649: Prove It With Cameras

34:19And that's going to be slowly eroded over time as all of these basically scam and fraud defenses have to keep going up. bad people ruin stuff for everybody i mean but the express replacement is good because they'll still catch the fraud presumably because you do have to send it back and they have put a hold in your credit card so if they get if you send in fake ones to you know so someplace where they can check that they're fake you're just not going to get your money back so it stops the counterfeiting presumably but also it helps you not be without airpods for as long as casey was so i guess that's the the the best workaround we have for this unfortunate situation see you all made fun of me for my initial solution of my AirPods don't last as long as a plane ride.

35:00I just bought a second pair. I am so happy that I keep two pairs of AirPods because if the battery is dead because I haven't forgotten to charge it for a while no problem. I'll just take out the other pair. It's fine. If I accidentally leave one at the house and I'm out somewhere and I have my backpack with me, I have the other pair. No problem. I'm wondering why Casey doesn't have a house full of old AirPods like I do. Well, I have, so my AirPods Mark 1, if you will, I had given to Erin and she almost never uses them. And I did that, you know, married person thing where I was like, hey, it's really stinky.

35:36I don't have my AirPods right now. Hoping that she would say, oh yeah, you can just take mine back for a little while. But that seemed a bit aggressive, even though she almost never uses them. Like, I should be a grown ass man who can last five days without my beloved AirPods. And I did, but only just. I would. I mean, I could have gone to the attic and dug up some of my like OG AirPods that probably would have lasted 10 minutes at a time, but that would have been better than nothing. But it just didn't seem worth the effort, especially because the attic is a trillion degrees right now. And then finally on the AirPods topic, a different anonymous person writes, it's not uncommon for my store to run into five sets or more of fake AirPods per day that we visually identify.

36:17It's unknown to me how many we send out that are later found to be non-genuine products. So here's the thing. This is what Marco was saying a moment ago. I don't want to really crack into the right to repair discussion because we've been through it. It's not useful right now. But if you look at it from Apple's perspective, a lot of the stuff that they do that gets iFixit upset, I understand, this is Marco's point, I understand why and how they got there. That doesn't make it right, but I get how they got there. And this is a very tricky problem to solve. And I had no idea how bad it was. And this anonymous person said they were in a metro area, but they didn't specify specifically where.

36:54But it sounded to me like it was a roughly Richmond-sized metro area. It was not like a Manhattan or anything like that. So I didn't realize how prevalent this was and how widespread. I bet most of those people don't know they have fake AirPods. You know what I mean? That's also very possible. Like they just bought them online and they found a good deal on AirPods and they had no idea they were being sold counterfeit goods. And also they don't work and they bring them in. That's got to be the common case. Oh, absolutely. I mean, there's so like back in the day, I don't know how much this is still the case, but back in the day, SD cards were very commonly counterfeited.

37:24And so I, you know, like I once unknowingly bought a counterfeit one on Amazon, like a counterfeit SanDisk SD card right from it from Amazon, you know, ships from and sold from Amazon.com, like everything. And so from that point forward, I was very careful to only ever buy SD cards from B &H because I know they are also a very good high-quality retailer and they're very strict with their supply chain. Whereas Amazon is not strict with their supply chain at all. And so you don't really know necessarily what you're getting on Amazon. And I still buy everything else on Amazon really. But the stuff where that kind of thing matters a lot and where they're highly counterfeited, I buy from more authoritative sources like B &H.

38:05I think now that Apple's products are that highly counterfeited, it's probably best for something like AirPods that apparently are very easy to counterfeit. I think it's even more important than ever to buy Apple's products of those types from Apple. That's I agree with you on paper. But have you seen the deals running on AirPods Pro 2? I think right now, actually, on Amazon, they are like 80 bucks off. Are they AirPods Pros 2? I mean, fair, but they're like absurdly discounted. So again, doesn't make you wrong, but if it were me, it'd be hard to pass that up. Anyway, so yeah. So in summary, 30 bucks later, I have effectively new AirPods, which is great for today.

38:45But future Casey is going to be real mad when those AirPods Pro 3 come out. I really want to upgrade. And I look at my like two-month-old AirPods Pro 2. They're going to be your backups then. Yeah. When you drop the threes in the sink. We are sponsored this episode by Delete Me. Right now, the headlines are chock full of data breaches and regulatory rollbacks, making us all vulnerable. But you can do something about it. Delete Me is here to make it quick, easy, and safe to remove your personal data online from hundreds of data brokers. So here's how this works. The data broker business is kind of gross.

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40:53All right. Tell me, John, about tabs in Tahoe, please. This is something I mentioned on the last episode that there was a way to set a property list entry somewhere to revert the weird capsule shaped tabs in Tahoe to be more normal looking tabs. And I couldn't remember if it was like a global one or app specific or whatever. But anyway, uh steve strutton smith pointed me to the uh two of his that i was remembering it is global it's defaults right minus g which is the global specifier uh the key is ns solarium window tabs and then you set it to a boolean value of false uh and it won't use the capsule shape tabs uh steve says it sets it at the app kit level so it should affect all apps using the system tabs but safari does not use the system tab so it won't affect safari and that was thus the confusion about whether it was global global i just tried it in uh terminal and so they look the tabs look more normal but everything is still like extremely bright white so it doesn't like it doesn't change the ui back to uh sequoia or anything but if you want to try that out uh for as long as that option lasts uh have fun and i think the the tahoe public beta is coming soon i think it was accidentally released to some people already so uh you could at least probably try it in the public beta if it's still there yeah probably tomorrow i would guess all right low cost apple laptops with a18 pros.

42:14Mandanam writes, this would not be the first A-Series chip in a Mac as there was... Oh, I forgot to bring this up. This pissed me off so much because I thought about this when we were recording, and then it completely slipped my mind to say something because we got sidetracked on talking about us, talking about something else, and then I meant to circle back and never did. So anyway, Mandanam writes, this would not be the first time the A-Series or the first A-Series chip in a Mac as there was the Apple Silicon Developer Transition Kit which used the A12Z from the iPad Pro. I mean, technically was that a Mac?

42:42Yeah, I mean, fair yes i mean you couldn't do a ton with it but it was a mac it ran mac os but it wasn't it was called the apple developer transition kit wasn't it i don't remember it had a mac but anyway yes obviously uh yes there have been you could run mac there's better to say you could run mac os on a series chips before but to call this a mac obviously it's not a mac that people could buy in the general public and we had to send them all back to apple so you didn't even get to keep them we leased it for a little while so we're saying it's not a mac but is it a robot or not yeah Anyway, it's worth noting that that was the A12Z, which was way slower than the A18, and it was fine.

43:19Many different people had a few different things to write or to add. Perhaps the shell would be plastic instead of aluminum. I don't think that's probable, but it is certainly possible. People have fond memories of the plastic iBooks, especially the toilet seat ones that came in fun colors. so i think there's a lot of nostalgia for that uh apple could tap into that nostalgia and make a really good plastic macbook but plastic is not as good a conductor of heat as aluminum and uh with today's thin and light laptops i think uh a plastic one doesn't have the strength or the heat conductivity to be an option so i'm thinking that's not particularly likely but people really did love those colorful ones so uh keep hope alive i guess i mean honestly i think when people are hoping for a plastic macbook they're not thinking about the ibooks they're thinking about the plastic macbooks the intel ones from 2006 through yeah well there was the there was the ice book too like the the white one uh there was a whole bunch of plastic was not just the toilet seat yeah but but like so right at the end of the plastic era so you know when we think fondly of the plastic macbooks what we are thinking of is those very first gen intel ones from 2006 and eight you know and you know the ones where like the handrest would like get cracked or would yellow or things like that well at the very end they still i think it was like 2010 it was surprisingly late they made a unibody ish looking plastic one it was it was like the cheap macbook you know product that you know for businesses and education for for like a year or two and it was a different white plastic case it was i believe like basically one piece or you know very few pieces oh yeah they did like a unibody plastic or something close to that yeah yeah and it didn't have any of the problems that the earlier plastic ones did.

45:05It was just like it was the cheap one and by that point everybody else was like the entire rest of the line was using these cool metal ones and nobody really cared about those anymore but they could do something like that. So I think I wouldn't worry about heat because as we learned there are like you know basically like safety requirements in most countries where they can't just bond the processor to the metal body of the laptop because it gets too hot and you can't have that on somebody's lap or touching somebody's skin but that's why aluminum is good because it lets the heat spread and not concentrate in one place well but so their their usual approach to heat management is like they don't just stick the processor bonded heat wise somehow to the case they have a heat sink on the processor and a fan blows air over it and then there's vents on the outside oh these are surely to be fanless right i just think the a series mac is going to be famous yeah because you know if you look at like the the low end you know the macbook air is fanless and that uses you know the m4 or whatever but the way they do that is with an air gap like they basically heat up the cavity inside inside of it and you know and hope it cools a little bit by convection um but the iphone chip uses way less peak power than the m4 so i'm it's definitely going to be fanless but i think they're going to they could do a similar thing where like they're not attaching it to the case so you don't really necessarily need the case you just need ventilation it doesn't it can't be sealed maybe Maybe you can get away with it, but aluminum would be better.

46:30But here's the thing. I think people forget exactly how massive by modern standards those plastic ones were. Even the very last plastic one that you just described. Forget about the toilet seat. If you ever looked at the toilet seat, you'd be like, was this always this big? Yeah, it was always that big. The Icebook that people have fond memories of? Massive, huge, gigantic, way bigger than you remember. Even those old plastic MacBooks, including the black MacBook that you charged extra for, that last unibody one. They're a lot bigger, especially on things like the screen. like how thick is the top lid that has the screen in it i'm not sure you can do a top lid like that with plastic um and i don't think they're going to have an aluminum top lid in a plastic bottom i think the plastic is extremely unlikely engineering wise it could be done but it seems like it would be again at this point more effort for apple to figure out how to make a viable laptop in modern proportions and performance with no fan out of plastic than would for them to just use aluminum, especially if they were using an existing case.

47:25I mean, I think you're probably right. I think plastic is a stretch in this case because one of the big benefits of using aluminum in this case is you get a lot of rigidity for a thin case. Plastic, you don't get a lot of rigidity. So typically, plastic electronics have some kind of metal frame inside of them. And, you know, it doesn't necessarily cover the entire thing, but it's like, you know, a frame a skeleton basically made of metal to add rigidity in various points um so they would probably need to do something like that and i can't imagine they would i can't imagine that would be worth the trade-off like i think they would probably if they want to have a different case construction that is cheaper my idea that i said last time about like just not doing it unibody having it be like in panels i think is more likely gross but but again like keep in mind two this is if they are going for very inexpensive they are probably going to want to replace that that walmart 650 dollar mac you know m1 macbook air now one option i believe they mentioned this on upgrade like one option is they could just keep using that old macbook air case the teardrop i said that on the last episode stop crediting upgrade for things that i said okay so gracious so you know they they could just keep using that case which they are currently selling brand new in a 650 laptop so that is possible to just keep using that at that price point what i really hope is that they don't jack up that price point too much that obviously like whenever apple has a low price point and then they introduce like a replacement like a generational leap for that product, they almost always raise the price at first and then eventually chip it down back to that product.

49:13So hopefully that would be like if they if they have to go above 650 for this for this new one when it's brand new, hopefully then after a year or two, it's right back down there or maybe even lower. I think Apple could really get a lot of great market share if they could get it, you know, as as close to that$500 point as possible, because if you look at what is out there and PC laptops, there's a lot of options at those prices, and they're not all garbage. There are some decent ones that are around that price point. And again, if Apple's making that low-end iPad for$300, they can totally do this with most of the same parts, just throw a keyboard and trackpad on there.

49:55So we know they can do it if they choose to. I really hope they do, and I think it could be a very interesting product. I don't think, though, that that has to be a super cool, thin, and light product. It really could just be that old MacBook Air case, or it could be the M2 forward MacBook Air case, like the flat one that we have now. It could just be that case with lower spec parts in it. I hope they're more creative than that, and I hope they take the opportunity, if they're going to do something new, to really rethink a lot of those design choices to make it radically cheaper, not just$100 or$200 cheaper.

50:34But that is not necessarily the Tim Cook way. The Tim Cook way normally is you just keep selling the older one and the older one and the older one and cut$100 off each year it goes older. That's the Tim Cook way. And that goes fine for a while. But if they really want to dig down into that price range and get really much lower than where they are now, they need something that's designed that way from the start. So I'm still very interested to see what this product ends up being. And I think it could be really, really cool. And I think the disaster scenario for my hopes and dreams here is it's literally just the MacBook Air with an A18 instead of an M4.

51:13And it's like$200 cheaper. That, I think, would be the very disappointing scenario. But I hope they do more than that. We shall see. we are getting a call that Jason says that he said it before you John so I'm sure he did but I didn't hear it before I recorded it in my okay so again if you're on this podcast and you're going to credit somebody with I think I heard somebody say this you heard me say it oh John I mean in all fairness so Upgrade comes out on Mondays I usually make a point to listen to it before we record because we cover a lot of the same topics i'd make a point not to listen to it before we record for exactly this reason well because we cover a lot of a lot of similar topics i try to listen to them before we record and so chances are i did hear about it from jason before i heard it i know but you heard it from me most recently you heard it from me most recently and it's most relevant to this show because it's the show that i'm on oh my god gosh oh my gosh it's not like a last modified thing it doesn't matter who said it most recently you touched it last okay well it's in the in the trying to reach back into your memory, I think recency might make it more prominent.

52:20Oh my God. Primacy. Is that the right word? Makes it more prominent in your mind? Moving on, gentlemen. Another piece of feedback that a lot of people sent in. Hey, maybe it'll run iPadOS instead of macOS. I don't want that. That's just an iPad with a keyboard. We have those already. Yeah, no, but that's something that we've talked about for years that a lot of people want. And the rumor mill being what it is, it's not, you know, ridiculous to assume that maybe they got this wrong. What we're talking about is basically an iPad. with a permanently attached keyboard with a hinge, like an iPad laptop.

52:51For the entire history of Apple selling various floppy or not so floppy keyboards that you attach to iPads, many people have said, I love iPadOS. I would love to use this as a laptop, but the floppy thing isn't right, and it's heavy, and it's weird, and can't they just sell me an iPad with a permanently attached keyboard and trackpad, just like, you know, a regular laptop? Only it's not a laptop, it's an iPad. I think that's a product that some people still want. I don't think enough people want it that Apple's going to make it, but this type of rumor is the type of thing that could be misconstrued by, you know, a game of telephone or whatever the other analogy, the people, lots of people are feeling different parts of the element and not knowing which part, you know, like, you know, a, a cheaper device with an A series processor.

53:34But, but I honestly, I think if it was an iPad, they would probably say, yeah, but it's a touchscreen and that really, or there'd be like some kind of touchscreen Mac rumor. So for all the people out there who want an iPad with a permanently attached keyboard and trackpad, we hear you but i'm gonna i think this rumor is not that because i think if if we would know if it had like a touchscreen or something yeah i don't think and by the way that would be the thing to call ibook if you were gonna bring that name back oh yeah but uh yeah i think the the reality is that the ipad for for most of the people who want that they're already using ipads and it's basically fine um for people who want you know inexpensive laptops or less expensive laptops, I should say, people who want less expensive laptops, usually there's something about iPad OS that makes them say, no, I need to, I can't do that or I don't want to do that.

54:24That's, that's not going to, that's not what I'm looking for. So ultimately when people want a laptop, they, they've already had the option to make an iPad into a laptop for many, many, many years. So all the people who are satisfied by that already have it. I think Apple could make a better version of that if they had it built in, you know, They wouldn't need all these all this bulk for the case to attach to the iPad and the weird hinge and the counterweighting and everything like the experience of using an iPad with the modern magic keyboards. I think, frankly, is terrible because they're so bulky.

54:57They're so that is so thick. They're so heavy. It doubles the weight of the whole thing. And most of that is structure and apparatus that you wouldn't need if you did make a combined product that just had a laptop base with a screen and an iPad. It was like the resulting combo device, if it was made that way from the start to have a keyboard, you'd put the battery at the bottom. You'd have the thin screen. You'd make concessions that would make it far more compact and easier to mechanically operate. So it could be better, but I just don't think that the people who want to use an iPad as a laptop are so dissatisfied with the current options that this would gain Apple much market share.

55:41Whereas if you look at how many people want a laptop, but don't want to pay$1 ,000 for it, and you can go to any store, or you can go on Amazon or whatever, and you can buy a not awful PC laptop for$500, that's a pretty big potential market to expand into. So I think, I hope Apple really addresses that to try to expand the Mac market share meaningfully rather than if this ends up just being an iPad with a keyboard built in, like that's fine. But I think that's a much smaller incremental market above what they already have. Finally, I'm contractually obligated to bring up what a handful of people said.

56:24Cellular? A18 already knows how to talk to cell networks and cell modems. We talked about this on past episodes. I know, but still, I've got to say it again, because come on. Keep trying to manifest, as the kids say. It'll happen for us someday. But see, we already have M4 cellular devices. They're called iPad Pros and iPad Airs. We are sponsored this episode by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website to engage with your audience and sell anything you want, from your products to your content to your time, all in one place and all on your terms.

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58:51All right. So as we record, it was a day or two back, I think that we heard news that Apple is suing John Prosser, the prolific leaker for stealing their ios trade secrets reading from the verge apple has sued the well-known leaker john prosser for the alleged theft of trade secrets related to ios 26 according to the lawsuit apple claims that prosser offered michael ramachiati ramassiati uh money or a future job opportunity in exchange for access to a company phone belonging to his friend ethan lipnick an apple software engineer working on ios ramassiati i hope i'm getting that right allegedly learned uh lipnick's iphone passcode used quote-unquote location tracking to determine and when he'd be away from home for an extended period and then access the iPhone running a development version of the mobile OS.

59:33Apple says that Ramicotti showed the software to Prosser over a video call, which Prosser recorded, shared with others, and then used to create renders of the new designs. Apple says it found out the details of what happened in April from an anonymous email from someone who claimed to have seen Prosser's recording of the call and recognized Lipnick's apartment. The company also claims to have a voice note sent by Ramicotti to Lipnick, apologizing for the incident and claiming that the subterfuge was processor's idea, which Lipnick in turn provided to Apple. Lipnick was fired by Apple for failing to properly follow its policies around securing unreleased software.

1:00:07Wow. Yikes. I think when we saw these demo videos where it's like, Oh, he was being smart by not showing the info we has, he's showing a recreation. So that way, you know, someone, whoever leaked it doesn't get in trouble because you could figure out what build they had or secret stuff in the background that you can only, you know what I mean? Like, like watermarking it or something. Um, so that part was smart. The part that doesn't seem like it's smart is the thing that he's accused of doing, uh, is pretty clearly, uh, outside the realm of just like, I'm just, you know, I just report things that people tell me.

1:00:38It's more like a sort of a conspiracy to, commit a crime, which is to, uh, access, uh, a Apple employee's phone, uh, without their consent or whatever. Like, I don't know. The details are fuzzy and I'm sure it'll be hashed out in court, but reading this whole story i was thinking that if it was my profession to do like to you know do apple leaks which i think is a perfectly fine thing like any kind of journalist that you can get sources who are going to give you secret information and you publish it that's fine but like i would be a lot more careful than it seems like these people were being about what is and isn't the right way to do that like you know learn like i guess i mean i guess you live and learn this is how people learn but like uh what is covered and what isn't when do i become a criminal when do i not if i just accept anonymously leaked information and publish it uh you know is there other cases where that's a problem but like you know working with somebody to try to get you know access to company secrets yourself is now you're basically like a computer criminal like it's not you're not so much a journalist or a leaker anymore but yeah i bet these folks uh play fast and loose with that just because it's so, the desirability of getting a big scoop and the value of it is so big to them that I can see people being tempted to do things like the accusations in this case.

1:01:57Yeah, when I first heard about this, my reaction was, oh, that is so gross. Here's one of the most valuable companies in the world going after a guy. And that just feels super icky to me. And then I continued to read more about what he's accused of. And obviously, maybe this is all fabrications. Maybe it's all lie. Like, as an example, what did I read a second? Where is it? Claims to have a voice note sent by Ramis Piatti to Lipnick apologizing for the incident, claiming the subterfuge was Prosser's idea. How convenient, right? Like, that could be completely fabricated. This will get hashed out in court, but like there is precedent for Apple essentially shutting down leakers when they do something where they're basically the leaker is in the wrong, legally speaking, and Apple uses its weight to crush them.

1:02:49And that's part of, you know, it's kind of like if a newspaper, like if reporters for a newspaper hack their way into Apple and took secrets out and published them, Apple should sue them and should win. And they shouldn't do that. Right. but that's that's what these court this court case will determine now obviously anything any kind of court case especially in this country is so lopsided when one company has infinity money and the other the other uh the other person in the court case is essentially zero when rounded compared to how much money apple has for lawyers but so that part of it isn't great and fair but hopefully uh we'll figure out what the truth is here uh eventually uh you know like it's it's a tough business to be in if apple leaks are your business there's lots of danger and one of the dangerous as the big angry tiger that is Apple that doesn't want leaks to happen.

1:03:34Apple is usually, I think, i'm not gonna say nice but like more hands-off than you would imagine but if any of the facts in this case are actually as reported here i can see apple saying this one we need to you know right i'm right i'm right i'm right i'm right i'm right i'm right i'm right i'm right i'm right i'm right i'm right i'm right i'm right he was fired that lipnick was fired like i know like he i'm sure he violated things by not properly securing blah blah blah but if he was like duped into doing this i don't know maybe they have evidence that he was not as uh that he actually participated in this thing but like everyone makes mistakes like i don't think the guy who left the uh the iphone 4 in a bar he didn't get fired did he no i don't think so but so there's a few things there first of all i i think i can understand how this lipnick person got fired because clearly he left this pre-release phone or maybe not pre-release hardware, but pre-release software in a place where other people could get to it.

1:04:28And his passcode was not secure enough that other people discovered it. Well, where was the place that other people could get to it? In his apartment, but still. In his house? I mean, I hear you. I do. But, I mean, any Apple person I've ever spoken to that has gotten pre-release anything is kind of bananas about it. And they're supposed to be. And I've never asked for a leak or anything like that, to be clear. But, as a matter of fact, I think I told this story years ago. But after the Apple Watch was announced, and so it was public, I went to dinner or drinks or something with a friend of mine who was working on the Apple Watch.

1:05:02And so he was allowed to wear it out because it had already been announced or whatever. And he had his wrist or his hand on the table. And I was like, oh, wait, let me see that and let me touch it or whatever. I just wanted to see what it felt like. And he jerked his hand back. You can't do that. Oh, oh, okay, sorry. I wasn't trying to be any kind of way. I just didn't realize. And he was like flabbergasted that I would even make a motion to like just pet the outside of this like watch band to see what it felt like. It's like when I grabbed the mouse of the iMac Pro at WWC and got scolded by an Apple person.

1:05:34Yeah, yeah, yeah. A Mac that was out in the public in a place where people could see it, but like, oh, you can't touch it. Right, exactly. So, but to go back to what you were saying a moment ago, what I was starting to say, and then we got sidetracked, is that when I first heard this, yeah, it felt really gross to me. But then as I'm hearing more, and again, we don't know what the reality is, but if you're to believe what Apple is asserting, that this was a concerted effort, a kind of conspiracy, I think you said a moment ago, to get this information out of this device and out of this employee, I don't think I'm too upset about them going after Prosser.

1:06:04I feel bad for him, but FAFO, man, I kind of get it. I kind of get it. I don't know. Marco, where do you come down on this? We don't know enough of the specifics yet to judge for sure who's liable for what and who should be prosecuted for what or whatever. But in general, I think it's a very, very bad idea for companies to sue journalists. That's not a great idea most of the time. It is occasionally, you know, you can occasionally have, you know, good grounds for that. It is occasionally the right move or at least a valid move. It's a very dangerous move. And it's like they have to be you have to be really sure what you're doing.

1:06:46And and I think it can it can very easily have a chilling effect. Like where I stand on on what has probably happened here. I don't think there's anything wrong if somebody gives you information for you to report on it because look, we do that we don't have the kind of sources they do we don't have really salacious here's what the next version of nobody gives us that information and we don't ask for it but if people tell us stuff and we talk about it on the show, it's not that far from that. You can see a world in which if Apple sues John Prosser for this and wins, like if we talk about what John Prosser's videos had in them and we say, oh, look, John Prosser, this YouTuber, had this report that alleges these mock-ups of what the new iOS will look at, and we talk about it, are we putting ourselves in danger by talking about it?

1:07:43I think you've identified the line, which is in that scenario, we would have no participation in the extraction of this information from Apple. Like someone posted it on a web page and then we're just talking about what we saw on a public web page. Right. So we're fine there. Are we? Prosser would be fine if he just received this information and published it. But if he was conspiring with how to break into this guy's apartment when he's not there and look at his phone without serious consent, that has nothing to do with journalism. It has everything to do with like that's just forget about journalism.

1:08:12That's just a crime, period. like going and go into someone's apartment and messing with their stuff when they're not in there monitoring their locations and know when they're not there and then going and getting their stuff that's i mean again this is this is a civil suit not a criminal thing but you know depending on how they executed this plan it could actually be criminal proceeding or maybe they got let in by a roommate but even if they got let in by a roommate they're messing with other roommate stuff but like in a civil procedure like this looks like a a conspiracy to like they're participating in to get the information.

1:08:42If you're a journalist, you can't be planning how we're going to break into Apple's HQ and get the secrets out. You're not a journalist anymore when you do that. You're just, you know, it's just industrial espionage. You're just you're just a criminal. You're a spy. Yeah, that I mean, yeah, that so I do agree. Like there is an obvious difference between like if you are paying for the information, if you are hiring people to get things for you, like that is a different level of involvement. but we don't necessarily know if there's enough evidence that john prosser was at that level being accused of we'll find out in court whether they have evidence right so i don't know this like it's too soon to say i'm sure they had good reason to claim what they're claiming i hope they have good reason to claim what they're claiming because i did see some of the evidence that's like i can see this again be interesting court case because in one of the conversations i think prosser's uh or whoever he was talking with says well at least you'll have like plausible deniability because i did this without all your consent and and uh or no i i forget which way they were going but they discussed this very issue of like essentially is john prosser part of this like does he or are his hands clean and they had like a funny back and forth and like and a messages conversation that's in the the the evidence and and that's uh submitted as part of this case what idiots and because they're debating about it and there could be like laughing and joking and sarcasm like i wonder how it's going to play in court of like well we were just kidding about that but i do have plausible deniability and i didn't participate and yeah especially if like uh you know apple can flip one of the people around on prosser and they'll say yeah well you know get him to say that uh when he said that i totally believed he was serious and not being sarcastic like that's the tricky part about like jokes you know with with texts there's always the problem of like is my intention coming across in texas why people put emojis in and stuff and when it becomes a court exhibit trying to explain like imagine having to explain in court like texts that you sent people that could potentially be ambiguous depending on whether you're being sarcastic or funny or joking oh i don't want to be in that situation yeah not fun there was i think there was a 99 pi episode i'm not gonna be able to dig it up about like interpreting emoji in the context of legal agreements and stuff yeah fascinating and i don't remember the conclusions but it made me very uncomfortable because it's like when it's just when it's just a message thread who cares but like when this is potentially evidence of whether or not there was a crime committed and it hinges on whether you knew this thing or whatever and you make a joke about it and it's like but were you serious or was that like did you put if you write ha ha after it or a lull or a happy like which one of those things mean you're obviously kidding and which one of those things mean you're just excited about the fact that you participated in this crime like it's i would never want to have to argue that i would never want my fate to hinge on the interpretation of that you know what i mean but i'm sure there'll be more evidence that comes out oh thanks to the long form who immediately found the link for the 99 pi episode which is, it's not required listening by any means, but it's worth your time if you haven't heard it.

1:11:34The other thing I wanted to talk about is Gruber took a look at one of the documents that was in the legal release and it's saying, I'm not sure, this is an email, I'm not sure who to contact, but as a courtesy to the iOS 19 team at Apple, I wanted to share information that I have about an employee who leaked pre-release design details. The iOS 19 information shared by John Prosser is sourced from Ethan Lipnick, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they have some redacted names that Gruber has done what appears to be a crack job, a really bang-up job of filling in who he thinks these names are.

1:12:07So this is the aforementioned Ramessiotti, Ian Zalbo, Joe Rossignol, and Michael Burkhart are all listed potentially in the redacted sections of this note. Yeah. Joe Rossignol is from, what, MacRumors, right? Shoot. I should know this, and I'm drawing a blank. Yeah, I've seen his name a thousand times. Yeah, those other names that don't, those other names don't ring any bells for me, but obviously Gruber knows them. What he was doing about it, this looks like one of those things where someone failed to redact a PDF, like they just, you put a black box over the letters, but when you could select, you know what I mean?

1:12:37But that's not the case. I think they did correctly redact it. And what Gruber was doing was simply matching the font in size and then typing in letters in the same font in size, seeing what names would fit. Now, obviously there's tons of names that would fit in those spaces, but presumably Gruber knows that these names are actually relevant to this particular case and it's a you know a big coincidence if these are not the names that fit in there but we'll find out he also put a put a card down saying that he has a theory about who the tipster is like who who sent this email to apple and he did his usual thing where he puts an md5 hash of his prediction and we'll find out in the future if he was right do you think john grubber will be the last person to use md5 uh i don't know i use it constantly truly i'm not still works fine for this purpose like it annoys me that apple deprecated the apis on uh mac os because i use them as part of uh hyperspace i'm not using them for cryptographic purposes i'm using them for other purposes and i don't care that they're you know easily cracked or whatever it's not you know when you're not using them cryptographically i wish the way i could turn out that warning and say i know i'm not using it for cryptography it's fine do you think somebody's gonna like rainbow table attack john gruber's tweets about it seems to think it's harder because he does like a full sentence and not a word but yeah somebody someone with a big farm of gpus probably could crack this if they wanted but i don't think it's worthwhile we'll find out soon enough all right uh let's talk about some news from a couple of weeks ago now actually almost a month ago cloudflare has announced that in certain circumstances they will be blocking ai crawlers by default and so reading they have like a marketing page blog post about this and then they also have a news release from the blog post for nearly 30 years the deal that google made with content creators was simple let us copy your content for search and we'll send you traffic but search is now declining in favor of ai and ai doesn't reward content creators the way that search did instead of being a fair trade the web is being strip mined by ai crawlers with content creators seeing almost no traffic and therefore almost no value that changes today july 1 what we're calling content independence day cloudflare along with the majority of the world's leading publishers and AI companies is changing the default to block AI crawlers unless they pay creators for their content.

1:14:49That content is the fuel that powers AI engines. And so it's only fair that content creators are compensated directly for it. Yeah, I wanted to talk about this because this sounds like Cloudflare is being a hero and I'm sure they have their hearts in the right place. But both of those things you said are not my initial reaction to this, but continue. Yeah, because this kind of – this sat very badly with me. So the situation is that, yes, the kind of implicit deal between web search engines and kind of the ability to publicly crawl websites and publishers, that deal no longer holds in the world of AI.

1:15:33That is true, and that radically changes the dynamics of bots crawling websites. But the problem is that's going to radically change the dynamics of any ability for any software to automatically fetch the contents of a website. Now, you might think, oh, who cares? That's no big deal. But I can't think of any major app I've written that hasn't needed to do that. tumblr did that uh for its you know ill-advised rss importing feature um you know rss itself like is something on a website that is hosted by the website and if you proxy your website behind cloudflare that includes your rss feed um so rss readers you know will run into this problem uh if they if your site is too aggressively blocked from cloudflare um and podcast apps definitely do it Instapaper certainly needs to do it.

1:16:28But RSS readers and podcast clients wouldn't fall under the category of, quote, AI companies, right? Well, so here's the thing. When Cloudflare protects you from things online, they protect you from what they feel is bot traffic in whatever threshold they are or whatever heuristic they're running as like, this is suspicious or this might be an attack or this might be scraping all of your content. but what if you just have a bunch of people hitting your rss feed uh what if you what if there's like you know overcast servers for a while i had this problem where like overcast crawls millions of rss feeds every day from six ip addresses i ran into this problem a couple years ago where cloudflare was starting to throttle my requests but of course they wouldn't tell anybody you know they certainly they certainly wouldn't tell the website owners those owners wouldn't have any idea what was going on.

1:17:28And so for like a lot of the results would just be like, oh, Overcast just can't read these feeds that everyone else can read. And it took me months. They had some kind of like good bot registration program where you could like register to be a good bot and you could bypass some of these limitations. And it took months for me to get through that. Eventually, I was able to find the right people and eventually I got it through. but when people put their website behind cloudflare i don't think they necessarily understand all the technical ramifications of what they're doing and you know potentially blocking things like oh we have this rss feed or we have our podcast feed and we're going to block a whole bunch of apps from accessing accidentally i don't think they i don't think they intend for that necessarily or understand what they're doing with that so what's very very important are what cloud Flare does by default and how Cloud Flare brands what they do in the user interface.

1:18:27Because what happens a lot is, again, people will think they're going to, oh, I'll block attacks to my site. Sure. I'll make my CDN cost cheaper by putting this in front of it. Great. And they don't realize what they're doing is causing a lot of problems for smaller apps. And so when I first read this, it was kind of unclear. Fortunately, it was not as bad as I expected. It was kind of unclear. it seemed like they were turning on AI crawl blocking across their entire network by default. That is not the case. They're doing it only for newly registered domains. And they apparently it's going to be part of the onboarding flow where you are asked, do you want to block these or not?

1:19:08But it does. They're not retroactively changing it for their entire network, which is good because one thing they brag about in their press release is that cloudflare proxies 20 of the web okay so think about the amount of power they have and again i can tell you from from running an app that crawls a bunch of feeds from a bunch of websites cloudflare is everywhere we use it too we use it on atp.fm i use it for overcast like it's everywhere and the reason why i use it is not for attack throttling. It's because it's a really cheap CDN. It's a very, very cheap, and that's why a lot of people use it.

1:19:51Cloudflare has a lot of power on the web. And what they just did was show us that. And if they actually did go a very, very small step further and turn this on for all of the domains by default and not require an opt-in on all old ones, they would be able to cut off crawling for tons of different apps from 20 % of the web in one move. Now, the web works best when the power is not that concentrated. That was the whole point of the design of the web. If you accumulate a whole bunch of power over the web, the best thing you can do is shut up about it never draw attention to yourself or how much power you have and definitely never like overreach in a way that draws a lot of attention to the amount of power you have and you can look at you know some various events over the last few years that that show this you know even i would say this even possibly applies to apple's controversial c-sam scanning plan where it's like oh we're just gonna do this on all your phones What?

1:21:02You know, but you can also, you know, Apple certainly gets it with like any controversial app store rejections where it's like, oh, you can just declare an entire business won't exist. And it just won't. Like, that's a lot of power. Let's look at that. But, you know, and with the web, you can you can see like whatever it was last year, two years ago, when Google started invading pages that they have their login integration with by putting the huge overlays saying log in with your Google account, like right over the page. They just turn that on one day. Like there was there was no, you know, checking with people.

1:21:37There was no consideration that like you're literally just going to like turn your like little login embed into a giant thing that plasters over the page across thousands or millions of websites. Google just did that they just turned that on because they felt like it and they wanted to juice their numbers or whatever whatever justification they came up for it they just did that and that showed oh my god they have way too much power here oh you know you could also you know more recently I think obviously the WordPress drama with Matt Mullenweg and that whole thing like it's like oh he has a lot of power over a lot of the web maybe we should change that And you can even I would even look at like, you know, in the current political atmosphere, the U.S.

1:22:19has a lot of power over a lot of the Web and a lot of the infrastructure around the Web. And a lot of other countries have been like, hmm, we used to be able to trust that. Now we can't. Let's start, you know, reducing that power. Let's start diversifying and taking control of our own stuff. Cloudflare has that level of power now. I would say Cloudflare has a level of power similar to the United States in terms of power over the internet. It is a huge entity. It controls a huge amount of traffic. That makes me very uncomfortable. A small group of people now, a very small group of people, can now make decisions that can impact huge swaths of how the web and how the internet and how internet connected applications work.

1:23:06I really don't like that. And that makes me very uneasy. They shouldn't have as much power as they do. And they just showed us how they could wield it in ways that, you know, they're a giant stepping around and who knows what they're going to step on next. They came very close to stepping on something really big here. And they don't seem like they noticed or cared or thought it was that big or thought it could be a problem. And ultimately where we're heading with this, and this is not, you know, Cloudflare alone. and this is kind of a problem with the rise of AI and the destruction of the search trade-offs, as we were saying earlier.

1:23:41But where we're heading with this is the web used to be a place where anybody could really build anything or publish anything or build something that read things that were published and process them and different web apps to read RSS feeds and stuff like that or parse page content or whatever. We are heading to a point very rapidly now where that's going to be over. That's going to be shut down. You're going to have huge swaths of the web blocking crawling from anything. Google search index, maybe, but it could block crawling from any of the web apps you use. If you use something like IFTTT or Zapier or use some kind of automation, your own curl scripts on your Mac, not to mention, of course, things like RSS readers and podcast apps, but so many automations and automation apps and apps that parse data off a website to do something, make a widget or something.

1:24:32We're in an era now where those are all significantly at risk of not working anymore because everyone's going to start locking down their content and putting things like Cloudflare's JavaScript thing in front of it. And so it's going to be harder and harder to make anything that interoperates with any of the rest of the web. And what that's going to do is make it much harder for small projects and small companies and small developers to get their stuff off the ground and to have their stuff work. Because the big companies, they'll make deals. The big companies will be fine. Google will be fine.

1:25:05They will make deals with everybody. It'll work out fine for them. But people like us are at risk. And the tools that we use, the tools we make, the businesses we run, the apps that we make, the apps that we use, those are all at risk as these giants stomp all over the internet. And I really am feeling very uneasy about all of that. You know, it's funny. I've noticed in the last couple of weeks, so part of my Docker, I don't know, swarm, not in a literal sense. I think that's like a technical term in some context. But my array of Docker containers, one of them is this open source project, change detection.io.

1:25:40And I'll put a link in the show notes. I think I've talked about this once or twice recently. And what this lets you do is it will periodically go and look at some web page, you know, maybe because you're trying to get an alert for, I don't know, if the TS5 Plus is in stock at CalDigit's website, which is one of the times I most recently used this. And it'll ping that website every minute, every 10 minutes, every hour, every 10 hours, whatever you want, and send a little alert when it changes. And it even is smart in most cases with regard to stock. And it'll actually parse out and realize, oh, it's in stock and send me a little push using pushover or what have you.

1:26:15I love this thing and I use it for cases where a website doesn't have an RSS feed. And I've noticed in the last month or so, and I never put it together until I heard you talking, despite having read about this a few days ago. In the last month or so, I've been getting a lot of 403 errors on things that I crawl. And they're not critical. It's not the end of the earth. But like silly things that I'd like to know when they're updated, I'm getting 403s. And I was working on earlier today, actually, trying to find a way to get around that. And a lot of people have said that the cloud flare, like, oh, are you a robot?

1:26:47Yes or no? Like that checkbox that I guess occasionally will give you a capture, but I almost never see that, that that could be causing the problem. And there's some people that have developed some workarounds that seem to not really work, which from cloud players perspective is great. But for me, it's just a little, you know, dorky home labber. That sucks. Like I want to be able to very gingerly and lightly crawl these things. And apparently they can detect that a headless instance of Chrome is going after these things and they deny me. And that stinks. Is it a big deal in my personal case? No, it's nothing like what Marco was talking about.

1:27:20But it still sucks, man. And I kind of hate it. And maybe this isn't the same thing. Maybe I'm conflating two very, very different events. It's exactly the same thing, just a smaller scale. And that just shows the problems that Cloudflare creates by having so much power over so much of the web. Like when I was first running into the problems crawling podcast feeds, I would email some of the big publishers and be like, hey, just so you know, Overcast can't crawl your site because of what you're saying. I would go to this settings. And the settings you'd have to go to would basically be like turn off all protection.

1:27:53Like it was all scary and nobody would ever do it. And thank God I was able to get registered as like an OK bot. But again, it took me months. And maybe I was only able to do it because I was so, you know, bothersome to Cloudflare's people. and maybe because I already had an app that had a good number of users. If I was just a nobody starting fresh today, could I do that? Probably not. I fear that the era of the web is just collapsing in so many ways. It felt like it would be forever. It felt like it would be our entire lives where the web would be a healthy functioning place the way we always knew it.

1:28:26And I think it's very much not already in lots of ways and it's just going to keep getting locked down more and more. The last thing the web needs right now is to be made worse. The web is struggling in a lot of ways. Content on the web is struggling. Economics on the web are struggling, again, largely because of AI, but also because social networks and different pressures and different competition from video and stuff like that. There's a lot going on. The only thing worse than publishing on the web right now is reading on the web. It's really quite terrible on so many levels. But the advantage of the web is that it is much more interconnectable.

1:29:05You can build upon it in ways that you can't build upon the app platforms nearly as openly or nearly as flexibly. You can build things like browser plugins that will interact with other people's web pages. There's different things. You can have servers backends and crawl people's APIs and process them like you were just saying. There's ways you can build things on the web that are simply impossible to do in the world of native apps, especially on phones. They're so locked down and isolated. And that is getting eroded. And when you look at what Cloudflare can do now, what they are already doing with their little bot redirects like you were just saying, and then now when they do something like start blocking AI crawlers by default, that's dangerous.

1:29:52That can really start stomping on lots of things. That's why we're here on the web. We're here – like the reason we do things on the web instead of in native apps is to have that kind of reach and flexibility and power. And if that starts getting locked down where you have to be a big company negotiating with everybody to get your stuff to work at all with anybody else's stuff, the web is dead. That's killing what the web is. So I really am fearful for the web. And I find myself mourning what we have lost and hoping that we can somehow preserve what's left and maybe get some of that back. But I don't yet see a path forward to do that.

1:30:32you should probably be more scared of google than cloudflare but the good thing about all of this is that because the web is the platform that nobody owns even google technically um they will they don't think that there is an avenue to uh like essentially like if if uh if the currently somewhat benevolent somewhat dictators like the big companies like cloudflare for example like they're they're big enough that they can cause a big problem if they start causing a big problem and like the big companies need to make deals with them or whatever it is actually technically possible for to it's kind of like what you were saying with like the eu and everybody doing when they're seeing that apple is no longer that the u.s is no longer a trustworthy actor uh you have the ability to go off and splinter and say okay but we over here are going to do our thing based on these same technologies um obviously there are things that big companies that can do to thwart that in particular if you control let's say the world's most popular web browser or the world's most popular search engine.

1:31:29There's a lot of things you can do to thwart that. But technically speaking, we do have a little bit of an out there. And it is a somewhat competitive market. Cloudflare is not the only company that does what it does. So if it does something bad, in theory, its competitors could take advantage of it and yada yada. But anyway, all that said, when I saw this story briefly go by, immediately what I thought of is, you know, Cloudflare saying that they're going to, you know, they're presenting this as we are we're a tool that empowers people with websites to do things they couldn't do on their own like withstand a ddos attack and deal with bots and stuff like that and we're saying here creators who are on the web we're giving you this new tool we have heard that some of you don't like these ai crawlers taking your stuff and using it for their training and it's difficult for you to figure out how to stop that because it's not like things on the web uh have a trustworthy way to identify themselves that's what you're getting at before it's like you can say in these things we'll block ai crawlers but what does that even mean right it's not the type of thing that an individual small web developer has any chance of being able to to do how do i stop web ai crawlers well you can't it's a really hard problem and cloudflare is this big powerful company with tons of money let them take a crack at it you already pay them for your cdn or whatever here's a checkbox you can check we'll block ai crawlers and this is a tool that you the web you know the website owner you are empowered to do this for your website if you choose to and we're giving you that tool and this is the relationship you want we're being a good company by empowering creators and i looked at it as saying what you're doing cloudflare is constructing a situation such that if uh that you are the middle party that gets paid to allow ai crawlers to access websites you know what i mean that's what you basically what you were saying margo is like okay if people enter into the situation and check the checkbox what they're checking is saying i now allow cloudflare to decide what is a what is and isn't a legitimate crawl that's always what they're doing but you assume that cloudflare is benevolent and is actually deciding what is and isn't legitimate crawler according to your understanding of that checkbox so they'll block the ai crawlers oh but what if open ai says hey we'll make a deal with you cloudflare and we'll pay you a whole jillion dollars if you put us on the allow list and so now we're not counted as one of those bad ai crawlers i mean that's obviously the very first thing that will happen yeah like but like their cloud wouldn't it be great if instead of uh ai companies getting to crawl all that content for free instead they all had to pay cloudflare and yeah that'd be great anyway uh this so this is like the worst case type of scenario right we're presuming that cloudflare wouldn't do this because part of their whole reputation and value proposition is that they are the defenders of the open web and all the things that you were talking about, Marco, or whatever, but it's always dangerous to be in a situation where you're relying on the good graces of a very powerful company.

1:34:22We talk about that all the time with Apple and podcasts. If Apple turned bad on podcasts, they could do tons of damage. So far, so good. They haven't, fingers crossed. But that's a terrible situation to be in. Don't rely on the kindness of giant companies with huge amounts of power. And I think the current leadership of Cloud Vlair probably has good intentions with this, like most of the things they do as evidenced by how they're rolling it out. But you're one bad CEO away from all of this turning in a second, which is why structurally it's a bad place to be. Even if reality-wise you could say, oh, it's fine, everybody's doing the right thing, this is actually a good move or whatever.

1:35:00But I don't want to be one bad CEO away from 20 % of the web getting a man in the middle, collecting money in exchange for allowing AI crawl. Like, it's just, it's not a good situation. So again, I have some, I take some solace in the fact that the technologies involved in the web and the way that those technologies evolve and already exist allows for some routing around of this. and it does require for a real doomsday scenario would require multiple ones of these big companies to sort of cooperate in a sort of pact of evil where google agrees to change chrome in a certain way and cloudflare agrees to do this and so on and so forth and historically those big companies have been more at odds at each other than willing to do that so i think the web in the end will probably be okay just because as it gets damaged and changes and morphs over time it still finds away like weeds in your yard to just find a new place to grow but i would feel much more comfortable if we had a little bit more diversity than we do now and you know how how much how big is too big is 20 20 of the web too big what is what is wordpress what percentage of websites in the web run wordpress it's some other big number like 45 or something yeah that's probably that's probably also too big or at least too big to have any single person be able to influence that 40 in the way that we had seen it was possible right and and again i'm heartened by the reaction to that which is like everyone's like we don't want this to ever happen again so let's start figuring out how we can remove this single point single point of failure single point of control can we we don't want that to be the case and again with cloudflare if they start sort of turning the screws or trying to turn on the money faucet i would hope the reaction of everybody would be similar so i i i have a lot of you know i spent my entire career as a web developer i have a lot of faith in the resilience of the web just because i've seen how it has gone in cycles from being screwed up and then coming back and being screwed up and then coming back but yeah when i see structures like this and you know like you said marco like this brings attention to it it was always the case this is not like this is news we've known cloud flare is big but as long as they're just sitting there and not doing anything you don't think about it too much but when they do stuff like this everyone's head comes up like little prairie dogs huh because they're like again with apple podcast i hope i hope i didn't ever do anything to make us think they're going to do something bad but it would be better if this much power wasn't concentrated in this few people i think this is a general uh lesson of history and humanity don't concentrate too much power in the hands of too few people that never goes well even if it looks like it's going well for decades or centuries it always ends badly and it is better to more widely distribute that power let's say.

1:37:48All right. Thank you to our sponsors, Squarespace and Delete Me. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic, plus all the other member exclusive and bonus content we do over the rest of the year. Overtime is every episode. You get a bonus topic every episode. This week on Overtime, we're talking about is copying Apple hardware a good idea in the context of some new pro display xdr options so we're going to talk about that in overtime you will hear that if you join atb.fm join thank you so much everybody i'm gonna talk to you next week now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental Oh, it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM And if you're into Mastodon You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O, A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.

1:39:16It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long. All right. So we have in the internal show notes the following for an after show. marco solved sunscreen i know i know what it is you do hats european sunscreen that has that chemical we're not allowed to use i just bought a new so i just bought a new sun hat so it's top of mind for me oh anyway before you go any further please send me the link for that partially because i am interested in it for myself you want to link to the hat i bought yes partially because i'm interested in getting a sun hat but mostly because the entire internet will ask for that me being me i bought two of them um because i didn't know which one i would like better uh but anyway i'll I'll send you them both.

1:40:01Yes. Oh, my God. Okay. No, Casey wins. All right. All right. So I, for a long time, have had a huge amount of trouble trying to get a sunscreen that doesn't burn my eyes. Now, you might think, why don't you just not put sunscreen in your eyes? That's spoken like someone who has never been to the beach. Right. And I thought, great idea. And so I have been so diligent, you know, trying to try not to like, you know, wipe my arm on my face or things like that, you know, tried like, you know, wiping with handkerchiefs. Have you tried not sweating, Marco? Right. Yeah. The problem is, you know, sweat and gravity.

1:40:44So I've just had a problem for years that like sunscreen just always finds a way to burn my eyes, even if I don't even even if I don't even have it on my face, like even if it's just like on my like ears and neck and stuff. Somehow, if I make one little mistake, if I touch something, I touch somehow a little bit and then my eyes are burning for hours afterwards. First, I mean, first I was like, OK, mineral sunscreen was the obvious solution. You know, the way sunscreens work is they either have chemicals that absorb into your skin that themselves absorb UV rays so that they don't burn you. Those are called chemical sunscreens.

1:41:22Mineral sunscreens basically are lotions that contain very fine metallic particles, usually zinc or titanium dioxide. And they basically reflect the sun off your skin as like a physical barrier that literally just reflects it off. They both have ups and downs. The main downside of mineral sunscreens, which is what I've been using more recently, is first of all, because it's just putting metallic powder on you, it has to kind of stay a little bit goopy forever because like otherwise the powder would just fall off of you so you kind of are like a little bit like tacky all day long if you have it like on your arms and you lean your elbow on a desk you slide off like it's that good that does not sound enjoyable don't forget about leaving that sunscreen all over the interior of your car like your arm rests it's terrible yeah so any yeah anything you touch like if you i made i made the mistake of putting sunscreen on my arms and neck and stuff, mineral sunscreen, and then a few minutes later putting a shirt on.

1:42:24Of course, it gets all over the shirt in the process of putting the shirt on. It's like, okay, that shirt's ruined. Next. And yeah, certainly if you go into your car and you put your arm on the armrest in the car, you're going to have a big stripe of white goop. And here's the thing just for people thinking about this. I know a lot of people put this on their small children. If you put this stuff, put physically, physical sunscreen, like physically block sun if you put this on your children and let them loosen the back seat of your car you will never get it clean like it is really hard to get i'm telling you from experience it's really hard to get this off of like the interior like the door cards i don't feel like that the the stuff that's on the door that plastic material even if you don't have a fancy car you just have a cheap car and it's plastic you think oh anything comes off plastic real easy not this stuff it's a problem.

1:43:12Oh, and also, Mineral Sunscreen, you know, it doesn't burn my eyes, but because it is a bunch of metallic powder, it does occasionally just get in my eyes, and then it feels like you have dust in your eyes. It's also not great. It is, there are advantages, like it is like reef safe, if you are swimming somewhere that requires reef safe sunscreen, like most of Australia. There's a reason why it's out there, and it's good for that, but like, it's a pretty big set of trade-offs. People who don't go to the beach a lot, the one place you may have seen this in pop culture is if you ever see something on tv or movies and they show a lifeguard with a big white stripe down their nose that is the most extreme case of physically blocking sun from getting into your nose by putting an opaque white substance obviously you're not entirely covering your body like you're a french mime or something with white stuff but like that's that's the extreme case of this and seeing what little kids with the stuff on their body do to the back seat you would think their entire body was like the strip you see on the nose of a lifeguard yeah and and they are i mean to be clear like you you do get very white with mineral sunscreen like because it is just coating you with white dust and there are there are tinted ones that like a lot of they're mostly used if you're going to be putting if you're trying to like use it as like a foundation on your face you're going to be putting makeup over it they they have like skin tone tinted mineral sunscreens that are come in various shades of brown and tan and stuff um but it's they all have the same trade-offs of like you're leaving dust all over everything it's not great and i was thinking like when i was a kid i had sunscreen all the time in the summer and i never remember it burning my eyes like what what was different back then maybe it was just mayonnaise wow you are from ohio i mean little kids you know their son is young their cells reproduce quickly i spent every summer in new york anyway um which casey knows uh yep well then you should have been covering yourself with mosquito repellent i mean we were also doing that to be to be clear um you know what the best sunscreen in the world is crisco because when you start sizzle you move your ass lewis black for you so what happened is in the late 90s we started getting chemicals to do full spectrum blocking because the original chemicals when we were growing up in like you know the 90s and 80s those chemicals didn't block uva they only blocked uvb and once we learn that uva was also bad and worth blocking um you know we had to develop new chemicals and the only chemical in the u.s that is authorized by the fda to block uva and uvb is avobenzone sunscreens when we were kids didn't contain this well avobenzone is now in every u.s chemical sunscreen the only sunscreens in the u.s that don't contain it are the all mineral ones so avobenzone is very effective at blocking uva and ubb but is known to cause severe eye irritation in lots of people hmm and so sure and i this is why i went through every i i must have especially at the beach house i have 10 different brands of sunscreens trying just as i've tried to find that when you were doing this you didn't like i figured like your first youtube search would have thrown like korean sunscreen in your face like that didn't come up in your searches when you're buying 10 US only sunscreens?

1:46:28Well, I didn't realize there was a difference. But like, did you Google for it once? Like I can, I'm getting, I'm constantly getting the, anyway, maybe my algorithm is different than yours, but I don't even have an interest in these things that I have literally watched. Anyway, go on. I'm surprised that you were able to find and purchase 10 US sunscreens without having non-US sunscreens thrown in your face by every algorithm on the entire internet. Yeah, I mean, well, because most of where I was looking was stores and Amazon. However, the second I involved ChatGPT. You know, you could just use Google and you would have the same thing.

1:47:07Or YouTube. Yeah, but it would have taken a lot longer. No, you could have just written sunscreen, eyes thing. As soon as I involved ChatGPT, I very quickly found out, oh, here, like I basically said something like, you know, my eyes burn with sunscreen. What should I do? You know, what are my options? and it gave me the whole readout of all the different chemicals and what they do and why they're there and what are the trade-offs and I said, oh, and by the way, other countries, including countries with very strong regulatory agencies like the EU and Japan, I know the EU's not a country, forgive me, like EU and Japan, like, oh, they have strong regulatory agencies and they allow more chemicals than the US does.

1:47:44Apparently, the process of getting them approved in the US for sunscreen is apparently onerous and burdensome and terrible and so nobody can really get new ones approved. But other countries have solved this problem with newer chemicals that have chemical sunscreen and therefore none of the downsides of mineral sunscreens, but chemicals that just don't sting your eyes. And so I'm like, okay, well, how do I acquire chemicals? Obviously Amazon doesn't have them. I'm like, well, if only there were some kind of electronic bay that would include things from other countries. Are you sure Amazon doesn't have them?

1:48:21I can imagine you could find it. Oh, I've looked. They probably do. I mean, maybe. Although whether you get that or a thing full of Crisco is up in the air. Like the AirPods. Right. And B &A does not sell international sunscreen, unfortunately. But I went on eBay and I found a couple of recommendations from my glorious chat GPT research. Yes, John, that's right. And I got two recommendations or I got three different options delivered over the last week. and I've been using them every day, like different, like, oh, I'll try option A on my legs, option B on my arms, you know, that kind of, and like doing all these tests.

1:48:56I've had zero irritation, none. It's like, it's night and day difference to the point where now I'm actually like wearing sunscreen more, which I, you know, most of us really should. I'm wearing sunscreen more now because all of those downsides are gone. And I also thought like, you know, if I'm going to be ordering like sunscreen from, you know, the EU or Japan or something like it's going to take weeks to get here or whatever. Nope. There are like U.S. sellers on eBay that have huge stocks of these. It says, you know, more than 10 available like that, you know, that kind of eBay seller. You can just buy like four of them if you want.

1:49:34Who cares? Like, you know, I have solved it. The U.S. I assumed we would have the same option. everyone else i was so wrong and i will put in the show notes the link to the my two favorite ones uh one of them is forgive me la roche posse uh it's like this fancy french i think brand um they have one the uvmune 400 and that one is fragrance free which is nice it's expensive though because these are european so they're tiny and expensive and then my my overall favorite is skin aqua super moisture uv gel from japan uh i'll put them both in the show notes that runs about 20 bucks a bottle like and it's it's totally fine like it just works 20 bucks a bottle a little steep yeah but okay it's japanese sunscreen i'm importing through an ebay seller like give me a break i got some japanese toothpaste that way to try it i wasn't a fan um i'll put a link in the show notes to uh one of the things that i just pulled out of my youtube history about australian sunscreen which also has lots of uh as with all these things for the many years that they've been bouncing around like you'll see tiktoks about them everything it's always like the sunscreen that they don't want you to know about and this youtuber is taking advantage of the same fed or whatever but actually goes into a little bit of detail and did kind of a unscientific personal test with different kinds but they do go into the most of the things you just described about the uva versus uvb and reef safe and spf levels and uh all the all the myths and the realities of like because what you'll see very often is like in australia you know they have the real sunscreen that works better this isn't so much about ice thinking it's about like oh a u.s sunscreen isn't actually blocking the sun but because australia there's so much sun they have much better sunscreen than we have and we can't get the good australian sunscreen here and anyway this is a pretty good video it's is that just blue lizard it's a it's a long video about it but it includes lots of details and part of it is what you said like the reg our regulations are crappy it's the same reason we couldn't have matrix uh led headlights for so long although that's finally changing like we're we're not great at uh regulations and those things but part of it is also that there are actually different trade-offs with the type of chemicals they use in every country it has their own has their own thing that they're super paranoid about and their own things that they don't care about um and then i would say that on this whole topic of like buying it's not a health care product but like buying anything that's going to be like rubbed onto your skin from like ebay or a sketchy amazon seller or whatever there's always some inherent risk there i mean there's risk buying you know american sunscreen as well but like i don't it it depends on how much you care about the eye stinging versus wearing a hat versus not going outside versus all those other things so i and of course 20 a bottle is also a bit of a deterrent so um this obviously what we should have here like with the matrix led headlights is we should change our regulations to allow these things in the u.s and solve this problem because i'm sure u.s manufacturers would love to sell us a new kind of sunscreen that they can advertise as not stinging your eyes because they all would advertise that and presumably they would sell it for less than$20 a bottle but in the meantime uh if you're desperate lots of other countries have it you can find it in various places did you check canada that might be easier than getting it from japan like maybe uh you can find some uh way to get it from canada through somewhat shady means that will cost you less money than$20 a bottle well i mean obviously like well at first i was just buying on an ebay just to try it out.

1:52:58But I was like, I didn't, it wasn't that big of a deal because these are coming from, like the Japanese one came from Long Island. The French one came from Columbus, Ohio, where I'm from. So it's like, it arrived in like two days. Like, so it wasn't, it's not really a hassle to buy it. You know, when you think about eBay, like, yeah, eBay has, you know, randos like me occasionally selling some weird thing. But like most sellers on eBay now are like professional sellers. Like it's, it's not that different from Amazon, really. like amazon is a collection of a whole bunch of third-party sellers so is ebay and it's many of the same people so it's not like ebay has grown a lot from where it started and it's now just kind of a general purpose shopping site in addition to auctions did any of your sunscreen smell like cigarettes no it's super professional like everything my main fear with ebay is that everything behind ebay will smell like cigarettes i've been having good luck i've been buying lots of mice to try to deal with my mouse situation uh none of them smell like cigarettes so far so i'm doing good yeah cigarettes are cats that's how i see the other one yeah one of i avoided one of them because it has some minor yellowing i'm like i know what that is yeah but yeah honestly i could say like getting it like you're you're right obviously there are risks with buying stuff from you know unknown sources but like is healthy center 84 on ebay that much less credible than whatever the hell goes into amazon's warehouses like i don't know i don't i don't think it's that different to be honest you know when you look at the overall risk profile of like i have not been wearing sunscreen most days even in the summer even when it's bright outside i was gonna say that when you said oh when we were growing up in the 80s and 90s this is the sunscreen we use well we grew up in the 70s the sunscreen we use was none right but like you know like the copper tone that i grew up using like it was not it was not using alva benzone it was using whatever you know weird chemicals came before that and they might have had downsides but they didn't burn my eyes so I would use sunscreen.

1:54:51Whereas in the modern era, I almost never wear sunscreen because I hate it so much because it's either I burn my eyes or I cover everything in dust and feel goopy all day and I can't even cross my legs because they slide apart. There's so many trade-offs with Mineral and everything else. So if it makes a difference whether you're going to wear sunscreen or not, then you're also greatly reducing a lot of risks on that end. So I'm choosing to take the risk of Healthy Center 84 on eBay instead of you know skin cancer i'm interested in your idea that it doesn't sting some people's eyes doesn't that a chemical sting all human eyes like is there some person out there who's like no it doesn't bother my eyes at all like if it bothered everyone else as much as it bothered me i don't know why anybody would ever wear sunscreen i mean it's like the the soap tasting cilantro thing or whether it's true or myth or whatever like i honestly i can't imagine sunscreen with this chemical going into someone's eye and them not noticing it but maybe you know everyone thinks their own experience is the same like i yeah i i am very familiar with the ice thing of which you speak uh and uh yeah if you want to avoid it uh be very diligent about uh not sweating through your eyebrows and reapplying rewashing and reapplying or uh wear a hat on your head and sunscreen everywhere else or yeah find some uh ebay sunscreen even the diligence isn't always enough because these chemicals migrate they actually like they can move across your skin like it's you you just can't have it anywhere near your face like that's why it's just oh my god the rest of the rest of the world has a soft like the answer is not of a benzo that's that's the answer my my eyebrow mopping usually works for me