of all the information sectors.

Yeah, I think somebody in our chat, I think Galia was there. Yeah. Yeah, a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. The thing that makes it so hardcore is it's held between Christmas and New Year's. Yeah, that's hardcore. If you're ever willing to talk your family into saying, hey, instead of going to see your family at Christmas or going skiing or whatever, how about we go to this hacker conference in Hamburg?

Sure. And Hamburg is so lovely that time of year, I must say. So they presented in 2023, which was like the end of the year. And then they got sued repeatedly by this company. And there have been multiple parliamentary inquiries and so on. And one of the causes of action here is that the law in America that bans reverse engineering, Section 12.1 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the DRM law,

that says that removing DRM, trafficking the device to remove DRM is a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. The US Trade Representative went to Europe in 2001 and got them to transpose that into the European Copyright Directive. Article 6 of the Copyright Directive says the same thing. And of course, Poland is part of the European Union. And Poland has been like a source of amazing hackers doing incredible things for many years. During lockdown,

Medtronic, the company with the dodgy insulin pumps, they also make the world's most widely used workhorse ventilator. And they use parts pairing for all the major components in the ventilator. So if you take a dead ventilator with a live screen and put that into a live ventilator with a dead screen, because it's not serialized to the central computer,

unless you're a technician, an authorized Medtronic technician who types in an unlock code, it won't recognize the screen. It's the same thing John Deere tractors do. It's the same thing cars do. It's called parts pairing or VIN locking. And this Polish hacker got really pissed off because there were hospital med techs all across the world who are like, I'm trying to keep my ventilators running during the pandemic.

Medtronic can't even send a technician to type in unlock code. There's no planes flying. And so this Polish hacker who used to work for Medtronic made like a Raspberry Pi or EEPROM based authorization gadget

and made a bunch of them and put them in whatever housings he could find during lockdown and started mailing them to hospitals. And so hospitals were opening the mail and there was like a guitar pedal with a USB port epoxy to it that would unlock your ventilator after you fixed it or like a clock radio or a bedside lamp. And no one knows who this guy was because

because he was or woman or non-binary person they were totally anonymous because article six of the copyright directive yeah create criminal liability yeah for them for doing this

And, you know, these are the, these are the hospital's own ventilators. They don't lease them from Medtronic or whatever. They belong to them. You know, people who say, if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. They really misunderstand what causes companies to abuse you. It's not paying for the product that makes them treat you well. It's fearing that, you know, you can retaliate against them by getting a regulator involved or switching vendors or whatever. If they're not afraid of you, they will treat you like the product all day long.

father robert has a good coda for this he says shall we hack a train so they revealed this uh hack uh and gotten a lot of trouble with nuvog yeah nuvog weaponized this uh dmca provision

And they, so this is the talk at the. Yeah. Great talk. One of the things they reveal in the, in the talk is that, you know, the majority of customers for trains in Poland are publicly owned firms and

And the publicly owned firms have strict procurement rules, statutory procurement rules. And when they put out a tender for new trains, Nuvog often is the cheapest option and they are legally required to buy the train with the cheapest option. And so Nuvog is still selling tons of trains in Poland, even though they're doing this nonsense. Yeah. And they deny that they know anything about the locks, even though they say three, they say,

Train operators revealed they paid NUVOC more than 20,000 euros for unlocking a single train, which they were able to do in 10 minutes.

Yeah. They probably went to the bathroom and opened and closed the door twice. So what was happening is train operators called Nuvok and say, our train has stopped working. And they would say, ah, it sounds like you need your security resynchronized. And they would say, okay, what does that cost? And they said, 20,000 euros. And they said, okay, well, I guess we've got to pay you 20,000 euros because we need this train. And then they would just remote into the train and go like, make train go and collect 20,000 euros. Yeah.

- Right to repair, baby. - Yeah. - All right. Next, since your blood pressure probably isn't yet high enough, we're gonna talk about meta. Stay tuned. - Oh, good. - Nicholas De Leon here from Consumer Reports. Fighting the good fight. You, I know, are big on the right to repair movement as is Consumer Reports. And this is the kind of silly nonsense that goes on. Great to have you, Nicholas.

Cory Doctorow, of course, his new book, Picks and Shovels. Go to martyhench.com. Martin. I call him Marty for some reason. Martin Hench. No, he goes by Marty, but it's Martin Hench. I just wasn't going to register two domains, but martyhench.com. My friend Marty, the CPA, forensic accountant, his new book, martyhench.com to get on the Kickstarter so you can read it the day it comes out. And of course, the digital Jesuit father, Robert Balassaire.

great to have you you're going to be another month in uh in nevada and then and then back correct so the agreement that i've made with my big boss is i can come back for roughly three and a half months a year so i can take care of my parents give my sister a break my mom a break etc yeah it's nice to know the vatican has uh families yeah we're like we're like a vin diesel movie

Vin Diesel was at the Golden Globes last week and it said among his credits that he was in the Guardians of the Galaxy and I said to Lisa I said I don't remember him in Guardians of the Galaxy she said yeah he was Groot yeah yeah he had one line

he's there he was there perfect perfect casting that's all I'm gonna say did he voice it over and over again or did they just record it one take one yeah that's no no no he did every single line and it's a his lines were I am Groot

We are Groot and I love you guys. So those are the only three lines he said the entire series. He had some trouble memorizing the script, I understand, but in fact, they put a little thing in his ear. Eventually he got off book though. Yeah, he got off book. Are you sure? Yeah.

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every time you connect to an unencrypted network and that's everywhere from a cafe to a hotel to do to not use the free airport wi-fi i've been told that many times especially during defcon in vegas but i'm you know i'm just saying they just found out that there was a um uh you know the fake cell towers what they call those shark sky rays stingrays at the democratic and national convention snarfing up imei's they don't know who did it

Every time you connect to an encrypted network, I was saying cafes, hotels, airports, your online data is floating out there. Steve Gibson on Tuesday, this shocked me.

I thought, well, at least we don't have to worry about our email passwords anymore. Randall Schwartz, my favorite hacker, I remember he used to go on these geek cruises with us. He went on a geek cruise and the first day he was going around with a piece of paper to people. He came up to me and said, is this your email password? I said, yeah. He said, you're sending it in the clear.

but that was a few years ago i thought every email server now by now was encrypted no turns out steve gibson was talking about there's there's tens of thousands of email servers still running in plain text that means not only is your email flying through the air unencrypted but your password unbelievable any and that's the worst thing of course if somebody hacks your email because that's where all of your i forgot my passwords go i mean this is

You're pwned by then. Any hacker on the same network can gain access to and steal your personal data. And it's not always HTTPS. It's not always TLS encrypted. And frankly, it doesn't take a lot of technical knowledge to hack somebody. We had Alex Stamos on the other day, formerly of the Stanford Internet Observatory. He teaches classes in hacking and he brings this Wi-Fi pineapple to class. And, you know, this cheap thing, it's 100 bucks or something.

And all you need is this Wi-Fi pineapple. You sit in an open access point at the airport or whatever, and you can see what people's Wi-Fi connections are. You can pretend to be their house. So your laptop, you're sitting here and your laptop says, oh, we're home, joins the fake Wi-Fi access point. Now every bit of your traffic's going through the pineapple. A smart 12-year-old can do it.

And there's a lot of money in this, of course. Hackers can make up to $1,000 or more selling your personal data on the web. In fact, in many cases, we know it's not even illegal.

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they're making the money somewhere you but seven less than seven bucks a month for the best expressvpn.com twit four extra months free when you buy a two-year package express vpn we thank him so much for supporting this week in tech so uh i have a friend who used to work at meta is still on a number of message boards of former meta employees and as soon as mark zuckerberg announced

that meta was going to stop doing fact checking and stop moderating at least in the u.s a variety of content the boards went crazy it turned out i did not know this but he informed me one of the reasons mark did this it wasn't the biden administration it was the employees at meta who said you can't let this stuff

you know this anti-lbgtq stuff you can't let this hate speech you can't let you know the stuff that happened in myanmar and the philippines you can't let this happen on meta we don't want to work for a company where that enables genocide so mark uh did two things in the short term he did fact checking and uh and uh moderating in the long term he fired them all

So there isn't apparently the same internal pressure anymore. And that combined with the fact that there are certain people in the new administration who hate Mark Zuckerberg. I think Donald Trump said, in fact, that he was going to throw him in jail. Now he likes him. He says, I have a warm spot in my heart. I like Mark Zuckerberg. We found out Zuck met with Trump right the day before.

announcing that in the US Meta will get rid of fact checkers replace them with Community notes actually I'm not I'm not sure I hate that idea I think Community notes is a is a but I'm sure you guys will have an opinion uh he's also he's also going to move this one kind of frosted me a little bit the firm's content moderation teams from Blue State California

where they're inevitably biased, to Texas, quote, where there is less concern about the bias of our teams. He admitted to the changes to the way Meta's, this is from The Guardian, Meta's filter content would mean we're going to catch less bad stuff. All right, so there is this story. Corey, first of all, let me ask you,

I personally think that content moderation at scale and fact-checking scales in the scale of meta is huge is very very difficult to do I'm not sure that I hate the idea of community notes I don't hate the idea of community notes either they're a perfectly good way a good way of of uh doing some kinds of content moderation um I think that you know that the the

I think that by the time you're arguing about whether or not this one guy who no one ever voted for, who bought all of his competitors and who used all kinds of anti-competitive conduct to drive his competitors out of the market, whether that one guy has the right idea or the wrong idea for how 4 billion people can talk to one another and consume the news, but you've, you're, you're too far down the stack, right? You're focusing on the wrong problem. Yeah. Yes. You know, it's not, so look, the, there, there,

The old content moderation policies were anything but great, right? People who survived genocides who uploaded video of the war crimes committed against them found that video being deleted under content moderation rules. People who'd experienced racial slurs and discussed the abuse they'd experienced had their content removed for containing racial slurs. And then there were the deliberate ones, the ones that were not just, you know, kind of weird edge cases, but like

people who supported Palestine independence or who opposed genocide had their content removed and so on. So there was all kinds of stuff where Facebook made very bad moderation calls. And, you know, there are lots of ways that Mark Zuckerberg could have announced that he was getting rid of this broken system. The most offensive

worst most terrifying way to do it would be to include a long list of incredibly offensive disgusting things you're allowed to say about trans and gay people and immigrants uh and say these are now all okay which is what he did he basically said yeah that was weird it was very weird right it was very very weird it's okay to say this now

It's okay to foment genocide against the Rohingya now or whatever. It's the most... It really... I don't know if you can call it saying the quiet part aloud. It's like standing at the top of a mountain with a giant PA stack. Try this, kids. Yeah.

Yeah, like getting the app that makes your phone go nap, nap, nap, and sending an alert to it that says the quiet part, right? It's like TikTok saying, it's okay to eat Tide Pods. Go ahead. Yeah, it's a very terrible and disheartening thing, but you know,

I think that the right answer to this, or the right way to think about this, is that given that Facebook has been so bad at moderation, that all of the moderation that we're mourning the passing of was at best fixing a few things around the edges on a platform that is just irretrievably toxic, is why are people on Facebook? And I think the reason people are on Facebook is because they love each other more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg.

And by making it hard to leave Facebook, by not having... You talked about the Anatevka problem on Twitter last time you were on. Right, yeah. We're all in Anatevka. Yeah, the people in Fiddler on the Roof love each other more than they hate being beaten up by Cossacks. The only thing worse than living in Anatevka is being forced to leave Anatevka.

And so if there was interoperability, if there were APIs that let you leave Facebook, go to a rival platform, exchange messages with the communities that you left behind and so on, people would leave.

Right. And they would go somewhere else. This is what Facebook did. I'm sure I said this the last time I was on, you know, when Facebook started, they had a billionaire problem named Rupert Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch owned a service called MySpace. MySpace was the most successful social media network in history. Everyone who wanted a social media account had one already on MySpace. And they didn't say, hey, leave Facebook, go to MySpace, never talk to your friends again until they get wise and come with you to MySpace, to Facebook. They gave you a bot.

And you gave that bot your login and password. And it went to MySpace and logged in as you, scraped all the messages waiting for you, brought them back. I don't remember that. Wow. Wow. And so like this, you know, they gave people a way to ease their passage.

So you didn't all have to agree at once that you were all going over to MySpace, you know, or to Facebook. To continue the Anatevka metaphor, my grandmother was a Soviet refugee. She was a child soldier in the siege of Leningrad, got evacuated to Siberia eventually, got knocked up by my grandfather, deserted from the Red Army, went to Azerbaijan, and then decided not to go back to Leningrad. They destroyed their papers so they could become displaced people, made their way to Frankfurt, and got in a displaced person's boat to Canada.

And the thing is, no one else in our family did that. All the ones who stayed behind in Leningrad stayed behind. And the reason they did that is because of each other, right? All the old people had young people they were looking after. All the young people had old people they were looking after. They couldn't afford to leave. And so here we are a couple of generations later.

I've got a great life. My father had a great life growing up. He was born in Azerbaijan, but he grew up in Canada and had a great life. My family in Leningrad, they're screwed in St. Petersburg. They're all worried about being pressed. Your grandmother made a huge sacrifice.

Yeah. Her life so that you could have a good life. And she lost touch with everyone in her life. So my father talks about a decade after they landed in Canada, the phone ringing. And it was my grandmother's mother who she didn't know was alive or dead.

Right. So why didn't people leave? Because they knew it was a one way journey, because they knew they would lose touch with everyone, because they would lose everything. If you make it possible for people to go to one place and then another, you know, I'm a Canadian. I lived in Central America and then I lived in San Francisco and then I lived in London and then Los Angeles and then in San Francisco and then in London and then Los Angeles again. I might leave, you know, again next year when my kid goes away to university. I've got a Canadian passport, a British passport, an American.

- Where would you go? - Well, I'm working on a Polish passport so I could go to the EU. 'Cause my grandfather was a Polish citizen. - I hear there's a train company there that's looking for inspectors. - Yeah, exactly. So I wouldn't necessarily go to Poland, but there's 27 countries that it has me. - Right, all you need is a Schengen passport and you're anywhere. - So making it easy for people to leave means that they don't have to put up with the bullshit of the people running the place.

And the fact is that Mark Zuckerberg has made it as hard as possible for people to leave. So, you know, Mark Zuckerberg has these incredible moderation, free speech, absolutist policies where you can talk, you know, foment genocide. But if you mention Pixel Fed, which is an Instagram competitor that runs on the Fediverse, if you mention Pixel Fed on Instagram, you'll have your account suspended. If you tell people how to leave Instagram, they'll suspend your account. If you tell people to murder their neighbors, they're like, fine. No problem.

yeah that's important too this isn't this isn't just facebook this is all of meta so it's threads it's instagram it's facebook um yeah and no so x you're still on x for the same reason you don't want to leave your friends x uses community notes and they seem to work okay some people we were talking about this on wednesday on this week in google and uh paris or jeff said well what about brigading

community notes. What about, you know, moderating? That's possible too, right? It's possible. And moderators make mistakes. I mean, you don't, what you want is defense in depth. What you want is community, more than one set of community notes, potentially, you know, minority report. What you want is like,

you know, you think about all the stuff Slashdot did for moderation where you have an independent panel that's evaluating moderation and so on. So like your chance of getting to be a moderator goes down if your own moderation calls are downranked by meta moderators and whatever. It's a lot of different ways to design this. And some people, that's the game they want to play. They're not on Twitter to talk about Twitter. They're on Twitter to like

Think about how Twitter works and same with slash dot back in the day. And they'll happily do this all day long. Let them, you know, this is like for a certain kind of person, this is model you at. The truth is Mark's not, this is lip service. Mark doesn't care about that, whether it works or not. Right? Yeah, no, he doesn't care at all. Mark wants to make a lot of money and have no accountability. The main thing is to avoid accountability, to be able to say something that makes people go, Oh, okay, good.

There's a thing called Wilhoite's Law, that conservatism consists of one principle, that there are in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, and out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. Mark Zuckerberg wants to live in an environment where all of his rights are protected, but he does not have to respect anyone else's rights. And everything else is for the. Roots for me, but thee, but not for me. Yeah. Yeah.

I love, by the way, that law. Yeah. Whose law is it? Will Hoyt? Frank Will Hoyt. And not the Frank Will Hoyt everyone knows, the other Frank Will Hoyt. The guy who everyone knows in his Wikipedia entry has an entry for Will Hoyt's law to say, this is not the guy who came up with Will Hoyt's law. One L in Will Hoyt. It'll probably come up. That's it. Francis Will Hoyt. Yeah, that's not the guy.

This is not the Wilhoyt, but this is the one that has the entry that says, this quotation is often incorrectly attributed to Francis Wilhaw. It was actually a 2018 blog response by a 59-year-old Ohio composer, Frank Wilhoyt. They're all called Frank Wilhoyt. I'm sorry to cut. It's a very, I like the, I very much like the law. So you're still on Meta, aren't you, Father? Yeah.

I am on no matter platforms whatsoever. I'm not on Facebook. I'm not on WhatsApp. I'm not on Instagram. I haven't been for about 14 years now. Yeah. I call that being a Zucker vegan. I was big into it and my job required it for a while, but once I was able to separate, I said, no, I don't want the same one. Yeah, that's kind of my attitude is I don't want threads Instagram or Facebook anymore.

but I have to kind of I kind of have to be there at least let things to see like for instance how community notes are going so I have I maintain journalistic accounts there but I I I don't enjoy it uh I did get rid of my Facebook account for a long time but I realized I was missing the the story sometimes how about you uh

uh are you uh Nicholas are you a Facebook user or just like me a looky Lou uh the actual blue app Facebook I don't use very often actually uh WhatsApp I use every day I uh talk to some friends back in New York and all my family crucially is all on WhatsApp that's the problem isn't it yeah

Well, I mean, it's funny. Like if you were to ask them about any of this like content moderation stuff, they would have no idea what you're talking about. Even if you explain it to them, they would be like, I don't want to hear this. I get the same thing when I say, oh, look how awful Twitter's becoming. People say, what are you talking about? Yeah. No, I'm still on X2. I feel like one of the few remaining, you know, quote unquote journalists on X. But a lot of the sports guys, you know.

tribute romano yeah like a lot of the kind of mainstream i'm on if i'm on the x for any like actual reason other than like sending silly seinfeld gifts or whatever it's like it's for sports report and they're all still there and none of them are right i don't see any of this sort of like discussion and honestly when the fires were going on uh in la the most up-to-date fastest info was coming to me on x and by the way faster than the news networks for sure

So there are reasons. It's still there. Maybe we can save it. I don't know. Should we try to save Meta? No. What happened, by the way? I thought Meta was all about the Metaverse. What happened to that? You're not in the Metaverse? Leo, don't tell me you still have legs. I still have legs. Jesus Christ, Leo. Actually, I wish to God that the Metaverse lived up to its promise because once we close the studio...

i am living in a virtual world i'm all alone in my little attic and uh all of you guys are out there in the in the in the verse whatever verse the zoom verse and um i would like some friends i feel like i did a metaverse story for cr uh right around that time

basically zero people read it. Like it was just not a, it's not, it's even like a nerdy, even like a nerdy topic. It's like way down the list of like things people were into. That's actually something I grapple with all the time. All the metaverse users read it.

zero perhaps actually yeah I I have abandoned the metaverse for um for all of my relatives over the age of 70 who now use that almost exclusively so they they're in there they're they've got their their WhatsApp they've got their posts not the VR stuff just not the VR stuff they wouldn't know what to do with the VR stuff honestly and just like most of us wouldn't know what to do with the VR stuff right it's look

moving over to blue sky slowly it's made me realize I spent the better part of two decades building up social media presences for companies that I now despise and I really don't want to do that again I really don't want to do that yeah you were an unwitting pawn you thought you were putting content out but in fact it was building them their businesses

So I want to be on blue sky really badly. It sounds great, but I feel like they have built a nightclub. They've invited 17 million people to it and they haven't installed any fire exits. Right. The fact that they say that they're going to have Federation someday, but they have not prioritized it in their development timeline. And they have made it so that if the CEO gets kicked out by their VCs from blockchain capital,

and replaced with someone who starts doing the same stuff that Elon Musk did, then there's no way for you to go. You have exactly the same Anatevka problem. And what's really worrying about this is if they actually did have federation, that they keep saying they were going to have. They've said this since day one that they were going to have this. They've never delivered it. If they had real federation, then if the VC came along and said, all right, you've got to make everything worse. You've got to un-shitify it.

you could imagine the CEO saying, well, you know that if we do that, everyone's going to leave. Right. Right. Right. One of the reasons that VCs ask you to do this is they don't think you'll lose users as a result. Yeah. You know, and everybody loves stickiness. Yeah. I mean, ironically threads is more federated as blue sky. Ironically, there's been a bit of stuff on Mastodon about what are we going to do about threads? Yeah.

Because there's no moderation. I'm not collating with threads existing and being federated with Mastodon. I know that's not a popular opinion in the Fediverse, but I feel like it makes it easier for people to leave Mastodon

Facebook and go to mastodon exactly providing a path out I do not block uh threads on my social uh because it's a way to follow people who are not elsewhere yeah I don't have a problem with that uh it's a lot of but if you know I moderate pretty actively and if somebody if some some an account is appalling I just block it and you can easily block an account rather than block the server so

Do you guys get any sense that people are tiring of social media? Yes, I am. It's like, oh, I got to leave X now. I got to join Blue Sky. Like, I don't want to join another thing to have to leave in two years. Like, I've been doing this for 20 years of like popping between. It's like, I don't know. I'd rather like go on a walk with my dog or whatever. I agree with you, but I want a social connection.

And unfortunately, I don't have one locally so much. I'm building as fast as I can. But most of the people I know, we are united not by geography, but by interests.

Yes. And that's where I meet those people. So I remember something like that. When I was a teenager, I was huge into pro wrestling. And so some of my first kind of like online social interactions were like pro wrestling dedicated message board. So it's like, I don't know these people. These people were all across all over the world, actually. But we had a thing in common. We liked watching. And so that was like how you formed friendships.

And now that's way easier. You know, you don't have to jump on Usenet to do that anymore. Now you can open up threads or whatever the Instagram, whatever the case may be. So there's clearly like people want to do something like this where you hang out with folks who are into what you're into. But it just feels like the experience is just so like bad a lot of the times. That's like, you know, I can't crack this nut.

I'm just going to, I'm going to reopen my old BBS and that's the only social I'm going to do. People can dial in and let's go. Yeah. And you know, two lines though, because otherwise it gets too busy. It used to be that, you know, in the days of BBSs and magazines and whatever is that, although we didn't have social media, if you're interested in wrestling, you can get a wrestling magazine and then maybe find a wrestling fanzine in the back pages and so on. Exactly. And, and if you were,

someone who wanted to write about wrestling, there was someone who might pay you to do it, or at least an audience for it. And now all of that stuff is on social media. So I think about books. I write for one of the big five publishers. I'm a Macmillan author. And there aren't hundreds or dozens of newspapers and magazines that review science fiction novels anymore. There used to be.

There's one science fiction trade magazine holding on by the skin of its teeth, Locus magazine. I write for them. I've written a column for them for 15 years. And they're just, just eking by. And so the thing is, if we get rid of social media, we're,

It's not that we won't get rid of something terrible. There's lots of terrible that we'll get rid of. But how will anyone sell a book? And how will anyone write about a subject of interest? What's the transitional phase between social media and everything else? And if we get rid of AM radio, how are you going to sell a record?

Well, the problem is this is a roach motel. Communities check in, but they don't check out. Right. So if you can move the communities off social media, if you can move them to more. What would it be though, Corey? What would it look like? Would it look like Usenet? Would it look like Slack? What would a successful social media, a safe, successful social media network look like? I think it would be a protocol that would federate Mastodon, Blue Sky, and whatever comes next. All of them. And you could just follow people wherever they were.

And you'd be on Blue Sky because you like the Blue Sky vibe, but there'd be 100 people in your...

No, Posse is different. I do Posse, post on site, share everywhere or syndicate everywhere where I have a canonical link. That's my own website. Pluralistic.net, right? Yeah. I copy and paste into Tumblr and Mastodon and Twitter. That's not good. I use microblog. I use Manton Reese's microblog and it does post to Mastodon. This is my Posse. Mastodon threads.

it at linkedin i think they just added so he's slowly building something that will post everywhere does it look good because my experience has been that every time i do this it doesn't look good it doesn't feel like a native post oh yes it does oh it does it does a nice job of it yeah yeah he's really thoughtful uh you know he's part of the automated tools he's part of the decentralized web movement you know and uh

he's done I think it's been around almost 10 years now micro.blog and I think he's got the right idea and he's quite accomplished at it I think anyway my organization has been doing really good social media for a very long time it's a way that you can get information you can get out you can touch grass yeah if you just build a building in every community

it was really good except for that one period where they got very angry about some books well they had the same problem they you know is they didn't you could check in but they didn't really want you to check out that's right oh no we have people checking out all the time now you know you're being facetious but actually that's what we're trying to duplicate yeah is that is the community the kinds of communities we had

in religious communities uh or communities of any kind we don't really have communities anymore Kiwanis lions yeah yeah yeah I mean there is a there is a Lions Club and a my the Moose Lodge in town yeah was was kind of thinly populated by people who were super annuated and I had a bunch of friends in their 40s who said you know

if we all got together we could actually take it over yeah and they have a nice little Clubhouse and they did

yeah they've got they've got prime real estate they've got cheap beer yeah yeah there's the only bad thing was in order to become uh official you had to go to the big moose convention oh really yeah and there's an oath you have to give uh pledging fealty to god or something that they were a lot of these are religious a bunch of them also used to have really racist policies yeah and so they i think there was some discomfort with the oath

But they got over the discomfort because the lodge was pretty nice. Well, you know, the advantage in the era of COVID is you can go to the swearing in ceremony wearing a mask and not recite the oath. They'll never know. Yeah. And they'll never know. It's like eyes wide shut. Ask me about my U.S. citizenship ceremony. You know all the presidents. Come on. Yeah.

You know, most US citizens couldn't pass the citizenship test. No, no US citizens could, but that's because we don't need to. We were born here. I got into an argument with my examiner because she was like, what is the economic system of America? And I said, I know the answer is...

is capitalism, but it's technically a mixed market economy because the single largest employer is the federal government. It's the Pentagon. And you cannot tell me that a country whose largest employer is the federal government is a capitalist economy. Is it formerly a mixed market economy? Just like, just say it's capitalism. Yeah.

I have to check this box. I work for that group. I saw the name Cory Doctorow on the list. I was going to have some problems. That's hysterical. Did you really say that? Yeah, we had a whole discussion. God bless you. I love it. It's a mixed market economy. Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. I think that counts. They should give you credit. Yeah. All right. Let's take a break.

We are doing a wild twit. Let me tell you, as always, Father Robert. I should have known. Corey, Father Robert, Nicholas. It was going to be crazy. It was just going to be. It's a good day after. Yeah. See, yes, it was going to be in the Computer Chaos Congress. Did they change the name to Chaos Communication Congress? It's the club is called the Chaos Computing Club. The conference is called the Chaos Communications Congress. It's very confusing. Yeah. Yeah.

i always just call it the chaos computer conference but okay by the way corey you know that you were evoked in the uh this year's defcon badge right yeah i saw that there was an identification i spoke at defcon this year i guess we missed each other but yeah

So how was he? There was an enshitification thing in the DEFCON badge? Yeah. So the badge this year was every other year is an electronic badge. And they built it off of a newly released RazzPi that drove a little screen. And there was a mini game. And in the mini game, Cory Doctorow is mentioned several times.

I love it. It was very flattering. That badge was also the source of a giant controversy, which I never thought. Yes, it was. Yes, yes. What? What? What? Tell me. I don't know. Whether the contributors got paid and whether they turned over their source code the way they were supposed to. And there was just a whole like... I could just tell you for sure that you are not mentioned in the GitHub badge. No. So the creator of the badge actually did a talk and was escorted off the stage from his talk because he...

It was some bad blood going on. Complicated. Yeah. No, it's good. I couldn't figure out who was in the right. I spent 10 minutes trying to figure it out, and I was like, nope. Yep. I've heard both sides, and they both said good. You ought to know that. That's important. Yeah. That damn Martin Luther guy. We'll never get over that.

I'm still trying to fix the door. It's got a big nail hole in it. Yeah, he was actually an anti-Semite. Yeah, it wasn't so great. I have access to all the works and all the letters. Yeah, when I found that out, I was kind of disappointed a little bit. Okay, it was a different time. It's a different time. I read the archives from Jesuits who were on mission in Asia,

and there are a couple there who if they were alive today you'd be looking at them going you are the most racist person i've ever met they had good intentions but crazy races well look what they did with the indian churches in the united states or the indian schools rather in the united states i mean it's tragic it's horrible it's horrific i hear he was good to his mother mrs luther loved a little boy that's for sure marty come here she used to nail his chores on the door

You and those theses, again with the theses, over and over. Stop touching your theses, you'll go blind. Okay, you win, Corey. Our show today brought to you by ThreatLocker. We've talked before about zero trust. It is such a brilliant, simple concept and the best way to harden your security.

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has decided that if they can't control it they don't want it and they are going after Wikipedia editors uh they told the people planning to donate to Heritage Foundation that's part of their work to combat any Semitism is not to combat any Semitism they're going to Target volunteer editors on Wikipedia the folks who've made Wikipedia one of the most six biggest successes of the internet

the heritage foundation which is of course a conservative think tank says that those editors are abusing their position by publishing content the group believes to be anti-semitic what it is is by the way heritage foundation created the project 2025 uh policy blueprint for the trump administration what it is is uh just like elon they want you to they don't want any independent media they want you to get your information from approved sources not this wikipedia thing

um do not fall for this uh Corey you have anything I see a link here popping up I dropped in a link to Molly White's commentary on this this is where I found out about Molly is a long time editor of wikipedia she started when she was a kid yeah she is just the greatest she of course created the web3 is going just great website

And her citation needed newsletter had this article, Elon Musk and the rights war on Wikipedia. Yeah, she's really she really nails that. I mean, obviously, we're talking about a real mismatch here where you have individuals who are volunteering in their spare time. So not proposing to unmask.

astroturfers who are paid contributors who are you know sneaking in and and and uh making edits in bad faith whatever these are people who are pseudonymous or sometimes even reveal their real names who are in their spare time trying to take one of the best things on the internet and in the history of the internet and keep it good and make it better and they're targeting them it's really quite uh disgusting i have a great bit of trivia for you about molly white

if you'd like. I would love it. She's been on our shows. We love her. So I had breakfast with her at South by last year or the year before, and we had a lovely chat. And she said at the end, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm so ambivalent about copyright and it's weird because I'm about to become the executor of my grandfather's literary estate. I said, Oh, that's interesting. Did he write a memoir? And she said, no, I'm Molly white. He's EB white. She's EB white. Yeah.

She's the elements of style lady. Your, your Oxford commas. I got the book right here. Not to mention the once in future King. Yeah. Which now do you have elements of style or Charlotte's web right here? I don't have Charlotte's web right here, but I do have elements of style. Very good. I love Charlotte's web. Yeah. Right. Giving tree. I,

And Father Robert, I suppose that the very definitive views that E.B. White had about whether Jesus takes an S after the apostrophe bears on your work every day. It's something I consider every morning. Let's see if I can remember this. You always have apostrophe S, even if it's the, you know, the Joneses. But, well, that's not a good example. But even if it ends with S, except for Jesus. Yes.

because ancient names you could have just an apostrophe. Is that right, Corey? Am I right? Am I remembering that? That is my recollection. You should ask me all of that. Wait a minute. Let me go get... She's E.B. White's granddaughter? Yeah. How amazing is that?

Well, and I think if E.B. White wants to copyright all this stuff to hell, I think go right ahead, E.B. Actually, it started entering the public domain this year. That's right. 1924 and 1929 for music, right? Yeah. Yeah. So the first E.B. White works entered the public domain, entered the public domain this year. That's awesome. So it won't be for very long. So she doesn't have to worry about it for too long. Yeah. He did write The Once and Future King, right? I think so. I think that's my favorite Arthurian legend book. It's wonderful. Yeah.

Of course, Charlotte's Web is probably his best known work. And every writer has a copy. Oh, no, that's T.H. White. T.H. White. You're right. You're right. I got the wrong white. Okay. Sorry. What else did he write besides Charlotte's Web, then? E.B. White. I'm working it up on the old Wikipedia. I'm sure Molly's weighed in on this. He wrote The Great Gatsby. Stuart Little. Stuart Little. Great Stuart Little. What a great...

yeah he's got a massive bibliography yeah yeah one of the great one of the greats uh oh geez and he you know his haircut looks just like molly's so i think and they kind of look alike when you look at them they do there's a there's a resemblance so she is a perfect example of why wikipedia works um

People really who are committed, and yes, they have a mechanism to handle bias, to handle cheating, you know, and I think it's a remarkable document.

It is on the moon now. It's not like there haven't been problems. It's not like there haven't been shills and it's not like there haven't been bad calls on Wikipedia. And I think there's room even for legitimate debate about kind of the standards for notability and all that. You know, you often hear from people is like, well, I know a thing is true about me and Wikipedia won't let me say it.

For a while, my article said I'd written for Hustler magazine and that was right. And those are all legitimate things that I think Wikipedia should strive to improve. And I hope they will. I do. And I don't think that doxing and terrorizing volunteer Wikipedia editors is going to help. She's talking about the tweets that came from Elon Musk on Christmas Eve. Stop donating to Wokapedia. Yeah.

what is wrong with him i think it's all the diet coke he's bored he has a lot of money a lot of diet did you see the picture of his bedside table it's like litter it's like littered with diet coke cans it's just a zempic is epic vials and diet coke oh elon oh um

I mean, Wikipedia is so transparent. That's the thing that makes it work. Well, you can see the edits. You can see when they were made. You can see who they were made by. Right. So I never stop at the document. When I'm looking at something that might be controversial, I will always look at what edits have been made in the last couple of months. And that gives me a really good indication of whether or not this is information that I have to fact check again and again and again. I mean, I don't know of any other source that lets me do that.

It always bugs me when I hear a school banning the use of Wikipedia for school papers. It shouldn't be your only source. I went to NYU for college and they were very... I remember the journalism program. If you even go to Wikipedia on your...

to your laptop you're in trouble i was like i guarantee you the same program is saying but chat gpt no problem i don't know what it is today this was a while ago was that when clay shirkey was running the j school or or uh this would have been 2005 six so i don't know who was in charge i think that was before i think he was still just itp then because i cannot imagine clay sanctioning that policy that would be oh yeah and i was like you know a huge nerd obviously i was like are you like okay you know you can't really fight your professors and that type of thing but it was very discouraging

Yeah, I believe it. Yeah. So one of the things they're spreading is the lie that when you donate to Wikipedia, you're not donating to the online encyclopedia, but instead the Wikimedia Foundation, which is some sort of left wing organization.

you know, something or other. I mean, the foundation does fund a bunch of stuff. You know, like if they identify areas that are systematically undercovered in the, in the corpus, they might, you know, try and figure out how to encourage more contribution. I don't think they pay contributors. I wouldn't swear to it, but I don't think they, they pay contributors, I think, but they do have a pretty active program as you'd hope they would.

of trying to figure out how to get more contributors to the under contributed areas and under, under resource languages, you know, outreach, that kind of thing. How do we get these experts to, to, to come and be a part of our project? You know? And of course people in power don't like Wikipedia or the Wikimedia foundation because they stand up to power in 2017, they denied Turkey's attempt to,

to force the site to alter information about the turkish government's support for terrorist organizations this is molly white writing um the foundation has likewise resisted threats from the u.s refusing to submit from legal threats from the fbi in 2010 after they demanded wikipedia stop using an image of the fbi seal i see what we all paid for by the way yeah public domain and in 2015 filing suit against the nsa

over its upstream mass surveillance program yeah the powers that be don't like that they're uppity this uppity Wikimedia Foundation I'm not allowed to make any edits to anything about the Vatican or the Saints or the Society of Jesus because all when I'm at my workplace I come up with a Vatican IP you come up from dot V yeah a dot VA uh so they block you they block me and that's fine I understand it I get it yeah I yeah now they aren't quite as effective in blocking like

in theory they they can't stop me from editing my own article but I never would yeah exactly you know and but you can and by the way you can always tell when somebody's doing that you know Leo Laporte is the good-looking podcaster who's been dominating the podcast airwaves since 20 2005.

And I think we can all agree that every publication, irrespective of how it's made, should strive to get better, and none of them are perfect. And Wikipedia is imperfect, but it's imperfect in ways that are different from the ways other media are imperfect. And it is complementary to them in many ways because it doesn't have the same blind spots. There may be some blind spots, but they're not the same ones. And so there are a lot of gaps that Wikipedia fills.

that other publications wouldn't i do think it's an unalloyed good which doesn't mean it's perfect and i don't think there's a single wikipedian who would say it was perfect right but you we need more sources of information not fewer yeah and we need more independent sources of information not fewer i mean it no anyway i think we're preaching to the choir here uh if you support this independent source of information i think one of the things that we do that's really contrary to the

general flow of uh online media is we don't do like link bait the closest i do to link bait here

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and just as handsome. Let me see if I can find your post. Look at you guys. Is that your friend Pete? What did you have? Did you have pizza?

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for doing that we'll be back with more of this week in tech and our amazing panel but first a word from our sponsor us cloud now i love these guys i had never i can be honest i had never heard of them and i got on a phone call with them and i said well what do you what do you do us cloud we said well we are the number one microsoft unified support replacement we do microsoft support i said oh that's cool and why would uh why would people use us cloud

Well, they gave me a bunch of reasons. We've been talking for a few months now about US Cloud. They are, besides being the global leader in third party Microsoft support for enterprises, they support 50 of the Fortune 500. But one of the things they told me is switching to US Cloud can save your business 30 to 50% over Microsoft Unified and Premier support. I said, well, that's great.

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Sam, the technical operations manager at Bead Gaming, he gave US Cloud five stars. He said, we found some things that had been running for three years. Same story, right? No one was checking. These VMs were, what, I don't know, 10 grand a month? Not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spent on Azure. Well, that kind of adds up.

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replace your Microsoft Premier services visit uscloud.com book a call today find out how much your team can save uscloud.com faster better Microsoft support for less hey here's something the cfpb wants to do which I think is great they want to protect your Robux

Yeah. Good. In a new proposal issued Friday, this is from Wired Magazine, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau seeks to regulate virtual currencies like my Simpsons donuts or your Roblox bucks. Leo, I have to ask you,

in your best estimation how many donuts did you buy three hundred dollars worth of donuts and I and I can't get them back the problem isn't so much idiots like me spending money on virtual stuff that I shouldn't be the problem is scammers and hackers yeah uh the the proposed rule from the cfpb would interpret terms in the electronic fund transfer act

which will protect you against things like ACHs and Zelle and stuff like that to include some virtual currencies supplied by gaming and crypto companies. It is not unusual that you will lose assets. Hackers will steal your assets as you're transferring them and so forth. In fact, Roblox can be converted into US dollars. So we're not just talking donuts here. This ain't just donuts. This is money, real money.

Another, another nice move from Rohit Chopra. Is he, so we don't know what's happening with this. I don't know. Someone probably knows it might be, he might have announced it and we're getting close to the wire here on January 20th. So there may be an announcement, but I have not seen it a week from tomorrow. I've been pretty busy. I've been, I I'm writing a documentary series for the CBC, the Canadian broadcaster. And I've just been heads down on that. What is that about? I,

about in shitification. It's called who killed the internet. You know, we're going back yet. It's not, I'm not dead yet, but we're going back and forth on the, on the structure and kind of what, where I think we're probably going to end up landing. I'm actually writing something about it for pluralistic today. Let's just point out that a lot of the decisions that we see in our history that are, um, you know, really, uh, disastrous in retrospect, like, um,

you know, section 12, one of the DMCA or whatever, that they were warned when these policies were being discussed, that it would come to this. And then it came to this and you can't really say like, well, who could have predicted why, why blame us because they're to blame. And so we're going to point out that these people are alive and,

They're around, they're here in our world. They're often very wealthy and respected. And they made these bad calls and never took any kind of heat for it. And we're going to put some heat on them. There's a couple of Canadian lawmakers who consulted on Canada's version of the DMCA. They got 6,500 comments saying that it was a terrible idea and 50 comments saying that it was a good idea. And the minister responsible guy called James Moore is now a very wealthy white shoe lawyer who

gave a speech where he said, we're going to throw away those 6,500 comments because they are the babyish views of radical extremists. Like Cory Doctorow. Yeah. So we should just take these people and hold them to account. When you make a decision in the teeth of expert advice, and then it's a disaster, someone should point that out in the future.

By the way, congratulations. I know and shitification was the official word of the year last year. Macquarie Dictionary has named it the word of the year 2024 as well. And the new scientist made and shit a scene. It's word of the year as well. Is that our era? Have we decided it's not the Anthropocene? It's the and shit a scene.

Can I ask Corey a question? It's not really something we talk about at CR really, but is there a single moment or single event that you could point to when the internet... Because now I feel like you log in, everyone hates the internet. Who likes using this anymore? Was there a decision? Was there a company, something that clicked and it's like the BCAD of all this stuff? Or is that the wrong way to look at this? So I think that what happened, the engineification at its root is about the idea that

People who are no better and no worse than they were 25 years ago who were running these companies lost the constraint that used to stop them from wrecking things. So they used to have to worry about competitors and regulators and their own powerful workforce and interoperability.

And each one of those things kind of disappeared. They were all eroded and they were eroded because of policy choices, right? The decision not to enforce antitrust law, the decision to, you know, make weakened unions, the decision to expand IP law to block interoperability.

the decision to allow these regulators to be captured and not to update privacy law and so on. Like these were all choices that were made and they got easier to make, right? The more power these tech firms had, the easier it was for them to secure policies that gave them more power still. And so as a result, what you see is something like a doubling curve where for a very long time, it's very shallow, right?

And then it gets steeper and steeper, and then it just takes off. And so, you know, I think most of us would say that the last like eight years or so have been pretty bad. And what I think makes this different from other times in history where you've seen individual platforms go sour, like MySpace or LiveJournal or whatever, various e-commerce platforms, is that they all did it at once. Like everything sucks all at once. There's no refuge from it.

And that's what I think we're living through now. And I think that it's because the constraints have collapsed across the board sectorally and because...

digital stuff has moved into the real world. And so you can turn cars into subscription services, which is just not a thing that was like technically possible. And, you know, labor is now being mediated through apps in a way that they weren't before. There was an amazing report last week about how, or no, it was in December, about how nurses increasingly, rapidly increasingly are not hired by hospitals anymore. They're brought in through apps that do gig work.

And these apps are buying, uh, commercial data on the nurses who work for them. And nurses who have higher credit card debt are offered less wages because the app assumes that if you're broke and if you have a big bill, you'll take a lower wage. Uh,

And so this is just not stuff that was technically possible because our labor markets weren't mediated through apps in this way. And it was the systemic erosion of labor rights by gig platforms like Uber that opened the door for doing this to nurses. It's coming from both directions. This is a...

capitalism there we incentivize this and then that the means became available and the two together and you've got a justification you know it's not just nurses uh I've seen evidence that that you will pay more when you're online if your IP address comes from a wealthy location

yeah 100 personalized pricing is on on the buy side and on the sell side uh and with you know e-shelf tags and so on uh it's going to be in the retail environment as well new york city's started surge pricing after the hue and cry on that you know because it costs more to get into manhattan uh during certain times of the day uh i thought oh boy they must be 50 60 bucks it's six dollars yeah

What the hell? It's not, I mean, six bucks. We pay that much to go across the Golden Gate Bridge.

no we paid double that to go across the golden yeah what people are upset about six bucks to get into manhattan during nine to five i don't know have you seen any of the videos like it looks like yeah but that's that's disinformation i don't think it's a ghost town no not a good but like it i'm saying like a lot of the advocates are like oh it appears to be working uh you know well right and then and then others are saying depends where you are if you're on x they're saying you see it's killing the city

exactly it's restaurants are dying one side will say exactly that and then the other side will say this is good because it's easier for people yeah i don't want people yeah i think it's uh i think frankly they should ban private vehicles in all cities but that's the problem is it's not a progressive tax right so there's a large group in like a very some people six bucks is a lot yes yeah in a very only unequal society six bucks is a lot and then for another group of people it's nothing and so the you don't want it to be nothing and you don't want it to be a lot

right? You want it to be some friction. And it's not just some friction where you have this very, very unequal society where some people are a little poorer every month. And some people can just light a hundred bills on fire all day long. And I don't know how you solve it. This came up in London. I mean, obviously bankers coming in from Chelsea had no problem with the congestion charging. And now they've got the ULAs, which is the

the ultra low emission zone it's still not a big deal you know people can afford bankers can afford it to come to the city but you know if you're a man with a van who does odd jobs and you come into the city that's true vehicle it's right it's it's a big hit and i don't know how to resolve that because i don't want to surveil people means testing sucks you know like

it's just it is what it is but our Manhattanites have corrected me Professor band of panda bear says it's nine dollars sorry about that and uh trucks and buses are fourteen dollars uh to twenty one dollars but still twenty one dollars divided among a bunch of truck uh deliveries I saw restauranteurs saying well we're gonna have to pass this along to customers

really if you've got one customer and they have to pay nine dollars sure nine customers the extra dollar will probably be fine you know like i said hanks opened up in a restaurant in manhattan and i don't know if he's addressed this yet but uh those sandwiches are gonna have to cost more i'm sorry it's not my fault blame gatherer hulk joe um all right let's see

twitch streamers returning home talk about the rich getting richer uh people like uh Ninja uh who left Twitch to take a lot of money from Microsoft at mixer I forgot what Ninja got it was millions of dollars uh he left Twitch in 2019 for a deal with Microsoft's now defunct by the way mixer for 30 million dollars

uh man he got to keep it he got to keep it higher package he got to keep it because mixer uh flopped he went back to youtube uh myth received four million dollars from youtube over his two-year contract but they've all gone back to twitch because the contracts ran out they took the money

and uh Twitch is the place to be apparently even though Amazon's Twitch is apparently losing money right and left and they've been laying off people used to work at Twitch right Benito but you know Gonzales I actually used to work there at this at very moment at that moment when they were when all the big ninja was a banding them had just come up and they were they were starting to buy up all the streamers I was working there at that time and uh yeah that was definitely happening and then but

This was inevitable. This boomerang was inevitable because those companies don't you're losing money on those contracts. Well, this is what they said. They said YouTube doesn't care about live streaming anymore. Now they're all about shorts. Yeah, that's exactly it. Right. I mean, YouTube could afford 30 million. It's not that's not the issue. Microsoft can afford it. But but but they've changed their priorities every five minutes.

when you Valkyrie is going back after uh uh she she left for five years and three contracts on YouTube on Wednesday she moved back to Twitch but is Twitch gonna survive Benito what do you think I mean you know a lot of people it's a culture thing and like to Amazon it's not a lot of money no they're not losing a lot of money they're probably losing more on the web store still you know yeah they're losing more on Alexa we know that

i want the gaming streamers back on twitch because when they started finding lucrative deals elsewhere that's when we started seeing the rise of the nuisance streamers and their channels right so if if the gamers come back maybe we get a little less attention paid to the people who really should have no attention paid to them yeah and i'm glad that these people like uh phase swag from phase clan

uh he says he he got generational wealth from his YouTube contract this is from a Bloomberg story his father had two jobs his mother worked the night shift YouTube's offer for him to live stream Call of Duty allowed him to help his mom retire yeah and now he's back

and i mean it's it's work if you've got a successful live streaming channel that is a lot i mean you know my poor son my poor son is you know stressed through the roof because every minute you need to post another another piece now and by the way i give uh tick tock a lot of credit because uh and i mentioned this many many times where the the oral arguments uh for whether or not to ban tick tock were heard uh on friday for the supreme court they're gonna have to rule in the next week if they're gonna

the stop the forced sale or closure of TikTok. The deadline is January 19th, the day before inauguration. The incoming Trump administration filed a brief with the Supreme Court saying, give us some time. I think we can make something happen here. But those who listen, we will have Kathy Gellis, who is an attorney admitted to the bar at the Supreme Court, who, of course, listened to the oral arguments. We'll get her opinion on Wednesday on This Week in Google. But

um the general press said that it seemed like the justices were pretty much ready to ban tick-tock there wasn't a first amendment issue in their mind should it should it be banned or sold does it matter you know who benefits Instagram just in time to save Mark Zuckerberg

Well, might we all benefit if the guy who destroyed the Los Angeles Dodgers ends up owning TikTok? That's one of the possibilities. Now, are you not a McCourt fan? I don't know. I think that the current thing, his blockchain-based social media thing is just nuts. It doesn't make any sense to me at all. He says he's got $20 billion in commitment, which is, I don't think, enough money.

And by the way, the Chinese government has already said or forbade ByteDance from selling the algorithm. So I guess he'd be buying the. He says he doesn't want the algorithm anyway. How hard could it be? You just if you notice somebody watching a video, you give more of that. Well, look, I think there's there's like TikTok did do a pretty good job better than its predecessors of figuring out.

uh things that plausibly you might like so oh they're brilliant the virality this is this is exactly why people go back to Twitch or the the ability to make it to be a king maker or Queen maker the ability to take somebody like yeah Salt Hank who's making sandwiches to 5 000 people and promote him in the for you tab and suddenly he's got two and a half million followers incredible

So what's interesting is not just that they could do that because anyone who's got a lot of users can do that. So like CNN could put you on the news, right? And you can do well. iTunes, Apple has the power to make any podcast a hit. What they were good at was guessing which users to show that to. They weren't just having a megaphone. This was why there was such a scandal when Emily, I've forgotten her surname, at Forbes,

Emily White did a story on the heating tool, which was a secret tool at Tick Tock that they would use to do just that to just give a bunch of traffic to a to a performer. And they would do it tactically, they go like there's not a sports bros on the platform, they pick a sports bro, they make him king for the day, he's getting bajillions of views, he goes around like a Judas goat, and says to the other sports bros, they love sports content on Tick Tock. And

And then people like retool as TikTok users falsely, right? They think that they're doing well. I call this the giant teddy bear strategy because when I used to go to the Canadian National Exhibition or traveling carny that used to come to town every year, if you go to the Midway at like 10 in the morning, there's a guy with a giant teddy bear that you get by getting five balls in a peach basket. But like no one's ever gotten five balls in a peach basket. What that guy is doing is he's saying like,

hey i like your face come over here you got one ball in the peach basket i'll give you this key chain we'll trade two key chains for the teddy bear and that guy wanders around all day lugging this galactic scale teddy bear and people are like oh i guess i can win a giant are you telling me it's a profit thing is that what you're telling me i'm but it's not just that it's a profit thing is that it's deceptive yes right so they're just peach basket is not in fact round

Oh, you mean the basket? Yes, that too. But I mean the heating tool, right? Like when Uber, you know, there are all these stories in the New York Times about Uber drivers in New York 10 years ago who are making $100,000 a year.

Or, you know, $100. You see the billboards outside of every casino in Las Vegas. Sure. And they're giving them, well, no, but it's different because in Vegas, they just, one player out of X will win a jackpot. Right. But Uber, what they're doing is they're saying, you, you individually, we are choosing you to give you a jackpot. Actually, if you did that in Vegas, the Nevada Gaming Commission will put you in prison.

Right. They don't have to. You win. Because the psychology of gamblers is always, oh, that's me. Right. And so then you get these people out there, out there sort of, uh, bigging up the service, claiming that it's very lucrative. They're speaking from their own kind of worm's eye view. They don't know that from the God's eye view that someone has reached in and said, you're going to do well. And, you know, Vina Dubal is a lawyer who's done some ethnographic work on Uber drivers. She talks about how these Uber drivers are,

are pulling down like two and a half shifts a day, sleeping in their car. People who live in like the outer, like way outside of San Francisco, drive in for three days a week and sleep in their cars to drive. And they're on the message boards with people who are making $100 an hour. Right. And they're making eight. And they're like, I'm doing Uber wrong. I don't know what I've done wrong. And what they've done wrong is they're not the one Uber reached in and touched and said, you get $100 an hour. And for Uber, it's a bargain. Right.

And so I think that when you know, it's exactly right, because as soon as Henry hit it, there were a dozen ASMR sandwich making TikTok feeds.

Right. Because they saw he was doing well and they copied it. Now, I don't know if the heat tool hit him or what. Elon tried to do the same thing with Twitter. When he went to X, he was offering some of the bigger influencers, including Mr. Beast, massive payouts, just a lot of money because he wanted them to post about how much money they were making so that it would lure other content creators back to X. Of course.

So yeah, it's par for the course now. Yeah. So I ain't going to work on Maggie's farm no more. That's all. I'm sorry. The thing about, about, about, um, I almost said flicker. The thing about, about is that, is that they, they have both things running in parallel. Sometimes things go viral because they're really good at predicting that there's a latent audience for a thing and they show it to those people. And those people are like, that's amazing. And sometimes things go viral because they're cheating.

right and that's what makes you don't know the difference and you don't ever know the difference I can't tell so Frank McCourt is actually paired together with Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary which immediately sets off alarm he's done so well since he was orphaned and wrote that memoir uh they're gonna they're gonna uh and the White House has given its go-ahead

make an offer. I don't think, somehow I don't think TikTok will sell. - It doesn't make sense for TikTok to sell. Why would they sell off a competitor to their service? They know that they can still get plenty of business outside of the United States. It doesn't make sense for them to have a clone inside the US that they don't control. - Well, then there's also the question, and you'd probably be an expert on this, Father, of how do you ban TikTok? One thing they will do on January 19th,

barring a sale is tell apple and google take it off the store but that's they can't say unload it from the phones no and you can't you can't blacklist their ips it can go basically from anywhere so

I mean, it's essentially giving businesses the ability to tell employees that using TikTok on a device can be a fireable offense. That was one of the scenarios that we had to game out because if the ban takes hold, we've got a lot of HR departments that want to know if they should enforce that, if that should be part of the employee handbook. You mean in the church? Okay. So remember, when we say the church, there's a lot of

businesses that operate under the umbrella of the church well okay so let's say we've got a one of our research centers in los in los angeles um and tick tock is now illegal tick tock has now been banned does that go into the employee handbook that

We do not allow the use of TikTok on the campus over our network. Yeah, it's one of these weird things where we're like, we don't really know what a ban would look like. We don't know how serious they want to be about the ban. Is it just going to be you can no longer get the app on a new device? If you have the app, will it still work? Will it still update? So it's all hypothetical right now, because unless you want to fragment the Internet, you can't really ban a service.

Well, I also think that what they'll do is just kick it out of the app stores and that's going to do 90% of the work. Right. They will do that. That's actually in the law, but the law also says you can't tell ISPs to block it. Right. Because I think there's a strong first amendment argument about that. I want to say that it may not be as easy as you think for TikTok to walk away from the U S market, not because there aren't lots of other people everywhere, but the U S has the combination of being rich populace and having no privacy law. Right.

The most valuable users. That are large, but they have privacy laws. There are lots of poor countries that have bad privacy laws. And there are lots of small, rich countries that have weak privacy laws. I'm counting on France. No privacy vacuum, wealthy nation. And normally, I'd be down with you, except for the fact that ByteDance does is very close with the state.

So, I mean, if they have any pull whatsoever, the state is not going to... The Chinese Communist Party. Right, the Chinese Communist Party. They see it as a strategic asset. They're not going to clone off a piece of their strategic asset. That's a better argument than the argument that they can just make up the revenue somewhere else. That they're geopolitical or realpolitik things. But, I mean, America is unique. I mean, I think that

We underestimate how contingent so many of our weird technological factors are. I had a conversation with Bunny Huang, the hardware hacker, about the CHIPS Act a little while ago. And he said the reason the CHIPS Act is going to fail is because Taiwan is so distinctive. It is a country with an amazing education system and a bad passport.

And that is why you have PhDs with PhDs in electrical engineering who will work in the chip fabrication facility where they make $50,000 a year and sit in a bunny suit for an eight hour shift without a toilet break overseeing five nanometer scale chip fabrication where like he was just describing, it's crazy. You vaporize tin into an evacuated chamber. You track the droplets.

You hit them with one laser that smashes them into a coin shape. You hit them with another laser that vaporizes them. And that's how you get the light wavelength needed to do the fabrication. Every wafer is balanced on two platforms that spin to stop any vibration. They have to be exactly the same size and weight. And this whole thing has to be recalibrated constantly. It's not a science. It's an art. And you need a PhD in electrical engineering to do it. And the people who do it get $50,000 a year.

and so like that's just not a thing you're going to do in america right and i'm like well you're right there's like that seems plausible wow you just don't have the the climate to i mean tsmc is building a plant in fact they're doing foreign nanometer chips they said in their arizona plant up in phoenix i bet they're going to pay their phd electrical engineers more than 50 000. 150 a lot more than 50.

um let's take a little break because we're going long and i saw corey yawn so i know it's time for a nap so long long days short nights these days yeah i i know you got stuff to do uh we're gonna wrap this thing up but what a great panel i am having so much fun it's always a a pleasure to have nicholas de leon corey doctorow and father robert baliser in the same zoom thank you uh thank you guys i really appreciate it our show today brought to you by the password manager i use and recommend

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Candy Crush, Tinder, My Fitness Pal, all spy on your location. And it's not because the guys who write the apps or the gals who write the apps have put that spying in, but because they're using ad platforms that automatically send location information back through the advertising ecosystem.

Data brokers can listen in on that process according to 404 Media and harvest the location of people's mobile phones. This is, here's the pull quote from Zach Edwards from Silent Push, a security firm. This is a nightmare scenario for privacy 'cause not only does this data breach contain data scraped from the RTB systems, there's some company out there acting like a global honey badger doing whatever it pleases with every piece of data that comes its way.

Tinder, Grindr, Candy Crush, Temple Run, Subway Surfers, Harry Potter, Puzzles and Spells, Move It, My Period, Calendar and Tracker. 10 million people use that, by the way. My Fitness Pal, Tumblr. Yeah, my favorite, Tumblr. Tumblr.

Yahoo's email client, Microsoft 365 Office app, Flightradar24, multiple religious-focused apps, Muslim prayer apps, Christian Bible apps, various pregnancy trackers, and yes, many VPN apps.

There are no ads on my app, so no one's tracking you. You're safe. Thankfully, I don't have to worry about Tinder or Grindr or any of the fitness apps. How do you get dates then? I don't understand. No, fitness I know. Me neither. Yeah, not so much. But I do love Tumblr. I do. I'm a very avid Tumblr user. I don't want to go for another two hours, so I'm not going to ask you about Matt Mullenweg. We'll just save that for...

I wish I understood what was going on with him. I hope he is well and figuring stuff out for himself. It's getting worse too. They're starting to kick people out.

What do you do? What do you say? What do you do? Muslim pro, which is good. Cause you don't want to use the amateur Muslim app. Muslim light. Wait, is that, is that much? Is that much much much much? No Muslim pro is a Muslim prayer app. Okay. It said they didn't even know about gravy. Yeah. We display ads through several ad networks to support the free version of the app, but we don't authorize these networks to collect the location date of our users. Okay.

well yeah you do of course you do when you it's in the fine print somewhere there uh gravy's been hacked by the way which is part of the part of the part of the hair on fire in this story

uh, Joseph Cox writing in a four Oh four. I don't know what the answer is to this. I mean, it's just a privacy law, a privacy to this. I'm sorry. It's just like, not that complicated. Put these guys out of business, a privacy law, a privacy law. That's all we need. A privacy law. How is it possible? This is legal. You know, I just saw the other day, the CFPB proposing that it would be illegal to sell someone's social security number.

It's legal? Yeah. No, I mean, Congress needs to act. Yeah, I could buy it from the AARP right now. It's legal! I mean, yes. Is it Congress or is this CFPB regulation going to be sufficient? Yes.

The regulation won't be sufficient. We need a federal privacy law with a private right of action and no preemptions. Because the Supreme Court that threw out Chevron deference is going to absolutely throw that out as well. Well, it's just a regulation does not have the same force that a law has.

We should have a federal privacy law. It should have a, so one of the things I don't think the CFPB can do is create a private right of action. That's really important. That's when you as an individual for justice. Are you in favor of those? I, it bugs me because the Texas, Texas uses that a lot. Oh, but that's, but, but that's not a good private right of action. The Americans with Disability Act is a good private right. Oh, okay. Well, there are those who, I mean, I know a lot of small businesses that have been

very much harmed by, by. If the contours are poor of the American, of the Americans with Disability Act, then fix them. But I mean, I think that, um,

You have to distinguish between people who receive baseless threats and people who lose lawsuits. Right. Oh, I do. But there are a lot of businesses. There are ambulance chasers in the ADA. At its root, the American with Disability Act says if you do renovations, then during the renovations, you have to accommodate people. It doesn't say you have to do anything. It's appropriate. If you're changing the steps, you have to add a ramp.

If you're not changing the steps, you don't have to add the ramp. Right. Like it's, but there are people who go around and tell you that you do. And that's the problem. Okay. But like that, right. Like the, you know, the,

What we don't want is a world in which you only get privacy if a federal prosecutor or a state attorney general thinks you need one. The CFPB does not have a big enough enforcement arm. Antitrust law is going to do reasonably well under Trump because of private rights of action. So the case that Epic just won against Google over monopolizing the payment system, that's a

That's a private right of action, right? Like you have even with trillion dollar companies, you have a lot of billion dollar companies who are angry about being exploited, who can use. So explain what a private right of action is to people. Right. So under most federal statutes only give the federal prosecutors or sometimes state attorneys general the right to to enforce them.

But if you have a private right of action, then you can say, oh, you violated my privacy. Sure, I'm going to send a letter to the state AG and say you violated my privacy, but I'm also going to file a lawsuit.

Right. And, you know, in those cases, ambulance chasers are great. The no win, no fee bar actually goes out and finds people who have been screwed over and says, I tell you what, you don't need money. And in fact, the bigger and richer the company is that screwed you over, the more money we can get out of them for our fees if they fight it.

And so we're going to go after him. If you're for it, I'm for it. And I am absolutely for a federal privacy law. And no preemption. So we need to keep the state laws intact because what they really want to do is preempt those laws. Yeah. Get rid of the Illinois biometric privacy law. That's what Marsha Blackburn's all for. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

i couldn't figure out why marcia blackburn was supporting a privacy law until i understood that it invalidated all the state laws sure sure and they're like oh we'll have a patchwork of laws just don't violate people's privacy it's really straightforward you know corey the the my theory has always been that we would never get this because law enforcement goes sub rosa to the congress and says no you can't do that because we need that information we buy it

That's been the historic story, right? For years, I've gone to Silicon Valley and talked about privacy and had Googlers say, well, all Google wants to do is show me better ads. I don't give a damn. But those govies at the NSA, they're all too stupid to get a job in Silicon Valley. I don't want their thick fingers on my data. And then I go to the Beltway and I give that talk. And they're like, well, those Googlers would sell their mothers for a nickel. Yeah.

I don't care if Uncle Sam knows my information. You know, I already I got security. I trust the government. Right. Got it already. But what they don't understand is that there is no private or private public surveillance. There's only public private surveillance. Yeah, that it's the intervention of the public sector of safety and security agencies that

That actually allows the coalition of surveillance of the surveillance industry to successfully resist privacy law. It's that that is the unbeatable combo. We got to get Marty Hinch in on this. Yeah, maybe that I'll bring him out of retirement for one last time. The new book Picks and Shovels comes out February 18th. Go to martinhinch.com and you can get in the Kickstarter for it.

That's the best place to buy it, right, Corey? Right now. Because it supports you. Yeah. It's great. Those numbers help. It doesn't cost more.

doesn't cost more no no and you know you can get it signed and whatever oh i like that ebook and i have a few of your autographs ebook or the audiobook from the kickstarter uh they come without a eula so it's not just that they're drm free but they're also eula free so you have all of your copyrights intact so you get the right to sell it to loan it to give it away just like don't violate copyright law you know it's funny i went to the kindle store to buy it and they said the

The publishers demanded no DMA on this. We aren't going to copy protect us. Sorry. I think we just brought martinhench.com to its knees. So wait a minute or two. Go there. It's a Kickstarter. No, I'm working. Is it working? Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's just me. It's just a redirect at my domain registrar. I use Hover.

I like them. Mush it right through to Kickstarter, or you can just go to kickstarter.com and search for Martin Hensch or Corey Doctorow. Corey, always a pleasure. Good luck on that documentary. That sounds fantastic. You always have like 18 different things you're doing, don't you? I know. Book tour coming up. Big one. Lots of cities. So many cities. Let me see. Do I have that tab open? It's...

Boston, San Francisco, LA, Seattle, Toronto, and some city in the prairies. We haven't figured it out yet. And then... You mean the flyover prairies? Is that what you mean? Either Winnipeg or Calgary. Oh, nice. Sorry, in Canada, we call those the prairie provinces. The prairies. Okay. New York, California.

Penn, Penn State, a college station. And then on my way to DC, I'm going to do a day in Doylestown, PA, Baltimore, DC, Richmond, Virginia, places I've been in years, South by Southwest and a bookstore event in Austin. And then San Diego, Burbank, Chicago, Bloomington, Illinois, never been there. And then one more. Bloomington is nice.

And I lied. You can read the first chapter. Yeah, you can get the first chapter. And the audio book is up there, too. Pluralistic.net, Corey's website, has the picks and shovels chapter one. So if you want to taste it. Oh, nice. Yeah, all of Will's stuff.

thank you Corey always a pleasure to have you thank you good luck surviving your long March yeah yeah wow the bezel.org for all the book information pluralistic.net is his website he's on the mastodon at pluralistic

Nicholas DeLeon, what are you working on right now for Consumer Reports? Oh, I spent all day Friday doing stuff on coffee makers. Oh, yeah, you were doing that. Yes. Did you come up with a winner? It's anything we've talked about. Did you come up with a winner?

I don't think that's the purpose of this article is like how to like pick one. Okay. Like that. There was so much coffee stuff at CES. Oh, you should have come for that. Do you like AeroPresses? Yes. My Christmas present for Lisa was the new AeroPress.

pro or whatever they call it the metal glass one I just have my old one oh no get it it's glass and metal it's beautiful oh yeah I like the old French press I'm very old school I think that makes I have a bottom I'm with Nicholas you know I have a bottom

I have 13 ways to make coffee, actually, in my house. A lot of people have a lot of ways. I didn't know that people had so many ways and opinions about making coffee until very recently, actually. So this is all kind of new to me. But in terms of tech, we'll have something this week on all the AI PC stuff.

You know, we saw some of them at CES this year, well, at last year as well. You know, one of the things we do, maybe it's struggles, not the word, but like there's all these little AI applications and services. I don't know what the consumer use is for a lot of this stuff is yet. Like I use ChatGPT. Wait till you see a pearl on my temple and then you can ask me. I'll interview you then for that story. That's going to be, I keep buying stuff that's going to record my life and then tell me what happened.

because i figure i'm not i don't remember it right but it never lives up to its promise good i will look forward to that i've been a subscriber since the 80s so uh i will i will get my consumer reports and i will look for nicholas de leon senior electronics reporter corey this is the aeropress premium

which now is backordered. Yeah, it's backordered. I think I might ask for it for my birthday. I think Williams-Sonoma has it. I got it from Williams-Sonoma. They seem to have some sort of exclusive with a number of coffee companies. But it's beautiful. It's aluminum and stainless steel and

It's just beautiful. If I buy something aluminum, I have to argue with my wife about whether it's aluminum. She's British. I take it. Are you? Who's who? She's British. Yeah. Absolutely.

But you're Canadian, don't Canadians say that? No, we say aluminum. We don't insert random syllables. Good, because it'll make it much easier to absorb you into the 51st state if you just pronounce aluminum properly. Thank you. So long as it comes with like 50 electoral college votes, I'm in. Wouldn't that be nice? Yeah. Hey, I never thought of it that way.

I mean, you're going to get two just like everybody else. We'll bring in Canada and Puerto Rico. And yeah, I'm cool with that. Let's do that. And Greenland. Greenland. Yeah, let's do Greenland. Sure.

Do you know, I just was already in the electoral college, isn't it? If they sanction Denmark for not selling Greenland and don't allow imports, America will cut off its supply of Ozempic. No, no, we go for you. Oh, that's OK. Elon will fly his private jet over there and grab his weekly supply.

father robert balacera they call him the digital jesuit he uh is of course a priest and his app is called jesuitpilgrimage.app and you can follow him on blue skies padre sj and he's doing amazing things that he can't tell us about because god would get mad well you know it's it's a team effort and i don't want to put one single face on the team effort it's kind of a trinity

Yeah, yeah. There's three of them now. Sure, why not? It's a group. I'm sorry with the sacrilege. I apologize. I've stayed side for another month, so it's all good. It's not until I have to go back that I have to get holy again. But normally you can find me just outside my residence up on the roof. So if you're ever at St. Peter's, just look for the rooftops and you'll probably see me.

Look for the one with the white smoke. Is that what you're saying? That's what I do. That's pretty much what I do. I have got to come out and visit you and get this special tour of St. Pete. We were there last year. Unbelievable. And I would like to do what you did, Corey, and see a Christmas Eve.

mass there that would be it was pretty amazing wow i mean i was 12 and i still remember it oh you'll never forget it now leo what i can do is i my uh my access card allows me to bring in two guests so we could just sit near the train station which is right next to pope francis's um apartment and you know you can just watch him come in and out uses

Can I use his Wi-Fi? That's the question. I bet you Robert knows the password. I know all the passwords. I have them someplace. What a great show. Man, I just want to keep going. I'm sorry I've kept you so long, but you know, when it's a show like this, I don't want to stop. Thank you, Robert. Thank you, Nicholas. Thank you, Corey. You guys are the best. Have a wonderful evening, and I'll see you soon, I hope, on This Week in Tech. And thanks to all of you who watched this.

We do this show, as you probably know, Sundays, 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern, 2200 UTC. You don't have to watch then because it's a podcast. You can watch or listen whenever you want. But we do a live stream of the show in its production on eight different platforms. Club members get to watch in Discord. But there's also, because I'm trying to be a big YouTube star, youtube.com slash twit slash live. It's not going to happen, is it? We're also on Twitch.

uh twitch.tv twit we also are on kick because you know i want to cover all the bases x.com linkedin we're even uh streaming live on facebook and tick tock at least for one more week uh you know what come to think of it i think we could continue to stream on tick tock even after they're banned they're not going to prevent that so

I don't know what we're going to do after January 19th, but I think we'll just keep streaming on those eight platforms. If you don't want to watch live, I understand. In fact, I encourage you.

to either go to the website twit.tv or to our YouTube channel at twit.tv slash twit there's actually links to all the shows have a dedicated YouTube channel for the video that's a good thing to know about because it's easy to share a clip if you want to take a little bit of you know uh E.B White's uh bibliography and send it to your your friends you know Molly White's grandpa wrote some books you could just clip that on YouTube they make it very easy and send it off and that's a good way of sharing

what you see here, maybe grow our audience a little bit. Best thing for you to do though, in general is subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way you get it automatically. You'll have it. It'll be downloaded, ready for your Monday morning commute. Thanks to everyone. Thanks to our wonderful club members. We appreciate your support. Thanks to all of you for watching. We are, this is a, this is a special year for

uh the network we are in our 20th year now our 20th anniversary is coming up in april 20 years of doing this show and every single show for the last 20 20 years i've been at the same way right now thanks for watching we'll see you next time another twit is in the can