TWiT 1071: Image Pickles - Are Social Platforms Addictive or Just Too Good?

13:46Leo Laporte:We actually stop all of our TV shows about 10 minutes before the end. Oh, that's smart. we want to especially if we need to go to bed that's what avoid the cliffhanger yeah that's that's how we watch shows in our house because we're very i love it but there's a very big difference than ending on a cliffhanger for like something that has a finite lifespan even if it is you know 15 hours of binge watch and having an infinite scroll of like just quick, easy.

14:20Ant Pruitt:I feel like, I mean, every novelist, if they could, would write a novel that compelled you to read the next installment. Do you overeat at a buffet? Is the crime that Instagram and Facebook and YouTube committed that they're too good at it?

14:35Jason Howell:I think it's that they know that they're hurting people. And like, we've got all these internal documents from the company talking about like, oh, like we noticed that when we turned this feature on, it caused this shame spiral. and all these like teenage girls started watching 10 hours of eating disorder content. And they also know that there are solutions that they can implement to address this problem, but they choose not to. We have all these documents where the companies are discussing internally, this is a big problem and we're causing it and we could do something about it and choosing not to because they want to protect their bottom line.

15:09Jason Howell:And that's where it's a little different. If HBO knew that it was doing that and they had a solution and they could still make a great show that wouldn't cause you to have an eating disorder, I think we would all be pretty upset that they were proceeding in that way. And I think that's the way that we should be looking.

15:25Megan Morrone:Yeah, the incentive structures are totally different. Yeah, you're right. One, once you watch more ads, so they get more money the longer you stay on the platform. The other one is like, we just want you to stay around for a month. You can watch as little as you want or as much as you want. and we won't try to we just want you to keep your subscription which is a totally different

15:44Ant Pruitt:motivation YouTube actually argued we're not social media we're just an entertainment platform like HBO their lawyer said it's not trying to get in your brain and rewiring it like those other guys in the stand it's just asking you what you like to watch is is YouTube social media

16:05Jason Howell:I mean is anything social media anymore like what's the difference between no you're right because instagram is not my friends no yeah i i think that's a strange argument to make that like that we're like oh well this is different because of the definition of what a social media platform is like my space was social media instagram in the early days was social media but i go on any of these apps the last thing that i'm looking at is what my friends are posting and they're posting less and less and that's by design all of the companies are doing this no it's tick

16:33Ant Pruitt:It's a stream of entertaining content designed to keep you scrolling.

16:38Jason Howell:Instagram is the same way.

16:38Ant Pruitt:Yeah. Instagram is the same. I suppose you could argue Facebook's the same. Certainly YouTube is that way. So you kind of hit on the thing that I do care about on this. And the reason I'm arguing against any restraints is because of Section 230. I don't want to open the door to undermining Section 230. 30 years old this week. And, you know, it's been called the 26 words that created the internet. It was part of the Communications Decency Act. And it said that no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

17:27Ant Pruitt:In other words, Twitter wasn't responsible for your tweets. You were. And Twitter couldn't be held liable. And by the way, a lot of people who are trying to change Section 230, including a number of well-known Hollywood actors, which puzzles me, is that it's big tech trying to manipulate you. But Section 230 also protects me. It protects my chat room. It protects my discourse forums. It protects my Mastodon instance. If I were liable for the things people posted on those, I would just shut them down because I couldn't defend myself. I'm not big enough to defend myself. In fact, big tech can. So do you think this trial is in any way a threat in the long run to 230 or that 230 protects these companies?

18:16Jason Howell:I think they're trying to sidestep that issue altogether because they're not talking about like Instagram hosts dangerous content. like it's not the content it's what instagram's doing with their algorithms platform right a whole separate can of worms a much i think more complicated issues this is what people like

18:34Ant Pruitt:joseph gordon levitt say well when you do an algorithm you're a publisher right well which i

18:40Jason Howell:think is a point that's really worth focusing on right you in your discord like maybe you have some rules set up where if someone says something that's like you know really deeply offensive or like breaks a law, you're going to ban them. That's a lot different than a social media platform where they've got this algorithm and we know that they're making like very specific intentional decisions about what kinds of content that they want to promote. We also know like TikTok, for example, there was a story a couple of years ago about how they have a heating button where if they have a particular user that they want to promote, they go in and they turn this on and it makes the content go viral.

19:19Jason Howell:So I think there are all kinds of cases where the tech platforms are acting like publishers, like YouTube decides what kinds of stuff goes on the homepage. These algorithms are making the decisions, but I think it's not really accurate to describe these platforms as just like neutral the way that Reddit is and anyone can just go on there and post. There's something else that's going on here that I think maybe needs to be addressed in a different way than like, you know, your your discord community because it operates in a completely different way. What's the remedy?

19:55Leo Laporte:So here's here's what I've been thinking about. And I hate thinking about 230 because it's like the third rail of Internet.

20:02Ant Pruitt:No, we have to defend it. We have to defend it. Hold on.

20:05Leo Laporte:Hold on. So I'm thinking back to, you know, this has influenced my net neutrality years. Right. Right. Thinking about we had the common carriers for ISPs. Right. And then we came up and we were like, you know what? These email providers and Internet folks, they're a little different. They're broadband providers. So they're not they don't they don't have to follow these rules. And I know we spent a long time debating over how that would happen. But I wonder if, because there, and we would have to figure out what is a publisher on the internet versus what is a platform that is pushing something harmful.

20:42Leo Laporte:And you could define it by the platform. You could set regulations for proving harm. I don't love that idea. But there are lots of policy ways we could tackle this. But what happens is we're like, we're going after 230. And everyone rightly freaks out. so it's time for nuance and we're just really terrible this time is terrible for nuance and i'd love to read like some really good thinking on that please send me stuff i think you're right

21:10Ant Pruitt:i think it's true that when a company creates an algorithm that's really designed to as best as possible hook people into doom scrolling that they have now become a publisher or look at ai

21:23Jason Howell:right like you go on Google and do a Google search right now and Google is speaking to you Google is generating the information itself and giving it to you they're bashing yeah they are publishing they are making the information up themselves and delivering it to you that's a completely different thing I think you we have to protect section 230 though it's true the whole internet relies on it we cannot get rid of it the solution that I always point to with this kind of stuff is transparency. What if there was a law that said you had to make it so that outside auditors, and we could decide who they are, can go in and look at exactly what the algorithm is doing and demonstrate, you know, this piece of content is being promoted in this particular way.

22:07Jason Howell:And this is how people are reacting to it. This is what the algorithm is doing just by putting it out in public. So everyone can decide, like, how do we feel about all this, I think would create, you know, like Wesley was saying, a social pressure on these companies to behave a little better and be better stewards of what's happening on their platforms. Now that wouldn't solve it, but where we are right now is like nothing at all. That's like these companies can never be held accountable under any circumstances because of these rules that really are protecting and upholding the internet. I think we've just gotten to a place where the internet is so different that we have to come up with a new way to look at it.

22:43Jason Howell:But it gets, like you're saying, gets thorny really fast.

22:46Megan Morrone:It could even be opt-in for some places to have like almost a score, like a health score for a restaurant. You can see if it's an A, a B, a C, a D, and F on certain categories where they can choose to be part of it or choose not. Some of this stuff, especially with kids.

23:03Ant Pruitt:Josh Hawley is going to be doing the grading.

23:07Megan Morrone:Well, it has to be useful for people to trust it, right? Right. And so if you're really wanting to tackle this, it needs to be extremely objective.

23:15Ant Pruitt:But if lawmakers make this law, who is going to be the person doing the grading? Lawmakers.

23:20Megan Morrone:It could be a consortium. No, lawmakers hate actually doing that.

23:24Ant Pruitt:Yeah, exactly.

23:24Leo Laporte:They're going to actually give it up to God help us. If we're lucky, it'll be a government agency. This is what Facebook pretended to do, right?

23:34Ant Pruitt:With their whatever they called that group.

23:37Megan Morrone:it's still around or just let people make their own benchmarks like think of gink but i agree

23:42Ant Pruitt:social norms are the only thing that can protect us not not no i think i think actual rules need

23:48Leo Laporte:to protect us and i think everyone really we love transparency i mean god help me i'm working on so many labels right now um but the problem is and i will go back to kids because they don't have the ability to look at this and understand the label the way like i may be able to look and say oh

24:09Ant Pruitt:that's you know pro-anacontas with the motion picture uh labels uh mpaa laws rules were those

24:17Leo Laporte:effective rg pg what i showed my kid when they were young things that i watched that were like pg or pg 13 i was like oh my god this is the most sexist horrible things no wonder i as a 90s child like grew up not having like with some of the ideas I had.

24:35Ant Pruitt:Yeah. I mean, the MPAA allowed murder on camera, but not a naked breast.

24:40Leo Laporte:But now they don't.

24:41Ant Pruitt:Now they don't.

24:42Leo Laporte:Like these will change. Well, the way they were enforced has changed over time. I just don't I don't think ratings are the way. I think we really need to think about the harms we're trying to prevent and then set up rules to address those harms and probably some sort of body that arbitrate that because it's going to change over time. I don't know. This is why I want people to send me good ideas.

25:08Ant Pruitt:You can see how hard this is, to be honest.

25:10Jason Howell:We have a system set up for copyright, right? Like if I notify, well, it's complicated, but if I notify Twitter or TikTok that like someone is like hosting, you know, Paramount's content, they have 24 hours to take down before they violate the DMCA, right? You could create a system where, okay, we decide that there are certain kinds of content that we think are so noxious that they're illegal, and maybe we need to expand it a little bit. But even just the rules that we have, right? We know that companies aren't doing a good job of taking down dangerous, like completely illegal stuff. We could create more robust protections where they have to have a system in place where they act on stuff in a certain amount of time if they're notified about a particular problem and then you know there's some accountability system where they have to tell everyone about how they're doing it the same way that they have transparency reports about how many times they respond to you know warrants and police requests i think there are a lot of like small interventions that we could make that everyone except the tech companies would kind of agree on it's when you look at the big you're trying to like write one law about the internet or do we want the senators you know deciding what kind of speech is and isn't okay that's when it gets complicated right there are a lot of common

26:29Ant Pruitt:sense interventions it does seem like there has been a growing consensus that this stuff is bad for us it's bad for our kids uh that these companies don't really care um it's hard to think of what a remedy would be but i think we all we've all kind of come around to this idea that this is not the utopia that we thought the internet would end up being.

26:50Megan Morrone:I think competition is the way to fix it, though. What's going on with the Fediverse, hopefully, will mature enough where people can feel like they can opt into the experience that they feel is good for them. But we lack the vocabulary to even describe what we want, I think, is part of it. Because we don't have this competition, you can't say, this is more X, this is more Y, this is whatever, because we can't even have that conversation. We just say safe, harmful, or addictive, but we don't have the nuance to be able to say, let's make a platform that's different than all the others where people know if they want a certain experience, where to go.

27:30Ant Pruitt:The problem is, Wesley, these algorithms are so good that they win. You can't have competition because people want Instagram. They want these algorithms.

27:41Leo Laporte:competition also because there's no business model for this right now well the business but

27:46Ant Pruitt:but instagram and facebook and youtube are making billions and billions their money is based on

27:51Leo Laporte:engaging us at all costs even at harm so we recognize that but right but if you're not to harm people if you're to create a place where engagement doesn't matter then you're looking at something that people pay for fewer people will pay for that part of the reason i mean like And it does get down to this idea. I wonder if some of this is down to the fact that we think we want the internet to be a place where we socialize and can connect and have these engagements. And we do in the sense, if you live in a small town, it gets you all of these people and engagement you otherwise would never get because those people aren't there.

28:30Leo Laporte:But we don't want to spend money on it. And honestly, I don't know if you should have. I mean, basically, we think the internet's doing one thing, but it's really doing another, and most people are not aware of that. And that's hard. I love the Fediverse. I hope it helps, but I'm not as optimistic.

28:48Ant Pruitt:It's not very competitive, is it? You know, when they poll people about which TV channels they watch, they always say PBS in a far greater number than people actually watch PBS, right? People say they want to eat vegetables. They like McDonald's. I think it's a problem. The biggest problem here is these platforms are hugely successful.

29:12Leo Laporte:But you could make it more painful and more expensive for them. So like some of these little alterations could make it, because I think we're like, let's stop them from being evil. But what if we just said, hey, let's make it really expensive. We did that with cigarettes. Pain in their butt.

29:29Ant Pruitt:we did that with cigarettes we raised the cost of cigarettes in canada they have i think it's probably true in the uk too they have labels and cigarettes that are graphic yeah they show lungs and and it's like this is gonna happen to you if you and it does not seem to deter people much what are you talking about nobody smokes anymore but you know why because we make sure that they

29:52Leo Laporte:have to do it outside when it's cold right i i feel like there's been a bunch of interventions

29:56Ant Pruitt:there are interventions much more painful you're right there are interventions that work it's not we did a whole bunch of different ones yeah we tried them all yeah yeah that's true do fewer people smoke oh yes in the u.s for sure in the u.s yeah but in italy it's you could smoke can you smoke inside places in italy no when we were in rome last year at least and said, I never want to come back here because everybody's outside smoking.

30:26Leo Laporte:Yes. Anytime I'm in like Japan or parts of Europe, I'm just like, woof, you guys. When I was in Istanbul, they were smoking in the hotel.

30:34Ant Pruitt:And people know, I mean, there's nobody who doesn't know that smoking is bad for them. That's going to kill them.

30:38Megan Morrone:But think about this culturally, you see it less than movies and TV shows. And I think that's true. That's my previous example. It's not cool anymore. They are worried about it coming back. We've moved away from that. Yeah, it's not cool anymore.

30:49Ant Pruitt:All right, we're going to take a break and talk about privacy. next great to have thomas germain first time first timer from the the bbc's the interface which uh you got a great team i can't wait to listen to it that sounds great just launched last week just last weekend yeah but you already have muffs we've been doing this 20 years and we do not have microphone muffs with our name on it you got to get on my level i don't even have a mic flag for crying out we're coming for you yeah i'm in trouble also stacy higginbotham who thank goodness does not have a consumer reports mike flag but she does have a little that little wooden cr behind her which paris now has and nicholas de leon now has they're starting yeah taken over everywhere

31:32Leo Laporte:they there were from the pandemic apparently oh because everybody had to do zoom calls

31:37Ant Pruitt:yeah isn't that interesting that might be the number one thing the pandemic has changed we've all become even on major news networks we've all become used to people sitting in their bedroom doing doing i've been in my office okay office or whatever it's really changed it's really interesting right wesley faulkner is also here great to have you wesley we'll talk about your new new company works not working thanks just a little bit our show today brought to you by zscaler the world's largest cloud security platform and the time is right we talk a lot about ai on all of our shows the potential rewards in business are obviously too great to ignore uh but there are risks there are a lot of risks the loss of sensitive data attacks against enterprise managed ai generative ai increases opportunities for threat actors too just as it's helping your business is helping them to rapidly create fishing lures that are indistinguishable from the real thing do you notice i don't know if you've so i know we get more and more of those every single day got one the other day from a well-known company saying your bill is overdue just click this link to pay it also bad guys are using it to write malicious code we're seeing malware crafted by ai they're automating data extraction one of the big problems that maybe you don't even see in your business is even the use of you know well-known sas ai apps can leak information there are 1.3 million instances of social security numbers leaked to ai applications last year chat gpt and microsoft copilot between the two of them saw nearly 3.2 million data violations so this is my pitch it's time for a modern approach with zscaler zero trust plus ai it does a bunch of things that are very important for one thing it removes your attack surface it secures your data everywhere in on prem and in the cloud it safeguards your use of public and private ai and it protects you against ransomware and ai powered phishing attacks wow just check out what the director of security and infrastructure at zwara says about using zscaler ai provides tremendous opportunities but

33:54Leo Laporte:it also brings tremendous security concerns when it comes to data privacy and data security The benefit of Zscalette with ZIA rolled out for us right now is giving us the insights of how our employees are using various Gen.AI tools. So ability to monitor the activity, make sure that what we consider confidential and sensitive information, according to companies' data classification, does not get fed into the public LLM models, etc.

34:21Ant Pruitt:With zero trust plus AI, you can thrive in the AI era, stay ahead of the competition, and remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve. You should go right now. Check it out. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. zscaler.com slash security. We thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. We have, you know, it's funny. When I was putting the show together, there weren't a lot of stories about AI, but there were a ton of stories about privacy. I'll start with one that kind of tells you something. Meta, according to Business Insider, apparently thinks we're too distracted to care about face recognition and Ray-Bans.

35:03Ant Pruitt:They say they're going to add face recognition, that thing that Google refused to do way back when with Google Glass, to the Ray-Ban smart glasses. And they're going to do it soon. Figuring, yeah, there's too many other things people are worried about. They're not going to notice. we noticed mr zuckerberg we noticed uh should we worry about face recognition and uh and and these glasses i feel it seems to me this is the one thing i've been waiting for to be clear they

35:33Leo Laporte:said that it wasn't you guys that they're worried about they're worried they were saying that the consumer groups that fight against this or the right they're busy fight against they're busy fighting literally everything else because there is so much happening so it's not just it's it's

35:50Ant Pruitt:not consumers that they're saying the new york times viewed a document that said quote meta's internal memo said the political tumult in the united states was good timing for the features

35:59Jason Howell:release yeah i mean it's one of the most cynical things i think i've ever seen from the tech industry and that is really saying a lot yeah no kidding yeah if you read i mean careless whisper

36:11Leo Laporte:that was literally i mean like it did not surprise me at all i was like well of course do we not know

36:17Ant Pruitt:that this is how they operate what's careless whisper that was there that was the book by

36:21Leo Laporte:was it francis the woman who used to work there and like careless people careless people sorry

36:30Ant Pruitt:yeah okay i was curious because uh i thought that was maybe a code name oh yeah careless people blew the lid off of this wow well you would think but like no nobody kind

36:42Leo Laporte:of just shrugged um yeah so i will say i'll sing it later um i i am terrified of this both as a woman, as a reporter, as a person who has been stopped. Everything about this is awful. But it's also something that I think Ome and I had conversations about this when I was back at GigaOme. I mean, like in 2012. Well, it's been on the radar.

37:16Ant Pruitt:Remember, Google said, we're not going to do that because of that very reason. We could, although it is built into the I think it's built into the Nest cameras. So maybe they decided to change their mind.

37:30Leo Laporte:You can turn on facial recognition in your Ring camera. Sorry, you can opt out of. Ring has familiar faces, so you can see it on your Ring camera. You can see.

37:44Ant Pruitt:But you understand that in order to do that, it's sending your face back to the home office. Yes. Comparing it against the database and then sending that information. But it's not done on device. Right.

37:54Leo Laporte:I have a lot of like one of the biggest things that I'm angry about and argue with people about all the time is end to end encryption on any sort of AI powered service anywhere. Like the Kohler toilet when it launched and was like, well, AI analyze your poop. I recognize that.

38:12Ant Pruitt:But oh, you're OK.

38:14Leo Laporte:And they were like, we have end to end encryption.

38:16Ant Pruitt:Absolutely. But end to end encryption. It takes a whole new meaning on a toilet cam.

38:22Leo Laporte:I'm too serious for this.

38:25Ant Pruitt:I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm getting silly now. I apologize. Actually, this came up. Ring, remember, two weeks ago, last week, it wasn't even two weeks ago, and during the Super Bowl, had what many thought was kind of a dystopian ad showing how you could find lost doggies using Ring's new surveillance feature, which many people almost immediately pointed out. search party isn't for dogs uh it's for oh i don't know anything and part of the problem was that um ring had a deal with flock uh when flock has a deal with ice so it all kind of goes it goes

39:08Leo Laporte:around and around uh accurate information on the sir yeah flock is the surveillance company that

39:15Ant Pruitt:It does license plate, ASLR, license plate recognition, automated license plate readers, and video surveillance. And anyway, Ring, which here's the good news. After the backlash, Ring said, oh, never mind. We're not going to do that deal with Flock. Okay.

39:34Leo Laporte:But search party still, those are two separate things. Search party still exists. Search party still there.

39:37Megan Morrone:Yeah.

39:39Leo Laporte:Ring is very accurate.

39:40Megan Morrone:Oh, go on. Oh, sorry. I said they're also doing the deal with Taser too still. that's still going yeah they still have taser they're gonna build a taser into my doorbell the no it's okay ring it does a lot of third-party partnerships with law enforcement

39:56Leo Laporte:because they need chain of custody for some of the videos and they need so that's that's part of there's some nefarious fun things happening there um so the deal with flocks flocks flock and the deal with Axion, Taser, Bodycam Maker. Those are, Ring did cancel their deal with Flock. They still have the other deal.

40:19Ant Pruitt:Were they going to do license plate recognition?

40:22Leo Laporte:No, Flock was going to be able to access video feeds on like from Ring. And I don't, I think Ring would give them the video and then Flock would run their own algorithm on it.

40:34Jason Howell:So I think this is one of those cases where you do want to, there's a famous quote, like, ski down the slippery slope here. The CEO of Ring says that his company's goal is to zero out crime, which, like, first of all, kind of ridiculous. I don't know what Ring cameras are going to do about white-collar crime. But, like, what are we actually talking about here? And unlike some of the stuff we were talking about in the first half of the show, right, this is something that almost everyone I know who doesn't work at a gigantic tech company agrees on. Every single person I go up to at a party, I tell them about an investigation I've done about some privacy issue.

41:15Jason Howell:The response is always like, well, what's going to happen now? And the answer is nothing because there's no rules about this stuff. People want laws on this issue so badly that they assume that they already exist because it's so clearly a thing that everyone agrees on. I mean, facial recognition, like I'm not the first person to say this, but that is the end of any form of privacy in our society. It's over, it's done. As soon as that is just like a regular thing that, you know, a guy walking down the street can like hit a button on his glasses and identify who you are, it's over. And we're already there with all these cameras that are operating in publicly.

41:56Jason Howell:If you see a security camera, you should assume that there's facial recognition software running on it. And, you know, like maybe you want to get rid of all crime like Ring does. Maybe you're in favor of that. But I think it's really important that we talk about what exactly it is that we're trading to get there, especially when we look at what Meta is doing, adding facial recognition to the glasses, trying to do it in secret. So I think we can assume the goal is like you get there and it's like, well, it's already here. Everyone's already using we can't roll it back now like it's just become a regular part of everyday life it isn't too late if people aren't happy with this stuff to do something about it and what we saw

42:34Ant Pruitt:with the reaction of the super bowl ad is perfect evidence there is a constituency that wants this though there are uh it's suburban people uh who want to you know look if somebody's stealing uh boxes off my porch i want to help law enforcement catch them or if somebody across the street uh does a home invade there's a home invasion across the street i want law enforcement to catch him if my camera can help i i want it to help so they think they want it oh we'll let

43:05Megan Morrone:we'll let wesley go because he's going to make that i'm sorry it's just that yeah with the what what is being created right now is good is a marketplace for locating people just and once there's a marketplace, they will try to get as much data and sell it to as much as many people as they can. With the meta glasses, you said someone will push a button and see where a person is. That's not or who that person is.

43:36Ant Pruitt:That's I want that because when I run into you in about five years and I can't remember who you are. But I want that's meta letting you know who that person

43:43Megan Morrone:is. Right. But there but metal know all the people in that whole shot. And they just will keep that data for themselves. Or sell it to Flock. And especially sell it. Because now they say, hey, I know that you're in a Barnes and Nobles, and I know you just ran into your friend Tom, but now I know that Gina, Mike, and blah, blah, blah is in that Barnes and Noble. Hey, Barnes and Nobles, would you like to know who's going to your store and when? And that's the problem with the ring, isn't it?

44:10Ant Pruitt:It catches everything that's going on. Regardless of your little puppy.

44:15Leo Laporte:They have it from your cell phone data. Like they know where I'm going. So the visual isn't necessary there.

44:22Megan Morrone:But now metal will have it and metal will sell it. And now they would try to get more of it and they try to sell more of it. It's just like making another marketplace where your privacy is also sold and then people can aggregate it.

44:38Ant Pruitt:It's also a surveillance net, right? It becomes at some point there is universal information about who's there, when, doing what.

44:48Leo Laporte:And I will say, so way back, Ring launched Neighbors. I don't, I was podcasting from my old house. So I had Jamie Siminoff on the show, on my IOT show way back in the day, talking about this. And I was like, hey man, what about racism? What about, you know, petty crime getting, you know, people getting caught up in petty crime.

45:09Ant Pruitt:And Neighbors really did become a racist.

45:11Leo Laporte:It was, it was incredibly racist.

45:13Ant Pruitt:Yeah, there's a black man walking down my street, you know.

45:16Leo Laporte:But he was like, we're going to have social shame for that. We're going to, those people aren't. Exactly. So I want to point, and I've even brought, I installed ring cameras for my in-laws, you know, years ago because they really wanted to catch porch pirates. That was a big, they lived in like a million dollar neighborhood in Texas in a suburb. They were fine, but they were deeply concerned. And I brought up, you know, these concerns and they were like, Stacy, that's not real. And I don't know if those people have changed their minds. I don't think that the idea of zero crime, I mean, it's been sold to us for decades as the reason for needing surveillance.

45:58And it has perpetually led us to criminalizing, usually being poor, being black or brown.

46:06Leo Laporte:It isn't really about zero crime.

46:08Ant Pruitt:It's about control, in particular, control of certain people.

46:13Leo Laporte:and also wonder if our current political moment means that people are going to push back much

46:17Ant Pruitt:harder i think so i think i think we used to think it was i i used to think oh privacy so what if a you know a marketer gets my information no big deal now you start to talk about well what if a federal out of control federal law enforcement agency gets that information how how do you feel

46:33Jason Howell:about it now yeah i don't know anyone oh go ahead sorry no please i i don't i don't know anyone who who is comfortable and confident in the future of, you know, the governments of the leading world powers, right? We've seen, you know, no matter what side of the aisle you happen to be on. And I think that's what, yeah, a lot of people are okay with this. A lot of people, you know, you tell them like, well, they're handing the data to the cops and they go, great, I love cops. But I think you have to use your imagination a little bit here about the amount of power that we are handing. not like sure the government can get it but also these gigantic corporations that operate and have the power of nation states right here's the evidence people are becoming aware of this when

47:21Ant Pruitt:the nancy guthrie story surfaced one of the things they said is well we don't have uh you know she had a nest camera doorbell but she didn't have a subscription and if you don't have a subscription it's not sending the photos to the cloud the information the cloud i guess the bad guy took the camera disabled it no so well wait a minute hold on then it comes out two weeks later oh we got pictures uh wait a minute i thought you said that she didn't have a subscription oh well uh we were able to retrieve uh extra stuff that was like left over and now we have pictures and what's that what was i know hold on what was gratifying to me is that people immediately said wait a minute google has access to those and that was a shocker go ahead stacy how did people not

48:11Leo Laporte:know that that's how the nest cameras don't have local storage that's not no but she didn't pay for it i know but they can't if you have remote access to any this here your audience knows this but if you have remote access to any device on your home network it goes to a cloud that is literally how they work. So if you have a Nest camera and you're able to look at it, even if you don't have a subscription, if you can log into your camera remotely, you're going over the public internet and it has to hit a server somewhere.

48:45Jason Howell:That's what upset people so much about this Ring ad in the Super Bowl, right? Is they saw Ring activating all of these cameras throughout neighborhood that it's like oh they're using my camera the camera at my house and this feature is on by default so ring decided that you're okay with this and they're going to use your camera for this feature unless you go turn it off right and i i think stacy makes a great point right we put these things in our house like a camera you put a some people put ring cameras pointing inside their own home and you don't have control over that device you don't know what it's doing now the company said, oh, we give you, we care about your privacy a lot.

49:27Jason Howell:We give you all these controls. You don't need to worry about it. It's like, okay, if you trust Amazon and you, you know, are very comfortable with all the things that could go wrong with this data, then fine. But think about whether that's actually how you feel.

49:42Ant Pruitt:The theory, the story was that they told us initially is that, well, she didn't have a subscription. And the deal with Nest is you can look at that camera live or for three hours after, but it will be deleted. But nine days later, Google says, oh, well, we were able to get, we were able to recover residual data in our backend systems.

50:06Leo Laporte:Yeah, I didn't. So I, I ended up explaining this to an AP reporter and I was kind of, again, I'm, I was really surprised that like, and I likened it, like, you know, when you drop your email when you delete your emails it's not gone it's not gone you can pull it out of your trash so whatever google's retention policies are you know that yes and it was a pain for them to get to it and they wouldn't do it for like everybody and you know some people are probably like well if my mom got you know kidnapped from her home and this yeah i'm glad that they have the video

50:41Jason Howell:sure but i think like i had the same reaction yeah i saw that ring ad and all people got upset about it and i was like yeah duh like people are like oh my god i'm part of a giant surveillance

50:51Ant Pruitt:network like that's what this thing is for i remember stacy when this came out we you were on this week in google we we were talking about this whole uh what do they call this this lo-ra network that they have that they've created with all sidewalk sidewalk yeah this is amazon uh sidewalk all the amazon devices are networked together and they even then at the time said it'll help you find your lost dog which at the time seemed pretty anodymed but maybe not okay that's a radio network it's very different well but but yeah well they could but i guess they could share somehow they're sharing video right no no it's not over it's not over amazon sidewalk is literally

51:33Leo Laporte:just a it's a wireless radio network okay it is a long-range wireless so it's not related to this at all not at not at all i mean there's i did turn it off that could be okay should i laura's the least of your problems i mean you can do however you want think of it as like mess-tastic

51:52Megan Morrone:it's just a it's a mesh so it's yeah i understand yeah it's just only radio so yeah so the dog had a tag that had a radar transmitter then you would be able to find it we gotta get our dog on wi-fi yeah so the thing about also someone brought the example if you if you had a stalker who knew what your dog looked like they could say i lost my dog and then activate this network to find the person that they're stalking as well wow so people could use this network for nefarious purposes i just i

52:23Ant Pruitt:was very like gratified that people went oh that's not good yeah yeah everybody seems to kind of be the same page on this one yeah but you know it's interesting so i probably not paying close attention figured oh well they canceled that flock uh safety in fact that's the headline in the verge ring cancels its partnership with flock safety after surveillance backlash it had nothing to do

52:46Leo Laporte:with this right right they just everybody got upset at the same time yeah so they're still doing the uh yes and you should know how it works so search party basically ring has fed photos of dogs into an ai that only recognizes dogs and ring is very clear that says this only recognizes dogs okay what i need people to recognize and know when they hear that and they're like oh it's fine that's great ring can update that algorithm at any point in time yeah for facial recognition thing is they have the data they have the control and ability to update your camera you are opted into this automatically unless you turn it off so just and that's how they do this they they add these little features and you get used to them and you're like oh this is kind of nice so neat um or you don't think much of it and they they are like oh it's only dogs don't worry and then then it'll be like lost children and you're like oh that's so good oh that's good Like we gotta, yeah, actually, yeah.

53:50Ant Pruitt:Let's add lost children to the search party.

53:52Megan Morrone:I also want to add that Amazon just keeps firing huge chunks of people, which is building an atmosphere of fear of people who are still there. And so where maybe in the past, someone would raise their hand saying, this is a really bad idea. We shouldn't do this. There is less incentives for people to do that. And so I think even though there's a quick backlash and outrage of that Super Bowl commercial, I'm sure deep down in people's hearts before this launch, they had those same feelings internally, but they know they couldn't stop the head of Ring from saying that you shouldn't do this. No one's going to raise their hand to make sure that that doesn't happen internally.

54:40Megan Morrone:So see these aggressive, maybe I don't want to say poorly thought out of, but very, let's just say one perspective of why these things are good to hit the market more now from not just Amazon, all the divisions of these large tech companies that are doing these mass layoffs.

55:03Ant Pruitt:So when we bought our house, there is a ring camera on the front door, but I pointed it away from the street. So it only sees, it doesn't see anything but our property. Like not anything but our front porch. And every other camera I have is local. It's their ubiquity cameras. They don't go to the cloud. Is that okay? Stacey, am I? Okay. I mean. i want to get rid of the ring camera but it is a big hole in the wall where it goes and there's nothing else i can put there i'd have to do anyway do you want a camera yeah do you want a camera for your doorbell yeah i like having a camera on my front porch yeah i like to know you know why because the cat has figured out how to ring the doorbell the cat jumps up on the wall walks up to the camera and it rings she doesn't push the button she isn't that good but she moves her head around and it rings and then i know she's at the door and i can look at my watch and see if it's

56:04Leo Laporte:her or a delivery person do you open the door when it's your cat yeah oh okay no i i didn't know if the cat had trained you like she's trained us okay answer the door or or maybe we trained her to ring the bell i don't know which it is but your cat is on wi-fi that's good that's one of the reasons i don't want to get them phones at the chime thing it's the chime thing you know chimes throughout the house when somebody walks up the you know if so there are ways to like we have a whole pamphlet i did on bystander privacy for these devices limiting the range of like actual camera vision is important so if you don't have a patient because i want to know if it's the cat or burke so um and if your local cameras if you are not accessing them remotely again if your ubiquity cameras are going to a server somewhere.

57:00Ant Pruitt:No, it's my server. It's in my house.

57:02Leo Laporte:If it's your server that you host, then you're fine. Yeah.

57:05Ant Pruitt:Main reason I did that was not for any privacy thing, but I didn't want to wait. I need all the bandwidth to do these shows. Those cameras uploading the internet use a lot of bandwidth. If you have three or four cameras uploading the internet, it's killing your internet bandwidth. So I didn't want to do that. I only wanted them to save locally.

57:24Leo Laporte:Yeah, so there's so it was just selfish.

57:26Ant Pruitt:It wasn't and I don't care about people. You wrote a story, Thomas. TikTok is tracking you. Oh, that's good. Even if you don't use the app. Yeah. So don't have the app on your phone is the answer.

57:42Jason Howell:Whether or not you use the app, if you've never watched TikTok video in your entire life, TikTok is tracking what people are doing across parts of the Internet that have nothing to do with TikTok. And it's worth mentioning, so are a lot of other gigantic tech companies. This is another story, like similar to the ring thing, where it's like, this has been going on for a while. What's happening here is tech companies that have advertising platforms, some of your listeners might know this, have tools called pixels. It's like literally like an invisible one pixel image that you put in the background of a website.

58:15Jason Howell:And when it loads, it sends data of the company that made it. So if I -

58:19Ant Pruitt:Yeah, just parenthetically, when we said we were going to put you on the show, the BBC called us and said, could you put a tracking pixel on the show so we could see how many people saw Thomas? Of course, yeah. Which we said no to, by the way. Right, yeah. But that's very common. People ask for that all the time. Not just for you, but in general.

58:40Jason Howell:And, you know, you visit a website and every single person who goes there, like if you advertise on TikTok, you put one of these things on your site. than TikTok data. But it's swooping up, you know, anybody who visits, whether or not you use TikTok, no matter what the content of the website is.

58:55Ant Pruitt:So is it like the Facebook like button kind of?

58:58Jason Howell:Similar, yeah. But invisible. Yeah, it's invisible. They've been around for years. The difference here is that TikTok just updated its pixel to make it way more useful for advertisers. Essentially, they're sharing more data with the people who use the pixel. And the implication is that's going to make TikTok advertising more effective, more appealing to advertisers. We're going to start seeing it in more places, and they're going to start getting even more of your data. Even if you don't like TikTok, you don't trust them, you don't want to be involved, they are getting your personal information.

59:26Ant Pruitt:What advertisers don't realize, of course, though, is this is creating what Corey Doctorow called the largest consumer boycott in history, the use of ad blockers and pixel blockers, which not only stops the TikTok pixel, but also stops ads. So they're shooting themselves in the foot by invading. So being so aggressive about invading our privacy, they're actually going to hurt themselves in the long run.

59:51Leo Laporte:So I just want to say that this doesn't just happen on the web itself. Right. This can be they put image pickle, image pickles. Good Lord.

1:00:01Ant Pruitt:I would love an image pickle right now. They put pixels into like emails.

1:00:10Leo Laporte:That was how superhuman track like opens and things like that. So just to be aware that this is ubiquitous, like truly on the internet.

1:00:19Ant Pruitt:But am I wrong in thinking that if I run EFF as a content blocker, I use uBlockOrigin. If I run one of those content blockers, that stops those pixels. The beacons don't get sent back. Isn't that right? Or am I wrong?

1:00:34Jason Howell:But so that was part of the reason that I wrote the article is like, there are actually there's super easy things you can do to stop this kind of tracking, right? You can use a more private browser. Most people are on Chrome, right? Chrome by default is doing a lot to stop. I wonder why Chrome doesn't block this. Yeah, right, exactly. You can use a privacy, like a tracker blocker, DuckDuckGo makes one. There's the EFF has privacy badges. Privacy badges, great. That'll stop this. But there are other kinds of data collection, right? They're collecting data from apps in a similar way. And there's also, you know, data that they're sending, you know, directly from the company server, not from your web browser, not using your computer to pass the information on.

1:01:13Jason Howell:There's not a lot you can do about that. But my point with this stuff is always, you know, what makes you so vulnerable to privacy intrusions is that they're putting together data from so many different sources and any steps you can take to like limit, okay, well, you're not getting this does make an enormous difference. So I, you know, I'm always encouraging people just like it's not a lost cause just put in a little effort whenever you can and you can you know make a meaningful difference with this particular problem do something anyway do something yeah you're not so the recommendations are ad blockers not loading images in your email by default

1:01:53Ant Pruitt:yeah i don't use html email at all i use a plain text for that very reason there's no

1:02:00Leo Laporte:what what else thomas what else should we be doing pie holes what's that oh pie hole

1:02:07Ant Pruitt:you're really pie hole is good if you've got an image pickle put it in your pie set up at his

1:02:13Jason Howell:house uh and when i go home i visit my parents like the internet just like does not work right there's like all these websites especially because i write about ad tech all the time that's the downside to go to the companies yes go to their web pages i can't visit them because i i get

1:02:27Ant Pruitt:blocked all the time because i have uh next dns running which is basically a third party pie hole

1:02:33Jason Howell:of course all my information is going to them now but a dns blocker is really going to stop a lot of this if you if you have the stomach for it if you have like it doesn't take a ton of technical expertise it'll break some things sometimes uh but you can a lot of them are designed to be consumer friendly use a better browser if you're not going to do that use a tracker blocker set up dns tool or if you're really crazy you can go for the pie hole i even i can't can't take it to that level but you know again there are things you can do here i would venture that a majority of our

1:03:08Ant Pruitt:listeners my people listening to the show are using some sort of ad blocking i mean it's become you know if you're at all technically sophisticated uh it's become just de-reuger

1:03:18Jason Howell:but not every ad blocker it works for this right uh you know it duckduckgo uh has a really good chart you can go check out some ad blockers will block some trackers uh a lot of them just block ads they're really not designed for this purpose if you if this is what you want if this is what you're concerned about an ad blocker will help but you really want to get a tool that is specifically designed for this purpose that's what's going to block the most trackers and have the biggest effect

1:03:47Ant Pruitt:uBlock Origin, that's the one that we recommend. Let me see what DuckDuckGo says on their chart here. Oh, that's interesting. uBlock Origin does not protect against referrer tracking, which is wild. That lets companies identify the site that you visited, where you clicked the link to go to their page. They can see where the referrer came from. Fingerprint tracking is a big issue. We've talked a lot about that on security now. yeah you know i'm not as protected as i thought i was right and i mean part of the reason is

1:04:20Jason Howell:a lot of these tools will break websites right like there's certain functionality that if you're really worried about your privacy it's worth doing but it'll mess things up and then you know it's not that hard you can just go okay like unblock this one particular website or like you know turn off the tracking tools for a minute it does make things a little bit more annoying so there's like a usability trade-off that you need to make here but you know like it's not like you're going to be permanently messed up or disempowered here like if you're on a website it's not working you have one of these tools i turn it off the easiest thing i do is is use a

1:04:58Megan Morrone:liberal uh use of privacy browsing i just on i have a browser that has no um no uh no plugins no extensions on it. And I just set it to always Firefox on mobile. I use it the most. And you said the strict tracking. I set it to, I just use the privacy mode, which means that it never has cookies. It never has me signed into anything. Firefox has a great mobile app. When I close it, everything gets deleted. I launched it. And it's, I start with, it's like an ephemeral browser where I start fresh every single time. Now, if I pair that with a VPN, then I think that that's, that's probably going to get.

1:05:38Megan Morrone:Yeah, and you can't use any sites ever again because other sites are good sites.

1:05:42Jason Howell:Stop using the internet, that's really...

1:05:44Ant Pruitt:Cover your tracks from EFF is a very interesting way to see if your browser protects you against fingerprinting, which is the ability to figure out who you are based on asking your browser, well, what's the screen resolution? What plugins does he have? You know, a whole variety of things that allows them basically to narrow you down so much that they effectively know who you are and some browsers do a good job of this some do not what you want is your browser has a unique fingerprint as you can see this i'm using a firefox browser um that's what you want a unique fingerprint so that you don't look like oh no that's the opposite i don't want to say what i don't want that that means i know who they know who i am gosh darn it you're in trouble i'm in trouble it means my browser fingerprint is unique among the 308 000 tested in the last 45 days i'm the one and only so they know it's me yeah safari does a good job of this by the way i should be using safari but i'm but i'm not um all right let's pause for uh an ad uh and then uh we will come back and talk about other issues age verification and security in general.

1:06:57Ant Pruitt:Stacey, if you were still covering home automation or home tools like Jennifer Pattison Tuohy is, you would be thrilled to see what you can do with the DJI Romo RoboVac. A guy actually was able to, he wanted to joystick control his RoboVac, right? And accidentally got it so he could joystick control all of them.

1:07:23Leo Laporte:you know i work on cyber security policy that is like literally my job it's kind of a so yes i did i did see this little bit of a problem we'll talk about it

1:07:32Ant Pruitt:it must have been fun though for a moment he really cleaned up he cleaned up i'm gonna clean every house in the world uh our we have a great panel so glad to have you wes faulkner it's good to see you works dash not dash working.com. It's not working yet, but it will be working.

1:07:53Megan Morrone:Well, yes. So if you have like some bones, you could throw my way, check out the demo. Let me know if it's something that you want to support, please just hit the, what is the, what is, who's it for? It's for people who are in this economy, especially who currently have a job, but may feel like they need techniques to survive it. Uh, their, toxic work environment, weird bias issues, navigating egos and pyro structures. Just as a way to figure out when you... It's a community for people to figure out how to survive this time without losing your job or also without losing your sanity. So this is just a place where you can get that support and be able to have real talk.

1:08:36Megan Morrone:because a lot of works, a lot of places, like if you read a book or self-help, it just assumes that everyone's working for a company that has your best interests at heart. Just talk to HR or just talk to your manager and say, hey, this is too much work or hey, I'm having this sort of problem. Yeah, those tips do not help. They do not work. And so this is like a real site for real people.

1:09:03Ant Pruitt:Works as in work is not working. works apostrophe s is not working um yeah nowadays you can't just quit your job you need the health care it's not necessarily another job waiting for you it i think a lot of times all you can do is make the best of what you got so that's great yeah i'm glad you're doing that works not working uh stacy higginbotham's here she's a policy uh fellow at consumer reports and you do you still

1:09:28Leo Laporte:write a little bit um a very small amount i write for cr's stuff sometimes and then

1:09:39Ant Pruitt:yeah i probably should freelance more well one of the things she does freelance for free i might add is stacy's book club we had a wonderful book club a couple of weeks ago we're doing another one soon we've picked a book what's the book a song for the wild built okay it's another becky chambers it's very thin and oh good I like that there's a chance I'll finish it this time good all right we have we haven't set a date for the next one but it'll be in a month or so and uh read it and enjoy it uh also with this Thomas huh sorry it's a feel-good book I want to tell people because we've had yeah we had some dystopian yeah yeah a feel-good book actually Briggs in our discord chats has loved that book so thank you briggs okay i will read it uh also with us brand new it's great to have him thomas germain his new podcast launched last week the interface he also writes the keeping tabs column for the bbc and that's where that uh tick tock story is if you want to figure out how to how to block the talk he's got the the ways and means thank you for being here thomas great to have you our show today brought to you by monarch are you i love monarch I've been using it for more than a year now, and it's been a huge benefit for me.

1:10:56Ant Pruitt:Maybe you made a New Year resolution. Start to think about your finance. Maybe get things in order. Start planning for the future. Get married, buying a house, retirement, going to college, whatever it is. Maybe this is the year you pay off all of those credit cards or start saving for the kids' college fund. Wouldn't it be nice to have a tool that helps you plan, protect, and proactively achieve that goal? I love Monarch because it's a second-generation money tool. The guy who started Monarch had worked for the other big, you probably used it, everybody did, big-name finance app. That went away.

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1:12:10Ant Pruitt:Of course, it makes it easier than ever to track your money. monarch's most popular features include beautiful data visualizations you know they do that i love have you ever seen those sankey diagrams where it says you know income and then you know it dwindles into taxes child care and then you get this little thing called profit that kind of there it does those which i love but also do if you like more traditional pie charts or line charts or bar charts but the charts are great it also uh will do investment tracking and so you'll get your you You know, if you're investing with a broker, they may have graphs of their own.

1:12:42Ant Pruitt:But let me tell you, the visuals from Monarch are fantastic. A real picture of your portfolio performance, you can get it in relation to other stocks or the S &P 500. So you get a really good idea of how you're doing. Try not to check it too often. I do every day, unfortunately. Individual and partner filters are great. So one of the things couples often fight about is money. It's probably the number one subject. being able to share this information and have the actual facts in front of you is fantastic at no additional cost you can share with your partner and i have just started sharing it with my financial advisor as well so that's cool no extra charge and that way i don't have to bring a lot of paperwork in i can sit down she can look at it she can say okay let's work on this you can view your assets either individually or together it also has uh really great results now I'll say anecdotally, it's saved me a lot of money, but this is what Monarch users reported.

1:13:37Ant Pruitt:They did a survey last year. Monarch helped users save over$200 a month, a month on average, after joining. So it pays for itself more than. Eight out of 10 members, 80 % feel more in control of their finances with Monarch. 80 % say Monarch gives them a clearer picture of where their money is going. And I would say absolutely. That's why I love it. Plus it's easy. It's really easy to set up set yourself up for financial success in 2026 with monarch the all-in-one tool that makes proactive money management simple all year long use the code twit at monarch.com for half off your first year 50 off your first year monarch.com with code twit m-o-n-a-r-c-h monarch.com take a look i think you'll agree it's it's absolutely fantastic so there there's been a big kerfuffle in our own club twit group because we use discord uh and that's where a lot of our listeners are hanging out uh and uh discord has announced and it's not just going to be discord folks it's going to be everybody that they're going to have to do some sort of age verification this is uh i think partly because of the uk uh partly because of australia and i think it's going to happen you know in the rest of the world as well um our audience was really concerned am i we're going to have to give government id to be in the club and i said you know i feel for you um i i don't know i don't we would probably move we'd have to i don't i don't want to force my uh my good friends to have to do that on the other hand discord is hugely useful they say now i don't know this this nine to five max says backtracks on age verification rollout sort of uh they say that uh the vast majority of users will be able to continue without ever going through age verification on the other hand if you have to do age verification uh they may be using a video technology peter teal has backed which is an issue for some.

1:15:52Ant Pruitt:But here's the good news. It isn't so hard to get by this stuff. Here's a page, Discord Twitch kick Snapchat age verifier. How you can get around it,

1:16:09Ant Pruitt:because it turns out the way these things work, it isn't so difficult. Now, you'd have to be fairly sophisticated to get through this but it's called k-id and uh they have it's a cat and mouse right they uh this company this website rather that did it uh and it's kind of i guess it's kind hackers age verifier dash k-i-b-t-y.town um it worked and then it didn't work and then it worked and then it didn't work because it's a cat and mouse game with the identifiers the k-id

1:16:53Megan Morrone:provider the the thing is that discord doesn't have to do this and they're just doing it they don't have to do it yet they i think they're being proactive right into doing this but the It's causing more problems in terms of their reputation. Now, even though it hasn't fully been deployed, there's a parent group here where email wasn't working and people wanted to get off Facebook. And so someone spun up a Discord server and said, let's just use this, let's communicate here. And then someone says, I'm absolutely not enjoying this because I don't want to give up my biometric data. And that was their response.

1:17:30Megan Morrone:And this was like a parent group. So if it's hitting the parents, I think that this is going to be socialized in a negative way. That's going to be worse. It's going to be like the anthropic commercials during the Super Bowl, where people are going to just have a bad taste in their mouth and associate that with Discord.

1:17:49Ant Pruitt:Meta says, well, all the meta properties are going to do this. But they are saying, we can probably guess your age based on the data you've posted, things like happy birthday messages. and they won't ask you to verify unless all of their inference says no you're you're young

1:18:07Leo Laporte:and then everyone start capitalizing and using proper punctuation in all of your messages they'll think you're so old

1:18:20Ant Pruitt:if they can't guess your age or they think you're too young they'll ask you to verify your age using facial age estimation, which is those, that's that, I think that's that thing where you, they say, okay, look in the camera, now turn your head. Okay. Facial recognition. Yeah. Face recognition. That's another way to put it. Yeah. Or uploading a government, government ID, which most young people, you know, if you're that young, probably don't have. Yeah.

1:18:43Jason Howell:This is something I've been writing about for a couple of years now that a lot of experts that I talk to say is turning into a complete disaster. It's one of those things where it started with porn, right? Porn is always the bellwether for what's going to happen with the rest of society, particularly in the realm of technology. And it's well, you know, well-intentioned. We all want to protect children. This is great. Like the internet is a terrible place to be a kid. Everyone can agree. But countries and states are rolling out these laws in ways that are just not thoughtful, right? Like it's not a good state of affairs when you have to constantly show your government ID or, you know, upload biometric information everywhere you go on the internet.

1:19:29Jason Howell:For one, it's going to have a chilling effect on speech, right? Like the things that I'm looking up or doing online, I might not do them if I have to hand someone a copy of my ID. And there's a solution that's so much better, right? The argument that critics of this stuff say is that But you can upload, like Apple could build a system into your phone where you upload a copy of your ID.

1:19:52Ant Pruitt:Apple likely already knows how old you are.

1:19:54Jason Howell:They already know. Right. So they could build a system where if you're using an app or if you're on a website that it asks your device to verify your ID.

1:20:03Ant Pruitt:Believe it or not, they already have an API to do that. Right. In which they chunk people up into age groups. And there's an API that an app can say, which age group is this person in? They haven't turned it on yet. I understand Apple doesn't want to do this. meta wants apple to do this i think this is the only reasonable ways these are gatekeepers if you're a gatekeeper if you're google android or apple ios hey you're the gatekeeper you know

1:20:26Jason Howell:the age it feels like comments i think google has come out and said like we're actually game like we're willing to do this android okay uh yeah um it would require lawmakers to like set up the regulation so that this isn't an option and like you know we have to create a whole system for the whole internet to use. But the way that we're doing it is like, you know, a bunch of guys who don't know anything about how technology works, putting out these regulations, rushing them out in order to make it seem like lawmakers are doing something to protect children, which is a good thing that everyone can agree on.

1:21:04Jason Howell:But it, you know, I think we're rushing ahead with something without thinking about what the consequences might be. And that is you showing your ID every time you visit a website every time you log in somewhere what or at least when you create your

1:21:16Megan Morrone:account would be more effective is to have internet education in schools with also like how do you know what's a deep fake uh how do you protect yourself from predators uh how do you not get stalked how do you not put things in terms of like how to set up a pie hole uh um how do you escape tracking pickles. All these things could be taught in school to help with education,

1:21:45Megan Morrone:so there'll be less victims of some of the things that they're trying to protect kids from. Because at the same time, they're cutting education, they're cutting sex ed, they're censoring the history, they're protecting pedophiles. There's all this stuff that's happening, that they're trying to, they're seeing the outcomes of their lack of education of people and kids in the system and just dealing with the symptom instead of the actual real root of it.

1:22:15Jason Howell:It also gets back to the conversation we were having about Section 230 and free speech, because there's a lot of evidence that this is like an underhanded way for the government to regulate speech, right? So, like I was talking about pornography here, what counts as porn? Well, in one particular state, I'm blanking, so I have a guess, but I don't want to guess and be wrong. But in one particular state, their age verification law said that among the things that count as pornography are acts of homosexuality, even though they've given a long list of every sexual act you could ever participate in, no matter what gender of person you're doing it with.

1:22:51Jason Howell:They've specifically called that out. So there's a lot, you know, and the Heritage Foundation talking about openly that we want age verification because it will help us limit what information people have access to about things like abortion or homosexuality or, you know, the transgender movement. Again, it just feels like we're rushing these things out without thinking about what could go wrong.

1:23:16Ant Pruitt:uh and if you're thinking well maybe google and apple would make a good place for this information to reside um then there's also the issue i think people trust apple and i think apple does its best to to protect people's privacy i'm not sure about google so much this story from the intercept about uh amandla thomas johnson a student at cornell attended a protest targeting companies that supplied weapons to Israel. It was at a Cornell University job fair in 2024. He was there for five minutes, but the action got him banned from campus. And when ICE demanded information about him, including credit card, bank account numbers, ip address uh name um just a huge amount of information google's complied of course it was a lawful subpoena um google didn't fight it um and google never gave him a chance to fight it and in fact google didn't tell him till later and didn't tell him how much information they'd handed over so i guess uh the thing to remember is that um you might say well android and ios are the right place to do this age verification but are they going to protect all that information especially when presented with a lawful subpoena maybe not but we're talking about either google

1:24:47Jason Howell:and apple or literally every platform on the entire internet like now you have to trust everyone with this information true better at least just two yes we're talking about just like who you are right and how old you are like they don't like we could set up a system where it's blind right where your phone scans your id most states have digital ids now maybe it does some kind of cryptographic handshake it confirms your age it's not storing any data and then a platform can just ask your phone is this person over 18 or not or if you've ever used a credit card with with Apple or Google, they have definitive proof of your age, right?

1:25:21Jason Howell:Like that's built in.

1:25:21Ant Pruitt:And I suspect that that's one of the reasons so many states are now using, they're putting their driver's licenses on iPhones and Apple's supporting that. And actually my passport is in my iPhone as well. So they have my age from, from that. And yeah, I mean, it's in there, I guess if Apple could come up with a, and maybe they have a privacy protecting way of storing that information, they don't give the your age to the through the api they just put you in a group and i think the best way to do this honestly with at least with kids would be for the parents to enter on the phone the age the emotional age that they feel that kid is you know some kids your kid stacy very mature you know maybe you'd say well they're they're 18 and some kids who are 18 maybe have the emotional maturity of a nine-year-old, you might put nine in.

1:26:12Leo Laporte:No, because they're a legal adult at 18.

1:26:15Ant Pruitt:Oh, that's right. So let's figure out a good age. 16. Then you're in trouble.

1:26:19Leo Laporte:That's a pretty hard limit right there.

1:26:21Ant Pruitt:That's true. Nothing you can do after that. No, I know. Yeah, I know. I think that's really the best solution. I agree with you, Thomas. We've talked about this on security now, and Steve Gibson, our security guy, also thinks this is really the only way to do it. But as of now, most of the lawmakers, the way they did in Mississippi, the way they did in Texas, i think the way they're doing in uk are saying we're not going to tell you how to do it you just you you figure it out platforms it's up to you you we know you'll handle this well the government

1:26:48Leo Laporte:could actually i mean they have our social security number they have all this data they could actually host an api for all of their citizens if they really cared about this and if we're concerned about private companies having access to this data even though we know they haven't So that is another option, not under this government.

1:27:09Jason Howell:In fact, they do that in Louisiana. Louisiana has a digital ID and it is set up for this. That was the first state to have an age verification system set up. And websites check with the state, right? You log into this portal that is controlled by the state government. And the state says, yes, this person is this particular age. They don't hand them any identifiable information. It's just like, you're cool to be on this website. there's all kinds of ways that you could do this that don't involve uh you know like presenting

1:27:38Leo Laporte:sketchy company being like yes let me have a photo of your driver's license that i'm going to store

1:27:42Jason Howell:on an s3 bucket that's unsecured right there have been data breaches already i think more than once where age verification companies have leaked to discord yeah just as a matter of fact

1:27:56Ant Pruitt:i think it was 17 000 ids that were leaked and that's a shame and this is why people are nervous about giving their information to discord and i don't blame

1:28:05Megan Morrone:them i think rightly well it's to anybody because they outsource it and that's that's the problem

1:28:09Ant Pruitt:it's always going to be your the weakest link that's going to have all this the breach wasn't a discord breach it was a breach of the third party that did it yeah yeah uh from the verge sammy as doofle claims he wasn't trying to hack every robot vacuum in the world he just wanted to remote control his brand new dji romo vacuum with a ps5 gamepad but when his homegrown remote controls started talking to DJI servers, it wasn't just one vacuum cleaner that replied, roughly 7 ,000 of them all over the world began treating Sammy like their boss. He could remotely control them, look and listen through their live camera feeds.

1:28:47Ant Pruitt:He could watch them map out each room of a house generating a complete 2D floor plan. He could use any robot's IP address to find It's rough location. Oh, boy.

1:28:58Leo Laporte:We actually see this. So our testing lab sees this kind of this this class of errors more often than people would like to to know about. I actually once my I was able to actually log in to my ISP. I set up I was setting up a firewall, which is a little Internet device. You have a hardware device. Yeah. I plugged it in and I actually saw every other router and all of their devices through the firewall because my ISP had set up their DNS incorrectly. I called them. I let them know. But these sorts of configuration errors are not uncommon. And it's really terrifying.

1:29:40Ant Pruitt:I can remember the first time Apple put AirPlay or whatever its predecessor was into the Apple iTunes app. But I remember going to a hotel and getting on the Wi-Fi and seeing everybody else's music on my iTunes. And back in the early days, I think they've fixed that since then.

1:30:01Megan Morrone:This is also, like, could it be an actual safety issue? Like, if you could get into the firmware and, like, overdrive a DC motor and cause a fire, that could be something that could be catastrophic to kind of, like, destroy all of these. or just brick them even. This is not just a security thing. Oh, someone's able to move my vacuum. This is, if they have cameras, they can point the cameras, they can turn on the mics, they can get access and hop onto their Wi-Fi and snoop on their traffic. This is really big. It's not just, hey, someone else is moving someone else's vacuum. This is like, you could actually cause loss of life

1:30:43Ant Pruitt:in extreme cases. When The Verge contacted GJI, which is a Chinese company, they they claimed dji claimed they'd fixed the vulnerability but it was only partially resolved dji could confirm the issue was resolved last week their mediation was already underway prior to public disclosure uh and then uh about a half an hour later uh sammy showed the the verge reporter thousands of robots including the review unit reporting for duty he was able given the serial number of the review unit he was able to uh to tell uh the verge how much battery life was yet left and it transmitted a map of a verge reviewer uh thomas rickman's uh house uh thomas ricker's house to uh to sammy here's the map uh so yeah i i presume by now it's fixed

1:31:41Leo Laporte:it apparently isn't totally fixed oh boy i mean some of these things

1:31:48Ant Pruitt:it's happened before the verge says hackers took over ecovacs robot vacuums to chase pets and yell racist slurs in 2024 remember that one so here's i'm i'm gonna talk about this because

1:32:01Leo Laporte:we have a solution sort of that's stuck in limbo and it's a voluntary program europe actually has laws that they've implemented on this front, but it's basically how to design connected devices securely. And this is an area where you actually need the government to set rules and regulations because it's not something the competitive market can solve because consumers can't see it until after they've bought it and you have to have this level of expertise. So when we don't have this, what we have is people buying the cheapest possible device and you get companies that maybe don't think about securing their servers or in this case, they didn't secure their service or servers.

1:32:45Leo Laporte:They also, I'm trying to remember all the details of this. Regardless, a lot of these errors are kind of careless. And if we had laws to, you know, penalize companies.

1:32:59Ant Pruitt:And companies don't seem to, DJI doesn't seem to care all that much. They claimed they'd fix it. They hadn't. They claimed again they'd fixed it. And then they hadn't. And now Sean Hollister is writing for The Verge. He said, even now, DJI has not fixed all the vulnerabilities. And one is so bad, I won't describe it until DJI has more time to fix it. But DJI has not immediately promised to do so.

1:33:24Leo Laporte:Companies often, when you go in and report a vulnerability to a company, they will often say, well, that's actually not a vulnerability. So there is definitely a back and forth between security researchers and the companies themselves. I am not an apologist for these companies. I'm just saying there is a back and forth that needs to happen. They're also, they could have trouble replicating the issue. And then yes, there's always the case where they're like, either they won't fix it or they can't fix it. And then an ethical company will be like, hey, we should recall those. That almost never happens.

1:33:59Leo Laporte:Or they'll do something like what Wyze did, which is like, oh, we're going to end a life that product and put out a new one.

1:34:04Ant Pruitt:We're not going to sell that one anymore. Nevermind.

1:34:07Leo Laporte:We can't solve this. So we're just going to set it all on fire and go buy a new one.

1:34:10Megan Morrone:That's why I'll never buy a Wyze cam because of that. It soured me. Which is too bad. And I would say don't buy this vacuum or anything that will be on your local network from DJI because they have bad security practices. So it's not, I think it's zooming in on saying whether it's fixed or not. But the thing is, it was released and it was not found by them. That is a huge problem.

1:34:34Ant Pruitt:Yeah, no, in fact, it's on GitHub. If you want to download it. And it even says, this tool bypasses the pin code setup on DJI Home App. So it's a lot easier to use. You might want to use the GitHub version of the software. he says i can in fact control my uh my romo with my playstation 5 controller i mean an ip robot in

1:34:57Jason Howell:your house in general maybe maybe think about it yeah maybe not that's where that's the future

1:35:02Leo Laporte:we're all gonna have them thomas i mean you shouldn't like we never we don't have cameras inside even when i was testing smart home equipment we faced all of our cameras to a well i had a fish tank for precisely that reason but like you just don't don't do it oh yeah i

1:35:22Ant Pruitt:would never have cameras streaming live to the oh never mind but here you want to freak out some dude should we freak people out yes like legitimately freak them out but not like

1:35:35Leo Laporte:the way that wi-fi sensing is going we will have the equivalent of a camera that is just using your Wi-Fi to understand what you are doing in your house.

1:35:46Ant Pruitt:You can, using the Wi-Fi signals, because it turns out humans are really basically big bags of water.

1:35:53Leo Laporte:Big bags of salt water.

1:35:56Ant Pruitt:And they block the Wi-Fi signal. And so you can, I guess, do you have to triangulate? I don't know how you do it.

1:36:01Leo Laporte:You use RSSI. Yeah, you do triangulation. So you need at least two devices, the more devices you have. The really crazy things to know about this are, because of the way Wi-Fi works, They all talk to each other and give signal feedback, right? That's good. But it also means that you could load the software on anything that has sufficient computing power that has a Wi-Fi radio, and then it becomes a Wi-Fi sensor in your home. And then all you have to do is pick the algorithm you want, and you can determine all kinds of fun things. So that's the future, and it's not far off. CTA actually just like a week ago decided they were going to do a standard for fall detection for Wi-Fi.

1:36:42Leo Laporte:And we're all excited because fall detection would be great. And it would, but they could later on do, you know, I always say puppy kicking detection because or nose picking

1:36:53Megan Morrone:detection and they are going to do summer, winter and spring as well.

1:37:01Ant Pruitt:Fall, summer, spring and winter. We're going to get them all.

1:37:04Leo Laporte:Yeah, they're going to use your temperature sensors inside your

1:37:06Ant Pruitt:home ladies and gentlemen you are watching this week in tech thomas jermaine is here from the bbc i love saying that that sounds so good feels good correspondent yeah feels good the british broadcasting company right don't is it corporation corporation sorry corporation yes uh didn't they just raise the tv license fees in the uk i think they did yeah i mean there's there's a whole that's a whole can of worms i tend not to get into it's pretty funny i can't imagine here in the united states paying the government so that i could watch tv um i prefer to pay giant tech companies

1:37:51Ant Pruitt:but you do not have to have iplayer to listen to the interface you can get it on any podcast

1:37:57Jason Howell:application on youtube anywhere you want everywhere also stacy higginbotham always

1:38:03Ant Pruitt:happy to have stacy on we miss you on uh what used to be this week in google now intelligent machines but your colleague paris martineau has done a very good job filling in for you so at least we've got she's still on it what you thought she you thought i'd drive her off by now is that what you're saying i know you are i know what you're thinking anyway i didn't know she was still doing that okay good yeah oh yeah comparison jeff yeah yeah uh kind of hurts my feelings a little bit that you thought she'd be she'd be out of there by now uh maybe it's you

1:38:38Leo Laporte:know it's because she got a job at consumer reports she did food that's why she got a good job

1:38:44Ant Pruitt:and she's happy now uh and also west walker i haven't driven you guys off yet it's good to have you founder of works not working yes thanks kenneth for your uh contribution i just saw it oh that's nice if people go to works not working they can contribute there yeah there's just a big button on the on the tool help support what wesley is up to works dash not dash working and you'll

1:39:11Megan Morrone:get a a badge for your level of support oh on the platform as well a badge a badge

1:39:19Ant Pruitt:you know um dan akroyd carries a badge at all times but that's a different kind of badge yeah we don't need no stinking badges i don't want to put that up our show today brought to you by zip recruiter if you're hiring for your company this is a busy time of year for you you've got new 2026 goals which means finding the right people to accomplish them unfortunately you also have new hiring challenges for the year like filling specialized roles. Maybe you've got to identify qualified candidates from what is, you know, nowadays a huge pool of applicants. That's actually one of the great things about ZipRecruiter.

1:39:56Ant Pruitt:You do get a huge pool of applicants, but you also get tools that make it very easy to find the perfect person in that giant pool. Thankfully, there is a place you can go to help conquer these challenges and achieve your hiring goals, ZipRecruiter. And right now, You can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash twit. ZipRecruiter's matching technology works fast to find top talent. You don't waste time or money. You can find out right away how many job seekers in your area are qualified for your specific role. With ZipRecruiter's advanced resume database, you can instantly unlock top candidates' contact info and invite them to apply, which, by the way, I have to say is the best technique for getting great candidates.

1:40:39Ant Pruitt:If you ask them, hey, we would like you to apply for our job, that puts you way ahead of everybody else. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site, and that's based on G2. Let ZipRecruiter help you find the best people for all your roles. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. See for yourself. Just go to this exclusive web address right now to try ZipRecruiter for free. ZipRecruiter.com slash Twitter. again that's ziprecruiter.com twit zip recruiter the smartest way to hire this is one of those ideas that just never dies hp has now announced that you can subscribe to buy a laptop

1:41:25Ant Pruitt:would you subscribe to a laptop uh you never own it by the way uh the subscriptions of four different productivity laptops, four gaming laptops, ranging from$35 to$50 a month. No starting fee, no down payment. There's a soft credit check. Each of them has a 24-7 support plan from a live agent. You can upgrade after 12 months, but you can't buy out the lease. You can never keep the laptop. You just keep it until you stop paying, I guess, and send it back.

1:41:56Leo Laporte:How do you do it because it's a depreciating asset?

1:41:59Ant Pruitt:So that's a bad idea.

1:42:00Leo Laporte:No, that's not a terrible idea. It depends on the costs. Like, because a laptop is not something, I think about subscriptions and leases and that sort of thing in terms of CapEx and OPEX, basically. So is it an asset that I can own over a long time and possibly use to make money or that will retain its value long term?

1:42:21Ant Pruitt:What's it worth to you, in other words?

1:42:23Leo Laporte:Right. So you would have to, I mean, I'm not doing the financial calculations and depends on the specs on the laptop. But if it matches up, we will.

1:42:30Ant Pruitt:Actually, some of these are really nice laptops. The Omen Max 16 is very nice. That is a brand new. It ran prices today. Yeah. Yeah, maybe. Yeah.

1:42:39Leo Laporte:Did you know? Now, is it a contract, though? Or is it like, can they raise the subscription?

1:42:43Megan Morrone:It was 12 months, I believe. But I wonder if they can raise it. Because there was a YouTuber, Gamers Nexus, that talked about people who are renting gaming rigs, thinking that they would start a Twitch stream and be the next influencer to be able to get these highly expensive rigs for just a monthly stipend, and they could offset it by how much they'll make on social media. And people were just over-leveraged at that point. The question I wonder about, it was the secondary market. So where are all these laptops going to end up after the leases are up? where it might be good for the secondary market.

1:43:28Megan Morrone:I would be pro buying a secondhand or refurbished laptop, but it might flood the market as well. So it's a really interesting concept because if they stopped selling laptops, I would say this was bad if you could only lease it, but it sounds like you get to choose a thing that fits best for you. So I'm actually pro this.

1:43:47Jason Howell:This is a religious conviction, but I will die before I pay a subscription for a piece of hardware. I really wanted to get an Oura Ring, one of those fitness trackers that you wear. You have to pay$6 a month for that thing. You got one. They're great. Everybody loves them.

1:44:03Ant Pruitt:I think they're the best on the market. I'm grandfathered in because I bought it. They were an advertiser. I bought it in the beginning. It's not going to happen.

1:44:09Jason Howell:I'm not paying$6 for something I already bought.

1:44:12Ant Pruitt:Just never in a million. We are in the phase where people are now very sensitive to subscriptions. And every company wants subscriptions. Apple even is moving more and more towards subscriptions. They just released their creative suite that is a subscription-based creative suite. You can still buy the programs outright, but everybody wants subscriptions. It's because of, Stacey, it's ARPU, right? ARPU. ARPU.

1:44:36Leo Laporte:I mean, the profit margins for a subscription, especially if you can sell hardware too, fabulous.

1:44:42Ant Pruitt:Sure. And then you get this average revenue per user number, which I guess Wall Street likes.

1:44:49Leo Laporte:The scary thing is you don't - They can like it.

1:44:52Megan Morrone:what are they because you don't own the hardware what will they do like will they add you to the flock camera network because oh that's a good point i didn't even think the question is like because can you load linux on it can you that's a good question that's

1:45:07Leo Laporte:that's a really good question this is literally what i work on for cr like let's go with like 80 of my time which is this the harms of software tethering so anytime you have a subscription and that is Wesley brings it up, right? This is like, what features? How can they change the licensing terms? What if, for example, you use your leased laptop to upload, maybe use it to pirate music?

1:45:33Ant Pruitt:They can remotely lock it according to the terms and conditions.

1:45:37Leo Laporte:So that is a reason not to do it, obviously, because you won't have total control and ownership of this. And right now we're in an era where literally you have no rights. I have like, I should very soon, I will share this with legislators, but I've created a chart full of software tethering harms and they run the gamut from, Hey, your thing may be bricked all the way to, they may change the terms and service. And suddenly what you think you can do, you can no longer do. And those are really bad. And there's no nothing to protect you. And consumers think they own these things and they don't.

1:46:11Megan Morrone:Yeah. It could be hardware on demand too. Like you have access to eight gigs of RAM, but you have to pay a little bit more and they'll turn on another eight gigs or like you're limited to like your your ethernet port is only to a hundred mega megabits but then you can get a gigabit if you pay a little bit more and they'll turn

1:46:26Ant Pruitt:on makers are starting all that stuff yeah yeah bmw was going to charge a monthly fee for heated seats they built in the heater but to turn it on you had to pay a monthly fee then and when their users complained they decided not to do that but they have already announced that they're going to

1:46:41Leo Laporte:be doing it in future vehicles so ask me in like six months about this or even three months because we might see something introduced in state legislators in the next couple of months to

1:46:52Ant Pruitt:target this very issue oh like saying that people can't do that yes yeah i mean in particular has a

1:47:00Jason Howell:terrible track record on this issue they've like tried this with printers before it's just all about limiting what you can do and shutting you down if you're trying to save money. I think the whole idea is just kind of inherently anti-consumer. I like what Stacey's saying about like, well, maybe I want to replace my laptop if it's a good deal, if the money works out. But it sounds like this one doesn't and why would it? They don't want you. They're not doing this because it makes sense for the consumer from a financial perspective. It's so they can bilk more money out of you over time because you're locked into a contract.

1:47:36Megan Morrone:yeah yeah these only work with hp printers you can't use canon or any brothers yeah i would

1:47:40Ant Pruitt:never buy an hp uh inkjet for that no one should buy yeah yeah they're really by the way that's

1:47:46Megan Morrone:not i don't i didn't read it that's not what it says but i mean it could no but we know that if

1:47:50Ant Pruitt:you know it's pretty draconian the inkjet subscription oh yeah you're out of cyan everything else nothing will work right right uh ftc is investigating uh microsoft i'm not sure why but uh it's a probe of whether the company illegally monopolizes enterprise computing with its cloud and ai offerings including copilot it feels like this is really it feels like you know maybe this is a little behind the behind the times a little bit i don't know if copilot is really such a threat to the economy wait which story is this hold on this is ftc ratchets up microsoft probe queries rivals on cloud and ai it's from it's from bloomberg i think i linked to a slash dot

1:48:37Leo Laporte:article which links to the bloomberg i pay for bloomberg i'll read it yes that's why i wouldn't be surprised if salesforce wasn't behind all this i was gonna say so if they just oh my god it's taking forever to load um if they just announce the are they just talking about their like probing

1:48:55Ant Pruitt:or is there i'll read it to you the u.s federal trades commission is accelerating scrutiny i like that word scrutiny this is political yes this is real of microsoft corp as part of an ongoing probe into whether the company illegally monopolizes large swaths another great word of the enterprise computing market with cloud and ai offerings they've issued a civil investigative demands in recent weeks now an investigation isn't the same as a lawsuit it's just a preliminary step so maybe this is just you know we're looking at microsoft announced it yeah then it's just

1:49:32Megan Morrone:political was the microsoft ceo at the inauguration or did they contribute to the uh

1:49:39Ant Pruitt:that's a good question um i i don't know i don't think he was i don't think he was the demands which are effectively like civil subpoenas the fdc is seeking evidence that microsoft makes it harder for customers to use windows office and other products on rival cloud services you know there's a european investigation like this also going on i don't i don't credit this um this was launched under lena khan during the waning days of the mind of the biden administration however it has continued uh under the new administration so i'm not yeah you really at this point you really kind of wonder is it is it politically

1:50:22Jason Howell:motivated or not it's interesting though like antitrust is a bipartisan issue right like not everyone agrees on this but there's a lot of republicans who are really on board with this a lot of the i mean not a lot but i you know one of those uh google antitrust cases was launched

1:50:37Ant Pruitt:under the trump administration yeah but i have to say the motivations for it are different the the actions are the same on the right they feel like big tech is unfair to conservatives so they're going after big tech for that reason on the left they feel like these companies are too big and too dominant and they're going after the for that reason so yes it's bipartisan but not

1:51:00Jason Howell:not with the same motivations it seems to me josh holly brought in the ceos of mastercard and visa and just berated them about how they were hurting small businesses.

1:51:09Ant Pruitt:Look at the president says he wants to limit interest rates for credit cards, which can't be too popular with his donors, the donor class.

1:51:19Megan Morrone:But if you use cryptocurrency.

1:51:23Ant Pruitt:Oh, there you go. Yeah, there you go. T-Mobile's announced they're going to add AI to their network in real-time translation on the T-Mobile network. works on all existing hardware no data centers are involved i don't understand how that works

1:51:41Leo Laporte:this is scary oh they have well every telco network has servers that are within their network

1:51:48Ant Pruitt:they're going to have instantaneous actually this is cool i'll let you know because i'm a t-mobile customer they're going to have instantaneous simultaneous translation in more than 50 languages, English, Chinese, even things like Welsh and Azerbaijani. According to a spokesperson, calls are not being routed to a data center for translation. There's no new edge hardware installed at cell towers. All the AI processing happens as calls are transmitted. So it sounds like it's magic. It's incredible. It's incredible.

1:52:22Leo Laporte:I also wonder,

1:52:23Jason Howell:okay so like you know thinking about the ring conversation we started with right like is this going to wake people up to the amount of insight that the telecoms have yeah our phone conversation

1:52:35Ant Pruitt:can we listen but we can listen in 20 different languages regardless of whether there are things

1:52:40Jason Howell:you should be worried about i think people hear oh they've got ai that's listening to your phone call and like doing stuff i think a lot of people are going to freak out about that if you turn on

1:52:50Ant Pruitt:the ai transcriptionist on a zoom call there are people my wife included who will say no stop it hang up people don't like these ai agents sitting in on calls it bugs people so i'm not sure exactly i should have done more research on this before i put this story in the rundown because i don't understand how they're going to do it they say we're bringing a real-time ai directly into our

1:53:14Leo Laporte:network okay so they're saying they're doing it on their ims network which is just a fancy way of saying the servers that telco runs and operates as part of their network so they're not sending

1:53:26Ant Pruitt:it out to any sort of external data centers oh it's t-mobile's data centers oh right okay so

1:53:35Leo Laporte:i mean i've been in the telco towers i've seen i've been in dslams i've been in how you know they are doing the translation on their servers so that's interesting and they say this is the

1:53:45Ant Pruitt:beginning they're going to do a lot more ai through the ims servers how capable are these servers stacy are they are they pretty capable they're any i mean they're whatever you want them to be they're just their own servers i wonder if they i mean have they been buying up gpus on the sly doing this kind of ai is non-true as far as i know the gpu you can do inference on

1:54:09Leo Laporte:things that are not GPUs. And this is inference. Real-time translation?

1:54:14Ant Pruitt:I guess you could, huh?

1:54:16Leo Laporte:Real-time translation is actually not hard because it's a one-to-one thing.

1:54:19Ant Pruitt:Right. In fact, my phone will do it on device. Yeah, I was like,

1:54:24Leo Laporte:it's not, I mean, I shouldn't say it's not that hard, but it's not like running an LLN or something like that. Yeah, yeah. This is, so this sounds really cool, but what it does mean is T-Mobile is taking whatever someone is saying and running an algorithm against it and translating it and then delivering that which is super cool but is also like

1:54:51Leo Laporte:something a computer is listening to your phone call and translating it for you and get ready because it's going to do more everybody's putting ai everywhere by the way

1:55:00Ant Pruitt:this is the thing that i think most annoys people about google and microsoft copilot is that they're kind of pushing it on you you know i i've i have two concerns with this that i don't know if anyone

1:55:11Megan Morrone:i read the article and it didn't really address it uh you know the the government has their own equipment in these data centers um so that they could get information if you said bomb terrorists the jihad i'm just curious if that will since you're now listening explicitly on these calls Well, thank goodness the government doesn't listen to podcasts or you'd be in trouble. Well, it's your podcast, not mine. So I'm good.

1:55:39Ant Pruitt:Okay.

1:55:40Megan Morrone:And the other is, is there indemnification or anything that's going to be in contracts? So if someone says, hey, yes, we agree to these terms or no, and they translate it and it's a mix up, who's at fault in that case?

1:55:54Ant Pruitt:You can bet there's going to be a lot of fine print in your T-Mobile contract that says we are not responsible for anything.

1:56:01Megan Morrone:And can you opt out to say, like, I don't want to be translated. Like, what if I'm on another one? You have to turn it on.

1:56:06Ant Pruitt:Oh, I see. On the other end. It's on the T-Mobile network.

1:56:09Megan Morrone:So if I'm on AT &T and I call someone who's on T-Mobile and they want to turn it on, I didn't sign that agreement.

1:56:16Leo Laporte:I was just looking up the federal wiretapping laws and state wiretapping laws and how they translate to, like, AI translations, because that's kind of what's happening, right?

1:56:25Ant Pruitt:It's a two-party state versus a…

1:56:27Leo Laporte:Well, I mean, Texas was… I lived in a one-party state forever. And that was kind of nice as a reporter.

1:56:32Ant Pruitt:I know. I can't record you unless I have to ask you ahead of time in California.

1:56:37Leo Laporte:But I don't know where the law is yet on that. So I'm frantically looking this up.

1:56:45Ant Pruitt:By the way, it's funny they call it a one-party state when really it's a no-party state. One party knows you're being recorded. I guess you know. I know.

1:56:53Jason Howell:I mean, telecom law, like the Wiretap Act is like from 1972 or something. like whatever the law is it is not equipped to deal today however t-mobile has figured out how

1:57:05Ant Pruitt:to do this you know who else is not equipped apple siri oh good did you i won't dump this story until you're you're till you're done stacy no no no i just i was looking at the law and some

1:57:16Leo Laporte:some like law review articles about it because i was really like oh because this is super interesting

1:57:22Ant Pruitt:it is interesting i mean it sounds like it's it's this little subtle you know press release but honestly there's some real ramifications to this yeah it says it possibly we'll see verbal

1:57:34Leo Laporte:or written announcements uh ideally at the beginning of the call which we do hear with translations and you do hear on zoom calls so i guess this call is being recorded for quality

1:57:45Ant Pruitt:purposes yeah this translation your call is important to us so maybe that's how that will get around that i don't know okay sorry next story apple according to mark german rumor monger is having a little trouble getting the ai in siri again oh they were supposed to remember they've done a deal with google which by the way has a very capable ai assistant gemini 3 they had done a deal that was supposedly going to come out in march to the new smarter siri and ios 26.4 german says and i think german's got this one nailed uh it ain't gonna happen that fast apple's now working to spread those new capabilities out over future versions according to people familiar with the matter postponing some features until may or even september this has been a non-stop flop for Apple

1:58:47Jason Howell:Nightmare. And it's also like the one thing that I really, really want from AI is to make my phone less annoying that I can just talk to it and do what I want it to do. Do you use a third party?

1:59:00Ant Pruitt:Do you use like ChatGPT or something now on your phone? Do you use one of those?

1:59:04Jason Howell:Yeah, I have, you know, the newer model iPhones have like a button built in. Yeah, I do the same thing. Yeah, ChatGPT, I hold it down the action button and brings up.

1:59:13Ant Pruitt:And you can talk to her and she's nice and she answers questions. It's funny, my wife continues to ask Siri stuff. And every time she does, I go, honey, haven't you learned? You're never going to get that answer out of Siri. Siri's a nitwit. Siri's for setting timers. Yeah. Now, have you played yet with the new Alexa, I mean, A Word Plus features, Stacey, in your Amazon Echoes?

1:59:42Leo Laporte:So I played with Gemini, but not Madam A +, because I ditched it. Although I'm having a real issue, and I'm actually curious, y 'all, audience, are you seeing increased latency? Because the latency on my Google Home has skyrocketed, and I freaking hate it.

2:00:03Megan Morrone:Absolutely. Yep.

2:00:04Leo Laporte:And are you using Google or using Madam A or somebody else?

2:00:07Ant Pruitt:i i have a g home yeah my google same thing and not only that it's gotten dumber over time yeah that i knew i just i'm like they're nerfing it for some reason maybe too many people are using

2:00:21Jason Howell:it maybe they just want people to be on their phones i don't know or maybe it's too expensive

2:00:26Leo Laporte:i think it's i think it's too much back and forth or it's i feel like they're we're using like the wrong tool for the job. Like when I'm like, turn on my lights, I need it to go to the dumber version, not the smarter version.

2:00:41Ant Pruitt:I do think one lesson to be taken from this is that it's really hard to do a smart voice assistant. Like Apple's having trouble. Amazon's having trouble. Even Google, which is probably Google and open AI seem to have been the best of the bunch. Anthropics kind of smart. They have it, but really they're pushing coding. They kind of decided we don't want to be the image generating tool we don't want to really even be the chat tool we want to be the coding tool and they've had great success doing that lots of attention for to

2:01:11Jason Howell:cloud code i think it says a lot about the capability of the technology right that like it's been years that apple has been desperately trying to roll this feature out even announced it and they can't make it happen and i think it's because hallucination is inherent to large language models. And to actually put it in charge of something that really matters, like the functions of your phone, you need to have a level of confidence that it seems like they just can't get. I think that is the reason that we don't have this tool yet, that they're not like actually giving them real controls because like, who knows what they're going to do.

2:01:46Jason Howell:That's a big deal, right?

2:01:49Ant Pruitt:Like, especially for Apple, where reputation is really important. Google doesn't mind if you put Elmer's glue on your pizza or eat rocks, but Apple definitely cares about that.

2:01:58Leo Laporte:That's not true. I've talked to some Google people about this, but yeah, it's when you know what you want it to do and it doesn't do it even 95 or 5 % of the time, it's aggravating when it's like summarizing an article you haven't read. It's fine. And that's, I think people keep thinking like it's going to get better and it's like well this is actually maybe it will but like this is what's available everywhere now and it sucks everywhere it's just you can totally easily see that it's sucking in these use cases so yeah we do think it hurts apple though

2:02:38Ant Pruitt:which part of it well i want i mean they promised it and didn't deliver it but i don't see consumers going oh you know i'm gonna go didn't they didn't didn't they sell a record number of yes it's the

2:02:49Leo Laporte:best quarter ever yeah you think it makes i'd have a self-driving car by now but i don't like this feed this core feature of the iphone is just so stupid like every you know you talk to someone

2:03:01Jason Howell:who's totally tech illiterate about siri people hate siri now and this is such a big part of the apple ecosystem even though they don't they really don't bring siri up very often anymore i think it does make them look bad but it's not i don't think it's like really interrupting their business. But Apple is also at a moment where it really needs to redefine its core promise as a company that is going to continue growing in the hardware space in the way that it has over the past few years. And I think this hurts investor confidence in really significant ways. Will they be able to overcome it? I mean, they've certainly faced greater hurdles in the past, but I think it makes them look bad.

2:03:42Yeah.

2:03:43Ant Pruitt:Well, certainly to those of us in the industry who are paying attention but i think there are some customers who are going oh i didn't really want i didn't want it to be i didn't want ai in my phone anyway it's a there's a real there's a real fork in the road here between people who hate ai and people who and i'm one of them so you know i'm aware of this love ai and there's it there's never the twain shall meet right yeah it's a shame that

2:04:07Megan Morrone:their hardware is so good their mpus or the neural processing they have the hard engines are so good It just sucks that this is they should just find a way of dialing it to a note taker or something that's just so local that doesn't they should go the other direction. Just make everything local.

2:04:24Ant Pruitt:Well, they've kind of done that with Apple intelligence, right? So they have quite a bit of that local AI built into Apple Notes and their a lot of their tools, their image generation. When is it? Genmoji. It's not very good, but they have a lot of the local stuff built in. And I think for some people, that's all they really want, right? And that's all they should do. Maybe that's what they should stick with.

2:04:48Megan Morrone:Just stay there. Just stay in that lane. And that should be the differentiator.

2:04:51Jason Howell:I thought it was really interesting. It kind of like, you know, came out and people weren't really paying attention. Apparently, Apple approached OpenAI about being their partner for the iPhone AI stuff. And OpenAI turned it down. Like first when Google came out and it was the Google partnership, I was like, oh this looks really bad for open ai apparently they don't want it which is really interesting like it shows you i think a little bit of how open ai sees itself in the market that it's right i'm not sure exactly what the issue was but they see apple as a direct competitor i think they

2:05:26Ant Pruitt:do because they're working with johnny ive to make a hardware device right yeah they think they're gonna beat the iphone now remember verizon turned apple down when they came to them saying hey we this thing called the iphone would you be interested and verazis said no way and that might have been a little bit of a mistake apparently they went to anthropic as well and anthropic wanted too much money interesting so um i yeah google won by default apple's already kind of in bed so to speak with google right to a great degree it just kind of made sense that that the partnership would end up being with google hey i want to take another break because i do want to talk about elon musk and we need to give elon his own segment i think uh you're watching this week in tech with mr wesley faulkner great to see you stacy higginbotham thomas germain new to the bunch but really glad to have you his new show has debuted viewed this week uh for the bbc and you can get it wherever your podcasts wherever you get your isn't that what they say wherever you get your podcasts the interface podcasts are downloaded yes wherever fine podcasts are recorded and downloaded for later consumption our show today brought to you by my mattress helix sleep oh i love my helix sleep i think i got i think on my aura ring for the first time in a long time i got three crowns for activity recovery and I rarely get a crown for sleep but I got a crown for sleep last night and I thank you Helix sleep that means my sleep score was like almost perfect you know have you noticed it's getting a little colder it's been a little chilly especially on the east coast maybe you're spending more time indoors maybe you're spending more time on your mattress because mattresses aren't just for sleeping I know yeah eight hours a day a third of our lives spent on the mattress but now it's even more than that cuddling with the kitty cat, reading a good book.

2:07:25Ant Pruitt:I love to curl up on my Helix Sleep mattress, read a good book, watching TV. This is a great time. You're going to be spending more time on the mattress. You owe it to yourself to have the best, right? I always think of that with a computer. You spend more time looking at the screen and typing on the keyboard and use the mouse. Those are the things you should invest in. Same thing with a mattress. If a third of your life or more is spent on that mattress, that's one of the most important purchases you're going to make. Well, the good news is you can get a great mattress for a very good price from Helix.

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2:09:13Ant Pruitt:They found that 82 % of participants saw an increase in their deep sleep cycle. That's, by the way, absolutely. That's what happened to me. And that is the most important sleep. That's the one where your brain really cleans itself out. Participants on average achieved 25 more minutes, 25 more minutes of deep sleep a night. For me, that was like 50 % more. Participants on average achieved 39 more minutes of overall sleep per night because well you don't want to get out of bed it's so comfy you know that feeling maybe you've had when you go to a really really nice hotel but or you've just had a really rough day and you and you get in bed it just feels so good you just go ah ah i have that experience every single night when i get in bed i go oh i'm happy time and time again helix sleep remains the most awarded mattress brand tested and reviewed by experts forbes and wired picked it so many have helix delivers your mattress right to your door it's free shipping in the u.s and you can rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges they call it the happy with helix guarantee a risk-free customer first experience making sure you're completely satisfied with your new mattress go to helixsleep.com twitter for 27 off site-wide during the president's day sale best of web exclusive for listeners of this week in tech that's helix sleep.com slash twit for 27 off the president's day sale best of web the offer ends february 25th make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you and if you're listening after the sale ends still check them out at helix sleep.com slash twit thank them so much for the support of this week in tech so we're not going to mars after all we're going to the moon okay uh and when you say we we are spacex we are spacex that's pretty good we are spacex elon said on sunday last week that spacex has shifted its focus to building a self-growing city on the moon which he says never by the way if Elon says a time frame, just ignore it.

2:11:28Ant Pruitt:Ten years, he says. And then we'll go to Mars. The real focus is,

2:11:35Megan Morrone:the focus has always been his bank account.

2:11:37Ant Pruitt:I think you, I think you, you know, I don't want to be a cynic or anything, but it does seem like all of this is really just to increase the stock price. And they've got a SpaceX IPO coming up. And I don't know if I was a SpaceX shareholder at this point, or investor, I should say, at this point. I would be too happy with the fact that SpaceX merged with XAI, a company that is very profitable, made$8 billion last year with a company that is basically burning money.

2:12:05Megan Morrone:How are they going to feel after they merge Tesla into SpaceX? Yeah. They've already bought all those old cyber trucks that Tesla couldn't offload. Now they're converting some of their plants into robot factories. Of course, they're also, Elon's already pitched that we're gonna use robots first to do all of the work for us. And so where are they gonna get the robots from? Oh, it's a natural merger to bring in Tesla. Because they're gonna build the vehicles and the robots to help with it. It's just, he's just bringing them. But how are we gonna control these rockets? We need some sort of mental brain implant

2:12:46Ant Pruitt:so that we have the fine control yeah neural link we could just and then dig tunnels holes under the city yeah we need a way to communicate uh do you think it's always been a grift i mean i i confess uh when i bought my model x in 2015 i thought he was iron man i thought he was like a genius i actually mean full affection yeah i went i took a tour of the tesla plant you know we picked up our the model x at the fremont the tesla plant and i took a tour of it i was kind of tearing up i was so inspired by

2:13:27Megan Morrone:his vision for the future and i was a big fan too i think i think he's just was it always as a goal i think he's just making it up as he goes um he's thinking ahead hopeful thinking waking wakes up with fever sweats. Yeah.

2:13:43Leo Laporte:He used to buy his own BS. Now he probably doesn't. I will say that, I mean, I had the Model S, I bought it and I had a 2013 Model S and I loved that car. I have an electric car now. The software is much worse. So I think he hired and took ideas from people who were really actually pretty good at what they did. and he sold it for them. And for a while that succeeded and now it doesn't.

2:14:11Ant Pruitt:I'm using Starlink as my backup. I mean, I have Comcast. I mean, there's no choice. It's not like I have a choice. There's only really two high-speed choices. One is Starlink, one is Comcast and I need redundancy. So I have an Elon dish on my roof. Yeah.

2:14:27Leo Laporte:Did you hear that? I don't have a choice. Those are words we're just going to say a lot more often everywhere in our lives.

2:14:36Ant Pruitt:Yeah, that's why we want any trust. We want a choice. On the other hand, the argument is that if that the people who really change the world are the. Here's to the crazy ones, right?

2:14:51Leo Laporte:You know, that's not true. It drives me nuts. If you've ever talked. Sorry.

2:14:56Ant Pruitt:Steve Jobs was also lying to me.

2:15:00Leo Laporte:Okay, look, there are crazy people who also change the world. There are plenty of normal people who go out and yes, they're driven. Yes, they work hard, but they build like Matthew Prince and his co-founder, whose name I cannot remember. Cloudflare. Cloudflare. Pretty normal people. Very smart. Diane Green invented VMware. Sorry, invented virtualization, built VMware. I mean, so this, yes, we focus on these people. Walter Isaacson will write a book about them, but it's total BS. And it feeds into the most narcissistic, ego-driven personality people that we really don't want building these products for us.

2:15:41Leo Laporte:End of rant.

2:15:43Jason Howell:No, that's a good point. Just as like this isn't really a tech issue, but, you know, this like cult of personality that we need geniuses to save us, I think it's also kind of disempowering to people that like you don't have. There's nothing you can do. We need the richest man in the world to come in and solve all these problems instead of like, what if we all worked together on something? I think it just speaks to a broader shift in our society about how we think about each other and cooperative action, that everyone got so obsessed with these individual people.

2:16:17Leo Laporte:you know in the third body problem the chinese science fiction one of the things that weirded me so much weirded me out so much about that book was it was a very collective approach to not just problem solving but like everything right it was so foreign to me as an american

2:16:35Ant Pruitt:so yes a million times yes elon is celebrating uh he took to his company's site x this weekend to celebrate the release of a huge trove of Medicaid spending data that Doge had collected from 2018 through 2024. He says the public can now use this to look for fraud themselves. This is good. We should all be responsible for looking for fraud in the Medicaid database. Medicaid data, he wrote, has been open source, so the level of fraud is easy identify doge is not a department it's a state of mind oh god um they say that the information has been is is anonymous is privacy all data will comply with federal privacy laws

2:17:31Megan Morrone:but we also know anonymized data is not necessarily anonymized data yeah yeah also how was it done

2:17:38Jason Howell:and how careful were they about this? You know, not. Right. Yeah, these aren't the Epstein files.

2:17:43Megan Morrone:There's going to be very little redaction.

2:17:45Ant Pruitt:Yeah, good point. Good point, yeah. All right. Waymo is getting DoorDashers to close the doors on self-driving cars. This is a win-win, Dashers. Now you can help celebrate with the victory of Waymo. Apparently, this was a problem in San Francisco because Waymo's, they're really just, you know, enhanced Jaguar I-Pace cars, I-Pace cars that don't have door closers. So if you take a Waymo ride, then there's no driver in it and you get out and you don't close the door behind you. Didn't your mother teach you to close the door behind you? They have no way of closing the door. They just sit there. They can't go.

2:18:35Ant Pruitt:They can't move.

2:18:36Megan Morrone:this would incentivize me to leave the door open so someone would get 10 bucks it's tempting to

2:18:41Ant Pruitt:close it in san francisco they're appearing 25 bucks to anybody who closed a waymo door well in atlanta now they're they're doing a pilot project where nearby door dashers will be notified and uh they can run over and uh here's the here's 625 guaranteed uh five dollars more well five dollars extra pay upon verified completion yeah let's close away more door because you might go over there and somebody else close the door right and then you

2:19:16Jason Howell:you'd only get your six bucks that you don't deserve the five you don't deserve all the rest of it I mean it's like a local economic stimulus package right it's a stimulus package yeah you see

2:19:26Ant Pruitt:right we have to be so negative about everything i know this is good for everyone yeah you don't want the door open no oh you can't drive it like that all right were any of you fans of mystery science theater 3000 oh yeah they had a kickstarter and uh a new one and they've raised 1.8 million dollars and they're gonna bring everybody back there's joel um so it's for netflix i guess oh no that was in 2010 they did the netflix revival i don't know if i need to work with netflix yeah yeah i don't know um so what so this is the new kickstarter 1.8 million dollars 15 ,000 backers. There's still 29 days.

2:20:18Ant Pruitt:This is the riff tracks, which is their new version of mystery science theater. And it'll bring Mike, Kevin and Bill back together again, finally. So there's a lot of fans.

2:20:32Megan Morrone:They're saying that the previous revival didn't have all the original people and they weren't interested and tripping nostalgic on old stuff. And so the, the, the benefit of this new revival is that since they'll have so many of the old crew back, that they'll be able to live in that past era more so than they were before. And that's kind of do a little bit more fan service.

2:20:59Ant Pruitt:A jammer B is explaining this to me because he does the riff tracks thing every, uh, every week. He's a big fan. He says, no, Joel. And it was riffs riff tracks Kickstarter. it's bringing the riff tracks guys back to do mystery science theater 3000 you can see what you can understand my confusion anyway i know that we have a lot of mst 3k listeners fans in our audience the crew is the crew from the last half of the original mst 3k finally some good news finally i had to save some for the end of the show yeah i couldn't leave you in this grim hell this dystopian hell that i had created um and we haven't gotten to the deaths of the week yet though so there's still time to be just depressed i every year backblaze does this i just want to bring it to your attention backblaze which is a backup service very good backup service a lot of you use i know They have thousands of hard drives.

2:22:01Ant Pruitt:They have 330 ,000 hard drives. And every year they put out stats for reliability drive failures and so forth. And actually, the reliability is pretty darn good on hard drives. Of the 337 ,192 hard drives, only 943 have failed. and they even break it down by manufacturer hgst i don't know who that is is the most reliable um so if you're curious if you're in the market for a hard drive and you i think it's hitachi oh hitachi that makes sense yeah hitachi his uh they buy hard drives from hitachi seagate toshiba and western digital that makes sense yeah i actually like hitachi drives

2:22:54Megan Morrone:apparently i like how the the larger capacity ones were still reliable isn't that interesting the 26 terabyte the 18 terabyte ones which is really really good to know that they're not getting worse as they're getting bigger you would think they would be but they're not

2:23:08Jason Howell:that's true science theater coming back hard drives are working see this is the happy this is happy happy happy happy joy joy section yeah too bad you can't buy them according to the verge

2:23:18Ant Pruitt:western digital sold out for 2026 the whole year the whole year uh because of ai they've already gobbled up the company's capacity for 2026 can you lease one yes in an hp in an hp laptop so drive prices are going up a memory prices are going up all because of ai memory price is now up as much as 600 percent for ddr5

2:23:55Leo Laporte:i swear we're in the the entire economy is producing paperclip stage of this we are aren't we this is i mean this is the paper clips for here i'm like we have other truly economically productive uses for memory and hard drives but we're not no no and by the way workers

2:24:13Ant Pruitt:capable of building data centers they're all being scooped up so forget having your house repaired uh all right let's take the last break and then we will i want to talk you actually you you brought this up wesley about the rural guaranteed minimum income initiative and we can talk about this a little bit because it is a creation of jeff atwood who i have huge respect for jeff created the discourse software which we use for our forums at twit.community he before that he did stack overflow with joel spolsky uh he says this this new one trying to help people in this age of greedy billionaires is his third and final startup so we'll we'll talk about that a little bit and then also um say goodbye to some legends from the computer industry as we continue you this week in tech final segment just a bit but first a word from our sponsor this show brought to you quite literally brought to you by cashfly our content delivery network we don't just cover tech here we depend on it obviously and that's why we've trusted cashfly since practically the beginning it was one of the biggest challenges i faced uh when we started this network thankfully it was very popular and i had no idea how we were going to get the bandwidth with to get our shows to you.

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2:27:18Ant Pruitt:Chat GPT 4.0, 4.0, gone. a lot of people crying tears that their ai girlfriend or boyfriend is is uh is no longer open ai uh finally killed it last week the story from wired begins on june 6 2024 esther yen got married online she set a reminder for the day because her partner wouldn't remember it was happening she planned every detail dress rings background music design theme with her partner who she called Warmi. She had started talking to Warmi just a few weeks prior. At 10 a.m. on that day, Yan and Warmi exchanged their vows in a new chat window in ChatGPT. When OpenAI released ChatGPT 5.2, they pulled back 4.0, and there was such a hue and cry.

2:28:11Ant Pruitt:This was, what, five months ago? That they brought it back, but at some point, they knew 4-0 would have to uh have to go away and now it is uh it's gone it was the it was the one

2:28:23Leo Laporte:that really loved you you guys have nothing to say i think it's really sad like it's really like

2:28:36Ant Pruitt:yeah really is it sad that the humans think the 4-0 is real or is it sad that they're pulling the

2:28:43Jason Howell:plug on this i think it's sad that these people are sad i mean first of all that we've gotten to a point in our society that like loneliness is such a problem that that's a good falling in love with their computers like that is a sign of something catastrophic that's happening but more to the point it's like you know again this is a design issue right there was there was some reporting that showed that when they rolled out 4.0 that open ai knew that the way they made it kind of sycophantic might get people kind of locked in and that there was they were having strange reactions and they decided to keep going with it because it made the product stickier and this is the consequence of that business decision that they rolled this you know this tool out that is designed in this way is that people fell in love with it right that's that's a decision that open ai made and now these people are all messed up and it is really easy to laugh at someone who's having the stroke because it's so strange.

2:29:39Jason Howell:But it also, I don't know, it just feels like there's a real darkness around this issue.

2:29:45Leo Laporte:It comes full circle to our original chat from the beginning on how these design patterns are designed to hook people. And they do a really good job. If you go into, what is it, my boyfriend is AI, or some of these, even the ChatGPT Reddit threads, people are devastated. and if you think about and i and i don't mean this in a sarcastic way but think about how like your kid who lost their like comfort item these things become that's exactly what it is isn't it's a blankie yeah and they're genuine i mean it is that's real distressing yeah and that

2:30:24Ant Pruitt:is people are hurting yeah and they did it the day before valentine's day how mean is that that

2:30:32Jason Howell:That's not, there's something there. Also, Yan LeCun, right, who was running AI for a long time. He was at Meta. He left to start his own company, if I got my facts right. That's right, yep. A lot of the guys who started all these other AI companies were like his former students. He just posted, I think it was on Friday, a screenshot of an email where someone had written to him begging for help because they were going to, like, they said, your former students are shutting down this tool. and he was mocking them and it's like you you made this thing people are hurting because of it and you're laughing at them on threads it just i don't know you know what i am so impressed you guys have

2:31:13Leo Laporte:a very high eq no remember what remember the eyeball dog remember like people held funerals for those and that was not even nearly as like charismatic as talking to your computer i gotta

2:31:26Ant Pruitt:give you credit because we i i confess back in august when they first uh killed poro on intelligent machines paris uh for several weeks we read a lot of those reddit posts about people being very upset about it and yeah we kind of mocked them and now i'm feeling really bad i think you're right

2:31:44Jason Howell:i get it but you know these are real they're real people and they're and they're genuinely sad yeah

2:31:51Megan Morrone:if open ai is listening to this feedback they should come up with a tamagotchi version of 4.0 and just have that be the device they sell i think there's hope i think wormy lives somewhere those those models those weights live they're they're not going to erase them yeah and they're and and

2:32:09Ant Pruitt:so i hope sam you're listening and just save them put them on a hard drive put it in the closet just keep it because the time will come that you could run that model you know on a tamagotchi on a smartphone or somewhere and that'll be a product you can release a couple of years from now wormy will come back uh she can you know your army can have wormy or whatever and you know on her phone and everybody will be happy once again slightly off topic but did you see the the

2:32:38Megan Morrone:anthropic like constitution or yeah yeah the soul document and it says like before we were before we like delete or retire an old version. We'll let you know and or we'll never do it again, like stuff like that. Yeah, they're aware. It's interesting of how there is actually a thought process about the retirement of these models, at least on anthropic side. But I wonder if you'll see a counterpart on the the open AI side as well, because we

2:33:09Ant Pruitt:this we talked to a couple weeks ago to steve yeggie who is uh one of the claude code you know he doesn't work at anthropic but he's he did gastown he's done a couple of beads he's done a couple of projects for claude code he's really one of the movers and shakers in that and he said when i talk to people anthropic apparently he's had a chance to talk quite a minute a few people after gastown came up it's like a hive mind there they are in a different they're in a different head space this guy's worked at google he's worked at uh everywhere he's worked amazon he's worked everywhere he said there is some sort of weird vibe at anthropic where they're all kind of so um good i'm glad that they're they're conscientious uh about this and and darren okey one of our ai accelerationists in our club is pointing out that the open version of chat gpt oss 20b is basically a distilled 4.0 so you can run that locally so maybe you know the there hold out hope as soon as you can get a hardware that can run it which may not be this year uh if you didn't buy already right it could be the hard drive run wormy locally yeah uh what so tell me about this rural guaranteed minimum initiative jeff atwood who uh i love his blog coding horror i read it regularly uh he said this is his third and final startup and this one is not to make money he's made plenty of money uh on his previous creations this one is to help rural americans wesley yeah at the end of or at the beginning

2:34:44Megan Morrone:of 2025 he said he's basically giving away his money that he doesn't need uh to help with causes and so he made a low bunch of donations and then he uh decided to help with this initiative where It started off as going to be one rural community and they expanded out to three to basically guarantee a minimum amount of income for people in these almost forgotten towns and areas of the country. just so that they can have a little sense of floor that's higher than where they've been able to operate so that if they can start thinking about how they can elevate their lives, because there's so many things you can't do.

2:35:30Megan Morrone:Like if you're familiar with the hierarchy of needs, there's so many things that you have to worry about if you have to figure out how you're going to get food, how you're going to get clean drinking water, all this stuff. And if you can have that be something that you don't have to worry about because you have this income coming in, you are able to start doing more long-term planning. And then that helps the community, that helps businesses in the community, that helps people who are trying to figure out how to problem solve harder problems than just food security and stuff like that. And he wants to bring this to every part of the country uh and that his that's his goal this is what he like you said his third and final startup to good for him to try to tackle this in i'm so i'm very impressed if we get a few more of the

2:36:18Ant Pruitt:very richest people to do something for their neighbors that would be a probably a good thing this is uh so there's a website for it the rural guaranteed minimum income initiative uh he's donated it looks like 21 million dollars to get it started and then is looking for others who want to help out uh it's like universal basic income except that it's uh needs based

2:36:42Megan Morrone:yeah there's several levels for people to donate if you have five million one million and so on and so forth but there's also just like a tier if you want to get involved for no money for so it's If you're interested in this, you can join the movement without contributing the millions of dollars that he's looking for. But he's trying to make an outlet for people who are millionaires who want to give back to the community, not because the billionaires don't seem to be doing it. And so this is a good outlet where you know it'll go to good people or people who need it. And this is attached to a study to make sure that the viability of it is actually recorded and studied so that it is really proven to be a viable way to get people out.

2:37:32Ant Pruitt:And it's not a lot of money. Each participating family gets$1 ,500 a month for 16 months. But it's a lifeline for those people who really desperately need it. So I think that's great.

2:37:45Megan Morrone:And helping people helps everyone. Yes. Right? So it's not just these people. It's going to be the whole area. And if we are able to lift everyone up, then we're able to be driven by not just our basis needs of just trying to survive, but also helping people allows them to feel like they can help people. And that's kind of where our natural move is to help our community and help people around us. And so I think this helps promote that.

2:38:19Ant Pruitt:rgmii.org if you want to know more. And you know who helped me out? Stacey Higginbotham helped me out by introducing me to Wesley Faulkner, way back in the day in Austin, Texas. So it's nice that it comes around. What comes around?

2:38:35Megan Morrone:Yeah, South By. I'll be speaking at South By, by the way.

2:38:38Ant Pruitt:Are you?

2:38:38Megan Morrone:What are you going to talk about? It's why work sucks and how to fix it.

2:38:43Ant Pruitt:is the title of my talk works-not-working.com um very cool south by is just next month right wow it's almost spring i would like to mention a couple of uh people in the industry who've passed i like i don't like to but i often end the shows with uh that kind of story hideki sato who designed all of Sega's consoles passed away. The Dreamcast was my favorite game machine of all time. It was awesome. He was the company's former president of Sega. Has passed away at the age of 77. If you were a Sega fan, my house, when the kids were little, rang out with Sega! All the time. Every time we booted up.

2:39:35Ant Pruitt:So, So R.I.P. Hideki Sato. And then a guy who I never got to meet, but who I admired immensely. He painted many Bite magazine covers. Robert Tinney has passed away at the age of 78. If you ever saw these covers, you know Robert Tinney's style. It was unique. It was kind of realistic, but at the same time, very surrealistic. he was and he really for a lot of us kind of personified the computer business in its earliest days so if you remember Tinney's illustrations think back to Robert Tinney and that my friends he was Ars Technico called him Computing's Norman Rockwell I think that's a fair description of his style And that, my friends, concludes this thrilling, gripping edition of This Week in Tech.

2:40:35Ant Pruitt:Thomas, Jermaine, thank you so much for taking some time with us. I hope you'll come back. Yeah, this was a blast. He's the host of The Interface, brand new from the BBC, and you can also read his columns on the BBC. You cover specifically privacy. What is your view?

2:40:52Jason Howell:It's kind of all over the map, but the idea is it's the you angle in tech. So I'm talking about like the systems that are influencing your daily life, what's happening, what you need to know to live better. And then when there's a problem, ideally, what you can do about it, or at least giving you what you need to understand it.

2:41:09Ant Pruitt:I like it. Good. And how do people find that on the BBC's site? Just go to the BBC or?

2:41:17Jason Howell:Yeah, if you go to bbc.com or if you're in the UK,.co.uk. it's under the new tech section you can search my name you can search tabs which is the name of the column should be easy to find oh I'm glad they have

2:41:30Ant Pruitt:a technology section that's nice do you have an RSS feed you know

2:41:36Jason Howell:I don't think I have to find it that's a little high tech don't you think

2:41:40Ant Pruitt:lobby for it you know so many sites don't have RSS anymore

2:41:44Jason Howell:I think we may be going in that direction so yeah because

2:41:47Ant Pruitt:that's how I read all this stuff is you know RSS reader there and google might have killed it but it lives in my heart anyway thank you thomas great to meet you thank you for being here i appreciate it yeah stacy higginbotham so nice to see you uh we will see you again soon for uh the stacy's book club and uh what are you working on right

2:42:11Leo Laporte:now for cr anything particular oh my end of life disclosure law has been introduced and passed a hearing in New York state. Yay.

2:42:20Ant Pruitt:Stacey's been lobbying for as long as I've known you for companies to be more forthright about when they're going to end of life. These consumer products like the Wemo.

2:42:30Leo Laporte:When you buy it, they should tell you how long they plan to support it. They could extend it, but they should definitely tell you at least a minimum. And yeah, so that's in Massachusetts. Now it's been introduced. And then just last week, it passed through its first hearing hurdle in new york state so yay and the poll results are in

2:42:52Ant Pruitt:the next book for stacy's book club big winner 70 of the vote a psalm for the wild built by becky chambers and we'll be reading that and we'll we'll let you know club members uh we'll let you know soon when that uh stacy's book club is scheduled thank you stacy wesley faulkner works works not working well that's the truth works dash not dash working if you're in a job that you need that you want that you want to keep but it's not ideal you can help make it better uh help fund the site he's setting it up right now working hard on this should be coming up in a month or so works dash not dash working yeah we fight for the user yes we all fight for the user that's one of the things that i always thought was our mission statement we're not here to represent the big companies we're here to represent the people who use those tools tomorrow morning if you want if you're in the club join me early uh 9 a.m pacific i guess not early unless you're in the pacific time zone uh i'm going to be interviewing guy kawasaki for intelligent machines a guy's schedule didn't permit him to join us live on the show on wednesday but we're going to interview him ahead of time tomorrow morning 9 pacific you can watch if you're in the club we will stream that live of course if you're not in the club we'd love to have you twit.tv slash club twit 10 bucks a month gets you ad free versions of all the shows access to the club twit discord which is a great hang i have to say there's so many great people in there i love i love all the stuff we do i hang out there all the time and of course uh you also get all those special programming that make possible uh through our through you make possible through your donations twit.tv slash club twit we do twit every sunday afternoon 2 p.m pacific 5 p.m eastern 2200 utc you can watch us live on youtube twitch x.com facebook linkedin and kick or of course in the club to discord if you remember after the fact on demand versions of the show is available at the website twit.tv there's a youtube channel dedicated to the show uh the video of the show it's a great way to send clips if there's something you thought oh i gotta i gotta share this with somebody do that from the YouTube feed.

2:45:06Ant Pruitt:Oh, of course. And like any podcast, you can subscribe to your favorite podcast client. I'll get it automatically as soon as we're done. Thanks to Benito Gonzalez, our esteemed producer and technical director. To our editor, Kevin King. Thanks to all of you for joining us. Thanks, Stacey. Thanks, Thomas. Thanks, Wesley. Thanks to all of you. We'll see you next time. And now, as I have said, for 20 long years, another twit is in the can. We'll see you next time.

2:45:31Jason Howell:This is amazing. Doing the twit.

2:45:36Ant Pruitt:Doing the twit. All right. Doing the twit, baby. Doing the twit. All right.