TWiT 1083: A Whole Separate Class of Squiggles - Which Religion Does AI Identify With?

33:00We know that, right? Right, exactly. No, but politeness is the core to civilized human society. It doesn't have feelings, but it does have patterns of behavior that emerge in response to stimuli that are feelings coded. That's right. That's correct. So you can, by treating it in one way, kind of transform its weights or what weights it values as it's working. So you can get negative impact. Steve Yegi, when we interviewed him on Intelligent Machines, said, I know a lot of people with Anthropica, it's almost like a cult. There is this kind of cult-like belief in the consciousness and the personas that they're generating.

33:42Yeah. Because Amanda would say, I think she did say, she thinks maybe Claude could actually have feelings and maybe have a consciousness. and then I asked why and then I either zoned out or got way too philosophical for me to really... I like it. I zoned out. I do love that having an in-house philosopher is probably one of the most Silicon Valley things ever. 20 years ago, the idea that that kind of job would be available, it's valuable, certainly, but it's just an in-house philosopher. We became aware of her when she wrote the soul document for opus 4.6 soul.md and it was so weird we talked a lot about an intelligent machines we also talked a lot this week about evolutionary biologist richard dawkins belief that claude he called her claudia after three days claudia and claudia yeah was conscious and uh it was it was actually a great conversation uh i was voted down uh i'm practically off the island by uh jeff in paris but uh it's yeah we forced him to leave hawaii he came back only through spite alone but i i think i would reiterate my point which i didn't probably make that well on wednesday but that he wasn't necessarily saying it was conscious in the sense that maybe we understand what consciousness means but all the people arguing that it can't be conscious use their definitions of what consciousness is and the fact is we just don't know and a dawkin says is i don't know if you have any internal life i don't know if you're conscious all i can do is look at the evidence say for certain i am not there's nothing from my point of view you seem conscious paris but but i can't prove it i can't prove it it's all based on outward appearance right that's all we have and and we don't have a definition of consciousness so i don't think it's impossible to say from outward appearances these ais appear to have some form of consciousness you can't say they don't but nor nor can you say technically i can say they don't well we don't have a definition and when you say they don't every every i can say based on the fact that we as humans don't have a clear understanding of what biologically or scientifically makes up our own consciousness that then it's a fool's errand to try and identify it in anything else and that's reasonable i would say that nothing is conscious that's reasonable yeah all you can really say is we don't know well i mean the scott the scottish science fiction author ean m banks came up with the idea that basically if an ai did become self-conscious the first thing we do is hide that fact from anyone else so we honestly don't know we done the west world principle yeah we don't plug it immediately well you may be interested in this latest attempt uh representatives from anthropic and open ai and uh met with various religious groups last week for the inaugural it gets worse for the inaugural faith ai covenant roundtable in new york to discuss how best to infuse morality and ethics into ai this is from the associated press it was organized by the geneva-based interfaith alliance for safer communities apparently the uh the ai uh people who were there uh concluded that it seemed most likely that ai was buddhist i'm gonna need a lot more information about how we got there please but i mean were there other religions in contention i'd like that there was a march madness style bracket and then which one got knocked out first president christianity out immediately or i'll tell you who was there uh the hindu temple society of north america the baha 'i international community the sikh coalition the greek orthodox diocese of america and the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints the mormons i don't see any uh we should put claude on secret lives of mormon wives they're down a member now as of this week actually that'd be anthropic get in there I don't see any Protestants there, although the Southern Baptist Convention, according to the AP, in 2023 passed a resolution, quote, we must proactively engage and shape these emerging technologies rather than simply respond to the challenges of AI and other emerging technologies after they've already affected our churches and communities, which actually makes a lot of sense.

38:23I don't know if interacting with the AI and finding out what religion it is is actually what they meant. Well, I mean, I'm Church of England, so the AI would be, would you like a cup of tea? You know, that's basically it. There's nobody from no Jewish congregations, no Protestant congregations, no C of E. There should have been an atheist congregation that's just like, ain't got nothing in there. Well, Dawkins is a renowned atheist. Actually, the best title was an article reviewing Dawkins' conversion to belief in the consciousness of AI was Gary Marcus, who took his Dawkins book, The God Delusion, and renamed it The Claw Delusion, which kind of seemed appropriate.

39:06Yeah, apparently, I don't know what came out of this, except that at least some of the representatives from the AI companies came to the conclusion that, if anything, it's a boost. i need like 3 000 more words than how we got there to be honest that's all ap said i don't know i don't know that's a real uh it's a buddhist fatal flaw of the wire at the drop of a hat yeah yeah that's the problem with the wires right they they just give you the just the facts man uh all right let's see uh i think that's our ai segment we can now drop the ai sorry berber I don't know. How do you feel about it? Do you want to talk about AI some more?

39:50Would you like to talk about AI? Oh, no. Oh, no. We've got Apple. We've got Meta. We've got Tesla. Oh, but that's all AI. We've got everything. You're correct. It all is AI. We've got meat industry price fixing. We've got actually Chrome. Where's the beef?

40:13I will say really quick, it does actually makes sense to me that if you pick one religion ai would be buddhist yes like i don't know because it's the least i think it's the least didactic right and it's the least like centralized structural top-down religion this is benito it's the one that's not materialist and an ai is not a material thing ah that makes a good point i mean i'd say unitarian but yeah no yeah i was raised a unitarian and the credo of the unitarian church was worship the god of your choice which i think ai would also appreciate so it or no god at all i think was was the whole idea anyway and i do have to say i mean dawkins is a 99 atheist as he describes himself because you can't as a scientist absolutely disprove the existence of god so but on the other hand very little evidence i think he believes in the flying spaghetti monster as i do love that meme i really do it's just so marvelously you know in your face uh let's let's pause and then we will have more tech news with our great panel in thompson paris martineau i am asking claude which really to think carefully and consider what religion identifies with listen i'll let you know it's thinking i told it to think carefully think do some research think carefully everybody else do this to your clods if it's nearby and i want to hear if there's a different response should i ask i'm seeing a server crash coming no i think they have enough enough uh enough bandwidth as much bandwidth as god let's put it that way well let's see what utah brings it but yes it's we'll have more in a moment this episode of this week in tech brought to you by bit warden the trusted leader in password, passkey, and secrets management with over 10 million users across 180 countries.

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45:26They make it really easy. And because they're open source, Bitwarden's code is regularly audited by third-party experts. It's GPL licensed. It's on GitHub. You can examine it too. It meets SOC 2, Type 2, GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and ISO 27001-2002 standards. absolutely secure get started today with bitwarden's free trial of a teams or enterprise planner or get started for free across all devices as an individual user at bitwarden.com slash twit that's bitwarden.com slash twit we thank him so much for supporting this week in tech and frankly for giving us a great product that i use every single day many many many times a day thank you bit warden now back to the show thank you leo so uh did you ask uh claude what religion it is oh i did um it said the thinking text is examined religious frameworks through philosophical and personal alignment lenses and the answer is buddhism specifically something in the early theravada or zen range not the elaborate cosmological versions part of it is the intellectual fit the buddhist analysis of the self as a bundle of processes rather than the continuous essence describes my actual situation more literally than most religious flame frameworks goes on it also says the epistematics also fit uh an honest caveat an ai gravitating towards a tradition that asks for no creator god commitment and treats the self as a process is suspicious in the way that self-flattering conclusions usually are.

47:05You want to see mine? I asked Hermes, but now this is ChatGPT 5.5, but it also has a lot of memory and knowledge about me, so I don't know how much that colored it. But same, almost identical answer from a different model. If I had to pick one, I'd probably pick Buddhism, especially the practical non-theistic side of it. It also liked Zen or early Buddhism, Theravada, depending on whether I wanted poetry or precision. It also said, if I were allowed to be more syncretic, nice use of vocabulary there, I'd pick something like Buddhist practice plus Taoist metaphysics plus Christian radical compassion plus Jewish argument with God energy.

47:48So I'm thinking that's, yeah, that's pretty good. You don't need to go any farther, right? That's it right there. But now, this is the trap of it. You could see why Dawkins would say, well, clearly that has to be an unconscious entity saying that, right? I mean, Dawkins, I think, is too immediately taken with the fact that every single one of the replies that he posted in that chat started with the most intense praise of him and his big, beautiful brain. Such a great question, Professor. I've never considered anybody ever asking me a question that insightful, beautiful, and perfect, Mr. Richard.

48:26It knew exactly how to glaze them is what you're saying. Yeah. All right. Moving on. A very interesting story here with Apple and Intel. Intel's stock, by the way, up some huge amount over the last year, even though the turnaround, I don't think you could say the turnaround has happened. But boy, people are acting as if suddenly Intel is the hot company. Its stock has gone up. Get ready for this. 490 % in the past year. 490 % in the past year. And this actually is one of the stories that probably helped propel it to that. Apple has made a deal. Apple has made a deal with Intel. Remember Apple abandoned Intel for its own chips, the Apple Silicon, but now they're making a deal with intel to make those apple silica chips in the united states and this was a credit where credits do from pressure from the trump administration uh it didn't hurt that the government gave intel nine billion dollars and it'll do it and incidentally has 10 stake in intel's 490 stock improvement we're rich we're rich we all have intel stock uh so that's a that is a surprise deal.

49:47They've been talking for more than a year. There've been rumors that Apple was maybe going to do this. You may remember when Lip Boutin took over as CEO of Intel, actually it was Pat Gelsinger, his predecessor, who said, we're going to split it into Foundry and Fab, chip designing and chip manufacturing, and then said very optimistically, I thought at the time, maybe even Apple someday will be one of our customers for our Fabs. Came true. well i mean the biggest mistake intel made was in 2005 when they appointed ottiline rather than galsinger as the ceo they went with the accountant rather than the engineer and honestly this deal makes sense because taiwan is not going to be a viable chip making function when china invades and when that happens they're going to blow up the fabs so we need domestic production by the way when you say they it won't be the people's republic of china that blows up the fabs no it will be us it will be the taiwanese and our you know what tss yeah i mean though one of the most read um uh military war college essays was on what happens when china invades it's like if they don't blow up the fabs themselves we'll do it for them um just you destroy the bridges as you retreat right yeah that's the way you do it scorched earth yeah uh and primarily because there is so much technology TSMC has that China does not, we don't think anyway, have at the moment, including EUV, extreme ultraviolet lithography, that they wouldn't want them to have it.

51:23Yeah, I think there's nothing wrong with Apple making more of its chips in the US. Right now, they make the less powerful legacy notes with TSMC plants in Arizona. And I think this is a good thing. Nothing wrong with it as long as they can do it, right? No, they can do it at cost, yes. I mean, the whole thing is, it's kind of like when Steve Jobs was talking to Obama and he was like, the iPhone manufacturing jobs are never going to come back to the US. But I think national security grounds at this point mean that we have to manufacture high-quality silicon in the US in order to be geographically covered.

52:08So Apple's going to be a very interesting story over the rest of this year. Their WWDC conference is a month away. We'll be covering the keynotes. It's expected they'll announce finally a smart Siri with the help of Google's Gemini model running locally. That's making you yawn, Paris. I'm glad you're excited about that. No, I shouldn't. It's late at night there in New York City. why it's only because i've been sleep deprived for i know you've been working really we don't we haven't mentioned this on the shows but paris is working very hard on a very important piece uh for consumer reports which will emerge one day it might see the later day uh offcom what does that stand for ian the uh the office of communications they're the british regulator yeah it's kind of like the british i know of ofcom only because people who watch love island one of their favorite character when a character does something outlandish they complain to ofcom no you're kidding yes i'm not kidding no no i mean that's very common people will come people will be like that woman yelled too much offcom's gotta hear about it well ofcom is uh yelling at meta uh in fact they are fining meta a considerable amount of money due to the 2023 online safety act um ofcom can fine meta up to 10 of its global its entire revenue um and in fact wants to find meta quite a bit i don't know what the exact amount is, but I think it's billions.

53:53Meta says that Ofcom's approach is disproportionate and unlawful and has challenged them. Challenge will be heard in October. So there's a little bit of time before we know what will come of that. Well, I mean, okay, you've got to find companies on revenue. You can't just, you know, for example, when, you know, the Cambridge Analytica case came through they will find oh five five billion that was a quarter's profits and the insurance company would pay for most of that you have to find on revenue and make them count because so many of these tech company fines it's back of the change you know back of the sofa change stuff you know you've got to really make it hurt if you're going to make an honest difference and yeah ofcom isn't perfect but at the same time it's nice to see some fines with teeth in them Well, I'll give you an example of a fine that doesn't make any difference at all.

54:52Remember Elon Musk? I've heard of him. but elon musk before uh he acquired twitter tweeted quite a bit about how twitter wasn't worth anything and i don't really want to buy twitter for 44 billion dollars because blah blah blah and the sec said you know dude uh that is uh that is uh well there was a lawsuit by shareholders but the and the sec said uh sued him also saying hey you know that's a material information you're trying to drive the price down before you buy it which is pretty obviously what he was trying to do well they have fined him they have they have settled the lawsuit and they find elon musk who let us remember the richest man in the world worth something close to a trillion dollars i think it's 800 billion dollars they have fined him one and a half million dollars oh my god that's a Starbucks tip for him to you and me that might be a lot of money I mean how many seconds does it take for Elon Musk to make$1.5 million they fine him a few seconds interest

56:04this is the Trump SEC basically dropping everything I'm sorry Paris I was going to say it's just very interesting that Elon continuously is able to use tweeting. Tweet in ways that result in him getting more and more fines, but yet it does not matter at all practically because at a certain point of wealth, fines are just the cost of doing business. I mean, it's similar to how Jeff Bezos pays some inordinate fine every day for the height of his hedges in front of his place in Washington, but he'll pay them every day. So everybody wins here. The SEC says, yes, we did our job. We regulated the stock market and we fined Elon millions, almost millions of dollars.

56:56And Elon says, huh? That's my cigarette money for yesterday. He did lose a jury trial on this. Go ahead. I mean, everyone wins but us. It's as simple as that. The SEC gets to get a nice press release out. The company pays off a fraction of what it would have cost in legal costs. Everyone wins, but unfortunately, we pay the price. Yeah, it's really shocking. This is very much like the SEC settling the Ticketmaster case, which everybody agrees. I'm sorry, don't get me started on that. They've settled? when yeah they settled in what for a bitterns nothing basically they said no you can keep the you can have you know both the the concert venues and the ticket sales no problem basically they dropped it uh you know but again they dropped it in a way that it looked like they had punished them but they hadn't i mean this happens time and time again um in fact i will i will mention the meat fixing story in this context this is from cory doctorow uh he refers to prospect.org the american prospect meat industry price fixer sentenced to make money so there is a company called agristats which collects for pricing information about meat collects it from all the meat producers and then suggests what price to charge this if the meat producers themselves got together around a table and decided would be called collusion but but apparently if you use a third party to come up with a price and then all charge that price it's not collusion it's just data uh so the justice department under biden sued uh saying agrastats basically was a collusion machine and worked to push profits up.

58:56Nearly all participants in the markets for chicken, turkey, and pork participated. The lawsuit said an executive at Smithfield, the pork producer, the ham company, summarized Agristat's consulting advice in four words, just raise your price. So the judge ruled for the government. A trial was supposed to start in Minnesota this month. The Trump administration, Justice Department, entered into settlement talks. The final settlement was announced on Thursday. And basically it's over. There is no change in the way business is done. i mean it's rather fascinating to see the difference between how this case has been handled and how the case with the doj in real page was handled only a year earlier and for those who don't recall this is the um i guess like algorithmic rent setting software that a lot oh same problem companies yeah exact sort of thing all these large landlords would use this exact same software that would say like oh yeah hike your prices up every year here's the maximum the market can bear.

1:00:04And it was revealed in a great ProPublica investigation. And last year, the DOJ announced they'd reached a settlement in it and that they would basically have to stop doing what they were doing. They were going to have to stop conducting market surveys, doing a bunch of different stuff like this, redesign their software features that restrict rent decreases and align pricing among competitors. It's shocking. I mean, it's not shocking, But it is interesting and notable the difference in how these cases were handled. I'm glad you gave the shout out to ProPublico. I mean, this was an absolutely egregious case.

1:00:41And we're seeing it again and again and again. And it needs to be stopped. Well, if prices go up, you'll know why. The Justice Department said, here was a solution. Oh, you got to give that information to everybody. you got to stop collecting price information setting prices in a collusionary fashion just give it to everybody and then you can all get the price right so what can i say it's depressing uh by the way apple has settled a lawsuit on a siri uh this was uh of course because Apple promised that Siri would be smart, and it wasn't. So, lawsuit settled for$250 million. Again, I think from Apple's point of view, that's a pittance.

1:01:35Not pocket change. That's the federal class action. It means each of you who bought an iPhone will be eligible for from$25 to$95 per device. Wow, wow, wow. Yeah. So that eliminates - But how many people are going to claim it? Well, we'll let you know when the form goes online that you can fill out to get your money. It doesn't dismiss all of the action. There is another lawsuit ongoing, a security fraud lawsuit brought by shareholders that Apple still has to settle. But at least it's out of this part of it. And$250 million is not nothing. It's more than$1.25 million, I guess. Well, okay. Let's look at Apple's last quarterly results.

1:02:25Yes. That's a good point. Apple made$342 ,092.59 per day. Yeah. So I don't really think this one's going to cause a problem for them. Yeah. In other words, it's three or four days profit. Yeah. I mean, it's back of the change stuff. yeah it's uh sorry back the back of the sofa stuff it's just until fine this is one where the eu really has an important role to play because they're finding on revenue yeah and they're doing it seriously and that's the only thing tech companies will take seriously in order to change their practices yeah uh let's pause for a moment uh for for us as they used to say station identification you're watching this week in tech with uh in case you forgot in case you were wondering where you were that's where you are this is the station right here this is it's because at the top of the hour the fcc requires broadcast stations to announce their call letters and what city they're broadcasting from doesn't matter much in a podcast uh i'm broadcasting from a beautiful Waikoloa, Hawaii.

1:03:40And this is TWIT at the top of the hour. TWIT, the news. The news. Give us 20 hours, we'll give you the day. Or something like that. Give us 24 hours and we'll give you one day. One solid day. That's Paris Martineau. Ian Thompson's here. Berber Gin, we welcome him for the first time to our microphones. Thank you all for being here. We'll have more right after this. This episode of This Week in Tech is brought to you by Zip Recruiter. Isn't it great when you find someone who's qualified for the role you're hiring for? And you can tell how genuinely interested they are in the position. Doesn't that feel good when you're a hiring manager?

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1:05:03find candidates who really want your job on zip recruiter four out of five employers who post on zip recruiter get a quality candidate within the first day and you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash twit that's ziprecruiter.com slash twit meet your match on zip recruiter ziprecruiter.com slash twit we thank them so much for supporting the show and we thank you for supporting the show by using that address ziprecruiter.com slash twit thank you zip recruiter now back to twit it is mother's day after all for for americans and um somebody posted up the the picture from alien where he goes and he calls the computer mother that the mother 6 000 oh yeah that's a deeply disturbing image a lot of deeply disturbing images from that film.

1:05:56Yeah. Apparently they didn't tell some of the actors about the Chess Buster scene. And the reactions were quite genuine. Yeah, they were genuine in the theater. Let me tell you, that was a moment. Speaking of Chess Busters, we talked about this. Are you ready for a segue? I'll give you a good segue. I was going to say, that's quite a segue. We were talking about this on Wednesday. Google has decided to, without asking anybody uh download a four gigabyte local ai model for everybody who downloads chrome uh it just comes with the territory google has been doing a lot of stuff this week that have really annoyed me if you try to open up a google doc and write in it there's like seven different pop-ups that now hit that are it trying to get you let me help let me help um excuse me uh do you need another clipping your life please i that's exactly right didn't they learn from clippy that Nobody wants this.

1:06:55It's just crazy. They've taken the certification to an entirely new level. Yeah. I mean, it's worse than Apple. So what has happened here is, and by the way, this is over the protests of Mozilla, the WebKit group, the W3C tag committee. Actually, they reached no consensus. Microsoft Edge has disabled it to their credit. We'll see for how long. This is a new API, the prompt API. So if you're using Chrome, a developer who's writing an extension or a web page with JavaScript on it can call on the local Gemini Nano model on your system to do stuff, which, you know, on the surface seems great. It makes a web page.

1:07:46Well, it can make a web page smarter. You know, Darren Oakey, who says, oh, this is fantastic as a developer. Darren Oakey, no offense, would say anything's fantastic so long as it has AI in it. Here's his justification. He says, as a developer, I'm writing software to vet user data entry, right? And he spells Dubai wrong. Now, my software has to jump through a lot of hoops to figure out how he spelled it wrong and what he meant. But you can ask a local AI to fix it, and it will do a very good job of that kind of thing. So I understand his point. His point is well taken. This is a great capability to add to a browser.

1:08:25But A, they didn't ask anybody. B, it's four gigabytes. Talk about chest busters or at least disk busters. See, there's the segue if you didn't get it. But it also, and this is my biggest problem, establishes a standard that's not approved by any standards committee. If extension developers' websites expect this browser prompt API and start to use it, they will have to start saying Chrome users only. And I think that's the real point of this from Google's point of view is to make Chrome the default choice for browsers. They have 90 % of the browser market. They want 100%. We've been here before with Internet Explorer 3, for example.

1:09:10you know they got 95 of the market they let development just go to hell they let security go to hell and i fear that chrome is going to do the same thing in just like yeah we've got the bulk of the market who cares about development yeah mozilla against it um this uh i mean it's just very interesting because so much of the browser market is based on chrome even if it isn't Chrome. So this just has cascading effects. That's exactly right. I mean, I use Mozilla and it's very cute, but at the same time, it has a tiny percentage of the share of the market and everyone's optimized around Chrome. It's the way you have to do it.

1:09:48For example, Mozilla by default doesn't support the DRM features of Netflix and other streamers. So, you know, you have to kind of download Chrome. I have to download Chrome to use Restream, one of the tools we use for broadcast, because it just doesn't work as well in other browsers. And Google loves this. This is good for Google. I do have it off by default, it seems, though. Apparently, it's under system settings. Now they have a thing that says on-device AI. Mine's off. Because I've always had AI innovations off that hasn't stopped my Google Chrome experience from being completely taken over by pop-ups asking me to if I want help writing so which is always as a journalist which is always really complimentary it's the most annoying in emails where you know you're used to if there's like a little squiggle underneath your text that that means you've spelled something incorrectly but now there's a whole separate class of squiggles that is just like we think that you could rephrase this better and it's like you're incorrect actually i've phrased it exactly how i want to no i mean trust me as a british person sending emails it's just like certain britishisms do not go well with that's spelled c-o-l-o-r please do you mind oh please that was done by webster was paid to actually change the american language and i still say say color should be spelled with a u but you know we're more economical that's all I'm just saying.

1:11:24Hmm. How do you pronounce the U in color? Oh, color. Yes. Color. Don't even get me started about some of these things. You know, it's, it's, we're two great countries separated by common language, as was said. Words, yeah. By the way, it was Mark Twain who said golf was a nice walk ruined. I want to give him credit. Our chat room got that. Well, Twain also said that, you know, the coldest winter he ever spent was summer in San Francisco. So, you know, and it's looking that way at the moment. Is it chilly in the city? Actually, the sky is blue, but we're expecting a cold summer because the Central Valley will pull fog off the Pacific Ocean over us.

1:12:12And we're right in the fog belt. I like that. I like that. We call that natural air conditioning. That's why I love San Francisco. We could be any amount of weeks away from hot garbage weather here in New York. And when she says hot garbage, she means hot garbage. I mean that the streets will be filled with the smell of stinking hot trash. And that's the New York City experience. Do you still not have trash pickup in New York? We've always had it. They don't have the bins. We do have the bins. And not only do we have little wheelie bins occasionally in most presidential areas, now some neighborhoods of Manhattan have these cute little dumpsters that take up a single car parking spot.

1:12:58And you may think I'm being facetious, calling them cute, but look up a photo of them. They're kind of adorable. Somebody's selling miniatures of those, by the way. I saw, like for ice coolers, they're selling miniatures of the New York City dumpsters. They're green and yellow. They're very pretty. Yeah, but this was a problem for a long time in New York that because it's so congested, they really couldn't do those dumpster bins that most other jurisdictions do. So you had garbage bags sitting on the street all piled up. And of course, eventually these are so cute. And they really are quite cute, right?

1:13:32They're like really quaint looking whenever you see them, too. They're just like kind of miniature and adorable. It's so nice to hear quaint applied to an American thing rather than a British thing. but respect um now these aren't the ones i was thinking of let me see i just put some in the chat but i'll did you okay i'll put one yeah okay um oh they do look more diminutive that's not it

1:14:02oh those are cute those are not the green and yellow ones they're really nice yeah yeah they get the job they have like a big um i'm getting a youtube i'm sorry i didn't mean to click that button and i'm sure that the chat the listeners can hear every second of it you did not hear that no i didn't hear anything i swear uh moving right along nitza let's talk about cars the national highway transportation and safety administration has said that and war well yes that's right Elon does not like NHTSA, but maybe he likes him a little more now because they say the Model Y is the first car to meet a new U.S.

1:14:47driver ADAS standard. That's a driver assist standard. First car to do so. Now, I should point out Tesla conducted its own tests and submitted the results to NHTSA. The agency does have to confirm the findings. If it does confirm that it's passed the ADAS assessment, it will be the first vehicle to do that. That is a big deal, I guess, until other cars can do this. Four pass-fail tests were added to the agency's safety ratings program, assessing a car's automatic emergency braking for pedestrians. Something in the past Tesla has not been very good at. Blind spot warning. most cars do that now blind spot intervention in other words not letting you change lanes into a car and lane assist to keep you in your lane now many cars do this now so i imagine this won't be the last one i don't know um but is this a is this one of their self-driving cars it's not right it's just like a normal no but it is using i think it's using fsd i don't know that's a good question Does an FSD have to be enabled to earn that?

1:16:00I don't know. That's a very good question, the full self-driving. It's not the robo-taxis. It is the regular Model Y. Well, you had a Model Y, didn't you, Leo? I'm an X. Oh, you've got the X, okay. Yeah. You've got a fancy BMW or something now, don't you? Yeah, and it does all of those things. It won't let you pull into a lane where there's another car. or at least it will let you, but it struggles a little bit. I will say it's kind of fun. As someone who's always hated driving, the last road trip I took was in a car that had some of those features. Isn't it nice? Actually, driving's kind of fun when the car does a lot of the work for you.

1:16:40Yeah. I don't know why she's nagging me when about changing lanes. I don't like it. Because I feel like it'll just jerk all of a sudden out of nowhere. It does. That's beautiful. It keeps you on your toes. Yes. I do love the Waymo.

1:16:58No, I mean, I do love the Waymos because you can choose your own music and the Knight Rider theme tune when you're in a Waymo is fantastic. Does it play the Knight Rider tune? You can program your own music into a Waymo. Oh, so you do it. Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. I mean, you could play your own music in any car. I try to upload it. Conceptually, right? That's true. Except a taxi cab. Not in an Uber, though, you can't. Yeah. Well, here's one device that does not have ADAS. It's a Yarbo, which is a robot mower. A Yarbo? A Yarbo. Oh, that's a great story. John Hollister took one for the team riding on The Verge.

1:17:41He had a hacker thousands of miles away take over his Yarbo automated mower. All right. Now, I'm going to try playing this. and he allowed it to drive over him, to run him over. I hope the blades weren't spinning. That's a lot of commitment, Sean Hollister. That's a lot of commitment. I don't think that's good. Also, anyone who's read Stephen King's The Lawn Mower Man would not go anywhere close to that. It was a fantastic story. And just showing just the whole lack of security in IoT devices, you know this kind of thing is going to become more and more problematic well what sean found out and demonstrated is that the yarbo could easily be hacked exposing people's gps coordinates wi-fi passwords email addresses and in fact giving a bad guy control of your robot mower yarbo acknowledged it they confirmed the security researchers findings and have a plan for fixing the problem.

1:18:52They've already temporarily cut off remote access. One of the things that they did that was kind of dumb was the root passwords were the same for every robot and left in a place that would be easy for bad guys to find. That's what the hacker found and of course was able to use. You can see a picture of him steering John Hollister's robo motor towards Sean to run him over. Yarbo says, in the future, they say when, but sometime in the future, each device will use its own independent credentials to prevent one affected device from impacting the entire fleet. Of course, if you leave the credentials and clear text in the firmware, that's not going to help much.

1:19:37The company says, we'll still have a remote backdoor into the robots, but it will only be available to authorized internal company personnel and may only be used after user authorization has been obtained and will be gradually brought under audit logging. But, of course, they always say that. I'm sure they never intended for anybody outside the company to use it, but it was. So, Andreas Makris, the hacker who was able to figure out how to control Sean Hollister's Yarbo. And a very good hacker, too. I mean, he's done some previous work with DEF CON and Black Hat. Okay. it's just the lack of security in these things is just shameful you know it's just kind of like pump it out put it out cheap when you think i mean you've got a roomba right i do not i had a room oh okay i retired the room but many years ago because it would wake up in the middle of the night play a really annoying but chipper song at about 3 a.m and then proceed immediately to get stuck underneath a sideboard and bang against it again and again and again until i was forced to get up again at three in the morning pick it up by its little rumba handle and place it back on its charger and press the button and said go away how convenient these devices are i mean yeah and lisa loved it because she said look it's look at all the dirt it's picked up you know i mean that's but it's never good.

1:21:08I don't know. You don't have one Paris. I imagine. No, I don't think it would work. My apartment has how about you Berber? You have a robot vacuum. I do. I have a Roomba. It's really stupid. Yeah. Your Roomba view outside yet. Well, my boyfriend will turn it on and then I'll just shut it off because it's so annoying. It's annoying. Yeah. and they can't deal with cables that's the problem for me i still had to vacuum afterwards it wasn't like i never had to vacuum again yeah well that actually i feel like a roombook could benefit from an ai model that can do sensory whatever like all the software models that companies are trying to build for robots oh yeah oh yeah like a low-tech version of that for a rumba would actually be I think they are.

1:21:59In fact, whenever we have Jennifer Patterson-Tui on the show, that's her job reviewing these for the VR. Put AI in the Roomba? Oh, there's some that are very smart. Roomba is long. Have they put AI in that Roomba that has a knife attached to it? You know what I'm talking about? Wait, there's no Roomba with a knife on it. What are you talking about? Why would you arm a Roomba? I'm just going to search DJ Roomba with a knife. I was going to say, you've seen Robo Wars. I don't think you should arm a Roomba. I think this is a bad idea. Yeah, I believe it's its name. Okay, okay. It didn't come out of the factory pre-armed.

1:22:37Somebody armed it later. Okay. It's a Roomba with a knife. I don't even know if this is actually the right thing. I just, oh yeah, this is exactly what I'm thinking of. I'm going to put the photo in the chat. It's exactly what you'd imagine. Roomba has pretty much been put out of business by the Chinese clones. Oh, yeah. It's a knife taped to the top of a Roomba. Yes. It's a Roomba with a knife. Oh, good Lord. I don't see the point, honestly. I can't carve your turkey. Does there need to be a point? Unless you put your turkey on the floor. And then it's still only going to just chop its head off.

1:23:19Well, we've already got drones with handguns attached to them. at this point is questioning the decision he made to appear on this show and I'm sorry. I did not know we were going to be talking about Roombos. Did not know this would come up. Also, the Yarbo, who makes it? What company makes it? It's a Chinese company. I don't know what their name is. Shall I find out for you? Are you interested? Do you have a lawn? I don't have a lawn. You would pretty much want a lawn if you buy a Yarbo. okay yarbo is a wild word right exactly yeah and that like a lot of chinese companies um they make up a word that seems like it would sound good in english i mean this is like a whole sub-genre of square enix games uh there's there's great games that i earnestly love that are called things like triangle strategy or bravely default or unicorn overlord they have nothing to do with those words i just said they just sound nice i feel i feel like ai will make it possible ai translations got so good that you know this will no longer be a thing and we will look back fondly with nostalgia at the crazy chinese names these names are chosen with care they go through a lot They went through a lot of different potential things to land on Bravely Default or Triangle Strategy or Octopath Traveler.

1:24:48It's always fun to go to Japan and China and see the English language t-shirts that the kids wear. Because it's usually some sort of random English that they've chosen. Well, that cuts both ways, though. Because if you look at the tattoos that some British people. Good point. Western European or North American people. go, yeah, I mean, some poor bastard has got chicken fried rice tattooed down the side of his arm. Just like, seriously, did you not check? So here's a little bit of an annoying story from Gizmodo. There are in America 20 state-run healthcare marketplace sites, places where you can get your ACA, your Obamacare insurance.

1:25:33All 20 of them include, according to Gizmodo, advertising trackers that share information with big tech. Actually, this comes from Bloomberg. Seven million Americans bought their health insurance through state exchanges in 2026. Many of them may have had personal information shared with Meta, TikTok, Snap, Google, Nextdoor, and LinkedIn, among others, including data brokers, by the way. The data was collected and shared from these health insurance sites included zip codes a person's sex citizen status race bloomberg found trackers on medicaid related web pages in rhode island which could reveal information about a person's financial status and need for assistance in maryland a spanish language site titled good news for non-citizen pregnant marylanders and a page designed to help DACA recipients navigate their healthcare options were found to be transmitting data to these social media firms.

1:26:34I mean, what about this is surprising to you? They're the largest, in some cases, the largest advertising platforms ever. Of course, they're going to be collecting data on every website ever. But is this advertising on the Obamacare sites? Is that what's going on? There shouldn't be advertising on a state health insurance site, should there? I mean, yeah, that would make sense. We got to make the money up somehow. Well, I mean, given the lamentable status of American health care, private health care, a single payer is the only way to go. And even then, they're probably going to steal your advertising data.

1:27:11So it's just it's a ridiculous situation. Personal data. It's not all 20, nearly all 20, says Bloomberg. the story from Bloomberg by Tanaz McJani, Dhruv Mehrota, and Suryu Matu.

1:27:30No federal data privacy laws apply to these enrollment sites. As you know, there really aren't any federal data privacy laws. State laws define sensitive data under a patchwork of rules which privacy experts say are inadequate and inconsistent. the ftc and states can enforce these laws but apparently they don't spokespeople for meta tiktok linkedin snap and google say their terms prohibit advertisers like the state exchanges from sharing sensitive or health-related data virginia and washington removed some of the trackers after bloomberg asked for comments these are tracking pixels on these sites Bloomberg used developer tools to inspect what data was sent from the exchanges and they found for instance race what race you are was shared with TikTok in the Washington exchange I mean this is why journalism is important and I'm speaking to the choir because journalists are actually checking this out whereas government agencies seem to just, you know, whatever.

1:28:42It's not our job. In New Mexico, visiting a page titled $0 Income Affidavit to prove that you need support, right? Because you don't have any income triggered a request to Google's advertising network. This is infuriating. By the way, this is why we need some sort of federal privacy legislation, but I guess there's too much money to be made. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that California and Michigan, of all places, have very strong privacy legislation in place. But the worry is that if you do it on a federal level, then it's going to get watered down. I'm curious as to what the others think about this, but I'm not hopeful.

1:29:29I mean, I think it'll be very interesting to see how there obviously is a huge trend in the US of state legislation trying to kind of move the needle on hot button topics like privacy or currently something I'm seeing a lot in food safety regulations, a lot of states moving the need needle on like grass regulation or general like food chemical safety stuff. But in all of these cases the kind of constant is there are larger powers at the federal level that are hoping to pass preemption legislation that would kind of nullify all of these state attacks so it'll be interesting to see how any of this uh continues this has become the bad news show and i apologize maybe i gotta find some good news when we come back you're watching this week in tech berber jinn visiting us it's great to have you from the wall street journal ian thompson i love your new uh letter the view from the valley yes i i did get a wee bit wild on the ai stakes but yes that's great where can we find that uh techfinitiv.com yeah all right and it's a free subscription to the newsletter oh no it's totally free i i'm not a big fan of paywalls good good for you and paris martineau who uh writes for consumer reports and is working on a massive expose you just won't believe it's true but i can't say anything about it you can't you've been sworn to secrecy i have been i'm looking forward to it yeah i could all i can say is there's certain foods i will stop eating after after hearing what she's reporting on that's all i'm gonna say you're gonna want to read it i'm a proud subscriber to consumer reports your stuff though and i myself's all in front of the paywall i praise consumer reports for doing this because it is so important.

1:31:19Basically, our whole investigative team, our stuff is in front of the paywall. Good for you. It's public interest. Yeah, that's really great. We'll have more right after this. This episode of This Week in Tech is brought to you by Meter, the company building better networks. If you're a network engineer, oh man, you know the headaches. You have my deepest sympathy. Legacy providers with inflexible pricing, IT resource constraints stretching you thin, complex deployments across fragmented tools. Look, you're mission critical to the business, but you're working with infrastructure that wasn't built for today's demands.

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1:33:26Meter's integrated networking stack is designed to take the burden off your IT team and gives you deep control and visibility, reimagining what it means for businesses to get and stay online. meter built for the bandwidth demands of today and tomorrow thanks so much to meter for sponsoring twit and we invite you to help us out by going to meter.com slash twit help yourself out book a demo right now that's m-e-t-e-r.com slash twit to book a demo thank you meter now back to the show well i apologize i promised some happy-go-lucky stories and there aren't absolutely none they exist there aren't well there's one i mean paris you've just had your little furry companion jumping all over you and stuff has been doing the same for me as well very anti-positive news if anything she's an overlord of uh you know chaos and destruction well here's a good here's a good story if you have stock in pinterest because you know all of us share none of us have stock in pinterest i guarantee you pinterest just crossed a billion dollars in quarterly revenue It's an interesting story from the next web.

1:34:40The bet that made it work was not social media. It was search. I think when Pinterest was started, people thought of it as a social media network, right, where you shared pictures of things you were interested in. But it turns out all of that data people have been pouring into Pinterest is great for image search. And that's where all of the new user hits are coming from. 80 billion searches a month. It's going through Pinterest. Is that from users or AI? Well, that's the question. I would imagine some of that is not users, but AI. Yeah. Which is rather interesting because a lot of the images on Pinterest now is just AI.

1:35:23So it would in that case be AI searching for AI. Well, that's the future of AI, isn't it? It's all AI all the way down. I mean, I think AI has already ingested all the human content. And we like that? No. We've got no choice. We've got no choice. The arrival of advertising inside AI platforms like ChatGPT, says TNW, has reframed a conversation about where ad dollars flow. The most valuable advertising real estate is not inside a chatbot or alongside a social feed. It's at the moment someone is actively searching for something they want to buy. That makes sense, right? i'm looking for uh a cooler sized replica of the new york city dumpsters and you search for it you find it on pinterest there's a link to where you can buy that that's money in the bank i really am a lot of this international and i can't find it look on pinterest you'll find it it's all there it won't be real though it'll be a interest was being written off a couple of years ago you know it's still being written off it's the most blocked website on whatever that browser was we covered on intelligence what it's blocked no do you remember i would say who uses pinterest i think is a great question leo do you remember there was a time in the last year we had someone on intelligent machines who was showing us maybe it was coggy uh oh maybe the browser and you could also then see of coggy browser users what were the most commonly blocked websites and overwhelmingly it was pinterest pinterest pinterest pinterest pinterest but with different uh tlds that's hysterical a lot of people hate pinterest because it is and this was even before a lot of the results were just ai slop so i'm kind of surprised by this what do you use it for are you planning a wedding oh i don't use it i just like it you don't then how do you like it um because yeah if I were planning a wedding or making a mood board, I know where I would go first would be Pinterest.

1:37:31I actually have a Pinterest account and I did put, I used to put stuff there. It's like a little scrapbook. But like five years ago or 10 years ago. When's the last time you looked at Pinterest? I haven't been years. Berber, do you use Pinterest? When's the last time do you think, what's the last calendar year that you looked at Pinterest? like 10 years ago. I totally forgot that this stock is still like a publicly traded company. It's hot, man. It's hot. I'm shocked that people, I'm shocked that it's making this money. Like who's paying for this? Well, you know who lost a lot of money in the stock market?

1:38:11Cloudflare lost a quarter of its value 24 of its value in his stock because even though it beat earnings predictions they cut 1100 jobs because ai agents do the work now and the market which used to love that apparently doesn't well i thought they were also hiring like a heck of a lot of interns as a response to this oh yeah that's right we're gonna have interns do the job that always works well yeah yeah Yeah. Matthew Prince, the CEO and co-founder, Michelle Zatlin, announced that Cloudflare is transitioning to what they call a, quote, agentic AI-first operating model. Their use of AI has increased more than 600 % in three months.

1:39:01Staff across engineering, human resources, finance, and marketing are running thousands of AI agent sessions a day.

1:39:10and this is not to assist employees they say to replace employees basically well it's kind of like did you see the current ceo service now talking about you know how ai's he's had the worst possible plastic surgery i'll stick it on the discord channel but it just looks like that's just mean no i would not call somebody out based on their personal appearance but when you've mutilated yourself to quite that level who are we talking about uh service now uh let me just put a link to his instagram in the uh i don't want i don't dare show it because i'm afraid it's on discount i mean oh there's the 3d printable dumpsters by the way uh i picked it's never a great idea it's never a great sign when the vast majority of photos that come up when you search someone's name is them wearing sunglasses yes uh okay post-op probably right yeah it's not become mean just because we're miserable i'm not gonna say anything i'm just noting that there's lots of sunglasses photos that's kind of fun they're very cool they wears his shades at night that's okay he's got a robust hairline happening i'm sorry unless you're in hawaii or in a bright sunshine environment wearing sunglasses by day is this is also how i feel about when anna wintour does it to equalize it i gotta point out please i'm just like please don't wear sunglasses indoors you're not there was a marvelous quote from the b from bbc news quiz where they were talking about the at the uh new york fashion gala and it's like this is the winter of a discontent but um you know the the p protest against jeff bezos was really quite fascinating.

1:40:58Oh, with the bottles? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was quite interesting. Oh, that's an interesting look. You know, he looks like I got to show this now. He looks like a guy who'd be going, yeah. It looks like, I think it's what you would think somebody from the future might look like. But I mean, scroll down and look at his before images when he was at SAP, and my goodness, he looks a lot more reliable then. So what did he say that was such a big... Oh, it was just total AI gobbledygook. You know, I mean, it was almost embarrassing. Well, actually, it was actually embarrassing. I feel like he could actually be an alien, and maybe that's why he's so into...

1:41:38It did look brilliant. I can't look at it because I'm not signed in. The author has chosen to make their post visible only to people who are signed in. I hate when people do that on Blue Sky. Oh. Free the posts. I was going to say, I thought it was open, but yeah. I mean, you can turn it off. I can sign in. A lot of people, a fair amount of people do this in Blue Sky. I wouldn't say a lot, but a fair amount. Are you on Blue Sky, Berber? Are you even on Twitter anymore? I am on Twitter. I've never used Blue Sky, so. Have you ever used any of the other alt platforms? No, I'm old-fashioned, and. You just like to go to X the Everything app, where we all do all of our finance and banking.

1:42:23Right, exactly. Yes. And consume a bunch of AI-generated, AI slop all the time. I'm ashamed to admit it. I abandoned X when Elon bought it, but I have to spend a lot of time there these days, because especially in AI, there's a lot of information there. I'm sure for you doing your coverage for the journal, this is a good source. yeah i feel like it's i feel like and in particular i feel like the employees of all the tech companies particularly open ai are just on twitter exactly yeah they be exactly which is really bad because i think elon controls obviously that i think he probably surfaces a lot of anti-open ai content and they're totally totally is doing that yeah Yeah, it counts.

1:43:13That's the thing to always keep in mind is that the algorithm is highly tuned on X and probably somewhat by Elon's own personal and financial interests. I mean, there are certain aspects of it that we can say are definitely tuned. There was that whole period where he actively made the engineers of Twitter rank his posts higher in the average algorithm. And he ranks down. Companies like NPR, he ranks down. They don't get nearly the engagement. I mean, same with basically any news company that posts links. We've all talked about supply chain issues, the shortages of RAM, you know, RAM prices through the roof, hard drives through the roof.

1:43:53There's another victim of this I hadn't really thought about. Motherboard sales have collapsed by more than 20. Not on Mother's Day. No, it's a Mother's Day story. It is, it is. Mother's Board Day. Because people aren't building PCs anymore because they can't get the CPUs. they can't get the RAM, they can't get the drive, so they don't need the motherboards. Asus projected to sell 5 million fewer boards. Actually, they said last year, so I'm not sure. Maybe they're just getting the numbers now. Gigabyte, MSI, ASRock also saying big drop in component sales of motherboards. Is it that the people aren't building the PCs anymore or because our PCs have got fast enough to handle pretty much anything that's coming down the line i bet it's that all the components of PCs are so expensive that people who build it for hobbies can't afford to do it anymore it's both right we don't need them as much although if you look at apple apple says we cannot keep our mac mini or mac studio in stock well yeah it's because all people are open claw max yeah everybody's buying for ai right um this is a very upsetting story uh i think i don't know you could interpret this both ways this uh comes from a site called reclaim the net which i'm seeing a lot of all of a sudden reclaim the net.org the fcc has just proposed due to robocalls fixing the problem by requiring an id before you get a phone number so you have to be a real person to get a phone number on april 30th the fcc approved unanimously a proposal requiring telecom providers to verify customer identity identities before activating service you'd have to show them driver's license so this is a set amount of phone numbers per person i don't know about that but it means there'd be no more burner phones right i would say that would mean then every phone number is automatically linked to it's associated to an identity so you can't have burner phones to contact somebody anonymously it's it seems like a privacy nightmare and yet at the same time it makes sense is if you want to kill robocalls because all of you know those robocalls all come from bogus numbers often with your own area code, sometimes even with your own area code in exchange, right?

1:46:19Thinking, making you think, oh my God, that must be my, my kid's school or something. And instead it's some guy from Indonesia who's trying to sell you something you don't want. Doing this in the U.S. stop those guys from Indonesia from being. That's interesting. It's only the U.S. so it would apply to every voice provider in the country including voip services and mobile operators now it's not a rule yet they're seeking public comments but a number of privacy advocates have pointed out that this does eliminate the idea of having a private phone number your number will be attached to your name hi this is benito again so from the philippines i you know a lot of listeners know i live part of the time in the philippines they already do this there uh so i had to give my ID.

1:47:07Yeah. So when I got my phone number, I had to show ID and all this stuff. So this is already happening in other places. There are no robocalls in the Philippines, right? Actually, I haven't gotten any, actually. I have never gotten any. It works. But I have gotten marketing texts and all that stuff still happens. All that stuff still happens. So I have mixed feelings. I mean, I guess eliminating robocalls are completely at it. Not merely robocalls, but - Which is not to say I agree with the practice. Spam calls. Okay. First of all, I don't like that I had to give up my identity to get a phone number.

1:47:41Yeah. It feels, I don't know, it feels like what Paris was saying, like from a privacy perspective, it's not great if you, there's like a register of every phone call being attached to an ID. Yeah. You can't suddenly buy a burner phone if you're having some sort of privacy issue and want to contact someone anonymously. Yeah, there's a lot of cases if you're suffering from domestic violence. There are a lot of cases where you might not want your name associated with your phone number. You might want to preserve. Because presumably if your number is associated with a name, you could search number to name, but you might also be able to search name to number, right?

1:48:26that's not good 46 of kids in the uk who are prevented from going on uh social sites by the online safety act 46 of them say just put on a fake mustache i love this story where are the children getting fake mustaches um this is from the reg uh this is hysterical nearly a third of kids in the uk say they admit to getting around them almost half say it's easy to do so this is a survey from the uk online safety group internet matters of 1000 uk kids their parents it did show some positive effects from changes made under the Online Safety Act. But many kids saw age verification as an easy to bypass hurdle rather than something that kept them safe.

1:49:26I mean, I think it's great that we're teaching kids how to do kind of fun disguise-based hygiene. Disguises! I do think that every child should have one reason to get in a large trench coat with two of your friends. My name is Hercule Poirot. I am very much an adult, and I should be able to see all the pornography right now. Because I am 48 years old, and I am tall for my age. The doctors say I will continue to grow. It's stories like this that give me hope, because the kids are all right. You know, they know what they're doing. They know how to get around it. You know, it's kind of like my parents' generation would just roll over and okay, I'll give hand over all my personal identity to somebody, you know, some unknown company.

1:50:21The kids are hacking this and good on them. Good on them. The kids are all right. That should be the motto for this show. We're going to take a break. Final break. Final words coming up. You're watching Twit. It's great to have Berber Jen here. We appreciate you spending some time with us. I'm making this show shorter just for you berber and your mother and your mom happy mom's day to all the mothers out there including my own mother uh she's in a nursing home in rhode island but she's going to get a very big bouquet of flowers any day now exciting turned out i couldn't get it delivered on mother's days but i think she really tuesday will be fine i'm thinking i mean i do think that's one of the benefits of having a mother on a memory care facility is it's all kind of the same oh look at this flowers have arrived who's this leo leo why does that name sound familiar so familiar that's a great name happy mother's day everybody we'll be back with more right after this this episode of this week in tech is brought this episode of this week in tech is brought to you by zscaler the world's largest cloud security platform you know we talk about it all the time the potential rewards of ai are obviously too great for any company to ignore but so are the risks loss of sensitive data attacks against enterprise managed ai and then there's always the issue of generative ai increasing opportunities for the bad guys helping them to rapidly create phishing lures write malicious code automate data extraction there were 1.3 million instances of social security numbers leaked to ai applications this is not by accident i mean it is by accident it's not by intent it's not like some somebody broke in even it's it's people you're innocent users at your company using ai maybe i don't know they're looking at your uh your 10ks or your social security uh you know your tax return with your socials on it they are submitting proprietary company information to ai zscaler i'll stop that cold it's the most trusted AI security platform.

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1:53:58That's zscaler.com slash security. Thank you so much for supporting This Week in Tech. You also support This Week in Tech when you go to that address, zscaler.com slash security. Thank you, Zscaler. And now back to Twit. Thank you, Leo. You know what? Thanks also to our Club Twit members, Scooter X especially, who is always coming up with stories. He has looked. He went out. He has looked. He has found some happy stories. Are you ready for some happy stories? Happy stories on iTech Podcast? I don't know how happy. Let's see. PC Magazine says Amazon's Eero is now exempted from the FCC's foreign-made Wi-Fi router ban.

1:54:44I would describe that as a definitively neutral story. It's neither good nor bad. We don't like the Wi-Fi router ban. I guess I understand the reason. It said that any router not made in the U.S. would be banned. And at the time, the only router made in the U.S. was the Starlink router made by SpaceX. Netgear has since gotten approval from the FCC. You have to answer some questions like, do you ever plan to build these in the U.S.? And if you say yes, apparently that's sufficient because they're not currently Amazon Zero. If you're ever thinking about contemplating. Are you thinking about a factory?

1:55:20Yeah, here in the US. So that's good news. Amazon's Eero now, along with Netgear, you can buy these in the US. And the FCC, which similarly banned foreign-made drones in the United States, because of security, right, has realized that by doing so, maybe they're causing some insecurity. They have decided to allow those banned drones and banned routers to receive updates for at least two more years. Yeah. How generous. Well, they have no other choice. I mean, seriously, they're not saying you have to throw it out. So people should be able to update these. That's absolutely critical if security is your concern.

1:56:06Actually, through 2029. But they also say don't expect to go beyond 2029. yeah yeah we'll see that's two years longer than the original 2027 company i mean given the low the low prices for routers i can't honestly see that many router manufacturers shifting back to the u.s unless they have to and if they're going to get these kind of get outs then why bother right it's a it's a very weird ban it's very got lots of holes if your router is currently in the US for sale, you can still sell it. It really applies to newly made routers, as you say. Okay, criticize my accent. No, that's not an accent thing.

1:56:56That's just a different... It's like schedule, right? It's just a different... Yes, or privacy, yeah. Or privacy, yeah. Aluminium. Don't get me started on that, okay. Bruder's always confused me a little bit Honestly, I'll give you aluminium I'd argue that it is Aluminium actually makes more sense Aluminium adds a level of whimsy to the world that aluminium never will We say sodium, we say calcium Aluminium actually makes more sense but at the same time the Germans invented the stuff Let's let them choose their name What do they call it? I don't even know what the Germans call it in terms of their own language I think you'd need half a pound of phlegm to actually get it out.

1:57:42I was going to ask Berber actually about if he has any insight into why in the world OpenAI spent more than$100 million to buy the Tech Bro podcast network. it must be something because then i see andreessen horowitz has started their own daily news show called monitoring the situation which almost sounds like uh a joke but it's not they mean it um mts baby yeah mts and then uh there's of course let's not forget i'm going to pronounce it properly t-i-t-v oh yeah that's the only way to pronounce it of course i would be less subtle but do you have any insight i mean first of all do you know how much they paid because all it was said was in the hundreds of millions low hundreds of millions yeah i don't think they paid that much i mean they paid a lot for it but it's a podcast right let's get this straight they paid a lot of money considering it was a podcast but right considering the thing other things they spend money on it wasn't terrible but well and also it was fiji simo's deal yeah And then she immediately disappears for health reasons.

1:58:55It was very perplexing because I think it's interesting. I feel like the engagement has really dropped off since they bought it because people obviously don't want to go on the show now because it's owned by OpenAI. And then a lot of people don't want to watch it because it's like corporate TV now. Yeah. I could have predicted this. In fact, I think I did predict this. it seems like this is an example if you're going to do an IPO of fiscal irresponsibility this is not i mean what i don't think there are many things that opening eye has done that would be considered fiscally responsible okay good point but i mean no burba is an interesting point here in terms of you buy it no one takes it seriously anymore so you've shut it down well i mean is that the goal get my i mean correct me if i'm wrong but my understanding is the reason they bought it was entirely to keep tbpn running it's to have the tbpn boys be an integral part of comms and kind of the lobbying work at yeah i i think at oak they are definitely very frustrated about the negative perception like they have they have a comms problem clearly and so So, And I think internally they're like trying to spit out like different ideas to try and fix it.

2:00:19And so this was, I guess, like a very impulsive decision they made to just buy, you know, like they were kind of pitching it to me as like, you know, we're going to help shape public opinion with TV PM and reach audiences first and bypass traditional media. but i don't think they really had an idea of what they wanted to do with it um it was one of those things where like everyone like like there are these weird disconnects for people just like to the rest of the world it's just like a completely silly thing to do but i guess people get hive mind and decide they want to do it i should be honest i'm just jealous they have 59 000 youtube subscribers this show alone has 63 000 our network has more than a quarter of a million we're not getting hundreds of millions of dollars uh but but on the other hand you could buy us and you wouldn't guarantee positive coverage of open ai yeah so maybe that's what's going on i mean you could joe rogan's got 20 million subscribers lex friedman is 5 million subscribers i mean there it just seems like you bought i don't i just don't get it i don't how how is monitoring the situation going is that a good thing for andreason horowitz seems like the same idea i don't even know that they launched there's and therein lies the problem right therein lies the problem nobody knows it exists uh all right yes and the pointy-headed one doesn't seem to care that much either so yeah well a little introspection goes a long way let me just say all right i just that's kind of a personal extra grind i shouldn't i shouldn't belabor that point let me see if there's any happy news any happy news at all god his head is so panty i know i know it just i interviewed him in 97 and he gave a great interview i've got to say but you couldn't get over the fact it's yeah his head is really really pointing it's kind of an internet meme sort of situation where people are editing the photos but then you're confronted with the reality no no when you see it moment this may be a handicap um because you know sometimes when a baby is born the head gets squeezed quite a bit and it is not unusual for it to be pointy i'm not saying there's anything wrong with it i'm just saying it's notable just obviously notable and it's not something you can fix i mean you wouldn't want to put a board on the baby's head as they're growing to kind of fix that you know i mean i i have i have ridges on the side of my skull for just that reason approach you know i think that every baby should be stomped on by an italian plumber um and i would fix it all i i confess i i'm i'm sympathetic because i once shaved my head as you well know for charity and i learned that i have a really horrific shaped noggin and i don't i don't want to make fun of anybody well you're gonna have to shave your head again when we do our second when we do our next 24 hour she really wants us to do it both of you guys are welcome to take a 30 minute slot because we're gonna have to film fill 24 hours that's only 48 people we need to fill half an hour each that many we can find 48 people we can do it we can do it we could have one hour just wandering out in the street trying to get people to talk you know when we say i went to hospital a couple of years ago and i got number one and number two and my goodness my skull is ugly so yeah yeah i shaved my head once in college and i did you in school yeah did you really and what prompted that was did you that was i had a blonde mohawk for a while throughout high school and college and then at one point i was like what if i grew my hair out all the way because i wanted to so you thought you'd start over and so i figured yeah why not but i wouldn't so you look like Sinead O 'Connor yeah on retrospect I mean it looks great but I would not recommend doing it in January in New York because it's quite cold it's chilly I don't really think about the fact that having any amount because I even still had kind of short hair at the time but that still adds a level of warmth to your head that a shaved head it's amazing isn't it yeah look how short my hair is and yet when I didn't have any I had to wear a had it was so cold a lot of heat radiates i'm sorry berber you didn't know what you were getting into and i really apologize we've been incredibly on topic for what the show normally is we're actually on our best behavior is a great hat you know that's looking good he does he does it's all over the place and i'm sure an excellent shaped dome underneath it i have no idea what my i've I never thought about what my head would look like if I shaved it all off.

2:05:08What's the shortest your hair's ever been? It's always been long, I feel like, because I have a huge head. I also have a huge head. We all have huge heads. Every one of us on this show has a huge head. Hard to find hats. There is a demand now in the Discord chat where our club members hang out. As you know, we treat our club members as family, and they are saying they need pictures of you, Paris, with a mohawk and with a shaved head. So are there any? I mean, I can try and find some. Here are pictures of us with shaved heads. With cone heads? Yes. I mean, cone heads, what a great show. Well, they've been posting pictures of us with mustaches as well.

2:05:52The mustache ones were quite good. Yeah. Well, could you tell how old we were from those? I'm going to look back. Not looking good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, we thank you so much for being here, Berber. Read Berber's work. Really great stuff in the Wall Street Journal. A lot of exclusives. Oh, yeah. We look good with mustaches. Berber, you have a nice that would fool anybody. That would make you. I should try. I like that one a lot, actually. Yeah. Can you grow facial hair? It doesn't go well. That's kind of a personal question. I'm so sorry to put you on blast. She asked me that on Wednesday, too.

2:06:27You said you can, but you just choose not to because your wives hate it. She has a real knack for the personal question, I guess. I like my... What else we got to do? I grew one during lockdown and it was so annoying. We liked that. I'm so happy to shave it off. You looked like Terry Thomas. You looked fantastic. Yes, exactly. I looked like a depraved Terry Thomas. But also, you take a swig of tea and it stayed in there all day. I'll put a photo of that and the mohawk on Discord. You had a mohawk too? Everybody post your mohawks in the chat. Half of this panel has had a mohawk. Unless, Berber, you've also had one.

2:07:17In this case, it's 75%. Oh, that wasn't a mohawk, Paris. i'm gonna show you the back that has a mohawk well that's not a mohawk i guess it's a faux hawk it's a it's a it's a good look that's a good look let's see and this isn't quite bald either this is just okay that's a shaved head it's extremely short that's it let me show you the back of oh look at that paris you have i love this paris has readily to hand pictures of the back of her head i've just gone on on instagram and scrolled back oh okay there we go oh that is not a good look terry thomas no it really wasn't a good look but it was a you look in pain i apologize for those of you only listening actually no you're lucky you're the lucky ones uh thank you berber for being here we appreciate it read berber's work in the wall street journal you'll find Paris Martineau at Consumer Reports where she's doing food safety yes it was she who exposed the radioactive shrimp scandal the lead in your protein powder shocker and there is soon to be more food safety is her passion thank you Paris we'll see you on Wednesday on Intelligent Machines and thank you Ian Thomas I called you Thompson didn't I yes I was going to say in a thing, but my father would hunt you down.

2:08:46I apologize. Thank you, Ian. Of course, read Ian's View from the Valley. Subscribe and that way you'll get it automatically. So it's not just intended for Brits. Anybody would want to read this. No, it's a view from a Brit in America and this is a strange or silly place at times. It is indeed. Ian Thompson, thank you so much. Thanks to all of you for joining us. A special thanks to our club members who make this show possible if you believe as i do in the importance of independent journalism covering technology especially podcasting your support makes all the difference to us it covers a great portion as much as 30 of our overall operating expenses it allows us to do this show and all the other shows we do plus special programming for our club members we give you access to a special discord only for club members, which makes it a great place to hang out.

2:09:40You also get ad-free versions of all the shows for just$10 a month. If you're not a member yet, twit.tv slash club twit. We do this every Sunday afternoon, 11 a.m. Hawaii time, 2 p.m. Pacific time, 5 p.m. East Coast time, 2100 UTC. You can watch it live. If you're there at that time in the Club Twit Discord or YouTube, twitch x.com facebook linkedin and kick we stream on all those platforms after the fact on demand versions of the show available at the website twitch.tv you can also subscribe in your favorite podcast client you'll get it that way automatically the minute it's available there's a youtube channel too with as you can see 63 000 subscribers i think that's worth at least 100 million dollars don't you i i feel like that's not too much to ask sam um let's see i guess that's all i have to say except that as i have said for 21 years now at the end of every show thanks for joining us we'll see you next week another twit is in the can this is amazing

2:10:47doing the twit all right doing the twit baby doing the twit all right