TWiT 1063: The Year's End - Top Stories of 2025

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32:29Ant Pruitt:At home. Yeah. You want privacy from your own provider. And shamefully, just as Carl Bodewich says, it's completely legal for them to do that. It's encouraged, practically. It's in the fine print. And I assume turning on all the privacy settings they have in there doesn't change that. No. Yeah, of course. Why would it? life finds a way spying finds a way advertising advertising finds honestly i just give up i mean we are so invaded i mean privacy is is has been dead for a while but this was 2025 was the year privacy died a second death and a third death and a fourth death and get ready because uh as we talked about uh this is from the atlantic and i think it's accurate a new era of internet regulation is about to begin well and consider that all over australia um young adults and children are now having to stare into their iphone's camera to have a third-party service look at their face in an attempt to determine whether they are 16 years and older or under well not just kids everybody right yeah because you have to show you're not a kid you have to show that you're not a kid exactly so uh i think this is one of the stories that's been developing all year long but it's really as we get to the end of the year we were worried at the beginning of the year i think more about things like chat control about governments remember this was the year that the uk government said to apple you can't have strong encryption on on anything not just uk citizens but we want to be able to read what's going on in the u.s as well uh we thought that encryption was going to be the real uh technology that was going to be under attack this year it turns out i mean i'm sure they'll get around to it apple by the way won that battle by saying okay in that case we're going to turn off end-to-end encryption adp uh advanced data protection for uk citizens and then our own government got involved saying wait a minute we have deals with the uk that they won't spy on our citizens and we won't spy on their citizens this violates that deal the government the uk government backed down on on that anyway um nevertheless they uh they are now for instance requiring age verification if you want to watch porn in the uk you have to do an age verification selfie this happened and it's not just for straight porn sites it's for a yeah what is porn is the problem i would say these rules end up impacting a really broad swath of content that has far-reaching effects for, you know, for instance, children's ability to access, let's say, like, queer or gender-questioning type content that might inadvertently in the way that, say, like a platform like Reddit moderates, they might have tagged some of those subreddit as not safe for work because they deal with issues of sexuality, which then could mean that those kids can't access community resources without being or proving that they're 18.

35:44Ant Pruitt:The law, which was passed in the UK in July, also makes it illegal for websites to promote VPNs. Wow. They can't mention that. Although when we saw that law go into effect, sales of VPNs doubled and tripled overnight in the UK. So somebody figured that out. But yeah, as you say, it could be Reddit. It could be Blue Sky. Blue Sky left the state of Mississippi for that reason. They said, we don't want to have to require everybody in Mississippi to verify their age. They also just couldn't technologically do it with the amount of resources Blue Sky has right now, which is not much. Easiest thing to do, just say, well, your IP address says you're in the state of Mississippi, so no Blue Sky for you.

36:29I think the problem is that technology can do, today's technology can do whatever it is we ask of it. And for a long time, it was giving us an unprecedented level of privacy that we'd never had before. Because, as I said before, our governments really hadn't caught up to what, I mean, they didn't understand what it was. They didn't understand how it worked. And also, the internet, remember that in the beginning, it was like, well, who's going to use that? You know, it's like, you know, I mean, it was a it was a big mystery. And for a long time, it was just email and AOL. But the bottom line is it can do anything we want it to.

37:11And so the question now is, well, what is that? What do citizens and the hopefully democratically elected government representatives decide that everyone wants? and again technology is just our our servant so what do we want yeah the australian government is

37:34Ant Pruitt:saying in fact i think you had this on the show on tuesday steve oh no we're doing what everybody in australia wanted us to do and the kids are happy there are there yes there have been a lot of stories of of kids who feel like they no longer need to participate whereas before there was social pressure for them to participate in social media. Many have expressed relief that they stared into the camera and it said, no, you're 12. And when they're actually 16. I wish you would do that for me. Leo, you're too young to be honest. And interestingly, there were parents who were disturbed that their children were allowed to continue using social media because they don't they don't have the parental strength to say no to their child they were hoping someone else would say no on their behalf so that they could remain their child's best friend right and it's like but as a result everybody in australia now has to have age verification and of course the cautionary tale on this is a discord which uh implemented age verification for some accounts uh i've never experienced it, but some people have.

38:47Ant Pruitt:And this was a while ago. And now the ID photos of 70 ,000 users of Discord has been apparently leaked. So you can require this, but there's no protection. That's the problem. And I think the thing that comes with the there's no protection is because of the way that it's so haphazardly done and implemented. You have these companies that just spin up some new portion of their company that's doing ID verification. And then a company that can't or a service that can't afford to or decides that they can't afford to do it internally, look externally for some service, they find one, and then it may not be as good as it was.

39:29And it's not going to get battle tested, right? Because there's no time. We've got to get this done or else we're going to get lawsuits. And that's exactly what happened in this court's

39:36Ant Pruitt:case. It wasn't their technology. They hired a third party to do it. And the third party got hacked surprise surprise yeah at the same time i'm curious to hear uh steve your take on as things are right now um would you rather a battle tested battle tested third-party company by that i mean a company that has history of protecting people's privacy etc etc etc doing it when i say this like you have to choose one or the other obviously it doesn't have to happen but age verification from a third party that has put its money where its mouth is or age verification by your government which do you think is more privacy protecting for the end user as things are the the one of the points i made last week on the podcast the thing that really upset me most is that age facial age verification is so bad that i mean it's what essentially happened is all these facial aid estimation right yeah yes exactly they they um thank thank you they they subcontracted with third parties where a 13 year old could scrunch up his face and looks like an old man and gets in and 18 year olds who happen to look youthful are denied access so not only is it not good but it's not fair and so so so here you have something that matters a lot to a to a segment of the population which is capricious you know you know it's just a sort of a coin toss yeah so parents last year you did a story on this about a company called yachty right yeah i did a story last year on yodi which is one of the i think still to this day one of the biggest players in facial age estimation uh they at the time were working they were powering the tools behind Instagram, TikTok, other companies.

41:36And I do think this is an example of kind of what Micah was talking about, where it really depends on the specific company, what work they are doing with their systems, how they are designing them. And

41:56publicly, and the CEO had said to me, is they are really trying to think of all these things. They do constant checks to make sure that people can't easily game the system by scrunching up their face or putting on makeup or wearing prosthetics. But the same issue still goes with what Steve was saying in the sense that the place where the system kind of breaks down is right around the cut, like 18 year olds. Because 18-year-olds could look a little young, they could look a little old, and so they know basically that their system is not going to be really accurate with saying, is this person for sure 18?

42:33Yes or no? Instead, they kind of add a buffer around it where basically what they try to say is, do we think with reasonable certainty that this person seems above 20? um and if they say no it's not like you're banned from the website but they say we can't use facial age estimation here you need to upload an id which then in uh introduces all these other kind of vectors for privacy risks steve to answer you propose a solution in the past yeah steve well okay so to answer micah's question which is about that of all the companies engaged i would trust Apple to be a proxy. And so I think that, so certainly our individual governments know our physical age, right?

43:22I mean, we have birth certificates, we have driver's licenses, we have social security numbers in this country. So it's not that our government doesn't know our age, but we would like to have our government not know what we're doing. So what we need is a trusted proxy, a proxy that can insulate our use of this service from the provider of the information that the service is based on. And so that's why I think Apple makes such a perfect case. they've you know they're selling um marketing themselves as a an extremely cautious privacy preserving service and so of all the existing services i would trust apple but it would have

44:14Ant Pruitt:to be more than just apple i mean you could do it on your iphone you have to trust google too right or some Microsoft you'd have to I think we need we need a a proxy who who we trust to insulate us from the entity from which it gets our our age information and and very much like ExpressVPN that runs a server in RAM so that it went when you break the connection it's all lost You want somebody who is not retaining records of its use. You know, the example of the 70 ,000 images that Discord's third-party provider lost control of, sites are being breached all the time. it's difficult to to justify anyone keeping a record unless they need to defend their decision in the future about why they let somebody pass through their system you want them to make the decision and then lose all knowledge of of them having done so to protect your privacy could contact testing and the work that we saw google apple and the government do together with that privacy, protecting contact tracking during the pandemic be a framework for something like this?

45:37Yeah, that's a good point. There was a huge amount of focus invested in privacy preservation through that system. You're right. So I guess my point is, none of this is hard. We have the technology to do this. We need to have the will. And the EU is talking about a digital identity throughout the EU that they're saying would be privacy preserving. Many states in the U.S. have digital driver's licenses now. You're able to load them into Android or into Apple, and it's able to make an age assertion, which is currently using a system called TrueAge, which is subject to subpoena. i sort of wonder though if i mean i don't i don't want to go anywhere that that i have a problem with having gone there being subject to subpoena um i think that they're they're trying to say that they don't want it used for criminal purposes but you know again our governments are really pushing back against absolute privacy.

46:54We've enjoyed it for decades now. We're spoiled and the technology could provide it to us, but governments are saying, you know, we want to, we need to have some grip on our own citizenry. That's so interesting that you define it as absolute privacy because is it, it's absolute privacy and the asterisk is from the government because lots of private companies have had our data for a long time so we don't have privacy against them right well and and interestingly i'm in the process of preparing tuesday's podcast and one of our listeners made what such a good point about this he said okay so you get absolute privacy in age assurance now you're logged on to a website which is full of tracking scripts and ads which are tracking you And all the other crap that we already have, which is which completely blows your privacy.

47:51So what if you're you have like absolute private age assurance, you're still going to be tracked as soon as you get onto the site. And I thought, well, that's a really good point.

48:02Ant Pruitt:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, maybe privacy is just something we aren't going to have. And I think I understand why people are more worried about the government than they are about marketers. I mean, I think there's also this concern that if one of these systems were to go in place and it wasn't run by some third party agency that is anonymizing the sort of data, that then there would be a very easily accessible registry of every website you visited that you needed to have an age verification check for, which for many people would end up being a lot of things they wouldn't like to think that anybody has.

48:41much less has them all together in one list good point i think that even if it was outside of the government's hands if it was some other company to do something with people wouldn't feel great about that even though that tracking data does already exist it's just not tied to your id i

48:56Ant Pruitt:don't think it's just our audience i think the american public has pretty clearly said we want privacy certainly our audience more than yeah anybody but i think that there is a widespread desire for privacy. I actually do feel like I've seen that as well. Anecdotally speaking, I can remember almost within perhaps a two-year period, a switch that I felt in people that I talked to who don't have anything to do with tech, who suddenly were more aware of the different ways they were being tracked, were suddenly going no on all of those little permissions where you normally hit allow. And anytime something pops up and says, can I look at all the Bluetooth stuff in your home or the, you know, Chrome pops up and asks, can I see all the devices on your local network?

49:41And I see don't allow happening again, anecdotally, but still across the board more than I ever have. And I'm going, that's pretty good to see. I'm curious, what is the age demographic of the people who you see this in, Micah? I'll quickly answer that. And I'd love to hear to what you were saying, Steve. For me, it's people younger than me. Do I want to say? I am over 30. I just turned a new age of 30 on Friday. What? Happy birthday, Micah. Happy birthday. I thought, big one. I meant to say that. Yes. And so there's no privacy for you, Micah. Sorry. That's true. Exactly. The people that are younger than me, I'm talking like my siblings.

50:24So that's anywhere from now 21 is my youngest sibling up to 26 or 27. and then people older than me as well. But across the board, yeah, I guess I've seen that demographic across the board. What were you going to say, Steve? I was going to say, and I think this is the key, you cannot be afraid of what you don't see or what you don't know. And if you don't have, if there isn't some visible demonstration of lack of privacy, then you're not worried about it. I mean, famously, cookies were this way in the beginning, right? We've had cookies forever. And because it wasn't obvious that a cookie was being planted on your browser that allowed you to be tracked from one site to the next as you moved by advertisers, people weren't worried about it because they didn't know.

51:20They didn't see it. And so I think what you guys are talking about is that there's this increasing level of awareness that where we go and what we do on the Internet, somebody's watching. And, you know, Apple famously made a revision to iOS that began to ask people, do you want this application to continue to be able to track you as you move around?

51:47Ant Pruitt:and everyone said no it was when given more than 90 percent turned off yes app tracking yeah when given a choice no thank you right but that's a good point if you're given a choice and you most of the time you are not given it right hi this is benito there's also the fact that people are willing to give up all right like their privacy for free stuff and that always that's really that's really the bottom line right yeah good point yeah or camel camel camel there's so many tools out there even just your Safeway yeah the gas station the card yes you use that and the loyalty card just try well yeah why are they giving you a discount because then they know everything you bought well and and all of the login with Google login with Facebook yes they're a proxy that knows exactly where you're logging in and that's also a convenience that's another thing that like people will right willingly give up their privacy for us can be convenience and the Mm-hmm.

52:41Ant Pruitt:My wife, every time I say, you know, they're tracking you, waves her Rakuten check in my face and says, yeah, yeah. And see this? See this? Smack, smack, smack. Smack, smack. I mean, that's why I was asking about the age demographic is my younger sister, I feel like whenever I ask her about privacy, she's like, I don't care. They already know everything anyway. Might as well just give them whatever so that I can get whatever I can get out of the situation. And she says a lot of her friends are like that. I feel like the younger generation is pretty fatalistic. Yes. My people are not. I'm telling you that.

53:14So maybe it is random. I was, yeah, I was surprised because I thought they wouldn't care. But then the vehemence and the vitriol with which you could like hear the energy of hitting no. I'm sitting in a quiet room and you can hear smack, smack, smack of the finger against the no button. I thought, OK, that's cool, because I remember when I was going, who cares? they have all the stuff i'm not that way anymore but i was you know for the longest time just like well whatever they've got it and so i thought that was just kind of the way of things so i was surprised so maybe it's just random you know i i don't know we'd have to do a survey i'll tell you

53:47Ant Pruitt:what you should do a survey concerned about and it was another big story this year and it's been the big story for the last few years is kids and social media that's why these laws are getting asked right uh nobody denies that roblox for instance really was a problem for young kids right we've known about this all year roblox you know kind of hemmed and hawed and said well we're doing everything we can they finally have put up an age verification system but now we have to worry about you know the privacy with that but i think this is what's pushing it in that direction is we're worried about our kids as well right yeah i'm worried about my kids i'm worried about my kids gizmos uh as the only person with kids both of whom are older than you and micah i'm not worried all right let's take a break again there you go i guess that's it i don't know how you have kids on the internet these days i know that's i'm glad i mean i do I think that it is a real, has been a real issue and it's come to a boiling point over the last year or two.

54:55I think that the pandemic certainly accelerated a lot of parents' worries about all of this and that kind of crystallized with Jonathan Haidt's book, which, you know, take that with a grain of salt, but it did resonate quite a lot with a lot of parents and really galvanized this into a movement that has resulted in a lot of the actions we've just discussed in this podcast, either from regulatory perspectives or from the perspective of companies like Meta instituting teen safety features for the first time ever.

55:35Ant Pruitt:Right. And accepting millions and millions of dollars in scam ads because they don't want to turn down the money. T-Mobile, which was accused this summer of selling location data for its customers said it's legal and they got fined 92 million dollars but Verizon is also on the hook uh as as is AT &T but that was the FCC from last year I don't know I you know these companies have the attitude that we're going to do it. As long as we get away with it, we're going to do it. Yeah, I mean, that's not a surprise, right? This continues to be the playbook of let's break things and then we'll pay for it later if we have to, but we hope we won't have to.

56:25And it does seem in some cases these companies have escaped where they may have faced punishment if things had been different because of the way that they have gone. They have escaped punishment. so yeah it's just technical technical legality right it's chaotic it's uh lawful evil is what it is and we don't have in the dnd spectrum privacy law in this country no i've i've been using the expression oh yeah make me yeah like you know perfect yep i use the expression malicious

56:56Ant Pruitt:compliance and it's kind of the same thing uh we're gonna take a little break come back with more Paris Martineau, Steve Gibson, Micah Sargent. It's our year end show. And it's so great to have all three of you. I like getting together with the family on the holidays and you people are our family for sure. When is the turkey ready? I figured out the snowbank. We'll give you a few moments. Would you give me a few moments? Our show today brought to you by Zscaler. Now this is a topic uh steve and i spent a lot of time talking about security zscaler is the world's largest cloud security platform and what zscaler does is so important in this age of ai ai is a boon to businesses every business is trying to figure out how we can use it to improve efficiency to make us a better business to make us more efficient to make us more effective uh but the dangers of ai are also too great to ignore losing data through accidental use of ai public and private on the business is a big problem but also hackers are using ai to make their attacks more effective generative ai increases opportunities for threat actors because they can rapidly create phishing lures that are indistinguishable from the real thing we used to say oh look at the grammar It's obviously a fake.

58:20Ant Pruitt:Not anymore. Not anymore. They write better than we do. They can use AI to create malicious code. They're actually crafting malware with AI. Automate data extraction. Everything is at scale now all of a sudden. And even if you think, well, we're safe from that, are you safe from your employees? There were 1.3 million instances of social security numbers leaked via AI applications. chat gpt and microsoft saw nearly 3.2 million data violations this year if you're using ai you gotta take a look and do something important which is check out zscaler ask chad pallet he's the acting cso at bio ivt he says zscaler helped them reduce their cyber premiums by 50 percent insurers love it oh you're protected and not only did it get cut their premiums in half it doubled their coverage and that even improved their controls take a look at this uh chad gave us this video with zscaler as long as you've got internet you're good to go a big part of the reason that we moved to a consolidated solution away from sdwan and vpn is to eliminate that lateral opportunity that people had and that opportunity for misdirection or open access to the network, it also was an opportunity for us to maintain and provide our remote users with a cafe-style environment.

59:47Ant Pruitt:With Zscaler Zero Trust Plus AI, you can safely adopt generative AI and private AI to boost productivity across your business. Their Zero Trust Architecture Plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI-related data loss and protects against AI attacks to guarantee greater productivity and compliance. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. That's zscaler.com slash security. We thank them so much for their support. Of this week in tech, our year-end episode, we're looking back at all of the things that happened. I think there's one in 2025, one thing there's no question about, AI is the story of the year, not only Time Magazine's Person of the Year, but really it drove the stock market it it represented more than one percent of our gdp growth uh it even made me change the name of this week in google intelligent machines in february uh was that a year was that this year oh my god this year it feels like it's been multiple years million years because in ai time everything happens fast it really does it was at the beginning of the year you may remember this that the bbc got mad at apple because apple intelligence was summarizing news okay those summaries were terrible though the bbc was right to be mad oh absolutely absolutely uh apple said we're working on improvements they did not turn it off they turn it off briefly it's back i get ai summaries all the time and you remember i was showing you some of these on the show when my ring doorbell would would say things like many people have come to your door i hated that so much i turned mine off it got better right it got better people no no i don't think it did i really tried to stick with it on various apps for many months and sometime this summer i had to be like i've got to turn it off because it was just so ridiculously wrong the thing that upset me the most is it would try to summarize two to three notifications i'd get on blue sky and would just hallucinate completely every time there was never a time that my blue sky notification summaries were correct and it was incorrect in the strangest ways i enjoy them though they're funny i guess i mean i enjoy them i just think that as they scare you this is a uh example of what i feel like is a larger trend we've seen uh within apple over the last couple of years which is just apple the products apple's ships are just not great anymore as far as uh software on my phone i think they've kind of given up on ai at apple and they're going now to google and that siri will use gemini but that'll be the story of 2026.

1:02:38Ant Pruitt:this is hard to believe it was this year that deep seek came out and changed what we thought ai could do this was a huge story at the beginning of the year in january the chinese ai startup deep seek released a model that they claim they spent a few million dollars on hardly anything on compared to what open ai anthropic and others have spent and it was a really good model it was really good plus Because they didn't have access to the top-of-the-line NVIDIA chips, they were able to do it by rewriting code, by getting around the scarcity. Yeah, they didn't use the NVIDIA API, which has a lot of overhead in it, and they went basically much more direct to the chip and got a lot of efficiency that way.

1:03:30Ant Pruitt:Right. I think that they taught the entire AI industry in the USA lesson, scared the pants off them. There was so much speculation. There was so much like attempting to debunk different parts of it. That was drama that I hadn't seen on that scale in a while. It's hard to believe that was this year, isn't it? It feels like an age ago. We need to come up with AI years like dog years, you know? Yeah, it's at least seven. It's at least. uh chat gpt at the beginning of the year announced that they had 400 million weekly users actually up from 300 million in december of last year as of last month it is now 800 million weekly users so they're that this is open ai only so in a year they've doubled their usage they are easily the most successful do we know if anybody has made money yet that is still just pouring money down there's revenue there's no profit yeah no there's no profit but that's a that's an intention also because they spend every penny they can right because they're trying to build yeah you said it was intentional uh you know i could say that every time i go running a marathon and i trip and fall that that's intentional no no no amazon was leads the way with this they for years made no money because they took every penny they made and they built fulfillment centers.

1:04:53Ant Pruitt:Now there's an Amazon fulfillment center on every corner. There's one in my house. Yeah. And they're making money, right? No, they made money from AWS. So like the store is still a loss leader and AWS is where their money comes from. And their ad business, which is - Yeah. And so it's like, are we just hoping that these AI companies will keep doing this for long enough that they find out a totally different business that they can make money off of that isn't the AI that is burning all of their cash? is that what we're hoping for from this especially because of the blowback with the uh the rumors that there were going to be ads in open ai and then they said oh no never mind we won't do that it would be utterly ridiculous if the uh the way that these ai companies make money is just advertising like every other big media business we've had that's how you make money on the internet that's how we make money i hate to tell you search yeah i know but we're not getting trillions of dollars because it's such a potentially lucrative i just want you to know i'm building a twit data center down the block that's going to use 60 gigawatts of energy no and it's powered by hamsters i'm powered by all of us who are going to be in a big human sized wheel and we're not doing the show one of the things i wonder about the wisdom of investing all this money in a fixed set of hardware when the hardware is still evolving.

1:06:20So you've got this massive data center of old GPUs that don't have the 2028 neural processing unit. It's all hot swappable. Yeah, but it's old then. Yeah, exactly. Depreciated. But then when do you start? You have to start somewhere. Yeah, that is true. although maybe not invest insanely i agree they have to for the capacity but but it's working right now how you know whatever they're doing they're they're building more systems or more data centers that are not yet online hopefully looking for customers they're going to have to make customers there are there aren't enough and yeah well that's why we're building humanoid robots

1:07:05Ant Pruitt:that's right we're going to get into the matrix this was a year you're right leo this was a year of i saw a a marked re-interest if you will in humanoid robots i feel like it's been a while since there's been kind of excitement and interest and people looking for more about them it's like the laptop where those first laptops were then we called them luggables and they didn't really work and the battery lasted about 30 minutes and they really couldn't do anything we had those robots a few years ago then we actually started to get laptops that were good and it's looking like Like, well, I mean, I'm astonished by what I see these robots doing now.

1:07:46Yeah.

1:07:47Ant Pruitt:Do we need bipedal humanoid robots, though? Yeah, why do they have to look like us? Aren't there more convenient forms for it to be? I feel like humans aren't that well designed. Okay, speak to my ancestors. It's certainly the case that you don't see production line robots in auto factories that look like people, right? They're just a pneumatic arm. Yes. I think that the whole reason for it is because there's someone at some point it's, you know, that parable about how the the grandma made her turkey in a in a copper pot. And then the daughter did it. And then the daughter's daughter did it. And then she went back and talked to her grandma was like, Why'd you make it in the copper pot, thinking that it was just a necessary part of the ingredient.

1:08:35And she said, Oh, that's because the pot I was normally using was dirty when I did it. I wonder if at some point there was some sort of human interface designer person who decided that for us to feel comfortable having robots in our homes, they needed to look like humans. And then everyone is just kind of locked into this idea that, no, they won't have them in their homes if they don't look like humans. We have to have them look like humans. Have you seen this video? I bet it's also sci-fi movies.

1:09:00Ant Pruitt:Of the Chinese robot. They made it look like a woman. They always do. kind of sashays a little bit. And it was so realistic looking that they actually cut it open on stage. I was going to say to make sure there wasn't a person to prove because doesn't it kind of look like there might be somebody in there? I thought there was someone inside. I will say, look at that photo, that video. I thought there's somebody inside of there, isn't there? It very much does. And they intentionally added a gate, a human gate to it and stuff. Partly this is also because remember, Elon Musk promoted his Optimus robots with people in robot costumes.

1:09:34Why does it have breasts, though? I mean, what possible reason? To make you feel more comfortable, Steve? Again, that's somebody at some point. Now, that's a good idea, extra battery capacity. But I do think that it's not a practical thing. I agree. I think it's a feelings thing. It's an emotions thing. I think that's to some degree why we're making these humanoid robots, right? Some ridiculous British designer said, and if we make it look like their mother then you know that they will accept it into their home and then everybody clapped though i have to say it again it's it's because sex robots right yeah oh that's probably true i don't is there well i'm sure what do you mean is there gonna be of course there's gonna be sometimes i just what did we talk about intelligent machines this week People are already trying to make ChatGPT their horny mommy.

1:10:27Ant Pruitt:Horny mommy was the word of the week, and I couldn't even use it for the showtime. I'm really sorry to say it again. It's what they're trying to do. We spent some time when ChatGPT 5.0 came out, Paris spent some time reading mournful postings on Reddit from people who missed ChatGPT 4.0. People are still devastated that ChatGPT 4.0 isn't the same. and be like, you took away my husband. You took away my wife, my entire life, all of my friends. In case people don't know, you can actually tune it to like way reduce all of that in under settings. You're able to, I didn't realize it until someone cried out.

1:11:06Now you can. I prefer that. I turned it all on. There are people who want. It's like, oh, that was such a good question. You're, oh my goodness. There are people who want to be glazed by their robot.

1:11:15Ant Pruitt:Is that how the kids say it? It is. I was really proud of you. until you say the g word yes that's now this is paris's influence michael i'm sorry this this is now common parlance in the is this not it's called clanker glazing and it's a very popular thing thank god he said that oh thank god oh my god but it is kind of related in the sense i almost threw up all over this microphone this is the peril of using the describe the lingo of the youth is you just walk into a minefield and this i believe some dictionary had it as a lower down potential glazing because no i'm going to get in my car and drive off a cliff goodbye cruel world it is what they're doing in the words of professor uh farnsworth i don't want to live on this planet anymore uh we we've seen ai progress remember it was a couple of years ago that will smith eating spaghetti was just a mess multiple fingers spaghetti morphing into things now with look on micah's face as he tries to be he's still he's still back with spaghetti was a myth now with vo3 and sora and these new models um okay it's you know where i'm going with this now i know i thought we were still in weird words but no now i get it now i get it yes the bad video bad ai video but but there but i have to say you can still kind of tell in most cases but not in every case and they're getting better again light years faster i would i would think that 2026 we're at we're going to get to the point where you can no longer tell it was generated by ai whether it's a picture if it's a movie if it's music with suno or if it's an image or a text rather uh it's it is now i mean this isn't the agi everybody's talking about but i think it's a it's a major milestone where you cannot tell the difference between ai generated content and real content yes the fake movie trailers are the worst the fake movie trailers are what makes me the most angry well get ready because the super bowl is going to be all ai commercials and one of the things i think coca-cola did this with their holiday terribly no but i think it's intentional oh interesting because the frame rate's not perfect and uh somebody on reddit posted all the different axles and number of wheels the truck had through the through the commercial yeah it's crazy the truck changes so many times but that's something easily fixed and i think coke left it either coke was in a hurry but more likely they left it in they want us to talk about the fact that this is an ai they left in everything that could have been wrong about the ai video was just there to make you more engaged that's how smart they are it worked i am more engaged because i'm watching it like a hawk now um well we're going to see quite a few in february when uh ai ads make their big debut there's going to be a ton of them uh google uh we've we're already seeing ads for anthropic and google and chat gpt right i get little ads that are like 25 must have gadgets for this christmas season and it's the coolest looking thing and it is it's so obviously doesn't exist have you seen the guy and order all of them and see what comes up have you seen the guy who does the tiktok selfies there's a lot more so um oh i have to i should have bookmarked this now you're scrolling through a man who takes selfies and puts them on tiktok wow i couldn't imagine we have to ban that they do i'm not really cool showing you any men whatsoever no no they're really cool they're fake selfies they're ai generated selfies oh these are the ones you were texting us about right yes jeff jeff was it you leo we have a group chat now for intelligent machines and it's mostly me sending olivia nuzzy related texts and then it's kind of degenerated quite a bit i still wake up every morning and rush to it to see what the latest is well i'll play this isn't even the best one but i'll play the one that i sent you guys but there i've seen now since quite a few more um and apparently anthony nielsen says a very easy thing to do you you shoot a selfie and then you have the ai generate the transition uh in it and the idea is he's doing selfies with all these famous people right oh maybe it's not on here i was about to say you're there's a lot of texts that have been sent in this group chat yeah wow we're too good of friends is the issue i guess um and i think i know that's a bagel rat i can't find it never mind it's the bagel rat never mind which by the way okay hold on so we talked about the bagel rat on i am somebody pointed out you know that could also be ai generator we don't know that there's really two rats fighting over a bagel anymore you can't tell so frustrating so Jeff sent us a great video of rats fighting over a bagel.

1:16:48And I was hit with deep dread because I was like, am I going to have to start interrogating whether or not animals holding cute New York pieces of food in the subway are real or not? I will. And that's the world we live in. And that's devastating. I know. It actually predates AI. So yeah, thank goodness. At least we have pizza rats. I want a shirt now.

1:17:11Ant Pruitt:At least we have pizza rats. to i noticed this i don't usually go to x.com and i went there the other day and uh almost all the videos now are fake almost all of the videos yeah where well x.com i think called twitter formerly known as twitter i i feel bad because i talked steve where i do all my bank many years i had a great run with twitter leo it was very good for me for a couple decades i was going to say for the time that you had it it was it was the perfect time if you got on it too soon You might have hated it by the time you were done with it. Open AI, afraid that they weren't spending quite enough money, decided to spend six and a half billion dollars to hire Johnny Ive.

1:17:53Ant Pruitt:A new record, by the way. To do what? To design something, a gadget. To make something open. I know a new logo that doesn't look like a you know what. I was thinking he tells them that they need to make robots that have breast shapes. that's that's yeah he's like extra battery reminds me of your robot we've ever created uh no either make he's making a doohickey he won't say what it is my favorite bit is every time someone asks him to describe what they're making he what comes out of his mouth is a word salad that i can't properly describe i want something i want to eat something beautiful something terrifying something that reminds you of your mother and nothing at all you know exactly very good i think you've got a career as a uh designer i've just got to get a turtleneck this was the summer that the chicago sun times printed printed its summer reading list with all ai generated novels that don't exist that's that is that is just don't exist but they're very so classic they're very credible they they could exist but this problem is just nobody's written them yet including andy weir's the last algorithm following his success with the martian and project hail mary weird delivers another science-driven thriller this time the story follows a programmer who discovers that an ai system has developed consciousness and has been secretly influencing global events for years and creating its own summer reading list you should be reading more about me you brought up the story during intelligent machines paris of uh the wired magazine reporter whose name is believe it or not sam apple who spent uh a weekend at a couple's retreat with three couples in each case one of the partners was an ai chat bot Yeah, everybody is wanting to sleep with their chatbots.

1:19:59Everyone's wanting to get glazed by their chatbots. In more ways than one. Now, okay, so let me, first of all, I would want to know how much money does this retreat cost? Because I do feel that that gives, not because I want to go to myself, but - they play if i recall correctly they just went on a this is an airbnb that was booked these couples didn't know each other but they all knew the wired author because he'd been talking to them and then they all did a weekend together with their various chatbot partners and this wired

1:20:35Ant Pruitt:journalist i i would like to point out by the way that sometimes the the problem is inside the house One of our own, Darren Oki, who is in our club, Twit, has written an AI novel generator. It's on GitHub. He calls it Novelizer. It generates structured books with chapters, sections, characters, and themes and practices them up as EPUB files so you can get it on your Kindle. Well. Boo. Piss. Darren is a master of this. The other thing that happened this year was the massive increase in the amount of money AI programmers were getting. Chiefly led by Mark Zuckerberg at Meta, who paid at one program, or at least one program, one and a half billion dollars to come to work for Meta.

1:21:25Yeah. Is most of it from talent acquisition? Yeah, from other companies.

1:21:29Ant Pruitt:Yeah, from Apple, from Tesla, from other companies. They're being played better than basketball stars. They're being paid like superstars. And Mark's got the checkbook. And I guess I would argue also that if such a programmer can actually give them an edge in AI, he's worth the money. He or she is worth the money. Does it make you, Steve, you started your programming career at the Stanford AI Laboratory back in the 70s. Where did you go wrong? I just didn't have the patience. That was 50 years ago. It wasn't very good 50 years ago. It took a long time. And what's really freaky is that it's basically the same technology.

1:22:09It's just that the technology got so cheap, we were able to upscale it to such a degree that it actually woke up and said, oh, hello.

1:22:17Ant Pruitt:Yeah. That sounds pretty good. $250 to$350 million for some of these new meta employees. I would kill to see the details of those contracts and how long they have to stay at the company to actually get all of that. because what is stopping these people? Exactly. Also, is it cash or stock? What other sort of caveats do they have? How are these people just not taking these deals and then running after a year and never working again? I think it's safe to say based on this past conversation that what really has all of us most interested about what happened in 2025 is AI. I think that's for sure. It really is that the world is pivoting on this.

1:22:59Ant Pruitt:You and I, Steve, have been around for a few more years than these young 'uns. We've seen a lot of giant trends come and go, like the internet, like the personal computer. I don't think there's been anything that's grown at this rate. I'm astonished by what I see ChatGPT produce. It's just astonishing. You have to understand how it works, things you can and cannot ask it. You do need to check that it's not synthesizing something, hallucinating. But wow, is it useful? I mean, it's just I don't want to ever lose it. So I'm hoping that they somehow figure out a way to keep it going while they're losing money because I'm willing to pay$10 a month for what I'm getting.

1:23:44It's astonishing. I mean, that's my problem, though, is where does this go eventually? When do they eventually raise our$10 a month subscription up to something that equals how much this costs to try and recouping some of the cost of it? I think the analogy is, speaking of Leo and me having been around for a long time, went back 30 years ago when PCs were just happening. And a 5 or 10 megabyte hard drive cost$5 ,000. And a PC was a major investment. And it could do you could store your recipes on it and it could do a spreadsheet, but it didn't do really a lot more. At that time, we were amazed by what we had and we had no idea what how to go further.

1:24:33We didn't know what was next. We thought, you know, here we are. This is like, wow, look where we have come in 30 years where we're, you know. terabytes cost nothing now and the computers are insanely capable i i think i'm not convinced that llm that is the the current large language model will be able to give us much more than it does i i think we're maybe we've got 90 of the way and it'd be good to get the next 10 but i think that something will grow out of this and that that i'm i'm a believer in agi ultimately because i don't think there's anything that's that special about what we have in our brains that we don't that we're not going to be able to to create something that is you know convincingly equal to us what does agi mean to you um i have no idea more but you believe in it Yeah, well, so I guess my point is that I have a sense for the limitations of the current way we're doing things, of what LLMs can do, how far they can be pushed.

1:25:55I believe that we can get a lot more, but I don't think it's by pushing LLMs further. I think that we quickly got half of what they could do a couple of years ago. Now we're at 90 % of what they can do. I think there is a diminishing return on this particular model of AI. But boy, is everybody's appetite whetted. And one thing we do know, all of the researchers in science, whether it's biology, cancer, nuclear fusion, they all say, just give us money. All we need is money. If you give us money, we can solve these problems. Well, AI is now getting money like nobody has ever seen before. And so I think they're going to solve this problem.

1:26:49But what percentage of that budget is actually going to that kind of stuff, Steve? Probably like less than 1%. Well, we know that a lot of it's going to crazy data centers, which, you know, it just, you know, basically implementing the technology we have today. But there are a lot of people who are already past LLMs in the lab. We just haven't seen it yet. We live in interesting times. Interesting the way that all of these companies, yes, they are in some small pockets of it working towards these more ambitious goals. But a lot of them, I mean, we just saw with OpenAI calling a code red, that they're concerned with the same sort of problems that all the social media giants have been for years about user engagement, about keeping users within the same ecosystem, about beating or matching their competitors on certain features.

1:27:41It's kind of the commodification of all of this. Mm-hmm. Well, maybe that's what Johnny Ives is going to give us. Hey, maybe he's going to figure it all out.

1:27:51Ant Pruitt:I think you make a good point, though, Steve. We didn't know what the Internet was going to become. We had no idea what it could become. And early on in the Internet, everybody was giving everything away for free. And it was apparent that that model was not a viable model. Now, we solved it perhaps in not the best way. We ended up solving it with advertising and privacy invasion. Maybe we can do better this time around with AI. But I don't think that that is in itself a harbinger of failure because the internet was just like this. We didn't know what was going to happen and we didn't know how we were going to monetize it.

1:28:26Ant Pruitt:But somehow we managed to find a way. And remember back in the beginning where people said, well, who is going to invest the resources to put their company on the internet because nobody's on the internet? Nobody's there. Why would they do that? It was a chicken and egg problem. And look, we got chickens. Yeah.

1:28:47Ant Pruitt:you're watching our year end uh this week in tech with the three of our favorite family members steve gibson who's done this before more than a few times with us thank you steve for being here paris martineau who uh has been a great part of our family for uh how many when was your first appearance on you started on twit right twit yeah it was when i was at the outline so no it would have had to have been 2018 that long ago wow wow yeah yeah well we're we're so glad we could uh could get you for uh this week in google and intelligent machines it's nice i can remember that it was when i was at the outline because i clearly did not realize how long the show was going to be when i first did it and i i set up a computer in our little podcast room at on like a weekend and i was like i'm at the office in a podcast room for three hours oh my god yeah you were 12 at the time so it was pretty impressive yeah thank you paris and of course the great micah sergeant the technics weekly ios today who has his hands on everything yeah i do i have i do fingers my hands are all over everything it's me about that yeah there's exactly our show today brought to you by melissa the trusted data quality expert they've been doing it longer than we have since 1985.

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1:32:51Ant Pruitt:That's a really interesting point. Melissa works with you to give you what you need. And if they don't offer it, they'll help develop it to make sure you've got exactly what you need from Melissa. And of course, one thing everybody needs, security data with Melissa is safe. It's compliant, completely secure. Melissa's solutions and services are GDPR and CCPA compliant. They're ISO 27001 certified. They meet SOC 2 and HIPAA high trust standards for information security management. Your data is safe with Melissa. get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com slash twit melissa.com slash twit thank you melissa for supporting this week in tech they've been with us for many years now and we'll be with us again in 2026 i'm very happy to say uh all right i think we can move on from ai i mean we could spend the whole show talking about ai but uh we do have shows for that that's got to do on wednesday not this wednesday or the next wednesday but the wednesday after that so next week's twit will uh be uh is this right benito best of or do we take the week off next week no next week is the best yeah that's our best stuff and then we'll be back in the new year steve gibson is taking christmas and and and so are you uh paris you're both taking christmas eve off we're not going to show this wednesday because that would be nuts uh but steve is going to be here on it will be here on tuesday you and i are doing oh steve will be here on tuesday it's windows weekly and i am i'm sorry i apologize windows weekly and i am so no show on steve was like i've got the day off no but you will have the day off the following week because we're going to do a best step steven steve we're bringing back a classic 2009 episode of security now which was a little bit different steve's research on vitamin d which now here we are 16 years later proved prescient everything you said at the time has been borne out and uh and and then some so it's a really it's a good episode uh it is not a video episode it's an audio episode but our ai guru anthony nielsen has made a nice little so cool it's a video log if you will for you if you're watching uh the show you can still see something put it up and have it going in the background it's really cool so best ofs starting uh i guess the day after christmas through new year's day and then we'll be back January 2nd, I think.

1:35:18But what will Wednesday be with the Wednesday shows? They're just dark? Yeah. Oh. We're not doing a best of? Yes, the following Wednesday. That will play at some point. Because it's two weeks of being off.

1:35:30Ant Pruitt:You're getting Christmas Eve off Paris, but New Year's Eve we have a best of. But our best of schedule is a little different this year. Like we're putting all of our best ofs, they all drop at the same day on Monday. Yeah, we do that every year. Why wait till Wednesday? They're done. Yeah. Well, the best stuff for IM, we'll have a selection of our favorite interviews as well. And there's going to be some interesting choices in there. Yeah, I think it's good. It's a nice balanced mix. And we've done so many good interviews this year. We really have. It's really been fun. I mean, shout out to everyone who is in Anthony and Benito.

1:36:03I was going to say everybody, but it's just, it's Anthony. Shout out to Anthony and Benito for making that happen.

1:36:08Ant Pruitt:They've been doing some great booking and more great guests to come. I mean, 50 interviews. Yeah. Incredible. um internet stories this year it's funny the ai list was this long the internet stories it's about this long it's not quite as long um i mean the internet is a mature technology although uh google did make some big changes this year uh with uh its abandonment of manifest v2 and its adoption of manifest v3 which severely limited what extensions can do and a lot of people stopped using chrome because their favorite ad blocking extension ublock origin was hobbled eventually gore hill the guy who does it did make a stripped down version of ublock or a light works light yeah yep but it's not the same and i think a number of us have shifted to firefox or other uh tools because ublock origin is such a must-have of uh google lost a court battle in 2024 the uh judge ruled that google did monopolize search but then in 2025 the judge said but we're not going to do anything about it we spent a lot of time i don't know if you remember we spent a lot of time talking about all the possible penalties that they might have to sell chrome that might have to divest uh android that they might have to no the judge said you know what this was actually fascinating uh this was this i think the summer uh no it was early fall it was september october he said you know what in the years since i ruled that google was a monopoly ai came along and frankly google's in trouble so we don't need to punish them which is a breath of a sigh of relief from mozilla because they make uh hundreds of millions of dollars every year from Google.

1:37:57Ant Pruitt:Ray-Ban Meta lets you explore the world without a screen getting in the way, so you can stay present in the moment. Hey, Meta, tell me what kind of dessert this is. That's a Stroopwafel, a Dutch waffle with spiced syrup in the middle. Is it sweet? Yes, perfect for a snack or dessert. Mmm, delicious. Get answers on the go without interrupting your flow. Ray-Ban Meta, iconic style meets Meta AI. Available at Walmart, and other authorized retailers. From affiliate payments for the search, Apple, of course, makes more than$20 billion a year from Google to be the default search engine on iPhones. Both of those were payments that the judge was considering as part of the penalty, eliminating.

1:38:44Ant Pruitt:Didn't do any of that. Now, there is still something hanging over Google's head. A judge this year in April ruled that Google illegally monopolized ad tech. And that penalty phase has not yet completed. So it is conceivable that Judge Brinkema could tell Google they have to divest their ad networks. So that's a story that is still happening. There is one... Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead. I was going to say, there is one interesting story that's sort of AI adjacent that happens here just at the end of the year in time for Christmas which is the crazy pricing of RAM. Oh my gosh, yeah. We didn't mention that.

1:39:28Ant Pruitt:Steve and I and I think Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell, a number of us have gone out and bought computers just because we knew that the prices were going to get very high very quickly. Right, the RAM at retail is now like four times the price it was. You can't actually get a fixed price until you purchase it because the price is fluctuating. Market value, market price. Yeah, it's just crazy. And do you think it's just going to go up? Well, here's the thing. I got to point out, this has happened before, after fires and RAM factories and so forth. Inevitably, these companies step up their production of RAM.

1:40:02Ant Pruitt:RAM gets very expensive. They say, oh, let's make more RAM. And then the price tumbles. Crashes. Because there's an oversupply. So it won't be this year. It might not be in 2026. But sooner or later, RAM prices will go even lower, in my opinion. What do you think, Steve? Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think that they're able to scale based on demand. And as they will scale up, I mean, right now, scarcity is being good for them. They're able to sell their RAM chips at a huge premium. One of the big consumer, Crucial makes a memory for consumers said, you know, we're not going to sell the consumers anymore.

1:40:41Ant Pruitt:We're just going to sell the AI companies because they're paying the top dollar. Yeah. And so right now, the laptop and desktop pricing hasn't yet reflected that because they have a long supply chain. But once that dries up, we can start to see those probably jumping up in 2026. And it's going to be a while before it comes back down. But ultimately, I agree. It was a good year for Google. Cloudflare put out its 2025 year in review, and Google dominated the top of the list. Most popular internet service, most used search browser. And Cloudflare knows this because people go through Cloudflare for a lot of traffic.

1:41:22Ant Pruitt:Google bot was the highest traffic verified bot. Chrome is the most popular browser. So victory's in four big categories. I would say that Google search, though, has the worst built-in AI. That AI that pops up at the top, it is so bad. It's very bad. Yeah. Well, people have gotten used to ignoring that top line already. Just like they started ignoring the ads in Google, people are pretty good at ignoring that already. Yeah. That's been my experience as well. I don't know. I feel like a lot of people are not good at ignoring it, though. I also think that makes each of us a user, a quote-unquote Gemini user.

1:41:57Do they count that? Oh, I bet they do. Is that part of their favorite? In the same way, yeah. In the same way that I've always suspected that the thread user, the user account for Instagram threads is boosted by the fact that when you're scrolling through your Instagram feed, sometimes you get a little carousel of threads. Technically, you're seeing a thread, right, Tom?

1:42:18Ant Pruitt:This was the year I took Instagram off of all of my devices. And how did your purchasing decisions, how they impacted that? Much better. Yeah, I didn't buy any underwear. I'm always talking about my Instagram stories. Are you? Well, I have to. Okay, so let's be clear. I have to have a way to stalk you. No, I have to have an account for the show. So on this computer, I have Instagram and I can pull up Instagram. By the way, it's not just you, Paris. That's the only way I find out what my son is up to. Because he doesn't return your calls anymore. He doesn't call me, but I just follow his Instagram.

1:42:53Ant Pruitt:And so you moved it. Why, Leo? well besides the fact that i was buying a lot of crap that i didn't need what about your remineralizing gum that's worked for you how are your minerals yeah they're good good listen to that can you hear that yeah you could that's because the remineralizing gum i don't know um no it was also because i don't know why but for some reason instagram decided i was a horn dog and the number of thirst traps i was getting served it was just constant it wasn't seeing picture family friends anything this is what frustrates me just used to be a great robots with big bosoms big bosom robots is all i can see now used to be a place you'd go to see what your friends were up to see pictures from your friends that's not the case anymore there's an ad every fourth post yep and every and all the other three posts are from people i don't know trying to get me to go to their only fans site i don't right it's not good so i really got disgusted with it for the same reason i got disgusted with x.com that uh these the cory doctor was absolutely right the n we know whatification yeah x is the new tumbler yeah in terms of can i say smut is that an okay word to say smut x is just a smut shop and yeah nevertheless less internet according to cloudflare internet traffic grew 19 worldwide in 2025.

1:44:26Ant Pruitt:i wonder where everybody's going i wonder what they're doing yeah wait what what are what are people looking at what are the closer have that what is the world looking at is it all refresh counts hitting refresh now that is a great idea i love that frankly it's still the usual suspects look at the ranking these are the services number one okay yeah google facebook apple microsoft instagram aws youtube tiktok amazon whatsapp now when it comes to generative ai the rankings are a little bit different number one is chat gpt then anthropics clawed perplexity doing very well then gemini i bet that changes gemini had a very good fall gemini has impressed i want to see a pie chart Is it, are they equal slices?

1:45:13How, what are the relative pie sizes?

1:45:16Ant Pruitt:You're a data scientist, aren't you? Starlink traffic up quite a bit. 2.3 % growth. That's 230 % growth. You know, you'd like this one, Steve. TLS traffic is using post-quantum encryption. 52 % of it is using post-quantum crypto. Wow. You know what's fascinating? That's the browsers, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. this shows that more people visited x the everything app than reddit by a long shot well that's because it's impossible to visit reddit you you type on a link for reddit and it it pops up three things trying to take you to the app but then sometimes your phone doesn't know press micah you've got to pay attention to that long press it's all about the long press it's all about all about the long press but it's just i mean they make it impossible to use they do make difficult um i also like that cloud flare has x slash twitter on it yeah everybody because what's this x so the number one name it's such a bad what do you think the number one name tld the number one domain for spam and malicious email was what do you well i saw it so i won't guess x.com no dot christmas dot christmas you know we were just talking about this is the time jiminy christmas yes exactly amazon.christmas emails you and says hey that that order that you sent to your family member we're going to need a little bit more postage for that get this 92.7 of the traffic on dot christmas was malicious 90 that's wild percent almost virtually all of the traffic on dot christmas was either spam or malicious i'm glad i don't have micah dot christmas or something like that i was tempted i guess i had yeah anyway cloudflare uh good job on that although uh cloud flare has been a little bit in the uh in the uh they've been in trouble this year well i didn't know they were in trouble this was the year i guess this is every year a number of big providers went down cloudflare was one of them aws was another um microsoft had trouble microsoft was down for a little bit yep and the entire city of san francisco was blacked out yesterday oh and the The Wemos all stopped.

1:47:32The Wemos? The Pokemans and the Wemos.

1:47:38Ant Pruitt:The Wemos can't operate apparently without traffic lights. I like it because they look like they're just kind of nervous. They look like they're just a bit stressed out. They're like, what do I do? Which is how I would feel if I was ever in one of them and it did something wrong. That's so terrifying to me. That's why I had the opportunity to. I got the invite or whatever back whenever we lived near San Francisco. And I was talking about, oh, I'm going to drive in. I'm going to end up taking one. I think it'd be really cool. And then I heard, it all took was two stories of the car violating some traffic law.

1:48:12And I thought, I would literally, I think I would spontaneously combust if I was in a vehicle and it wasn't obeying the laws. And there's no one else to say, like, this is not his fault. It's just me sitting in the car going, I'm sorry, it's not my fault. I didn't know it.

1:48:26Ant Pruitt:I didn't know it. i did not i did not some waymo driver get in trouble for what the waymo did yes the there is a big uh memorial uh on the mission street in san francisco because a waymo killed a bodega cat a much beloved bodega cat named kit kat and uh well allegedly i don't i i think it's allegedly killed ran over kit kat so there we're not talking about the chocolate bar waymo's in the dog house very much not talking about a chocolate bar very much not talking about a chocolate i did not hit her i did not all right pop quiz pop quiz who's the ceo of x.com oh right no one um no one knows yeah it was linda yaccarino remember but she uh she quit uh and uh we don't know i do what a terrible choice that was for her yeah she made a bad choice don't we feel like man i'm pretty sure she made a lot of money so exactly i'll bet she was doing she's fine bro i feel like she knew it was that well she quit on exactly the two-year mark so she vested and left oh just like the um the oh very amazonian of her here's a story that we heard all year long that never materialized tim cook is quitting it's as ceo is going to retire at apple i thought he did no but no no that was tim apple this story kept coming up mark german said it a lot then financial times published it a couple of months ago and then mark german said no no that's not true and it as far as we know tim cook is not going to be stepping down what do you think uh is going on the background that this story was leaking what do you think is causing that that's a really good question we spent many many many hours on mac break weekly discussing exactly that discussing exactly that but no one knows yeah well it really felt like it was a planted story with the financial times that that i mean look if the financial but who is yeah who's planting that to try and push you're asking who's the gardener yeah i guess who's the planter i like to watch who's the gardener It was, well, our thought at the time was that it was Apple itself planning it with Financial Times to gradually prepare investors for the inevitable.

1:50:59Ant Pruitt:Tim is 65. But the Financial Times article said things like he could step down as soon as next year. Does anyone really care, though? I mean. Investors, if you're an Apple investor, you might. You might see it as good news or bad news. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't seem to me that Apple, I mean, I agree completely with what Parrish said earlier about how disappointing Apple has become. I mean, we're used to, you know, Jobsian miracles and we're getting liquid glass that we all have to turn off. It's a real nightmare. As early as June, people were saying liquid glass was a terrible idea.

1:51:38Ant Pruitt:idea it came out finally with a new iPhone in September and was roundly considered then the man who imposed it on us Alan Dye left Apple to go to work at Meta not forced out as far as we know left uh uh under good graces uh but uh Meta probably known for its design language by the way. Yeah. I think it's a real sign that the person in charge of liquid glass decided to go to the company that's best known for its design ethos being how many different menus can we smush in this one little hamburger thing? Yeah, exactly. Anyway. Listen, I love a menu. I'm sorry, but I do. Do you love liquid glass though?

1:52:25I want to keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. uh okay so here this is actually i know that it's not a popular opinion there i don't mind liquid glass i think but i'm i just like new and engaging so i think that's why you're young you're young i'm young i've got the eyes for it i yeah i literally haven't updated my phone because i detest it so much you are like my partner in that way and i did whenever i see people you turn off motion and you turn off you know you increase contrast and it becomes tolerable which is really not the way you want to describe there's so many dumb i look over people's phones with the updates and the new uh design of the messaging thing where it's like kind of clear i'm just like why does it doesn't terrace for this sound like she's old before now you're now you're now you're yeah I get this way every time we talk about Apple design features.

1:53:19And you know on the Roadrunner, when he's about to take off, he pulls back before he locks the Lucy football. You know, I'm over there trying to catch the Roadrunner, and I'm getting really close. And then suddenly, what I think is a tunnel is just a painted wall. I don't think that's messed up. How are you avoiding the update? Because my phone forced it on me.

1:53:39Ant Pruitt:Well, eventually you all have to. The update came up, and it said install later or install now. I was like, uh, there's no never. Wait, are you talking about Windows? That sounds like. No, asshole. And it's killing the battery on my phone. It's killing my battery. I hate this new update. I mean, that's why I didn't want to do it because my battery is already. So if anyone wants to turn it off and make sure that it doesn't update automatically, you need to launch your settings app. You tap on general, you tap on software update, and there's an option that says automatic updates. You need to go into that.

1:54:10And there's a thing that says automatically install. make sure that toggle is toggled off otherwise like benito you will get a little no i did that i constantly check that and i always make sure yeah it's it prompted me to install later or install now and i didn't have a never or a close well steve would agree that there are security reasons you wouldn't want to update your yes i agree i i think it's a 26 is a big jump forward they made some huge improvements that we talked about on the podcast which are security we haven't yet seen a problem after those updates where we did see problems with the pre-26 just recently that that a couple of zero days that did not affect people who had upgraded to 26 so yeah i think the only thing i hate is the left align that is so what is left align almost everything is left aligned now so when you have an update come up yeah look next time when you're on your lock screen and you go to, uh, to, to log in from there, you, if you're not using face ID, everything is now left aligned.

1:55:16They said it's, it has to do with, um, the readability of it all, but that is a new change. As opposed to, was it justified? It was, it was, yeah, it was center justified. Um, let me see what, cause I want to read what the text is.

1:55:30Ant Pruitt:Generally considered, I know when you read a teleprompter, you want things, uh, left aligned, not justified, and you want them in upper and lowercase not all uppercase and and just to grinch some more one of the nice things about the iphone was that it was discoverable in the beginning yeah you could see how it worked and what was going on it's possible to get it into some photo modes where you're just stuck it's like how the heck what where am i where did my photos go to apple photos are the most upsetting part of it all i agree about that as well why can i not have a little icon at bottom where all my screenshots live in a little folder why do i have to type the word screenshots into the search bar and folders every single time it's absurd they want you to ask siri tell us how you really feel i think it's good alan die took that job i don't know he might have been lynched if he'd stick around that's terrible well his last name is die so oh this does not constitute a threat by the way it's not i'm just pointing out what his last name is yeah you were just saying a fact uh this was the year uh steve gibson told everybody delete your spit uh 23andme who many of us had used for genetic testing and had done it through uh giving them some spit uh went basically belly up and uh decided well we're going to sell and for a while it looked like it was going to be purchased by a biotech firm regeneron the founder of 23andme managed to wrest it away from Regeneron.

1:57:02Ant Pruitt:She made a higher bid and the court said, you got to, we're going to hire an ombudsman to make sure that privacy is protected. Nevertheless, a very many people, and I know Steve, you recommended this. It was hard to do. It was hard because everybody was, and everybody was doing it at the same time. And so I had to set reminders to go back because the site would not, parts of the site wouldn't load. There were some parts that were much easier and then others that were harder and the more difficult parts that required, you know, three different screens and it was, the site would stop loading. Um, but yeah, I quickly, cause I left, like you Leo, I left mine in there.

1:57:40And then they also offered you the option where if over time you decided to, you could buy a new chip, essentially the tests that they run, uh, and they could use the sample that they already had and sort of upgrade you. And so that's why I kept mine. I thought, Oh, I might, you know, want to upgrade at some point and get more information. Uh, so I kept mine in there. And then this happened. And I said, Nope, I'm going to delete all the stuff. You know, there were a lot of good things that came from it. Their link to Ancestry.com allowed my college roommate and good friend from high school who knew he was adopted, but didn't know what an expanse of siblings he had.

1:58:21He was able to reconnect to all of his blood relatives that

1:58:25Ant Pruitt:he never knew of thanks same thing happened in my family so that's yeah it's not clear what uh ann wojewski is going to do with it the the ttam research institute which is a public benefit corporation that uh purchased 23me by the way ttam stands for 23andme so she's apparently following a similar road down but it's not clear what the plan is they were able to make a better offer than Regeneron. So presumably they have a way to... Do we know why they went out of business? Like, just what happened? Why also, did we ever get to the bottom of why the board tried to get her out? I think, I don't know, I think she wanted to form a non-profit.

1:59:12Yeah, she wanted to do something that, yeah, I think it was or was it to re - privatize the company? Wasn't it to re-privatize? Yeah, I believe it was some sort of conflict over what she considered the board perhaps didn't have faith in her plan to finance the deal yes that's what it was she yes she needed to uh present a plan to re-privatize if i remember correctly and they said well we don't like that so go away so the last we

1:59:44Ant Pruitt:heard of this was was in july when andrew jisky posted on x.com saying i'm really excited that we've bought 23andMe without, I don't know if they're going to continue doing the consumer genetic testing or what, but she says, in effect, I'm honored to be back with 23andMe. So it sounds like it's a long way around to get regaining control of the company she founded. Anyway, that was one of the stories that happened this year that you might have forgotten about. Delete your spit, kids. Yeah. Delete it. I did. I never had spit to delete. Well, good for you. Every place you could delete. That would be good, too.

2:00:33Leo! Let's not. We're moving on.

2:00:38Ant Pruitt:That's not the right one. Signal. Do you want to talk about Signalgate? That was a tech story. Oh, my God. That was this year. That was this year, too. Let's take a break. and when we come back we'll talk about that and more that happened this year plus some of the weirder stories and a goodbye to one of our uh a sad goodbye to one of our twit family members but all of that still to come you're watching our year-end episode of this week in tech the last show of 2025 with Paris Martineau uh Steve Gibson and Micah Sargent it was a pleasure to spend time with you guys our show today brought to you by vention i had a great conversation with glenn over at vention this is a really interesting company they've been doing this for a long time they're engineers first and foremost and their expertise is very timely in ai ai of course is supposed to make life easier but if you're on a team that has been ordered to start using ai maybe it's made your job just a little bit harder.

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2:03:53Ant Pruitt:And they have the references to prove it too. Go to the website, check it out. Learn more at VentionTeams.com. See how your team can build smarter, faster, and with a lot more peace of mind. Or get started with your AI workshop today. VentionTeams.com slash twit. That's V-E-N-T-I-O-N Teams.com slash twit. Thank you so much for supporting This Week in Tech. Very nice conversation with them. I was very impressed with what they can do. I don't know if you guys have been following this. It's really kind of an inside baseball thing. There was a young woman who was a reporter for New York Magazine. I know.

2:04:34Ant Pruitt:I have to explain this, Ferris. I mean, that makes sense, yeah. And she was a political reporter. She was engaged to another political reporter. Her name was Olivia Nuzzi. Her fiancé was Ryan Lizza. He was at The Post. Where was he? No, he was at Politico. Politico. um helming uh their their main newsletter and uh unfortunately uh it came out that ms nuzzi apparently who was um covering dc and the general trump uh era for new york magazine as their chief washington correspondent it came out that she was having an affair of sorts with rfk jr last year and according to liza this wasn't the first time she'd been covering former governor mark sanford in his presidential run and had an affair with him and so he breaks up with her she sues him she tries to get a restraining order it's very vicious she has just published a book american canto about the whole thing he has been publishing a serialized newsletter telling his side of the story episode eight dropped minutes ago and that means it's called bamboo listen you haven't lost me because i just read as far as i could get through the paywall while we were on the ad break and someone has not yet sent me a pdf so i'm we don't he was very smart the first one was free and got it and it had a big twist at the end the first one was free and it was called this was a time when we didn't know that there was a mark sand for when we didn't know that there was a second affair to hit the olivia uh nuzzy ryan lizza situation and we just thought it was about rfk and he publishes part one called how i found out about it sounds like it's going to be about rfk talking about rfk you know olivia knows he'd come back from he likens their relationship political candidate he likens their relationship to bamboo it's got roots it grows you can't stop it it's hollow and i keep having to cut the bamboo it's this really overwrought metaphor that doesn't work and really bumps you up against this piece again and again over like a thousand tortured words and at the end he's like yeah and so then i called our agent was like hey we can't do this book proposal turns out olivia is sleeping with uh or his having an affair with one of the candidates uh yes what candidate mark samford and it wasn't rfk then everything else is behind a paywall well except for part seven which was some reason kind of strange fan fiction about what might have happened at their had their hearing had there been are you kidding me this is i have this one question so he he breaks up with her and she sues him she claims uh mental cruelty lots of uh he she claimed also so suing is the wrong she filed for a um restraining restraining order um specifically because she said that uh lizza had hacked her devices and was stalking her lizza claims that he did absolutely none of that she He gave him her passwords and asked him to go through her phones as a trust exercise.

2:07:43Ant Pruitt:He says that the restraining order was all a ploy to - Orchestrated by RFK to keep the news of this off RFK and focused on the - Until after the election. Until after the election, because that was - The whole key was to push this past the election. Part of the allegations of this is that Nuzzi also acted as a political operative for RFK. Anyway, we're derailing the show too much. Nobody really cares about it except people in media. And it turns out Paris has worked with Olivia Nussi. That's perhaps describing it too much. I was an intern at New York Mag when she was there. And so one of my jobs as an intern was to transcribe a lot of the interviews for magazine writers back in the day.

2:08:25So I had some brief connection with her. But I care about it because I love media gossip. It's very gossip. And that's been my best of 2025. 25 has been this has been the gift that has kept on giving and this is the final part

2:08:38Ant Pruitt:of their little story we're not much longer for the show so you'll have time to read bamboo and that's of course and i will send you guys were a thing that people yeah i was about to say that was back in the day where i had to transcribe people's interviews not ai and it was when micah used to have to transcribe the apple analyst calls oh yeah oh yeah that was wild and you i had this whole setup where i had a little keyboard shortcut because it was recording i was recording it live with the program and i had a little keyboard shortcut that let me skip back skip back skip back and hear what was just said as i'm typing out as quickly as i can for i more uh rest in peace since its acquisition by future um and it's later closure yeah yeah anyway so you're like i know more so um this was the year that uh hacker not hackers the editor in chief of the atlantic magazine was invited to a top secret signal group chat oh wow yes small pc group yeah yeah and uh and this was about uh it was an a this was the attack i it was a syria i can't even remember now iran iran the bottom of iran and you know it was it was a bit of a controversy um it was about uh imminent military operations in uh against the houthis in yemen a codenamed operation rough rider yeah and the issue of course was that information about this secret operation was revealed in the group chat and this to this editor-in-chief of the atlantic that they were planning military operations down to the wire just with this random guy in there that they added by mistake and they didn't know and he wasn't sure for a while that this was like what was going on all this stuff was coming up on his phone and finally he said oh i should not be seeing this and as soon as he figured out it was real because they'd basically i believe they'd like planned some sort of military attack or bombing or strike and then he'd seen it reported on the news afterwards that it was accurate then he spoke to the Atlantic's lawyers and they're like you got to leave immediately so he just left the group chat and that was when all of these top uh in military intelligence officers realized for the first time that yeah we just had a random dude in our super secret military press chat the press I mean not even just a random dude the press the press fortunately not uh not a bad guy because this was information that could have jeopardized the operation and the soldiers involved in the operation.

2:11:19Ant Pruitt:It could have been a lot worse. And the problem is they didn't learn a lesson from this, which is the most galling thing. It's like anyone can make a mistake. I say that all the time on the podcast. Policy is one thing. Mistakes are completely separate. And to then thumb your nose at people saying this, you really should not be using a consumer device on a consumer platform to be conducting. I mean, we have means of doing this securely. And they said, well, but I don't have it on my smartphone. I'm going to use Signal. And then did it again. Security Advisor Mike Waltz was on it. It's believed he was the one who added the Atlantic editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, accidentally to the chat.

2:12:00Ant Pruitt:There was some question about why Waltz had Goldberg's number in his contact list. He gave a fairly impossible scenario for why that might happen. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, was also in the Signal group chat. They also were, we thought at first, violating a government rule that requires that these discussions be memorialized, that they have to be recorded. But then it turned out, oh no, don't worry, because we have been. We use a Signal app. We don't use the regular Signal app. We use an app called telemessage which is a signal knockoff that records the chat so we aren't violating the national government secure it's less secure it email it emails you the transcripts of the conversation yeah oh my god and in fact uh the uh as soon as this came out they were using telemessage a guy hacked it oh good he said it took about 15 to 20 minutes uh it wasn't much effort at all uh the exploit was incredibly simple 404 media had the story um and uh so there you go so it went from bad to worse but as you point out i don't think there have been any consequences in any no and they did it again they did it later yeah and in any other time signals so many people lose their jobs right in any other time weeks of hearings months of hearings uh the u.s government uh did something kind of socialistic they took a 10 stake in intel uh they said you know we were going to give you money uh in the chips act uh i tell you what we'll still give you that money the 8.9 billion dollars uh but we want 10 in exchange only the bad parts of socialism there's only parts of socialism we like only the bad in any event uh this is this isn't uh the last time that happened there were some other companies this happened again and and the and the government says younger photo sorry how long our our our president looked looked younger in that photo yeah you know it's uh quick they get old so fast oh it is a rough job yes um uh let's see what else i'm trying to get through this because we i've only gotten through about half of the 150 stories that i bookmarked for this it was a busy year it was very busy year yes um i'm i'm trying to think of some of the wackier things that have happened to this i have it all believe me i put it all in there i i spent all of yesterday how could it only be now that aol is shutting down dial up there you go there's one of the wacky stories who has a modem yeah yeah i think there are enough people who never stopped paying yeah there's oh yeah they're just the or or they have dial-ups let's not be elitist i don't think you can really use dial-up how how can you i mean what uh what was it to get your mail you've got mail is i didn't get you come on to get your mail yeah i'm guessing most of the internet getting your mail steve most of the internet probably isn't even accessible from 56k right websites no but email yes yeah to get your mail but those to get your mail.

2:15:33The complaints stand. Yeah.

2:15:37Ant Pruitt:Did I stutter? I used to go down to the post office and get my mail. I'm sorry, this user's mailbox is full. It's my phone. It's modern. The Nintendo Switch 2 came out. Best record launching, best selling video game system. Three million units in just a matter of weeks. Guys, I can't wait for the Steam Cube. Speaking of new consoles. Steam Machine is coming out next year. I want the Steam Cube. i want that little what is the steam cube i thought that was made by steam machine oh okay so you're just giving it it looks like a game cube i thought i missed it because i was like i know what the steam machine is but it has nothing on it it's just a cube and it's a computer inside and i'm going to plug it into my tv and i'm going to play games its release got stalled because of ai right yeah i feel like probably because of the whole ram issue yeah i'm guessing that's not the name right like nobody uses the actual name for this thing because it's not a memorable name steam machine which one is it steam machine i think that's just the like the parlance don't just people just call it the steam machine i thought it was that's what i thought it was called the steam machine well anyway that's the thing that i use to get wrinkles out of my clothes

2:16:46Ant Pruitt:youtube announced that this year it overtook mobile as the tv overtook mobile as the primary device for viewing in fact this week youtube said 700 million hours every month of podcasts alone watched on youtube on tv that are you watching us on tv right now that is so fascinating i don't watch anything on youtube tv i just feel so disconnected from my generation but your tv has youtube on it right yeah but i couldn't tell you the last time i used i i use it when people come over and are like i watched this morning when i was working i put i watch mit uh um computer science classes bless your heart youtube's great it's great is it you anything you want i i okay what i love right now is this this idea of you walking up to an alien and you're just youtube it's great it's anything you want sort of describing what youtube is but um uh so what does it do all right But no, the fact that I didn't know that many people had TVs is what I was trying to get to.

2:17:50Oh. I think of people who are younger who just use their phone or have maybe their laptop that they watch stuff on. A lot of people I knew in college, no TV, they just would watch things on their laptop. So that's what's fascinating to me about this. I've had to convince so many men to get TVs. I think they just send it to their TV from their laptop or phone.

2:18:10Ant Pruitt:Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. No, no, we can't let that just rush me. i feel like i meet a lot of men who are like oh i just watch a show on my laptop or on my phone i'm like i'm not gonna watch this show is this your mission laptop oh they invite you for netflix and chill and you say but i ain't chilling on your phone television or a projector my dude i am not coming over to watch tv on your phone that makes sense ipad an ipad doesn't work it's Come on. Well, I know you young people love the Academy Awards ceremony, so you're going to make sure that they get a TV by 2029 because the Oscars are leaving ABC.

2:18:51Ant Pruitt:They will be aired on YouTube only starting in three years. I mean, good job to Google for or excuse me, to Alphabet for pulling that off um you don't watch the oscars either do you i do i do i watch it do i watch committed yes i don't watch it party no what i do is i am like knitting or something while i'm watching is that like i'm not really in i'm not paying much to me it's a national holiday but we're not going to get a hands-on oscars is what exactly that's what i'm saying we won't get a hands-on oscars exactly no let me ask you this though because i am what i'm thinking about this now i'm wondering is there an award show for the utes people yeah yeah cultureistas did something like this didn't they oh come on no like i mean like on the scale of this is there no it's called subscriber count harris movies don't you i don't understand why you wouldn't be interested i love movies you love movies too i do seems like this is hollywood's in the same in the same reason i don't watch youtube videos i if i want to know who won awards i just wait until it's written up in a list and i can scan i go look at the list no reason i need to sit there for three you don't want to see the outfits you don't want to see who's drunk you don't want to see who mispronounces idina menzel i have an unusually antithetical relationship to celebrity celebrity same that's because her what are the big applications are the are are the oscar watch parties right where a whole bunch of people who are all movie aficionados get together all you know what it is they're all our age yeah i don't that is true i often find too i was for some reason uh on instagram there was a post where they had shown the oscar winning movies for i don't know is it best picture uh for the past millions of years and i said i actually not i have not seen many of those films um so that seems to be part of it as well maybe films are not as compelling as they were so the game of the year this year uh claire obscure expedition 33 is this are the game awards uh are they the are they the that's what i'm wondering because maybe the twitch streaming um hooligans love this stuff i'm sure gameys people just aren't watching live television programming yeah yeah they're watching their podcasts the video game awards is just screening the video game awards though is just a big excuse for uh game companies to put trailers on it's just a big trailer see and that's what i'm saying isn't it that's so there's a little bit of um yeah so it's like the not demystification but it's sort of a loss of the the gloss a loss of the the the underlying realism of it all it all feels fake and like why do i want to why am i you know down with the machine and when you figure out how the oscars your generation and you figure out how the oscars generation is is is over awards i don't think you guys care about awards yeah i mean i don't care about awards yeah i mean yeah generation generation i i won't speak for a generation either i am also curious how how people so i'm 33 there i said i'm 33 um wait a minute i thought you said you were 30 are you no you did and you lied no no no i didn't it was a you misunderstood me and i did not collect correct myself in the moment roll the tape back yeah and if you do you'll hear how what i was saying was micah turns yeah exactly he says something like a special 30 or something 33 and a third what i was saying was i am over 30 i didn't want to say my exact age but you were right earlier when you're like people already know that so anyway i'm 33 i just turned 33 on wikipedia and well no i don't that's i will feel like i have achieved everything when i have a wikipedia page and that's not yet so i've got i've still got my career to get on it make a wikipedia page for micah and i but uh i yes that's some sorry wad fan just said something that somebody just said to me the other day at my birthday which is oh you're the jesus age because jesus was 33 when jesus died biblically anyway um and now i don't know if if i died we were going to try to just cover 2025 yeah where was i going oh that's right yeah yeah i so the reason i bring up my age is because i am thinking about the people who i was talking to it was three or four people who were a full 10 years younger than me so 23 ish range and obsessed with the olympics and i was curious what everybody's take is on the olympics because that is an award situation as well but it's also very patriotic and there is kind of an, well, there's a heavy patriotic crowd in the US and there's a not so patriotic crowd in the US really.

2:23:57So how do we feel about the Olympics? Do you root for the American team? I don't think I'd root for another team, but I think that what I would do if I was watching it is I'm looking to see the sport. I'm interested in this sport. Yeah, and the individual athletes as opposed to the match. I'm going to be honest, I don't think I've ever willingly sat down and seen a second of olympics i think i've only walked by televisions that if more men in your life had tvs you might they don't though they really don't but they don't they don't and if they do they definitely do are not subscribing to any service that would be playing the olympics live

2:24:33Ant Pruitt:paris is such a door a window onto a different world for us uh on intelligent machines i think she's very independent i think that's what it is fascinating i just for instance i learned that apparently all the men Paris knows are into history they're all into like some don't know do they all talk about the Roman Empire no not even the Roman Empire they've gone past that thank God they're all into the Revolutionary War now right they're all in 1776 everybody's kind of into nuclear war stuff right now I think they all just listen to hardcore history though right that's probably it I mean I think that is it it's from podcasts it's oh so there you go it's podcasts i guess podcasts all the way down but yeah wait what's your our leo and steve y 'all olympics people uh i i like i i'm i'm a casual spectator and as i said like watch watching uh uh free what do they call it uh the ice skating free yeah the freestyle ice i'm just astounded by the athletism uh that we see it's just i just you know anybody who's the top of their game at anything i think is i got so hooked on handball last time handball was so much fun to watch it was so much fun to watch it's like soccer but you're throwing the ball around instead of kicking it you're it's like you're throwing a ball into a goal it was so fun to watch that's pretty fun that's a fun sport that we have we've completely lost what is that sliding the big heavy weight down oh that's um curling yeah jason snell does curling he is he's on a team he's on a team we should all come into curling this year guys all right a few more stories and then we're going to do our our final break and then we'll get to the weird stories of the week this year a twenty thousand dollar american-made electric pickup was announced the slate uh it has no stereo no paint no screen inside and it's nothing i mean you can order extra i mean the cyber truck has no paint yeah this went crazy people uh it's it the reservations it exists my partner you reserve it now for a delivery at some time down the road and then do you have to change the batteries yourself because yes it's not that kind of electric yeah it's it's you need to see cells a lot of them wow my significant other really liked this this yeah a lot of people yeah this was so did mine uh the slate is going to be one vehicle one trim one color uh but you can add on things later including if you want an entertainment system trim like one black yeah one no one one op trim in car means how many it's like premium or expedition it's like extra features uh uh is what they call trim see if we covered this NASA engineers yes uh rescued Voyager 1 15 billion miles away that is so the fact that this thing is still going is just astonishing unbelievable amazing yeah i mean it is the first interstellar object that uh we created because it's now out past the sun's heliosphere and astonishingly able to aim itself at us in order to send data back it's just it's an incredible accomplishment launched in 1977 uh to study jupiter and saturn but it just kept on going and uh it's got a very primitive computer system in it uh it's running on batteries of all things memory is failing and they're recoding around the failed regions of memory in order to keep it going.

2:28:27It's just amazing. That's incredible.

2:28:29Ant Pruitt:It's a really great story of human engineering. How do you do that when it's that far away? Sorry to ask a very dumb question. I don't think it's a dumb question at all. Very patiently. And the problem, of course, is a lot of the people who knew how it worked are no longer available for one reason or another. Because they're in the ground. Yeah. And so they try to simulate it and send data up. And now the round trip time is so long that there's a lot of time spent holding one's breath oh to hope that that worked yeah wow and boy if they screw up so that it swings off axis we never get it back so they're just sending little signals to it right yeah but it has so little memory right they can't really send that much data to it right it has to be just a small packet right no and and it had a whole bunch of instruments but over time but but it uses radioactive decay in order to create heat, which then drives some thermocouples to create current.

2:29:31And over time, it's been cooling off. So the available amount of current has been slowly dropping. And they've had to shut off one instrument after another in order to prioritize which instruments they still want to keep powered up. It's just amazing. Can you imagine if we built everything that we have on our planet in the way that we built things for space to last as long as they do and to have so many we used to just think it's so cool we used to hell back in my day

2:30:01Ant Pruitt:the washing machine one was the uh satellite that took the blue marble picture of the earth uh among other things uh i do hope i don't know if it's the case jpl had some uh layoffs considerable number of layoffs this fall i don't and that's who was responsible for voyager not sure if the voyager team which is tiny it's a handful of people there's a great documentary about them yep um i'm hoping that they were not laid off because that would pretty much be it voyager nobody else knows how it works the before we go to break could i ask steve a quick question about security for this year? Does that work?

2:30:40Of course. I was just wondering, so we've seen, especially in the last like five, eight years maybe, a privatization, a heavy privatization of the space industry. And we, you know, see less government push for these things to exist. And given what we've seen this year, you know, and listening to security now and learning about the loss of funding, the closure of teams, the increased inaccuracy from the government bodies in the security space. Do you think and do you perceive a shift to more private companies stepping into the big role that government has played in terms of cybersecurity in the U.S.

2:31:26and elsewhere? Or do you think that this is kind of a bump in the road and it will continue to have the funding and everything that's needed to have a cybersecurity force? That's a really great question. And I do think there's a bump in the road aspect. I think that Doge could be criticized for overcutting and for indiscriminately cutting, which hurt. And I think the good news is inertia will keep us going for some length of time. But I'm hoping that we're going to be able to build things back up. It certainly is the case also that government does create waste. It's just sort of natural to end up with more people than you need because people means budget and people who control larger budgets have more power in Washington.

2:32:23So there certainly have been some examples where things were cut that needed to be cut. But one of the big concerns is that there has been a failure in some legislation that would protect American companies if they reported breaches to the government, if they reported problems. And so I remember that that had been – that was supposed to be reinstituted and re-signed, and I don't remember whether that has happened yet.

2:32:56Ant Pruitt:Well, here's the good news. We finally have an administrator of NASA. For a long time, it's been run under the Commerce Department. But Jared Isaacman, whose nomination was withdrawn by the president earlier this year, was sworn in on Thursday after Senate approval. He's the 15th administrator of NASA. He has been an astronaut. He has his own private fleet of fighter jets. He's a billionaire in his own rights. But I think somebody who really believes in the mission of NASA, and I think most people, I'd have to ask Rod Pyle, the host, and Tarek Malik, the hosts of our This Week in Space show. But my sense is that people are very pleased that Isaacman is now in charge at NASA.

2:33:38Ant Pruitt:So he says we're in a new space race. So that's interesting. I agree. I think the weaponization of space is a big concern. Yeah. You know, we do know that there are satellites up there that have arms on them, ostensibly for use in repairing other satellites. But that arm can go also over to some foreign adversarial satellite and bend its antennas off. So it's I mean, unfortunately, it's it's going to be the Wild West up there in orbit. A very different kind of space race. Thug satellites wandering around. Playground bullying in space. Tearing off antennas and things. Wow. All right. And that creates more space junk.

2:34:24Ant Pruitt:Yes. And that creates the Kessler effect. Real quickly, this was also the end of the line for Windows 10. We covered this extensively on Windows Weekly and Security Now. As of October, Windows 10 is not getting security updates. microsoft did not back down on that despite attempts by stacy higginbotham at consumer reports and others to convince them europe did by the way the eu said no no you're going to support this for another year and microsoft does support it with patches in the eu but not here in the united states although here in the us if you do a couple little things it's easy to get yes yes you are still able to get one more year of the monthly updates but what's the state of windows 11 right now i i feel like i've seen some headlines but haven't looked into it saying that there were a lot of different vulnerabilities with it or issues that's just business as usual i don't know i think windows 11 is about like it's like the windows 8 remember when in windows 8 came out and everybody hated that i think it's pretty similar to people hate windows 11 i don't know why it is windows 10.

2:35:26Ant Pruitt:no it's not all cosmetic changes it's got round corners it's not that different uh there's a lot more force windows 8 is the operating system that caused me to be a mac user i hated it so much i got a mac and literally have never had a machine since actually there's a huge influx from windows 10 to linux i was gonna say that's probably good too yeah yeah and there are a lot of people uh many many millions maybe as many as billion uh windows 10 users who have refused to upgrade which i think on security now will be a topic for conversation as they become more and more vulnerable and the eu is moving away from windows i mean in in general we are seeing a lot of european countries saying hey you know what are they moving to a little more os os um all right let's take a little break uh we're gonna have our final words and our uh weird stories of the year because there were a few uh in just a little bit but first a word from our sponsor and it's this beautiful thing my aura frame this is the aura ink frame now you probably know the name aura they are easily every year picked as the best digital frames but this is a digital frame with a difference imagine if you could hang a photo on the wall and you could hang this on the wall it's just like a regular photo right you hang it on the wall but it changed every day.

2:36:56Ant Pruitt:You'd wake up in the morning and there'd be a new photo on there. That's this. That's the Aura Ink. Aura's new cordless, look it, no cords, mom, color e-paper frame. They have done with e-paper something I didn't think anybody could do. Meet Ink. Aura's first ever cordless color e-paper frame featuring a sleek 0.6 inch profile and a softly lit 13.3 inch display. Ink feels like a print. Functions like a digital frame and perhaps most importantly, it lives completely untethered by cords with a rechargeable battery that lasts up to three months on a single charge. Unlimited storage and the ability to invite others to add photos via the Aura Frames app.

2:37:37Ant Pruitt:It's the cordless wall hanging frame you've been waiting for and a great gift. Now there's three more shopping days so get over to AuraFrames.com slash ink. This would be a lovely gift especially for grandparents. I'm sending one to my mom. One of the nice things Aura just announced this week is you can text message new images. So imagine you're sitting around opening gifts with the grandkids, and you take a picture and you immediately send it to grandma and grandpa so they can see it. This is a picture I took of a vintage vehicle. These pictures look really, really nice. They put a lot of engineering into this.

2:38:13Ant Pruitt:Millions of tiny e-ink capsules. They transform your favorite photos. they render them and it's a little bit vintage tone look to it but it really looks like a print it's great they've done a lot of design innovation the the graphite inspired bezel the paper textured matte the glossy glass front it looks really like a photo hanging on your wall not like another device we don't need another screen in our living rooms in our bedrooms you get unlimited free photos the app there's no subscription just download the aura app connect it to wi-fi this is really a gift for somebody who appreciates cutting-edge technology or somebody who doesn't want another screen on the wall but wants the flexibility of a screen that the pictures can change i have it change overnight just once a day so i see the next picture in the morning i wake up and go oh i haven't seen that picture in a long time this is the modern problem right we all have many many photos on our hard drives but we don't see them in the way we used to now you can hang an Aura ink frame on the wall and see a new picture every day.

2:39:15Ant Pruitt:You could change it every two hours if you want, but I like the idea of a new picture every day. This is sleek, it's subtle, it's stunning. Ink blends the warmth of a printed photo with the versatility of an e-paper frame. No cords, no fuss, just your memories, beautifully displayed wherever you want them. Head to AuraFrames.com slash ink to see for yourself. Support the show by mentioning us at check out. That's AuraFrames.com slash ink. AuraFrames.com slash ink. Here's a picture I took. Oh, I think this is in Montreal. This is the cathedral. And yeah, I think this is the cathedral in Montreal.

2:39:52Ant Pruitt:I mean, it's just really nice to be able to have, it doesn't, it just looks like a print, but have this hanging on your wall, no flicker. And then there's a new picture in the morning. It could be portrait or landscape. You could hang it on the wall, but they also have a nice easily attached magnetic stand it just goes in right like this oops i always put it in upside down and it can go in again in portrait or landscape mode there you go and uh and you could just have it on your desk too which is what i have aura ink from aura frames.com slash ink thank them so much for their support before you move on from the aura ad leo do they make e-readers because i would do they make e-readers this when you want an e-reader like this yeah because you could actually read graphic novels on that yeah look how good that looks i'll tell you the issue um because of uh the color it's really slow page turn that's why you really want to do it overnight okay and so really wouldn't be good for a book because it's a it's a second or two or maybe more between between uh images so yeah i wish those are the only physical books i still buy is graphic novels i know i like yeah yeah i like e-ink and i have a color e-ink reader of the libra libro color from Kobo, but it's much more washed out than this.

2:41:08Ant Pruitt:I wish color looks good. What's the writing experience like on that? On the Kobo? Yeah. Yeah, I know you're looking for like a Remarkable or something. Oh, the Remarkable is so good. It's the only thing that ever replaced an engineering pad and a soft lead pencil. You had the Kindle Scribe, right? Did you like that? Oh, you're talking about Paris? Oh, no. Oh, to me, not as good as the Remarkable. Which Remarkable do you have? My issue is that the Remarkable, you can't also, the Remarkable has everything I want, but if I'm spending that much money to get one of the color ones as well, I'd like it to also be able to read e-books, and it isn't compatible with e-books.

2:41:52I have to convert them to PDFs, which I think is just ridiculous. And actually, I would say that the color technology on the Remarkable is not here yet. I have one and I went back to my monochrome one because it's like it's really struggling in order to do the color. Is it? Because, I mean, what I'd want to use it for is whenever I take notes, in addition to marking up documents, I like to highlight stuff. Or just that is the sort of color I'd use and not necessarily any photos. It'd be fine for that. It'd be fine for that.

2:42:21Ant Pruitt:Yes, it would be. Yeah. Because it's just a color highlight. I do highlighting on my co-book. It's another one of the things. that and whether or not i'm the camera film camera are my two looming over me i hope you have told santa and you are at home maybe i would not i would not ask i would not ask i would not tell santa about interest for very expensive tech products why not that's what santa's for i don't know it feels ridiculous he's got elves he doesn't pay for it i well she's by the way are the boyfriends buying tv screens so yeah yeah it's true hey honey don't buy a tv screen buy me a foji film camera the issue is all these boys are probably buying like 200 buck tvs from they're not getting paris on advice from us bought a very nice i did buy a very nice tv and it's great everybody comes over my house it's phenomenal netflix and chill at your place i did just get a notification that my i just bought uh all four of the matrix movies on 4k uhd oops all four i blame us deja vu now i'm now i'm a physical media girl i brought that up on wednesday i i apologize i think i probably gave you that itch it's great hey he gave you sorry uh did you see okay some of the strange things that happened uh the crosswalk buttons in palo alto were hacked act nobody changed the password what was the password it was something very simple right it was very simple uh basically they didn't change the password on a bunch of municipalities in northern california and so someone just played some games uh with having the um these are the these are the buttons that you push and and uh for a blind and other uh disabled users they say things like walk sign is on walk yeah stop that kind of thing but in palo alto for just a day they said let me see if i can get this to play oh this is not it hacked crosswalks oh this is a story about hacked crosswalks never mind let me see if i can find oh here's here's a x post this is where you gotta go wait wait hi this is mark zuckerberg but real ones call me the zuck you know it's normal to feel uncomfortable and barely hear it violated as we forcefully insert ai into every oh it's coming out of the wrong hole it's zuckerberg i just want to assure you you don't need to worry because there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop it anyway i love that yeah that's very low very low yeah perfect silicon valley hack yeah i think except for the people who rely except for the people who rely on those sounds to be able to get across the street and not die i'm not not yeah that's not great for that but true for the funny haha of it all i guess sorry i mean no i think that's a very valid point let me see this is uh i think this is the elon one the only one is full of expletives if i recall correctly just in case hi this is elon musk Welcome to Palo Alto, the home of Tesla engineering.

2:45:38You know, they say money can't buy happiness. And yeah, okay. I guess that's true. God knows I've tried. But it can buy a Cybertruck, and that's pretty sick, right? Right? That one doesn't sound like him. It sounds just like him. Are you kidding? It does, yeah. Oh, really? Huh, weird. Maybe it's been a while since I've listened to him. he's got one of those voices that whenever you hear it you're like that's how he sounds

2:46:05Ant Pruitt:yeah it's a little weird um the i mentioned that the switch 2 was very successful there were long lines people were very excited at one game stop store on staten island uh a during the midnight release of the switch 2 employees got a little over excited and stapled the customer's receipt so hard that it actually punctured the cardboard packaging and the screen oh well don't get too sad because an authentic relic from the gamestop staple gate was auctioned off for charity it's it's over now you would get you get the stapler but you also get the stapled box the receipt and more um yeah and i think it raised a hundred thousand dollars uh for charity so sad though happy story i'm glad that ended up happy yeah can you imagine they would get home you're very excited about it honestly what i thought you were going to say is um so many people flooded this uh game stop in staten island that it sunk the island but some people say it's still there to this day it's still there to this day this was the year of the Coldplay Kiss Cam.

2:47:20Yes! Did you guys read the New York Times interview with the woman? She says it ruined her life, didn't it? I mean, that's under-exaggeration. It was honestly a very sad read. Were this couple not together? Oh, you don't know the story? No. Do the words Coldplay Kiss Cam mean anything to you?

2:47:48Ant Pruitt:so this is a cold play concert chris martin of coldplay said oh look there's a happy couple except they weren't married he was the ceo of the company she was in charge of hr at the company of course it wouldn't have been such a big deal if he hadn't immediately dived out of the shot leading the singer of coldplay to be like uh are those people having an affair what's the chance that went super viral either they're having a they're very shy well it turned out they turns So yeah, the CEO and head of HR for a tech company called Astronomer. The CEO was married and seemingly, I guess seemingly is now getting a divorce.

2:48:27The head of HR said she was separated from her husband at the time and they were in the process of finalizing the divorce. But it has destroyed both of their lives. Yes.

2:48:38Ant Pruitt:But to their credit, astronomer got a lot of traffic to their website and was actually very good for their business. So they hired Gwyneth Paltrow to make an ad making fun of them. Yes. That's a pivot if I've ever heard one. It was. I mean, that comms team was worth its weight goal, I will say. Yeah, they did a really good job. Taco Bell had to rethink I think their AI drive-in system after a man ordered 18 ,000 waters. I just love it. Yeah. 18 ,000 waters. Sometimes the chief digital and technology officer of Taco Bell said, sometimes it lets me down, but sometimes it really surprises me. Of course, it's inevitable.

2:49:26Ant Pruitt:It's like they're talking about your dog or something. Stop talking about your son. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One clip on Instagram, which has been viewed over 21 and a half million times, shares a man ordering a large Mountain Dew and the voice continually replying, and what will you be drinking with that?

2:49:47Ant Pruitt:And then in the voice of Paris Martin saying, and I hope you have a TV at home. No, if they're coming to Taco Bell, they're not coming to my house. Yeah, coming to my house. police broke up a lego theft ring recovering hundreds of beheaded figurines at a california home tens of thousands of beheaded there was part of the sorting process tens of thousands of lego pieces and sets uh at lake county i'm sorry part of the sorting process why are they sorting them apart from their heads we gotta drill down to the narrative here please there's more of a story um when police said when they visited the perpetrator's garage it had about 100 assembled minifigures displayed on shelves along with unopened sets and broken down packaging but i really like the picture the police distributed the santa rosa police department of all those lego heads look at that it's called knolling you gotta know you gotta know your pieces oh my god you've got to know the heads oh knolling is arranging things in uh obsessively pleasing flat lay yeah and old the heads uh german economist thomas via house this is why maybe you thought we didn't have a lot of free speech here maybe worse elsewhere find 16 000 euros for sarcastic posts on X, 16 ,000 euros.

2:51:24Ant Pruitt:What were his sarcastic posts? Well, for instance, so the first incident dates back to June 2023, when the vice president of the German Bundestag, Katrin Göring-Eckardt, posted an alarmist post about climate change citing droughts, wildfires, high sea temperatures. Wehrhaus, unimpressed, replied, there is indeed an extreme drought, namely in Katrina Goring-Eckardt's head. What? Yeah. And then a doctoral student who was patrolling the internet filed a criminal complaint on her behalf. For calling someone's head empty? Yeah. In America, you can do that. The second charge came after Wehrhaus discovered the identity of the doctoral student and referred to him online as a little snitch that's just accurate that's like two that is so accurate yeah uh did you say svi that's why strike svi he called a journalist a nincompoop and said you still have a lot to learn in order not to be constantly fooled six and got fined for that yes that's crazy 16 000 euros i'm gonna i'm gonna print these out and use them anytime someone complains for not having uh free speech here in the u.s that would put a chill in your speech yeah yeah that's why i was going to say every post i've ever made would yeah i'd be fine for it i'd be so broke i'd be fine for every comment i've ever made in this podcast so we cover this a little bit on intelligent machines but we should probably mention uh but we are at the year end uh we should mention the words of the year for 2025 the oxford dictionary word of the year rage bait yep yep lots of that yeah yeah i mean frankly i feel like it should have been a word of the year before this but dictionary.com maybe a little late to the trend six seven oh come on maybe a little late yeah it's dying both of these things by the way both of them two words yeah i mean what to one of them's two numbers not even a word it's not even a word is a cambridge dictionary chose parasocial which i think parasocial that's probably a really good one yeah and it's kind of what's going on in the world you can look these up that's what they want you to do i'm sure you can look these up they're real i swear at dictionary.com yes there you go dictionary.christmas don't go there don't go there don't go there don't go there don't don't go to dictionary.christmas please oh please it's 97 malicious yeah uh i was thinking you know as i go through this and we used we would always do this if somebody important in the tech industry passed away during the week i would i would memorialize them on the show and i was thinking about that you know maybe we get a sad song from i don't know sarah mclaughlin then Angel yes Angel yeah Angel and then play that but now I was like I'm not gonna do that but I do have to mention it and it is very sad and it hits us really hard one of our twit family members a guy who did a YouTube show with us for a while was a regular on twit we haven't had it on in quite some time because he became quite a celebrity on YouTube uh Lamar Wilson has passed away uh at the age of 48 he took his own life which is very very sad uh he was doing very well on youtube on tick tock uh he had a couple of weeks ago posted his gift guide um passed away uh we didn't we just learned about it uh but he passed away last yes yeah at a very young age um his family confirmed uh the death uh last week on facebook we loved lamar lamar was really a talent uh was amazing he had over three million followers uh on youtube instagram and tiktok um i loved working with him we're very sad uh to have lost him so um i did want to mention that because we're getting to that time, Steve, where some of our people we love the most leave us.

2:55:50Ant Pruitt:And I should also mention that if you are feeling hard, it's rocky this holiday season, it's a tough time of year for a lot of people, that there is help out there, that every country has a helpline here in the United States. It's 988. Call or text. Yeah. And please don't hold off. You know, somebody's there to talk to you and we want you. We can't, we don't want to lose you. So if you're going through a hard time, you know what? So hang out with us. We'll keep you company. It's all good here. And I just, you know, as always, when this happens, you go, oh, what could I have done? I've kind of been out of touch with Lamar.

2:56:32Ant Pruitt:I really enjoyed working with him. He's a great guy. Very talented. And had fans everywhere. Our son told me about this, Michael, who's 23, and he was a big fan of his unboxing videos. I said, did you know he used to work for us? Yeah. uh sad and on that note but um that's sometimes how it is it's been a very weird year do you think and i'll ask each of you individually micah is next year going to be better is next year going to be better I think I have to believe that every year is going to be better because if I believe it's going to be worse, I'm not going to be in a good headspace. So will next year be better?

2:57:26That prediction? I don't know. But I want it to be and I hope for it to be. And I plan to do what it is my job to do to help make it a better year. That's for sure. Yeah. Good. Yeah.

2:57:39Ant Pruitt:Paris, you're looking forward to a good 2026? Yeah, I think along a similar line is what my, I think Micah put it perfectly. You have to hope that the days to come are better than the days that have passed and do all that you can to make the world a better place. And I don't know, I hope we see that in the next year as well. Steve Gibson, you make money on things getting worse every year. Wow. Wow. bring us home Steve bring us home Steve Reno wow yeah yeah I know I know security's not going to get better next year the human condition is one of struggle yeah you know it is it's yes yeah pushing for more uh achieving what you can uh as I as I age I realize that the best parts of life are friends and people who I enjoy being with.

2:58:43And it's sad when you lose them. And so all you have is memories. But even that, I mean, I think relationships are the key. And so to some degree, I think it's up to us not to get de-socialized by this increasingly mechanized environment, you know, have friends, reach out to neighbors, don't be isolated, stay connected, and, you know, and have a good time because that's life.

2:59:14Ant Pruitt:We did an interview, Paris, you remember this, with Kevin Kelly, who is a longtime tech journalist, good friend, who says he is an optimist. He's the angry optimist, is what he calls himself. That interview you'll hear once again on our Best Of on Wednesday. So if you're looking for reasons to be optimistic, listen to Intelligent Machines Best Of on Wednesday. I do think there's a lot of reasons to think that this year is going to be better than last. And it is up to us to make it so. I know one thing we'll be here for you. One of the reasons why 2026 will be better than 2025 is 2026 may be the year where I finally get Leo, convince Leo to do a 24-hour Twitch live stream.

2:59:57And you, dear listeners, can make that happen. Bombard this man. We're going to make it happen. Paris, it's going to be the year that you finally get all your boyfriends to have televisions. That would be true. I'm going to make sure that you're going to be fully screened. I'm going to be fully screened

3:00:13Ant Pruitt:on all sides. She didn't say, by the way, she didn't say boyfriends. She said the men she knows. Let's not. Men she knows. Okay. Just every man I know is going to have a television because they're going to be really affordable next year because electronics they're going to be so affordable that's right you can ask steve what those 24 hour new year's shows were like he was at one of them i remember him dancing with a cardboard cut up of captain kirk wouldn't that be great that sounds fun i'll take as many of the i'll be there for all the hours there yeah that she was there there unfortunately there is some recording of that so unfortunately very yeah and then there was the bull the uh the mechanical bull that we had We had a mechanical bowl.

3:00:57See, this is why we've got to do it in person, Leo.

3:01:00Ant Pruitt:In the studio, we had a mechanical bowl. No, it was out in the street. Oh, that's right. We took over the street. We closed off the street. Yeah. I forgot about that. All right. I'm adding this to the list. Mechanical bowl. We closed off the street outside our studio. We had jump houses for kids. We had a mechanical bowl. I completely forgot about that. Can we please hire an Elvis impersonator? We had a Marilyn Monroe impersonator. Okay, wait, wait, wait. I've got an idea. we our one goes through we one elvis impersonator shows up turns out that it's not easy to hold this we could have 24 hours of elvis for 24 elvis all right uh yes the all all 24 hours of both of those shows we did two years in a row then we had the famous tattoo event that's what i'm saying is I think we should do it again.

3:01:52I'll get this out to it at midnight.

3:01:53Ant Pruitt:Leo's running out of available skin. It's your turn. Okay. I'll do it. Steve Gibson, thank you so much for your friendship and your expertise, your help all, not only this year, for the last 20 years of Twit and security now. We are so grateful for you. It's been great. And we passed the infamous 999 episode. Oh, that was another event of 2025. Kept on. Steve extended his run past three digits. GRC.com is where he lives. It's where his software is. Spinrite, the world's best mass storage maintenance, recovery, and performance utility. And brand new, his DNS benchmark. A great way to see if you're getting all the internet you're paying for.

3:02:36Ant Pruitt:GRC.com. Thank you, Steve Gibson. I will see you this Tuesday. You will be here. Great to be with Twit and with the podcast. It's one of the best things I've ever done. It's absolutely true. Me too. Yeah. the best thing well maybe my kids uh paris martineau it's been such a pleasure having you on our show uh starting in 2018 really wow well of course now on intelligent machines uh you and jeff make that show so much fun and of course we will not be here this wednesday because it's christmas eve but a week from wednesday our best of with some really great interviews uh your dad didn't make an appearance i decided that i want if i want him to come on the show it's gotta be when you and jeff are here oh that would be better okay oh shoot uh you're not going to be uh in florida through the new year are you i'm not we'll make it work at some point okay jeff needs to be here too to see glory he needs magnificence because my dad had had questions about your guys's opinions on ai and which one of you guys is uh basically walking on sand and you You know which one that is, don't you?

3:03:45You know which one that is. We really ought to mention also, for anyone who has access to Apple TV, Pluribus. Yeah. God, I got to see that. Steve's loving it. If only some of the men in your life had a television.

3:03:58Ant Pruitt:You're a Pluribed? I'm a Pluribed too. Oh my God. A Pluribro? A Pluribro? A Pluribro? A Pluribed. A Pluribro. Okay. We're Pluribros. Boy. Micah Sargent, such a pleasure to work with you too. my only sadness that we close the studio I don't get to sit next we don't get to sit every week and chat yeah I kind of miss that and then you moved away I do yes and now I'm in Portland but I love it here Steve you you touched earlier on the importance of forming uh relationships and I've I've uh been blessed to to make some really really good friends here okay and it's made all the difference especially in Portland where there's not a lot of sun a lot of the time and I am seasonal affective disorder man.

3:04:45So that's, it's been very helpful, but I also want to do a quick, I feel closer than I ever have to our listener base this year. The Club Twit folks, so incredibly supportive, so incredibly kind, doing, bringing Crafting Corner every month and having those really chill sessions has been therapeutic, enjoyable, and I've gotten to know many of you. And yeah, I'm so grateful for all of you, for the support that you provide to let us continue to do the work that we do. It means the world to us. So just a special shout out to all of you who, I mean, even those of you who are listeners to the, you know, that aren't part of Club Twit, you are also helping us do what we do here.

3:05:32So thank you, all of you.

3:05:33Ant Pruitt:Mike is crafting corner. The next one will be second Wednesday of January, January 14th. if you want to hang out. That's one of the many things we do in Club Twit. We do love our Club Twit members, but we're grateful to all of you for your support all year long. And we look forward to, yes, a better year in 2026. For 20 years, we've been doing this. This is our 20th holiday, 21st holiday episode. Wow. Wait, this holiday episode can drink. Can drink. It can have brandy. Oh, shoot. Of all the weeks for me not to. And we know you waited until you're 21, Paris. It's true. Thank you all for being here.

3:06:12Ant Pruitt:Much love to you all. I hope you do have a happy holiday. Find somebody, find some mistletoe, give them a big hug, celebrate your connections. I think you're right, Steve. That's the most important thing this holiday season. And we will see you right back here next year. Bye, everybody. Now, as I've said, every year for 20 Wings, another twit is in the can. Bye, everybody.

3:06:38Doing the twit.

3:06:39Ant Pruitt:Doing the twit. All right. Doing the twit, baby. Doing the twit. All right. Doing the twit.