TWiT 1101: Adversarial Clothing - The Dramatic Calls to Regulate Artificial Intelligence

36:45Cory Doctorow:good that's exactly right we should but who and what so we don't do we trust government to nationalize it is that what we should do like nuclear weapons even if you did government would could just put it underground government's made up of people i don't want government to have this power and more than i want private industry to have no one trusts the government with this stuff We need the federation, don't we? The Star Trek federation. And then there are some crazy people, and I am not one of them, who say, well, that's why AI is so great, because you can trust it. We should just put it all in the hands of AI, have an AI world government.

37:20Cory Doctorow:Oh, no, no, no. that is like unfortunately i think where things eventually go unless the only way i really see out of this is if consumers push so back on products that either use ai or exploit it right there is a sort of generational uh thing now younger generations pushing back on technology right they're rediscovering old and it's hard to to know if this is a fad or just like well they never experienced having a walkman so now they're into it right it's cool man yeah they think it's It's kind of cool. Like how we like bell bottoms. Yeah. But if that turned into like a real, like an analog movement, right, that would really affect the bottom line here.

38:02But I'm not confident that people are necessarily going to do that either because this stuff is so bundled. Like, you know, we'll talk about the new iPhones, but the new iPhones are fully capable of running this AI stuff and it's being pushed on there as well too. So it's like if you want the latest technology, it comes with this stuff, right? So it's kind of hard to ignore.

38:21Cory Doctorow:I also think that there is, it's really hard to know what people really think, right? I agree. Because people are using it and not talking about it. That's what I think. I think people who don't like it are using it to do little things. Yeah, I agree. Sorry to interrupt. I think it's, no, that's exactly right. I think it's, it's cool to say I hate AI at the same time as everybody kind of is using it and digging it. And as Daniel pointed out, people are using it without realizing it also because it's so bundled. you go to the doctor, they're using it for transcription. I was just at the dentist the other day and the gal was like, the AI is going to look at your teeth real quick.

38:58Well, we're going to talk about, Jennifer is going to talk about AI toothbrushes in a bit.

39:02Cory Doctorow:I ordered one, so I want to know. Oh, you did? Of course I did. What do you think? I love that. I want to know how it works. Well, we're going to talk about it. We're going to save that. Yeah. I mean, it's so hard to it's so i think your question was perfect which is yeah we should control it but how and what and who i don't we just don't have a good plan for this no which means we're going to do the default we're going to do the president trump move which he said on friday which is no we're not i don't see a threat he said if you don't want data centers in your backyard you're a socialist and if you go on if you go on twitter and everything just you did discussions it always falls back to this well if we don't do it china's going to do it and that seems to be the default like argument and that's that's it people just shrug their shoulders and and that's fam on green as well isn't it it is except that here i am sitting in front of a bunch of uh compute running chinese models exclusively i'm not there are some decent open weight models and nvidia god bless them is investing 10 billion dollars with a company called poolside to make strong open weight local models that you can run yourself and nvidia is smart because they sell the hardware right so they don't care if you're if you're buying the software from them they they they just like apple they want to sell you the hardware um instead of instead of people carrying around uh weapons to protect themselves or whatever reason they say that they carry around weapons everyone's going to have their little ai agents going out and like i'm going to send one to you leo to shut down your computer last week i told quicksilver my ai agent which runs the whole house i said here is the prime directive your number one job is to protect leo and everything you do everything you're asked to do you should it's like asimov's number one right exactly the rules but it's very personal it's not not humanity just me just protect me uh and then you know about that yeah no well it looks like Lisa has your blood pressure to raise and therefore we should kill Lisa well Lisa's a really good example um she my wife who is also the CEO of Twit and is very comfortable with AI and has used a variety you know she uses grant she's this is the wedge you know you people start with Grammarly and then they kind of work their way up and they use Copilot and they work with Chad GPT and she so she saw what I was doing uh with uh Hermes and she said well can I have that.

41:35Cory Doctorow:So she has her little agent based on the same hardware and all of that stuff with its own context and memory so it's unique to her work. And then I told her the other day about what Meta's up to. Actually we're going to pause and we can talk about this. Have you guys tried Muse yet? The little app? Meta Muse? I've started playing with it today but I haven't got very far. I'm excited. I'm kind of like it. I generally steer clear of Meta. just well like i i completely know but you you we the people watching this show probably all say we don't want to touch meta we don't want to but the real world is still using instagram facebook and whatsapp like there's no tomorrow right yep 100 there isn't that i mean maybe they even think i don't like meta but i'm going to still use it uh because it's absolutely dominant and instagram and it's right there it's right there it's right there i mean it was it took me three minutes to connect like my entire life which was quite scary and you didn't it barely had to like log into anything it was really straightforward it's open claw my home and yeah it's the same thing as open claw was which came out earlier this year except it's meta the computer it's running on is not your computer it's running on their computers they're giving you and you gotta wonder why they're doing it a cpu some decent amount of ram and and horsepower and storage they're just giving it And what is it, a thousand tokens a day?

43:00Cory Doctorow:They're giving you free a lot of compute. To start with, and then they're going to hook you. And then they're going to share. There is a$30 and$100 step up subscription. But what they give you is enough. I haven't paid for it yet. And I've been using it since it came out. And Micah, you started using something similar called Instinct. And I've been, you know, it texted me earlier today and it said, Hey, I looked at the rundown for today's episode of Twit and noticed that there's a part where the co-hosts are supposed to put in stories. Here are five stories for you that you might want to put in your section.

43:34And then it even went as far as to know who JPT was because it said this story might be particularly of interest to Jennifer because she's into smart homes technology. I don't know how it knew all of that because all I have connected is access to that Google Drive. Well, my name would have been in it, I guess. I probably just did a search, like just a simple search. but i thought that's impressive and i also sent it out to i needed a uh there was a movie that we wanted to see we didn't get to see it on the day and so then i said could you just keep an eye out if this comes back and this is what people want that's the kind of stuff that people it's very

44:08Cory Doctorow:now jennifer said but do trust meta who the hell is instinct we don't even know who's behind and what's going on i don't even know who these guys are they're in san francisco is there any information about them it's just a thing you get an invite yeah and if you guys want to send you plain text website yeah we will exactly their their website is wild because there's nothing on it oh plain text i did send um i sent both claude and i think it was opus uh and uh soul after it to say could you just do some research on this company and let me know who are they this is not it sorry benito i'm i'm uh instinct.com.com looking for so they even own a pretty prestigious domain but look at the site spear street technology inc is the name of the company behind but you just gave it a vast amount of information by the way i did too yeah and i gave meta oh man i gave it my obsidian my gmail my google drive it started doing things like you know your tinnitus you should try this thing and this is what i figure in the long run for meta anyway they're an advertising company well i'm going to start getting subtle you know you could try this this might be very subtle this drug would be great for you ask you ask your physician wait till it starts blackmailing you which it totally it has the knowledge to do that yeah this is why i'm such a fan of local people want this capability nobody in their right mind is going to spend the amount of money I've spent and you've spent now, Micah, and time and energy to create a local assistant, yet that's the only safe way to do it because it keeps all that data internal.

45:57Yeah, well, I mean, I did drop this in the chat in the doc later, but I was just at IFA and they had two companies came out with local AI smart home hubs. So it was Ugreen, which is the NAS company and then um yuffie uh anchors smart home a chinese company yeah company and they have these new so it's a smart home hub so it has you know zigbee wi-fi matter support so you can connect all your smart home devices and then it's also a local nas so you can um store your videos and your music and your files and everything and then there's an ai local lm ai chip one of there's one you can buy with like the super nvidia computer in it for like twenty thousand dollars but you the cheap the cheap version is about nine nine hundred dollars and it runs all the it runs everything locally it's an nvr so you connect your security cameras to it and instead of using say ring or nest and their ai processing in the cloud where you get the text descriptions that tell you what your camera has seen so i don't know if you've started to get this on any of your cameras Leo, but like, it'll say, you know, there's a UPS driver that dropped off a package at the front door as opposed to just package at door.

47:12Or it'll say like Apple Home has started to do this with HomeKit. It'll say Jennifer was in the backyard feeding the chickens. And, you know, it'll give you a description. And so it feeds all of those, it does all of that locally on your smart home hub, and then can use that context to drive other agents in your home. So basically what you've set up, it sounds like in your home, Leo, you can now kind of buy a prepackaged box from, well, can buy. Right now you can't, but they've just announced them. So Yuffie hasn't said how much it is.

47:46Cory Doctorow:This is going to be huge, although it will be very expensive. But I've thought for a long time, that's really what people are going to end up spending. I think people reasonably will spend a few thousand dollars for something like that. And yes, you're right. I, with great effort over eight months have set all of that up and it's all running locally i'm running a chinese model quinn on a my old gaming machine and it looks at i have eight cameras around the outside of the house and you can see here this is every time something happens outside it sends me a text uh of of what's going on it will recognize people and put our names if it recognizes me or lisa you know there's a handful of people it recognizes none of these people were recognized it does then it does in my obsidian a list of recognized people who showed up around the house uh each day there's all sorts of stuff you can do and i trust it because it's none of this is leaving the house not going in the cloud right and that's what that's the selling point of these devices is that all the footage is processed locally um it's all stored locally you can connect to the cloud if you want remote access but nothing's happening in the cloud it's all happening locally on That's always been Eufy's thing, too.

48:56I mean, I use Eufy, and it's one of the reasons that I chose them, because you can download everything that's local. The whole system is meant to be local. It does have, as you mentioned, a cloud option. But you don't need to use that. And that was always a selling point versus Ring, especially because Ring went through not only does it all go to the cloud, but then there was the whole law enforcement thing, and they're teaming up with cops to use your cameras. And it's funny because these are the Chinese systems. But here in America, we're trained to think everything that China does, you can't trust those guys.

49:31But it's kind of weird with China's foreign policy. They're one of the few countries that have not been expansionist, at least for the last 80 years. It's soft power.

49:41Cory Doctorow:It's economic power. Exactly. They're the belt that they want to run. But they're not interested in conquering lands. They haven't invaded other countries. But you look at the United States' history. Not since the war. And all we do is invade other countries. And we're like, and that's why we feel secure. It's like, no, we should have the AI and all the power, but it's just like. And Greenland and Canada. Yeah, right. You know, yeah, we're going to take Canada, we'll take Greenland, you know, and it's so, it's very strange that we're taught to not trust China. And I'm not trying to put China on a pedestal.

50:12There are obviously issues internally with that country, but at the same time, they do view AI differently than we do, right? A lot of it is sort of under national control, and it's a lot more open with these models, right? And the way that they even view technology, like we always accuse correctly that China copies everything. But that's not like some nefarious thing that they're doing. That's just the way they culturally see stuff. It's like, hey, that's a good idea. We're going to do that idea, and then we're going to improve it and make it cheaper and more affordable, right? But in the United States, we consider ideas to be property.

50:47It's like, no, I came up with the idea. I own that idea and you can't do that idea unless you pay me for it. And in China, that's not how things operate. So we see it. Yeah. Yeah. And so they, they view things very differently. And we look at that as nefarious as, you know, uh, oh, they're just cheating, but that's just the entire way that they operate and see the world. And I don't think Americans quite understand that. And that's really causing a lot of conflict here because we see this technology and we're like, well, you can't trust China. You know, it's like, but do we stop and think the rest of the world just looks at the United States and go, those guys, though, they're they're a OK.

51:24We should trust everything.

51:25Cory Doctorow:No, in fact, we know the EU is really desperate to create sovereign. Could you imagine? And sovereign storage because they don't trust models that are coming out of the United States and they probably shouldn't. I mean, it's the way like France has moved away from Microsoft, right, because of these reasons. They're they're getting tired of all the dominance, even though we put that as like our big selling point. united states it's like well we got you know the valley we have all these companies that dominate the world here and that's what it's about right it's about domination and it's fine if that's where you want to be just be honest about it you know i studied chinese in college i'm a big fan of chinese culture and the chinese people and i've been to china i love it not a huge fan of the chinese communist party they've done some horrific things and perhaps i'm not sure they're not imperialistic in their goals towards taiwan and other uh border countries but uh right now they they're mostly interested in economic power and soft power with their belt and roads initiative and i think that's what's going on with these open weight models and it's driving the united states crazy uh the government this week accused six chinese firms of copying frontier models and even in some cases channeling requests to like let's say deep seek to clod surreptitiously now there there may be a bigger story behind that it's kind of technical i don't want to go into it you can't if you're in china use anthropic or open ai you're not allowed to so there are companies that specialize in selling you access to chinese ai but routing it through to deep seek and there's Some thought that maybe that's what we're seeing.

53:05Cory Doctorow:It's not a concerted effort on the part of these Chinese companies. It's really kind of just a routing thing that's going on. Nevertheless, the U.S. government has named six AI firms in China of waging industrial scale attacks, distilling frontier AI. This came from the NSA on Tuesday, from CISA and the FBI. DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, Minimax, Stepfund, and ZAI. I use all of their models. They're all fantastic. Maybe they're fantastic because they're distilled Claude. Maybe they are. But, you know, it's kind of a double standard to say, you can't steal from these companies that stole everything else from the Internet.

53:47Cory Doctorow:You can't. That would be wrong. I mean, where did they get their stuff? I suspect Anthropic ingested quite a bit of Chinese content in its training. i know they ingested all hundreds of thousands of hours of twit content and i'm okay with that but that's just that is the irony right that they're they're worried about china stealing all our technology meanwhile the ai companies are stealing everyone else's copyright uh without any issue i don't think you can uh it's a pot calling the kettle black all right let's we are way behind on our uh commercials i gotta take a break uh but this is so fascinating um we're talking about I think what is certainly this week the most challenging problem facing us.

54:32Cory Doctorow:It isn't probably really the most challenging problem we're facing in the world today, but it's certainly on everybody's mind. AI doomerism. Jennifer Patterson-Tui is here, who seems to be quite an optimistic person, and yet a pragmatist when it comes to robots mowing her lawn. So nice to have you, Jennifer. Lovely to be here. Only person I know who's been tackled by a robot. I have. I met the same robot again at IFA, but I stayed very far away from it. Oh, I was hoping you'd tackle it back. I was like, no, no, no. Stay over there. You remember me, buddy? I got my eye on you. Daniel Rubino, also here he is, editor-in-chief of Windows Central.

55:16Cory Doctorow:Great to have you, Daniel, and your brand new camera. Man, you look good. High praise for the new camera and mic. Excellent. Are you guys doing a podcast? Is that why you spent some money on equipment? Yeah, we do the podcast. I do media hits every once in a while. And then the microphone testing is for gaming and streaming. It sounds good. I like it. I'm liking it. Yeah, this is a sure. Yeah, I think nowadays experts like you are in demand on the national TV scene, which is great. I want you to do more hits. I want to see more people like you and fewer pundits talking about all of these subjects.

55:56Cory Doctorow:Also, Micah Sargent, our newest AI guru. He is a host of a brand new show, debuts October 1st called Hands On AI that will be all about that. Are you going to cover Instinct and Muse? Are you going to cover these? Yeah, I'm going to talk about some of these sort of in-between assistants and talk about privacy that's involved, security, what you can do to protect more or YOLO, as it were. there's there's i mean every day there's more to talk about so i'm really excited about this show because the possibilities are endless yep uh show today brought to you by built built hello built here's a question are you getting rewarded for paying your rent Thank you.

56:39Cory Doctorow:Like points or your mortgage? Oh man! If you're not, you need to check out BILT. B-I-L-T. Becoming a BILT member means earning points on every housing payment. Probably the biggest payment of the month, right? No matter where you live. BILT points can be redeemed for all sorts of stuff. Flights, hotels, Lyft rides, Amazon.com purchases, even future housing payments and more. An unexpected benefit Bilt gives every member is access to, I love this, it's a Gentic neighborhood concierge. It's in the Bilt app. It doesn't just give you information about your home and your neighborhood. It actually does things.

57:19Cory Doctorow:It executes. It's connected to your home and over 50 ,000 merchant partners, so you can ask it to pay your rent, make a dinner reservation, book a fitness class, schedule a lift, and more. it makes things happen while automatically applying your member benefits along the way see i really love the creativity like how can we give people a genic ai and this benefit for a crowd that thinks a lot about what a genic ai actually looks like in practice i absolutely think this is something we ought to pay attention to very very clever way of bringing a genic ai affordably into your life. So first thing to do, download the Built app.

58:00Cory Doctorow:Second, link any credit or debit card to the app because that's how the purchases go through, right? The purchases at your local spots become even more rewarding in addition to whatever rewards you're getting from your credit card anyway, right? And then third, you got to try this. Ask the neighborhood concierge in the app pretty much anything. It'll tell you about exclusive member benefits at restaurants, fitness studios on your lift rides, and more around your home. And for homeowners out there, Bilt works for mortgages too, right? That's your housing payment, I know, is one of the biggest monthly expenses.

58:36Cory Doctorow:Why wouldn't you want to earn points on it? Download the Bilt app and join the membership for where you live. It's very simple to remember this. Joinbilt.com slash twit. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash twit. Please use our link so that they know we sent you. Joinbuilt.com slash twit. I think this is so interesting. Really, a really innovative way to use AI and points. Joinbuilt.com slash twit. So Muse is the... is the so there's i think there's three kind of primary bots that i know of there's this instinct one which is invite only there's probably the one that was just announced last week that's going to take the world by storm which is meta's muse and by the way think about it they haven't yet done this what happens when they tie it into your meta glasses yeah now it's got even more data exactly yeah they did mention i thought that was in the in their blog post they mentioned that oh i should try it be i haven't even tried i'm not sure i don't think it's there yet but it's coming soon that you'll be able to talk to muse i called mine cosmo that was i just renamed mine it's called moss so it suggests when you join it suggests the name it suggested iggy for me which i thought was icky so so you renamed it icky i yeah icky would be a good name i decided to name it uh lele which was my childhood nickname nice so and and i and you can also design a little character for it so i have i said make it look like me when i was a kid and so it's kind of cute i don't know how well you can see that but and the thing is it types as it's doing stuff it it's just down to the computer and types and stuff it's i do like little animations they're really cute i think it's well designed i have a i wonder if this comes from an acquisition meta made and they've recently spun off from manis which was also about agentic uh ai clearly they've been working on this a while they also released open weight models that's another american open weight company uh muse spark which is quite good um i'm gonna say if it's a good idea they probably did buy it yes well it's a really interesting pivot isn't it i mean meta it was facebook then they bought instagram and whatsapp and then they were social you know large and then they said wait a minute no no no everybody's going to want to wear a nerd helmet they bought quest and then they made horizon and that was a flop because nobody had any legs and nobody really wanted to wear the nerd helmet so now they've been spending mark's been writing big checks to hire away people from all the ai companies billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars which they have they're very effective ad company and and all of a sudden out of nowhere boom this little thing i hate liking it It's an interesting solution just because they have the same problem I see as X does, which is you spend all this money creating this AI agent.

1:01:41It's like, all right, but how do people access it, right? So X, you can use it on there. Then they created a standalone app. If you have a Tesla, you can use it in there. And they have Brockbot. Yeah, so it's like, but then you have Google has this advantage of being like, well, everywhere. Everybody uses Gmail. Everybody has like these products. Microsoft has advantage of Windows, but then it's only Windows, right? Not many people are using, say, Copilot on their phones. Apple is locked onto Apple. So everybody has to have this sort of method of trying to get in front of people. And I would say Meta has had a challenge so far because what they've done with Instagram and WhatsApp has been literally the basics, right?

1:02:19It's like, okay, you have WhatsApp. Great, there's a new chat bot you can chat to. you know and it's just like okay that's fine but this seems like it actually a product that could go beyond their existing products of facebook and instagram and everything to something bigger and and to that i'll give them you know some credit at least because they needed that yeah i bet they're regretting getting rid of all those portals now though because that would have been an ideal i bought two of them yeah and you know you can hack those now and turn them into i gave one to burke he's hacked it he's done he's done it okay he's taken it because does this muse have a web interface i assume it does i haven't it does muse.ai yeah because so i i use all these ais in my home so i have the google gemini for home and then i have the amazon alexa plus by the new gemini 3.8 is very good uh at home stuff really because yeah to this to this point gemini for home sucks see if you

1:03:17Cory Doctorow:if you can get access to 3.8 flash, which they just put out. Yeah, but the Gemini for home is much more sandboxed and tailored than the Gemini. That's the problem. Yeah. I mean, so if you're probably using it on your phone, connecting to Gemini to your smart home, that's different from using the Gemini for home in your home. And it's very bad. But the advantage that I would say like companies like, well, I mean, you're right. MuseMeta is going to have a platform problem, like where people are going to use this. unless it's, and I assume we're going to start seeing it in Instagram and in Facebook so that you can access it when you're on those sites.

1:03:53But like one thing Amazon has done well with Alexa Plus is it is anywhere that you want it to be. The only, you know, you can have it on your phone, you can have it on your devices, you can have it on the computer, you can have it on your glasses. I mean, they've sort of given, they've spread Alexa Plus far and wide. Now it has a website that you can use. You can also now get it when you're on amazon.com. So yeah, getting it out there is, but I think to your point, that hasn't really meant that people use it. Yeah, I was going to say, who's using Alexa? Everywhere, but yes. And it can do a lot of what many of the other models can do.

1:04:32You know, you can feed it a document and it will summarize it for you. It's gotten pretty smart. It does have a lot of capabilities. It just doesn't have, so what they've been trying to do is add the agentic element, right? The whole book me a trip, book me a restaurant. And that, I think whichever company actually finally nails that experience is the one that will do well. And I don't think any of them have done that yet. I feel like Amazon is the closest to that, followed by Google, except for Google's experience is so fragmented. Like you'll use Gemini One Place and it can do what you want it to do and you'll use it in the home and it can't.

1:05:10Whereas Alexa Plus right now is a uniform experience wherever you use it, which I find more useful. But it still can't do many of the things it's sort of promised to do, that agentic element. And Muse looks like it's, I mean, I haven't tried booking a restaurant or booking a trip. But of course, it's always the first thing an AI asks you is, would you like to book a trip? Because that seems to be what it would be.

1:05:33Cory Doctorow:I don't trust it to you. Jennifer, do you really think, though, like that those features are what your average? consumers kind of looking for you can give you a credit card i want to point out you can give it a credit card it it makes it very easy to set it up with a with money well because that's the other thing it offered me offered three things um manage my inbox and draft replies plan a trip or book a restaurant or watch for a price drop and buy something you want and now that's good is something that amazon's alexa plus does and actually does very well um because it obviously has the inside track on all of that.

1:06:07I think, and I think there is a disconnect between what people are actually using, everyday people are using AI for and what the companies are sort of pushing people to use AI for. And I don't, and I think from my point earlier, when we're talking about ending humanity, most people just want it for very basic, simple tool as a simple tool to help, you know, with a spreadsheet or to help with their book report. They use it like they used Google photo editing. They're just, I don't think people are yet looking for this personal assistant that's going to run their lives for them because that just doesn't, none of those things work very well yet.

1:06:45There's a lot of promise and hype around, oh, your AI can just run your life for you. And yes, it sounds like Leo, yours can, but that took eight months of blood sweat. A lot of work.

1:06:54Cory Doctorow:And it's frustrating because almost every day I have to fix something. It's like the smart home. It's not, it's not. although muse can make instagram posts for me i asked it every morning look at what i did yesterday and make an instagram post one of the things i did the other day was that is so risky i didn't know i haven't i've only posted one so this is a drawing it made because it knew that yesterday i spent a lot of time setting up it setting it up to dig through my email and that's kind of fun so it made this picture of me digging through my email and it also proposed uh that i and i didn't do this that i post this text working now with q on data mining starting with all my old email during doing archaeology on my own inbox today 30 years of email layer by layer somewhere down there is a map of who i've been i'll let you know if i dig up anything good i said you know make a picture and then a cute post and then i you see it says publish or pass and I always pass.

1:07:55Cory Doctorow:I don't, I've posted one. Nice to see Leo contributing, Leo contributing to the dead internet theory. Dead slop automatically. Some of it is possible. We're just going to be bots posting bots. Now, so the other thing it figured out somehow looking through my stuff is that I have, ringing in my ears, I have tinnitus and it is now suggesting a bunch of tinnitus treatments. I said, well, I did that one. It said, oh, well, how about this one? And it said, should I go out and check? And it is now prepared a tinnitus evidence dossier on different possible cures that are out there now i don't my experience has been there's nothing that works but look that's pretty useful right uh one of the main things people do with ais is is supplement their doctor's advice because physicians don't have enough time anymore to i'm gonna take these meta glasses off that's silly i don't have enough time to really talk to you so they ask the ai yep uh and i think that's i'm trying to feel bad for doctors could you imagine all the patients that come in and be like well i actually heard i did i mentioned this to my doctor and he was interested but i think he was being tolerant i'm very interested in this eufy box i have to say the anchor mind base i've been waiting for somebody to do a home ai server yeah i made the argument that apple should do this and they should put people would trust it press in it well let's talk about network because apple is definitely the other big story of the week apple announced their new phones and new watches and actually there is an interesting ai component we'll talk about the phones in a second but they announced something yeah nobody nobody knew they were going to do this there's a new apple watch and it isn't in it yet but coming soon it will always be listening i feel like there was not enough backlash to this and i don't know there will be this is this is windows recall right i was surprised yeah that there wasn't as much backlash i think it's just because everybody's obsessed with the iphone duo so they're just let's just talk about it they were smart they said oh pay attention look oh don't look over there Look at this.

1:10:05Well, they also published a white paper simultaneously explaining the technology, which I think didn't get quite a lot of attention because actually if you the white paper does actually deal with a lot of the concerns relatively well. I mean, I've worked in this space a long, long time with people concerned about devices in their homes, listening to everything they say and do. and what I think many of the elements that they have put in place with this device will actually appease the privacy concerns won't eliminate them but will make it not that useful so you kind of end up with like why even bother so the one feature they showed was you're sitting

1:10:48Cory Doctorow:at a restaurant and the waiter comes over and says our specials of the day and then walks off and they showed you this live rewind, which I use all the time on Apple TV, where you press a button and it puts on your watch the transcription of what the waiter said. Not only does 15 seconds, which is not a lot. I think on Apple TV it's 30 seconds, right? If I say, what did she just say? It goes back 30 seconds, puts up the subscript, and then you can read. So my issue with this is not even Apple per se. Let's just give Apple credit, right? They protect the most privacy with people. It's kind of their big advertising feature, right?

1:11:33Oh, you can trust us because we don't do it. And let's just give them the benefit of the doubt. Okay, so this is fine. There's no real privacy concerns. It's never really about Apple, though. It's about the fact that they're opening the door to this. They're setting the precedent for it. Because now every other company is going to go, oh, we can do that too. Now, will those companies be adhering to the same standards and all this? We'll get to LG, of course, later on. And there's always going to be other companies that, oh, they cut some corners or they get a little nefarious. Oh, oops, we didn't know about that kind of thing.

1:12:05And then it's up to the consumer. It's going to have to kind of track all this. And then do you trust all the technology? Do you just give up on it? It's sort of like this idea of like years ago, people were concerned with their information leaking on the Internet. We all get those alerts. Now it's like you talk to the younger generations and they're like, I don't care. All my information is already out there anyway. So there is like this erosion of privacy or expectation of privacy. It's not only going away at a technological level, but it's going away at a cultural level too with the increasing generations who are just used to this, like their whole lives.

1:12:40you know parents were posting pictures of them as babies without their permission growing up on the internet right so it's like that's my concern here it's just like okay this is going to open up the floodgates for this technology which well i mean they're all it's already out there i mean i have one little one right here this is the um dependence oh the new switchbot one yeah but at least with these it's like a signal like if you have this on your lapel um sure you know and like the b i know

1:13:06Cory Doctorow:Leo you wore the B for a long time and that but yeah I think with the biggest consent I heard from people about the watch was that now anytime anyone has a watch on do I have to worry that they're right so let's explain what Apple's doing because it's yeah first of all they're trying not to be illegal and I don't think it's clear that they're not illegal by the way California is what we call a two-party state the consent of everybody in the conversation has to happen before you can record a conversation Apple says well well we're not really recording it exactly they have a ring buffer that's always recording yeah and then the audio gets analyzed by the ai summarized and then the ring buffer is constantly being replaced by new audio so nothing is saved no no recording is ever saved also it's doing it inside the secure enclave so it's processed only the new watches too this is yes well this feature will only be on the new watches, I presume, because it's the only way you can do this.

1:14:06Cory Doctorow:So the Enclave stores, does the processing for speech, sounds, and music without transcribing or storing the raw audio. So it doesn't transcribe the speech. It doesn't save the speech. It just gives you notes. Now I have to say - I don't know how you said what either. So why is this useful? Yeah, no identification. So I have to say, Lisa has a standing policy. If she gets into a Zoom conversation and the and the note takers on she says turn that off or i'm out of here she does not want people taking notes i said well people i said lisa they're people like me who have no memory we're just trying to remember what happened she says okay maybe but they got to ask my permission before they use it and i think that's not an unreasonable point of view is that but this doesn't ask permission this just does it it also is on iphone 16 iphone 16 plus pro Oh, it's on the phone too.

1:14:58Yeah. All iPhones since iPhone 16 will get both live rewind and Siri recap. Oh. This is going to destroy relationships.

1:15:09Cory Doctorow:By the way, it's not an enclave. It's an X-Clave. People are going to be fighting. They're going to be arguing back and forth. And they'll be like, no, you said this. And they'll be like, no, I didn't. Oh, yeah. And they're going to go back to their watch and their phone. So the secure X-Clave is different from the secure enclave. it's a hardware isolated compartment built into the silicon to process sensor data separately from the rest of the system that's supposed to reassure me data there cannot be accessed by watch os apps user or apple so i presume the audio goes into this exclave is synopsized and then text spits out is that right jennifer is that so yeah it it does a summary um it doesn't give you like there's no there's no stored recording so you can't go back and listen to what was said except for that 15 second rewind so there's two separate things there's 15 second rewind and then the uh summarizing the series summaries siri recap yeah siri recap and they do um there's no uh differentiation so it's not going to say leo said this jen jennifer said this micah said this um but presumably if you mention names then those will be in the summary.

1:16:20Cory Doctorow:We don't know because this is not available yet. Nobody can try it. It'll come later in the year. It's not surprising that they're doing it because there are so many other companies out there that have started to do this. I wanted this. I wanted to be, but Lisa said you can't wear it anymore. So I stopped. But the idea... My husband hated it. Yeah. He was like, are you recording me? I have a transcript of everything that happened to me in the day and then it could be analyzed and summarized seemed very useful to me, especially because, again, I forget stuff. And even if it would just tell me the five things I agreed to do today would be useful.

1:16:55Just to remind you. Just like you agreed you would do this. I think this is a warm-up for what's coming next from Apple, which is the earbuds. With the cameras. Yeah. So this is like testing the water.

1:17:07Cory Doctorow:The camera that doesn't take pictures. Right. And, you know, I think we will get to the point probably where this becomes normal as much as we, you know, as people are. I think you said there's not been enough backlash. I think there has been quite a lot of backlash. I think you're right, though. The duo kind of overshadowed it because the duo is fancy and fun to look at, whereas the Apple Watch thing feels smaller in comparison. But it is, it's Apple doing this, like you say, does sort of feel like it gives it a gloss that perhaps now we're going to see more companies do this. and there are benefits, but there are obviously considerable dangers.

1:17:46My concern, I love the idea of these as a journalist. Like when I go to a conference, it's so, it would be so helpful to not to have to like pull out my voice memos all the time and have something that reminds me, but the creepy side, like my husband went, you know, I had the B on and we had a minor tiff when we went driving in the car and he's like, did you record that whole thing? I'm like, yes, I can go

1:18:06Cory Doctorow:back and prove i was right yes that was my plan as well that is a recipe for disaster i think you want to be able to forget you need to forget lisa i have it here on my wrist no siri recaps summarizes conversations this is from the apple document throughout your day so it's it detects that a conversation is happening and then it doesn't transcribe or record it simply detects whether a conversation has started if it has the audio flows into the x-clave and then is isolated in hardware and then it's transferred to the phone by the way the phone does the hard work not the watch uh the phone then uh deletes the audio from the exclave on the watch and then transcription turns the audio into text on the phone and then this is designed to distill the conversation to its core meaning removing content suggestive of conversation tone i told you yeah non-essential language screw you buddy filler words like um you know and redundancies while preserving the topics discussed so what am i so you said jennifer nobody this makes it useless i don't see how valuable it is going to be i mean it might be able to give you a few action items like don't forget to take out the trash or yeah you promised you i'd get that one every single day 4 p.m but like if you're taking it's hard obviously it's hard to know because no one's been able to try it yet um but compared to the kind of having tested some of these audio listening devices like the bee and the mind clip uh those are you know they they don't give you necessarily full transcripts but they do give you quotes and full like uh quotes for what someone said and who said it if it's able to identify based on the context.

1:20:14This sounds like more like almost like reminders. Yeah, because it says even it. First of all, all of it is when you use this feature, it is sent to private cloud compute in the end. And it is. Yeah, it always goes to private cloud. Oh, so the phone isn't doing the transcription. It's well, no, it starts on the iPhone and then it. Yeah, exactly. The phone is not doing the transcription. So it goes from if you use the watch or if you use the phone, it says to create a summary Siri Recap sends an encrypted, condensed version of the conversation transcript. So I guess it does transcribe on your iPhone, but then it sends it off to private cloud compute.

1:20:52And then this is what's wild. This condensed text is designed to be less than half the length of the original transcript and distills the conversation to its core meaning. So then on PCC, private cloud compute, it is done at sort of, as Jen is pointing out, half of what it originally was. And then on private cloud compute, it's encrypted and sent back to the phone in the Apple Watch. And so, yeah, if you keep squeezing... What could go wrong? What context could you possibly lose by reducing it by half? I mean, I just feel like we'll have to test it, but I just don't, I feel like this is not going to be useful.

1:21:31Cory Doctorow:It does fix one thing that Bee did that I didn't like, which is it could tell the difference between a television show or something you're listening to and you talking. So now playing, it says, helps the model understand that speech may have originated from music or a podcast. Calendar data can help generate accurate titles of summaries, high-level location labels. It won't put location data, but it might say something like homework or school, along with locality like city, state, and country. Add context to the summarization. Points of interest like grocery store or park may be included. so it's going to use your calendar to say this was where this happened sounds like um and then the finished text-based summary is encrypted sent from private cloud compute back to iphone and apple watch where it's available to view in the siri app in a recaps tab i would love to be able to get that out of that and put that send that to my my yeah to my own stuff exactly siri recaps are automatically deleted after seven days unless unless you explicitly choose to save them uh siri recaps sync across your devices if you have an iCloud with two factor turned on might be interesting to see if they manage to make this work use and make it useful um but it's like i said at the beginning it feels like so just still it's just generic what value are you really going to get out of it unless you're specifically saying to it like but you could just say that and just say, remind me.

1:22:59You don't like, I would just say, Siri, remind me to do this. We can do that now. You don't need this for that function. You can do Siri to do that right now. So, I mean, I use voice memos on my phone all the time for recording things that I need to remember. But yeah, it'll be interesting to see if they've managed to make this a useful tool. If they haven't, then it just does feel like it's fairly invasive. well it depends i mean not every state is i mean south carolina you can record whoever you like so yeah but in california you can't in california you can't so i'm waiting to see this not available

1:23:36Cory Doctorow:in california new york and other jurisdictions only if it sounds like they've done a fair amount of gymnastics to make it not a transcript specifically and they do also because of the you know flock and ring concerns that people have had over the last few years you there's nothing that can be taken out like you can't take out a transcript and give it to the police like there is that is not possible according to what's funny is this is trying to have it both ways it's what we were talking about earlier which is people want the benefits of ai they don't but they don't want it and this is what it's and sometimes you try to appeal to both parties you get something something in the middle that isn't that helpful yeah i think that's always been the argument with apple and it's what i talked about too i've apple has done so much narrowing and guard railing of its ai in general that sometimes the responses i get from siri ai become useless because it's trying to make a deterministic system out of something that's not deterministic so interesting well we live in um interesting times i guess we've we've always known that let's take a little break we will talk about the new phones in a second you're watching this week in tech with home expert jennifer pattison tui senior reviewer at the verge daniel rubino windows guru he's editor-in-chief at windows central and micah sergeant our newest ai expert at twit his new show hands-on ai debuts october 1st of course jennifer's a regular on your uh tech news weekly every month yeah so you guys know each other our show today brought to you by threat locker i know these guys love these guys threat actors are using ai now we just learned this from the anthropic uh study to automate vulnerability discovery to modify scripts during attacks they they on the fly to generate new malware variants specifically targeting you and to coordinate activity across multiple systems tasks and they do it at speed i mean these tasks if a human did it might take an hour or days or more likely weeks now happens in seconds instantly which means you have to respond instantly then that's just part of the problem at the on the other end the organizations are adding their ai assistants and agents that can access your own data business documents source code cloud applications, APIs, internal systems.

1:26:13Cory Doctorow:If you're on the security team at your company, you know, you need to know exactly what's going on, particularly what AI tools are in use, what information those tools can access, whether they're operating inside their intended scope or whether they're freelancing outside of it. And it's hard to know because what data do you have, a successful login or unfamiliar file hash? That's not going to give you enough information to act. Teams also need to understand whether an application is behaving normally, whether it's accessing unexpected data, whether it's communicating with systems you should not reach or creating civilizations on message boards in Germany.

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1:28:30Cory Doctorow:They're all together. Centralization makes them visible. Visibility means we can defend. ThreatLocker has also recently received the following industry recognition. It's recognized as strong performer in the January 2026 Gartner Peer Insights voice of the customer for endpoint protection platforms. Ranked number one in application control by Peerspot, winner of the best zero trust security solutions at the 2025 Tice Awards. AI governance is, it needs more than just, you know, an acceptable use policy. ThreatLocker gives security teams the technical controls to define which AI tools are approved, who and what can access them, and how those tools are allowed to interact with business systems.

1:29:15Cory Doctorow:You need ThreatLocker. Visit ThreatLocker.com slash TWIT to get a free 30-day trial and learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's threatlocker.com. We thank them so much for their support of This Week in Tech. So, folding phone. Sexy. Dead sexy. But dead expensive. $2 ,000 to start. Over$3 ,000 if you load it up. I don't know who would put two terabytes of storage in there, but you could. It's expensive, but I actually found the price to be surprising. I expected it to be higher. We all did. So Apple, they did this with the iPad too. When they announced the first iPad at$499, everybody went, I remember how I felt that day.

1:30:08No way. I think they're protecting their prices for their iPhones and shuttling the cost increases to laptop and iPads because they know the iPhone is just their bread and butter. They can't screw with that.

1:30:20Cory Doctorow:Interestingly, they raised the prices of older iPhones 17 to 17e 100 bucks so like yeah we'll make it up somewhere else or or keep people from doing what a lot of people do which is i'll buy the previous year's phone and save right a lot of money um i you know lisa my wife decided she wants the 18 pro max she wants the traditional form factor but i i don't know i find that that's really interesting i was going to bring that up because like i thought i had to get into gender stuff with technology but i do feel like the foldable phone that they announced is something guys are going to be really into because we don't mind carrying around 250 gram phones in our pockets but i feel like females might have preferred the the flip style that is it wait a minute that's almost a pound yeah it's that's heavy it's pretty heavy it's as heavy as a surface duo was but it's uh oh that's the other thing we had a duo we had a folding phone from microsoft i bought the duo because I love that idea of a book.

1:31:24Cory Doctorow:It was roughly the same shape. It was. It had two screens, and it didn't have a front screen. But most importantly, the reason I sent it back is because it didn't have the software to really support it. It was via Windows device, and they Hail Maryed and put Android on it at the last minute to prevent losing all the R &D and the hardware. Yeah, so it wasn't meant for Android, but they tried. at least we got to see that hard I thought the hardware was amazing but I do wonder if Apple is going to do a traditional flip style phone which I think for your average consumer would find more value in and a little bit more familiar plus people do love ending phone calls by slamming shut their phones but I feel like I'd be real curious if there's going to be any data coming out about who buys this device I think it'll be a hit for them don't get me wrong but like I just don't know you know I just I know we'll have one, but I'm not sure how many other women are going to go out for that.

1:32:23Cory Doctorow:Jennifer, is Daniel being a sexist pig? How dare I? I'm not sure that it is specific to male versus female, but I do know that there are a lot of people who prefer much smaller phones. I mean, the Mini has been very missed, the smallest iPhone. Our phone reviewer, Alison Johnson, is always lamenting its demise and wants a small phone. Smaller hands. Smaller hands. That makes sense. I'm still on an iPhone 13 minute. Well, there you go. So those, I mean. Benito likes, he has small hands, though. And that, well, I don't think it's just, it's very much, for women, though, we have purses. So we can certainly carry around.

1:33:07And for me, like I, I was I'm very interested in this. So again, talking about Alison's experience. So she's tried all the flip phones and all the folding phones. And there's been a few instances where she'll be at events and she'll be blogging from her foldable phone because she can unfold it and actually write on it. And for me as a journalist and also a busy mum who does, who runs my life from my phone, rather than having to carry my laptop or an iPad and a phone, I like the idea of having this device that could potentially I can do much more with when I'm on the go, you know, from the soccer sidelines or from, you know, when I'm taking my daughter in the car line, waiting for my daughter at the bus at the school.

1:33:52and things, just the multitasking potential here had really appealed to me when first Samsung came out with theirs and then the Pixel. But I have had an iPhone. I've very rarely ever strayed to the Android world other than just to test Android devices and moving out of the ecosystem for me wasn't worth it. Also, it seemed like a lot of the software for many of the Fold devices just wasn't really taking a lot of advantage of the form factor. And there wasn't a huge benefit. was my complaint and it looks like apple has done a nice job here um from what they can hold

1:34:28Cory Doctorow:i can hold this in one hand people were making fun of uh the freakishly long fingers fingers i said that was really weird um and it's true that does look a little weird um but also really tiny palm yeah yeah yeah i don't think that's a fear just off yeah i think i mean i can hold this i i'm sure i don't know i i there have been people now you're not doing that are you i mean if you open it you're going to be doing this well there's the ipad you can hold the ipad uh is that a mini portrait mode that's a mini yeah yeah that's the ipad mini so that's that's roughly the size right i could probably do it that way too just barely yeah well you can palm a basketball too this is true i could very easily Paul Baskobol.

1:35:14So you're not a normal human. No, I have monster hands. I've always said that. And it's true. I think it's a good form factor. I'm going to definitely wait for Gen 2, though. I just don't think I offer it to get cheaper, which may not ever happen. Because I agree, I wasn't expecting it. I was thinking it was going to be more expensive. Because isn't the Pixel Fold about the same? And the Samsung is about the same. The Samsung is a little cheaper, but not a lot. $18.99. Yeah. Yeah, and the Ultra is$21. And my biggest concern, and we knew this was going to be the case, is I do use my phone as my main camera.

1:35:47And this is not as good a camera. And I wouldn't want to give that up. So I have the 17 Pro, so Pro Max. So I have the big telephones. And you give up that and pay more money. And that's... We're older foldables and trade-offs. I think I'm going to trade in my Aperol Spritz phone. and uh so pretty i do love burgundy though i'm the burgundy of the 18 is i think burgundy is

1:36:18Cory Doctorow:the rumor was it was going to be called wild cherry but they call it burgundy uh it is wine colored um i of course the duo you don't have that choice it's black or white um i think but i get like 400 bucks if i trade this in i mean it really makes a big difference in the overall it does the trade-in value is is quite nice there i think yeah yeah get 400 off I can't, I think it was even more than that. I think it was. No, it's gotta be, I think it's 800. 800 is a lot. It almost cut it in half. Samsung did that well too. I traded in my, was it the Fold 7 for the Fold 8? Oh, I know where I was thinking.

1:36:55Cory Doctorow:I got about half off the new Ultra by giving it my last year's Ultra. Yeah. I'm not sure. I haven't seen the phone trade-in press yet. I'll say though, Apple is not interested in getting Samsung people to change over. Really? If you look at the trade-ins for the Fold, it's terrible. they won't take anything less than or anything more than I think a Galaxy S22 or S23 so if you have a 24, 25 or 26 they're not going to take it and they won't take any folds so and the money they give you is like you get$150 off which I just thought was surprising because like I could see a world where people who have had Android foldables would be curious about this device because even a lot of Android fans have been like Like, oh, Apple did a pretty solid job before this gen one.

1:37:42But they don't seem to be interested in trying to convert those people, which, you know, hey, maybe they're lost, you know.

1:37:49Cory Doctorow:A lot of the success of the phone will depend on app developers taking advantage of it. Same thing with Siri AI. As usual, Apple is kind of dependent on developers to include those features. So Siri AI, yes, the smart Siri can see all of your Apple stuff, like your Apple Mail and your Apple Messages, but it's up to the developers to give it access in their apps. And according to the New York Times, key app developers have yet to embrace Apple's new Siri AI, embedding those app intents in there. Yeah, you sort of need every developer to create an MCP if we're speaking in the language of AI. And not a lot have done that yet.

1:38:32Because, again, it is a matter of what's the value to individual developers.

1:38:37Cory Doctorow:Well, Amazon's a good example. They have not built in support in their Amazon app. But, of course, they have Alexa support. And what is their AI called? Rufus. Well, Rufus went away. Oh, Rufus is gone. It's just Alexa Plus.

1:38:56i i wanted to ask you leo because for me uh obviously i'm gonna go the way of the duo but i i've been struggling because the camera on the duo you are you're you are losing so much

1:39:12Cory Doctorow:all right let me talk you off the ledge okay talk me off you're not losing anything yeah so the big selling point on this camera is that it has physical aperture blades right Right. But and I talked to Chris Marquardt about this, our photo guy on Friday. Because the sensor is so small, you're not going to get the same depth of field benefits you get on a real camera with a big sensor and more blades. In fact, he said the really the only benefit will be if you've got pinpoint light sources, you'll have six rays of light coming off of it. He says they're going to sell a lot because people will see that and go, ooh, you've got bokeh.

1:39:57Cory Doctorow:But he says you're not going to really get bokeh. He said any bokeh you get and the bokeh they showed is computational because without a big sensor, having a wide open aperture does not give you particularly. Samsung could this ages ago. And just the benefit versus the trade-off in cost and the potential of breakage, you know, because it is a mechanical thing. But you lose the zoom, though, right? You don't have the zoom. So if you do go for the Duo, I guess what I would say is if you have a 17 Pro Max, you're not going to – don't buy the 18 because of the aperture blades. Right. But I'm even losing, that's because here's the truth is what I did not realize even until recently about my 17 Pro Max was how incredible the built in macro photography is.

1:40:47And I find myself doing a lot of, because I use AI for a lot of DIY work and electronics work, I'm taking up close photos of little PCBs and other components. and now I'm going to get this duo and I'm going to be holding my phone up close to the thing and it's going to be blurry AF. I forgot. So like, I forgot. On Samsung, they used a wide angle lens for macro. I think Apple does that too. Yeah, it switches to the wide angle. Okay, so that's what I will say. Micah, Micah. I thought, maybe I'm misremembering because I thought it was the telephoto. Oh, it was the telephoto. It might be, yeah. That's why I'm curious because I don't know.

1:41:29No, I'll just say like people should evaluate how much they use the telephoto because I have an S26 Ultra and those are excellent cameras, but I can count the number of times I've used the zoom on it. And when I use it, it's like having the S Pen. It's like I barely ever use that. When I need to use it, it's great to have though. So I'm not dismissing it completely, but I would say people should evaluate their photos. Don't talk yourself out of it if you don't really use it. I think people in the city may use telephoto more sometimes for buildings and stuff like that. Personally, for me, wide angle is the number one in the regular camera.

1:42:07And so I've switched. I don't mind not having zoom, but that's me and how I live. And I think people should take a close look at that because I don't think it's that big of a deal.

1:42:16Cory Doctorow:I like the 8X zoom on the 17 Pro Max. I really do. And I use it for animal shots. For instance, I can't get too close to my cat. So having an 8X lets me get a great shot of her. But it's also a trade-off too with the telephoto, right? because the telephoto is never going to be good as the main sensor, especially for a low light performance. So there's always like this kind of like. It's a camera phone. It's not a camera. And so what I've decided in my own head is. If you're really serious about this, you're buying a camera. Yeah, that's what I've decided. Or you carry two phones. But there is a downgrade is the point that I'm trying to make.

1:42:49Thank you. Yeah, like I already have a great phone in my iPhone 17 Pro Max. And then if I go for the Duo, I'm paying more money and getting less. but I do get to use my Apple pencil on it, which I'm trying to say.

1:43:00Cory Doctorow:Only if you have the USB-C one, which is weird. I do have one of those. Because that's the older one, right? That's not the new one. I can't use this with it. That's because you can't charge it. It doesn't have the magnetic charging thing, right? I'll be real curious about the usage stats of this because I know it's very, this is one of those technologies where I agree, like especially if you draw, you know, as a hobby or you're like an architect or designer, right? and you can actually have a use of this. But for, you know, again, going back to Samsung's S26 Ultra and the Ultra Series, like the amount of people that use that S Pen is pretty minimal.

1:43:36And so I know Samsung had data, the amount of people that are using the pen on the foldable, because they had pen on foldable for years as well. And they finally removed it because they decided that thinner and lighter was going to be a better selling point than the pen. And I get for people who use the pen, they're like, that's egregious and how dare you. but you know if you look at the fold 8 the fold 8 weighs 201 grams whereas this new phone the iphone duo is like 253 grams or something which is half a pound not a pound i misstated that so yeah but it's a significant difference you know and so that's what samsung bet on that we would sell more of these being super thin and a lot lighter because the original folds were such i remember i returned i think was the fold 4 i bought it and it was like a gold brick in my pocket it It was just so heavy.

1:44:24But these new ones, you know, get around that. Thin and light is good if you can get battery life, right? Yeah, yeah. And the Fold 8 has actually like really, really good battery life on it. But I'm curious if people are going to carry around the big Apple Pencil. Because don't forget the Fold had a stylus that it would clip onto the back. You can carry it with you. This is going to be carrying a big pencil. We're going to put that in your pocket. Put it behind your ear. So I'm glad it's there. I'm not trying to dismiss it. It's a great accomplishment. I'm just like, I don't know many people are actually going to use it.

1:44:56It's aspirational, I think, in so many cases.

1:44:59Cory Doctorow:I remember when the first Samsung Note came out at CES, they hired a bunch of artists all over Vegas who had easels set up. And then they had their note on it, and they were drawing on their note to emphasize, I guess, that you could do that. And I bought every note that came out. I never used it. What was the one you got stuck? yeah that was i think the note oh what do you put it in the wrong way put it in the wrong way yeah the sad thing is i was reading the story on twit about how if you put it in the wrong way it would break it so i said you mean like this and yeah it broke it crazy but the the real point is i didn't care because i never used the damn thing you were you were doing was it jerry rig everything before jerry i was yeah if i'd had a uh if i'd had a box cutter i would have scored it no i i i think really jennifer what i'm saying is i know it's a downgrade i bet i'll be perfectly happy with the pictures i take with a duo that it won't matter yeah like intellectually i know it's a downgrade but the pictures are going to look fine i i take sometimes because i'm an old man i take pictures with my ipad what's this going to be like at concerts with everyone holding their duos yeah please folks do not bring your duo to the concert to leo's credit i mean computational photography is it's everything these days i mean google has the whole pixel line is built on this concept right but like i have the fold eight and i think the cameras are fantastic and you can argue like they're not even substantially different they made the um the wide angles now 50 megapixels So it has a different sensor in it.

1:46:47But the quality in it, like the ISP that Qualcomm did on there, along with the new algorithms, improved it in such a way that even I noticed it. But like, I don't really take photos even at nighttime and be like, oh, God, what have I done? It's not that dramatic. And I know Apple's always done well with photography. I think people will be totally fine with the cameras. I think there are other considerations in getting a duo, but I don't think the camera should really be one of them. I think most people will be pretty fine with it.

1:47:15Cory Doctorow:I predict I'll be okay with it. And I think having their real estate will be nice. Yeah, I'm so excited about the real estate. They've done some really interesting things with the camera. You saw they have a little kid video that will play on one side when you're taking a picture of the kids. The kid looks at the video and smiles. They have, you know, with selfies, you can put yourself in the, or you could take a picture of somebody and have yourself in the, they're doing some really, I think they're doing some creative, interesting things. We'll see. they didn't do the thing samsung does so samsung allows you when you open it up you can switch to the um the cover display to be your viewfinder and it disables the interior display then you can flip it around and hold it up and you can do a selfie don't they do that well they do it but they don't turn off the inner display for oh so it's still there yeah like i'm sure they can kind of fix that you know the and the whole like cover display showing you snoopy or whatever like i know I think Google has done that before the Razors have done that.

1:48:11So, but yeah, they, you know, I know a lot of people are giving that like saying, oh, Apple absolutely destroyed everybody. It's not so much that they had the last seven years to basically see how everyone has done foldables. It's very, and they just sit there and they took notes and they bought every single one. They broke it all down. They looked at the hinges and they just went to the drawing board and like, all right, we're going to amplify this. So yeah, their gen one looks fantastic. But I also would be disappointed if it was anything less than what they showed, because And it's like, well, you had seven years to watch everybody.

1:48:41Like, you know, to Samsung's credit, it's way riskier to be a Gen 1 of a completely new form factor.

1:48:48Cory Doctorow:Oh, yeah. Samsung has taken all the arrows in their back while Apple sat back and watched. I really like the standby mode adjustments that they've made. I'm so excited about that because I use that all the time with the phone I have right now. What, so you use it like a clock? Well, yeah, you can put it, so book face down. And yeah, so it's tent mode. And the front will be the standby and they've adjusted the standby technology now. So it doesn't have to be plugged in because it used to have to be charging. And now you can just plop it on the side and it will go automatically into standby mode and be a great bedside clock.

1:49:25I'm constantly on the look for the perfect smartphone clock. That's where Apple gets some credit here is that they've been a little bit more thoughtful about the different usage of positions and how to leverage the dual screen and foldable type concepts, right? Like, for instance, they show the apps running side by side. This was taken directly from Microsoft, right? This is how the Surface Duo operated. It was this idea of like you run an app on each screen and when you dismiss one, it only dismisses that one, not the other. And so Samsung really hasn't taken advantage of this stuff. And of course, there's the fancy animation when you open and close it, which, listen, I know it looks great, but as someone who just looks at technology as a tool, I'm like, okay, but it doesn't actually do anything.

1:50:09Yeah, it made me roll my eyes a little too. Yeah, but I get it, right? This is what Apple does. That's Windows versus Apple right there. Right, yeah, it's selling the experience and you're delighted when you use it. And I get it, I'm not trying to dismiss that. I'm just saying as myself, I look at things as tools. My first thought, Daniel, was how much battery is that using? Is that going to be a performance impact because it's doing that goofy little thing? Can I turn it off? Yeah, but it just goes to show you that like Samsung didn't do those kind of things and they had all these years to do it, right?

1:50:39So, you know, but this is the competition. Of course, Samsung's going to come out and, you know, someone's already created that effect on Android on the fold, but they haven't been able to build it into the launcher yet. Oh, I'm sure within an hour,

1:50:54Cory Doctorow:somebody at the samsung said oh let me see oh yeah we could do that oh yeah we could do that exactly it was cool though caught my eye did we michael and i did the uh play-by-play for the event on wednesday which was unfortunately because of apple's uh stinginess we had to do privately in the club but mike i don't remember did they say it does magsafe uh charge they didn't say it uh during the event but we found out afterward yes that it does yeah but the magsafe Which looks a bit like, yeah, I mean, there are, yeah, it's, it's a bit sort of bottom heavy. I don't know. I've seen a few creators already have, have shown some, like, cause there's some of the Like it's hanging off the thing or.

1:51:36Yeah. Your wallets won't fit. You have to have a whole new line of accessories. It's a little bit lower than you might expect, but it'll still work. Yeah. I do question. Your accessories will all still work, but yeah, there is, and there are some new ones that have been designed by accessory manufacturers that people would have. Well, there's an opportunity, right?

1:51:53Cory Doctorow:You could have it open and have it be a giant clock, and there's all sorts of stuff you could do. I am curious. So one criticism Samsung gets is that they didn't build in MagSafe into the phone itself, right? So it has the wireless charging, but not the magnet. But I always dismiss this because when I'm buying a$2 ,000 phone like this one, I do put on a case on it. So even if it's just a thin-borne, and this has the MagSafe built into it. But who's going to be buying$2 ,000 phones and not putting a case on it? I'm curious if you guys are going to be - I already ordered my case. I've already ordered a leather Nomad case.

1:52:30Cory Doctorow:Yeah. Exactly, right? So like, I always found this to be like a weird complaint. It's like, because we're all going to put cases on our phones anyway. Same with the color, right? So it's fun with the colors. It's like - Black or white, who's seeing it? No one. Yeah, who's going to see it? Doesn't even matter. Lisa, I said, what color do you want for your - Yeah, I like the orange. i do the app roll spritz but it gets me very i'm very popular with all my son's friends like you have the new iphone yeah now you're gonna have to have wild cherry are you gonna even order the burgundy one i'm sticking with my i'm a smart home person i'm not a phone person this was my first upgrade in like three years i think when i went to this and that's how normal people operate i got my whole family the whole they all we all upgraded um so and the the kid my son and my husband got the 17 so and i was sad to see that we don't get the 18 the standard yet because we they just laid at &t fiber in my neighborhood so i'm about to switch over so jealous um is it symmetric or is it uh asymmetric i don't know i haven't got all the details i did it while i was away and my husband was like they kept knocking on the door and i was like my wife has to do this i can't do that's such a reverse of how it is in most households right that's great i love that sign us up for the five gig plan so i saw this um micah these beautiful spigen uh cases that make it look like a macbook duo i mentioned that microsoft had done a duo phone but actually apple holds a trademark they did the macbook duo years before the duo phone so i don't think they have any issue i love these cases this was a spigen uh social post are they going to make them though i'm not sure yet they have not officially announced it but the way that they're interacting with all of the influencers about it leads me to believe because they did the wonderful um line of sort of old school uh mac looks that i ended up buying every single yeah they have those yeah you can get a kind of i wonder if it ages from beige to whatever like yellow were yellow So far it hasn't, but they feel so good in the hand.

1:54:41I love it.

1:54:43Cory Doctorow:Yeah, yeah. Well, this is all going to be very interesting. We're in a new phone. For a treat. It used to be, until AI came along, the single most interesting story of the year, fortunately. Thank God that AI has come along. Well, speaking of AI, I'm sure you guys talked about this in the show. Speaking of AI, were we? Have we? But Siri AI gets unleashed on everyone here next week. It'll be interesting. I mean, I've been very impressed when it can do things that I really wasn't expecting it to be able to do. Because our standards were so low. Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, it's not that impressive.

1:55:22Cory Doctorow:Just the fact that it works is impressive, really. Well, like, I mean, I think I was at a hotel in Berlin and I said, I need to get to the conference hall and then the airport and my, tell me what time I need to leave. And that was the only context I gave it. And it got my flight. It got where I was. It knew which airport I was going to. It told me exactly what time I needed to leave my hotel to get to the conference center. Oh, that's what you want. Yeah, I mean, it was, and that would have taken me, I mean, maybe five minutes to Google it and figure it out. But it just did it. And I was like, okay, this is useful.

1:55:57This is the type of AI people want to use. It has caught me off guard with its capabilities. I because I've talked before, it was sort of a abusive relationship where in the past it had disappointed me so much that I just stopped using it, stopped trusting it. And so even with improvements that have happened over the years, I still sort of limited my interaction with it. And I thought, I'm going to open my heart to you again. I'm going to give you another chance. And so there'd be times where I'd be going, this is something I would normally just do myself, but I'm going to see. I'm going to see if you can do it.

1:56:29And I have been impressed with it, particularly in the car where before I just did not use it. One day I said, you know, I'd really like to get slushy. And I wonder if there are any places nearby that sort of specialize in that. And so I was able to ask it and then follow up and say, are there any close to where I am right now? And just those little follow ups and the sort of details that require pulling in more information. and i i've been impressed well there you go there you have it our relationship is on your phone

1:57:05Cory Doctorow:and do you feel like apple's being forthright when they say it's private and all of that stuff we trust them more than we would let's say meta right i mean well i signed up for meta so who do i trust everyone yeah so we yeah we want to test i think given the the bending over backward we just talked about with how it's doing this Siri Rewind stuff. Yeah, I do trust that the company is doing a better job than others, whether it is about using that as a means of selling more devices or if it's an actual true core value of the company. I don't think that matters. I think that if privacy is part of what the company uses to sell its stuff and it holds to that, then good.

1:57:53Cory Doctorow:yep let's pause for a moment and we will be back with our panel it's nice to have some sensible people on the panel for a change let me tell you uh the comics always do that audience last night they were terrible i'm so glad to be in philadelphia today jennifer that is in too i actually always love having you on she is so great uh we'll talk about her travails i'll explain to the dog with the weed whacker on its back i should probably explain that since i started the show with that in just a little bit uh you'll find her at theverge.com daniel rubino senior no i'm sorry editor-in-chief of windows central great to have you as always we'll talk a little bit about patch tuesday it was a record breaker uh in just a moment and micah sargent host of well many great shows ios today i'm sure you'll be covered so let's see ios 27 comes out tomorrow.

1:58:53Cory Doctorow:Is that right? When is it coming out? God, I know I have it already because I'm in the beta, but I... What is it? This week? Pretty soon. I don't know that they've officially... Have they given an official date? But I think it's Monday. Yeah, Monday, September 14th is the rumor. I think it's tomorrow. Expecting, yeah. Oh yeah, there it is. Apple's updated its website now, available starting 9-14. So this week is all going to be about coverage of Apple. 27 is here. Apple's 27 releases. So watch iOS today for that with Rosemary Orchard and Micah, and of course, Tech News Weekly on Thursday and coming October 1st, Hands on AI.

1:59:28Cory Doctorow:Let's talk about privacy. Our show today brought to you by Delete Me. Holy cow. There is something we have here in the United States we're so proud of. We're so proud of the data broker industry. They make so much money. There's such a success story. There are more than 500 of these companies with more cropping up every day because it's so profitable. What they do is collect information about you. They collect it from all sorts of sources, your internet service provider, your mobile carrier, apps on your phone. You'd be amazed. Your TV set. They collate all that information to build a dossier about you and your family and your company, everything there is to know, and then sell it on to anybody who's got a buck 50.

2:00:14Cory Doctorow:And if you're a business owner, this should, I mean, everybody should be concerned about it but business owners in particular you're putting yourself out there it's kind of part of the job right it's part of marketing but here's the uncomfortable truth promoting your business leaves you and your team exposed 90 of business owners business owners have their home address easily discoverable online 90 and the average owner has more than 600 pieces of personal information just sitting on the open web we're talking your personal email phone number home address details about your family now let me tell you why that matters yeah it's bad enough for we individuals but for business owners it's a real risk because who's buying that information well yeah marketers intelligence agencies foreign countries foreign governments but the ones you should worry about is hackers because they use the data about you to make their phishing attacks more effective more targetive they have your real details so they don't sound like strangers and i gotta tell you it's worked it's worked on us we got an email from a client somebody we deal with regularly with what they call an rfp request for proposal i went into our uh i think our continuity department uh actually first it went to lisa and because i have some software on here protecting her she couldn't open the request for proposal so she sent it on to the continuity her her staff and they opened it and it looked completely reasonable we have to respond to those because that's a client right so you i mean somebody's asking to buy ads so we respond to it except that it wasn't a client it was somebody posing a client because they knew who our clients were they knew who our ceo was they knew who our continuity department was they knew our entire org structure so they said a crafted phishing attack that was designed to be something we couldn't not click When we clicked it, it popped up what looked like a login to our Google Workspace account.

2:02:21Cory Doctorow:That happens all the time, right? So we just typed it in. I'm not going to say who, but we just typed it in. Turns out it wasn't. It was a man in the middle that looked exactly like the Google account. This happened back in the spring. And they had given the bad guy everything, including the two-factor authentication, because they were sitting there waiting for it, and they immediately got into our Google Workspace. Now, the good news is we caught it. We got rid of it before any damage was done. But that was really scary. That's as scary as the other time when we got, our staff got targeted text messages from the boss, except it wasn't from the boss, saying, buy us some gift cards and say, I'm in a meeting, I can't do it right now.

2:03:01Cory Doctorow:Look, because they have your real detail, they don't sound like strangers. These bad guys sound like clients, partners, your boss. That's why attacks using verified personal information are five times more likely to succeed. And the average incident costs a small business more than$120 ,000. And one in four businesses will be impacted this year alone. It's happened to us, to my knowledge, twice this year alone. That's why we signed up for Delete Me immediately. Delete Me reduces exposure by up to 95%. How do they do it? They do it by removing you, your management, your employees' personal information from hundreds of data broker websites.

2:03:40Cory Doctorow:And that starves hackers of the fuel they're using to build these highly targeted attacks. Very important. It's not a one-time thing. It's a subscription. And you need that because, yeah, you could pull down the information today, but these data brokers, they're cockroaches. You can't kill them. They'll start rebuilding the profile or they go bankrupt and change their name and just start over again. So Delete.me knows about this. They know where to go to remove your data and do it again and again. Plus, you'll get regular privacy reports so you always know what's been happening, what they found, what they removed.

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2:05:01Cory Doctorow:Thank you, DeleteMe. Great, great partner, great sponsor. And we're very happy to have their service. Patch Tuesday, I was doing security now with Steve Gibson and the information hadn't come out yet. And he said, we're going to watch this with interest because either it's going to go up or it's going to go down. The number of fixes. His theory, and I think Steve's smart, is that as more and more of these patches get fixed, eventually there'll be a point at which the number of patches, they'll go up, up, up, up, up, and then they'll start going down and eventually be zero because everything will be fixed.

2:05:40Cory Doctorow:Not this week. This week, Microsoft Patch Tuesday released more fixes than double the number of fixes they released all last year. 972 vulnerabilities patched 112 of them high severity were you surprised daniel no and yes i mean obviously the number is high and it was that's good increase we should say that's good it's good and i'm not surprised because of obviously the tools that they're using right so it's not like that microsoft is finally taking security seriously It's just that now there's AI tools that help them go through and find these exploits ahead of time before they get out there. So this is where, you know, AI has a more interesting role in terms of software development.

2:06:33It can be both used as a sword so you can probe systems and find attacks and people can use that to exploit. Or a company like Microsoft can do that to themselves and try to find the exploits before they are public and patch them. and it's doing the job of more and more humans, which I think is actually a really good thing. So this is a good thing. It's making the operating system more secure. It's doing it before these exploits were made public in the first place. And it goes to show you how this technology does improve. And to your point, yeah, in theory, this stuff could drop down. Of course, they may release Windows 12 a couple of years from now, in which case it'll probably go back up again.

2:07:13But they do have a lot of old legacy code and it makes trying to pass this stuff very challenging. So it's nice to see the technology kind of working in the favor of them. But yeah, it'll be interesting to see these numbers go up or at what point they start going back down again.

2:07:29Cory Doctorow:Are they using, do you know, are they using AI? I mean, they must be. Yes. Yeah. So this is really a success story in some ways for things like Mythos. I believe so. Are they using their own models, Microsoft models, or are they using Mythos? What are they using? That I don't know the specifics of, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's... No one does it except the people inside Microsoft, I think. Right, right. So I do believe that, yeah, they're using these tools and I think it's helping out a lot. That's why they're discovering so much because they know if they don't do this, companies are going to be using AI themselves to probe and find the exploits in Windows.

2:08:06Bad guys. In bad guys, yeah. So they're trying to get ahead of the situation here while they have these frontier models at their disposal.

2:08:14Cory Doctorow:right right uh so and the other thing i would say is i said sometimes people say oh you see how buggy windows is but it's a big code base and it's always good that they find these and patch them that's just yeah good thing and buggy and i want to even you know buggy implies bugs right like errors and you know things crashing and that's not what this is a security exploit isn't a bug in that traditional sense. It's a bug in the more general sense, right? But these aren't, they're not patching things that people noticed. You would not encounter these. Right, right. Unless you're back. But they are also going to be using, yeah, they're also going to be using AI for, you know, quality of life things, right?

2:08:58We even see this in video games, right? They're using AI and video game development as well, not to, some companies are trying to steer away from creating the media assets for games, but instead they're using it for validation tests and making sure that the game performs in certain ways. I think this is a strong case where AI actually does play a super important role that shouldn't be really controversial because it can do the work of many humans on a different scale. And whether you're an indie developer making a video game or you're a giant corporation doing one, you know, using AI to stress test and look for these exploits, I think, could be very valuable.

2:09:39Yeah.

2:09:41Cory Doctorow:Let's talk TVs. Gamers Nexus, a YouTube channel, did a very interesting thing. I guess we've always thought, we thought for a long time, that smart TVs were spying on us. Yeah. I don't think any of us thought they were doing it at this level. Not to mention a company like LG, right? That's the biggest problem. Yeah, like Vizio, it's kind of like Roku, you know? Come on. Yeah, Roku, you know, it's like, but LG is like - Or Tele, the one that actually does spy on you and tells you. Oh, that's right. You could buy a free TV. There's a free TV. Buy it. You don't buy it. It's a free TV. Yeah. And it wasn't so much spying on you as putting an ad at the bottom, right?

2:10:29Cory Doctorow:Like it was a scroller. It had a camera that watched you to make sure you were watching the TV. Are you watching the ads? How do you feel about them? So what is the LG doing? It's a little mixed, I guess. Yeah. I mean, if you go by what LG says, they're not doing anything wrong, but if you go by all the other independent analysis, there seems to be a lot of recording of the usage of microphones and, you know, data being sent constantly. The thing is, to their credit, you know, a lot of the data is encrypted. So it's not like you can necessarily see what's being sent. You could just see where it's going to in the frequency at which it's happening um but i'm looking right now at an lg uh oled screen it was the best tv ever i mean it's really good quality is it recording what i'm saying right now it's off the the theory well the argument that they made or the point that they were saying the lg was saying that it's it's similar to the voice assistants so the um alexas and the Google homes, you know, it's listening for the wake word because you can control it with your voice.

2:11:38Right. Which I don't use. And you can either use the word, you can say it out loud ambiently, or you can press a button on the remote to trigger it. So you can turn. So it's listening

2:11:49Cory Doctorow:in the same way an Amazon Echo. An Amazon Echo. Well, yes, that's how they characterize it. But the discovery was that it's constantly sending. So they're saying the discovery is that actually it's constantly listening. Because the Amazon Echo doesn't send anything to Amazon until it hears the wake word. It's listening until it thinks it hears the wake word. Yes. And then it sends whatever it follows to the servers and processes that. But it's not sending anything. and if it if it hears the wake word it mishears the wake word then it in theory immediately deletes anything that hits sent because it says oh this was misheard this wasn't the wake word but yes that's the way lg's tvs are supposedly working is just by the same way that your smart speakers are because it has a built-in a voice assistant like a smart speaker does but the data implies that it is sending recordings constantly and lg is disputing this it also it's also saying that it was sending um content like what content you were watching using yeah it's like a shazam feature it tries to figure out what you're watching you're actually watching so they use so gamers nexus used wireshark uh to watch the network traffic yeah uh they also looked at the TV firmware.

2:13:13Cory Doctorow:They also looked at the memory in the TV. They said the LG TVs are, quote, capable of identifying your IP address, geographic location, the name of every Wi-Fi network in the vicinity. But everything with Wi-Fi can do that. And signal strength, channel numbers of neighboring Wi-Fi networks in range, and other devices on the network, even if not connected to the TV in any way. And the internal IP addresses of other devices on the network alongside others. I got to tell you, your laptop can do the same thing. Anything with a Wi-Fi radio could do that. And I think the concern people have here is that they're not expecting their TV to be able to do this.

2:13:52Like, you're right. Lots of devices can do this. But you know that and you're aware of it. You're used to seeing a prompt that says, can I have access to your local network? Can I do this? And this is a little bit more buried. And in particular, I think the issue here is that why is it that even when it's offline or on standby mode that it's doing this we were able

2:14:15Cory Doctorow:to capture gamers nexus said microphone audio while the tv was unplugged from the network so it's not even on the network the audio was reportedly stored locally in plain text so the theory being as soon as it connected to the network it would just get sent right up but again because it was encrypted the wire shark couldn't see what pack what was the content of the packets being sent uh lg's response is um lg smart tvs do not and i want to underscore this word though they did not continuously record or transmit users conversations speech to text processing begins only if a user activates a voice interaction through a supported wake word feature by pressing the voice button on the remote control audio is processed locally on the tv for the wake word and if no wake word is detected it is not converted to text stored or transmitted that's how alexa works we know that right yeah it's the same same kind of mechanism voice recognition results and related technical logs may be generated as part of processing a voice command these records are associated with specific voice interactions do not indicate continuous recording.

2:15:31Cory Doctorow:So, I mean, they're saying we don't do it, but they're not saying, well, they're saying we do it, but only in certain circumstances. It also uses something called automatic content recognition, voice recognition, and interest-based advertising. Those are optional. You can turn those off. And LG says they're not even on by default. Users can choose to enable those features and can manage or withdraw consent through the tv settings good luck though looking through the tv yeah so to um to ratings credit the the site ratings uh they do they have a video out right now and they go through and they tested a bunch of tvs and boxes as well yeah they all basically do it and the trouble is they all have call it by a different name so you have to kind of figure out what each one is called some have different some yeah you can just disable No problem.

2:16:25Others make you like reset the TV and go through the process again. And then you have to tell it no on all the various things. You know, so there's going to be different levels here. And there's, yeah, questions about what TVs. Some send more, some send less. You know, it seems to be that if you want the safest approach, you use to get a smart TV. Don't let it connect to the internet. But then you use some sort of box to connect to, you know, Apple TV or something. and use that as the interface.

2:16:52Cory Doctorow:Richard Campbell says that if you put a pie hole in, you can control what data is sent. You can still get your TV updated, but you can say, don't send anything back to the home office. And so it is possible to connect and then filter. Yeah, because the pie hole is... I know, it's beyond most people. What they're saying here is, yeah, we don't do... We're not sending this... We're not recording everything you say, and we're not sending it. But they are recording some things, and they are sending some things. And what are they then doing with those recordings? And, you know, it's all feeding the advertising.

2:17:26And that's obviously where, and this is, LG is not alone. Many TVs do this, and we've known this for years, but LG definitely got, you know, what they, the concern here is that they're doing way more than they say they're doing. They are recording way more than they say they are recording based on the evidence that was uncovered versus what they're telling us. And you can turn these things off. You can disable them in settings, but are they really disabled? Exactly. How do you actually know? We can't trust that now. And this is where, I mean, to Dan's point, and this is what we've recommended, is, you know, you buy your TV, and there is actually one, I think it's Panasonic.

2:18:03We wrote an article about this recently that we thought they accidentally launched a TV that you don't have to connect to the internet, but it seems like it was actually on purpose. So you can now buy a TV that is dumb.

2:18:14Cory Doctorow:I want a dumb TV. It's a good TV that has a good screen, you know, and it has no Wi-Fi requirements because you can connect to the internet, but you do not have to because this is the problem. A lot of these smart TVs, they just will not work at all. Even if you plug a box in, you still can't get them to work without connecting them to the internet. So, yeah, that's the best solution if you're concerned about this is stick an Apple TV box on one of these things. Some people suggest getting a projector because that doesn't have any of the hardware. Well, it depends what kind of projector you get.

2:18:48And also you spend an awful lot of money on a projector. But yes, there are solutions around. And I think we might start to see more manufacturers come out with TVs that aren't smart because there are people that really do want them. They don't want to have their TVs connected to the Internet. And two points to this, too. When the first 4K TV was showed off at CES, its retail price was$20 ,000. That was the very first 4K TV. Now you can get them for$200. one of the reasons why tvs are so affordable is because of this model it's the same thing with pcs and laptops right where they'll get subsidies through pre-installed software which angers everybody but you can literally just right click it on install it but it's one of the reasons why the laptop prices can be competitive and that's what you're seeing here it's like i was just i'm recently looking for a new tv and i'm shocked at how low some of the prices are for some of these devices.

2:19:45So that's the trade-off that you're getting for a lot of this. The other one is, even though if you can turn all this stuff off and opt out and all that, that's good. But this is a vector for attack. John Kiriakou, who worked for the CIA, famously went to prison for talking about the torture program, has talked about this. The CIA can easily hack someone's TV, turn on those microphones and record everything, even if the TV's powered off and all this kind of stuff. Oh, that's a good point. Yeah, so these are just different attack vectors. So that's the CIA, and I get a lot of people are like, well, I'm not doing anything.

2:20:22But the point is that there's no reason, especially with AI, that other nefarious actors couldn't figure out how to do this, and they probably already are, right? So this is just something for people to think about.

2:20:34Cory Doctorow:How much of this, Daniel, is related to, I suspect that GamersNexus did these tests because last month, LG Monitors started downloading McAfee ads on Windows PCs. Is that right? Did I get that right? Even Microsoft stepped in and said, whoa, all right, guys, you got to slow down. Because they were using Microsoft's Windows Update feature to install this. Yeah. It was sort of like a help around. Microsoft made them stop. Yeah. Microsoft made them stop. But the fact that they did it in the first place kind of opened the door to what else might they be doing? It's like every company in the world, right?

2:21:11They're going to push to see how far they can get away with something. And then like, all right, you got us. All right, we won't do that. But had no one said anything, not only would they have done it, other companies would have started doing it too. I have to correct myself. It wasn't Panasonic. It was Vizio.

2:21:27Cory Doctorow:Vizio. Vizio made a great dumb TV by accident. By accident. It might have been by accident. Yes. So there are options out there now, which there weren't for a long time. I've seen people come up with a solution of just like buying like panels. You know how like companies buy like panel, just a panel to run ads or something and just plug an Apple TV box into that because it is, has gotten so frustrating for people that don't want to connect their TV to the internet. And it's, there aren't many dumb TVs out there anymore, sadly. A tip for that though. Another way to get it. Good news and bad news.

2:22:01Cory Doctorow:The bad news is that firmware we put in the TV, it doesn't work. The good news is they're selling like hotcakes. Yeah.

2:22:11Cory Doctorow:Everybody seems to want it. Another place to get a dumb TV is store signage. You know those signage things on... Yeah, that's what... Right, that's what I was talking about. That's what she was saying. Yeah, get like the menu board from your local sandwich shop. Yeah. It'll have hoagies burnt into it, but no spyware. So there's a lot to be said for, you know, it's probably a niche market at this point, but this push for dumb technology again, right? You're seeing it, especially in the auto space, a lot of people are really upset with the way cars are going, you know, what I call the Teslafication of cars, even though it's like, in my opinion, Tesla gets a lot of the software stuff done right, but the other auto manufacturers are having a lot of issues, I would say, trying to get it stable.

2:22:56A lot of people are just getting it like they just want to pick up. They don't need all this giant infotainment system connecting to the Internet. Five apps got to do this. And so there is this kind of market, I think, for getting into dumber technology where things are just not connected. How far that goes, I don't know, you know, because it is convenience. And ultimately, that's what people kind of want. well and you get the fast tv channels now like a lot of these the free uh the free yeah the free ad supported tv um services which have gotten surprisingly good i have to say though they must

2:23:34Cory Doctorow:have worked hard to get that acronym oh these things are fast yeah free ad supported tv it's like i feel like we had this at one point how to get a tv oh yeah it's what we called network television back in the day. I pretty much watch regularly the All Cheers channel. It's All Cheers all the time? Yeah, I love those channels. They're the best. They should have called it Hello Norm. Yeah, that's funny. So you're saying they're pretty good, Jennifer? Like what? Like All Cheers all the time? So the Fast TV channels, there's all sorts on there. I mean, you can get like the NBC News channel on there.

2:24:12and like not your regular over the air.

2:24:16Cory Doctorow:So for us older people that grew up with ad-supported television, it just feels like home. Oh yeah. Because I dream of doing it has those pauses every five or six minutes for an ad. You might as well stick an ad in there. You guys don't use Pluto TV? And you can have like all Cheers or all Baywatch or all Friends. When Amazon started showing ads, it said, but for$4.99, you could turn it off. I immediately clicked the button. I just... So I would actually go try Pluto because they have channels dedicated for every sitcom from the 70s and 80s and 90s. That's an interesting idea. They also have thousands of movie channels.

2:24:53They'll have drama. They'll have horror. How often do the ads come up? Are they a lot? No, no. Knowing that, sometimes the ads, they don't have an ad. So they'll just play some nice music. And it always has a counter in the corner. It tells you like 30 seconds left or something like that.

2:25:09Cory Doctorow:My penalty is, in the early days of internet streaming TV, there weren't enough advertisers. So you'd seen the same ad eight times. That still happens. I hate that. I know. I don't want to see that ad again. Yeah. But the commercial breaks aren't, it's not like every two minutes. It's not as bad as it used to be. No, no. I find it acceptable. Plus it gives you that chance to go to the kitchen and get a sandwich or whatever. I was going to say, if it's in the background too, if it's just background, noise. Yeah, it feels very there is still something to be said about browsing and like, oh look this movie's on right now versus Yeah, it's like the old days.

2:25:48Picking a movie. You might have just convinced me to check out Pluto. I'm going to check it out now.

2:25:54Cory Doctorow:Is 2B also that or no? That's something else. Yeah, 2B. There's a few of them. Samsung has it on. Flum and Binggong. I feel like 2B is kind of cringe though. I don't know. If I told someone I was watching 2B, I'd be going it's got a it's a cool that's a cool chime you must be a green bubble you know what i watch like every single night is because there's a dedicated mystery science theater 3000 channel and a riff track channel i watch all i watch is mystery science theater and so it's like it's just on 24 7 i like that kind of a thing oh well you're in when you're in the mood you know you can always go where everybody knows your name or you can always you know you just know that there is you know it used to be we would say there's an i love lucy episode playing at any given time somewhere on the planet earth uh it's like that you can always watch you know i just like it's just background and sometimes you just want something on the background yeah it keeps popping up on the background on my fridge sorry on your fridge do you have one of those I have the Samsung fridge.

2:27:01And it has, so Samsung has its own Samsung TV Plus, I think it's called.

2:27:06Cory Doctorow:What, do you stand in front of the fridge watching TV? I don't, but occasionally it just starts playing TV shows on my fridge. Is that what they think people are going to do? Like they're just going to stand there with their mouth open in front of the fridge? Like WALL-E. Well, it's, you know, you have a TV in your kitchen often when you're cooking. Yeah, and just have something on in the background. Oh, okay. Oh, that makes sense. All right. But it's just, I didn't ask it to, it just pops up. That's what's concerning. I don't know. Is it scary? Like, what do you think's making that happen? I don't know.

2:27:37It does have a mind of its own. And it's weird when it just shows a really odd TV show that I wasn't intending to watch. I don't like that. I don't like that. I really don't like that. Yeah. I thought I would like watching TV on my fridge, but I don't. Only you would say that, smart home mama.

2:27:58Cory Doctorow:uh i mean people don't remember but in the days of network television at a half hour tv show was 22 minutes long so they could put in what is that 18 no 12 no eight anyway a lot of commercials i'm so 44 minutes quiet i'm watching the x files on pluto right now thank you yeah yeah yeah there's an x files channel yeah it's good stuff i'm telling you i don't search for spock i can't wait till i'm in the old folks home and i could just leave that on all the time oh it's molder and scully again there's a star trek channel for i know the truth is out there somewhere you're watching this week in tech our show today brought to you by scribe think about how much your team has figured out on their own shortcuts fixes better ways of doing things that have never actually been written down anywhere.

2:28:55Cory Doctorow:That's the gap Scribe was built to close. And that's what today's sponsor, Scribe, does best. Scribe is a specialized intelligence platform trusted by 94 % of the Fortune 500. You just do the process as you normally would, and Scribe captures it in real time, turns it into documentation automatically. There's no manual writing, no manual screenshots, no starting from scratch every time someone new joins the team. Scribe automatically redacts sensitive information, names and account numbers and emails. As an admin, you can enforce this across your entire team, and nothing is published without human review.

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2:30:24Cory Doctorow:It's really interesting how many of our advertisers these days are our AI companies. I think 100 % or close to it. It's a really interesting time. um as long as we're talking privacy lg tvs uh the flock backlash is everywhere city governments are being told take down those cameras although apparently in many cases they're replacing the cameras with cameras from axon so it's not flock anymore but it's still watching you and now retailers are putting it in ulta beauty which is a beauty store we have one in petaluma turns out, according to Rachel LaPointe, who is a Substack newsletter writer, turns out to be Flock's biggest commercial customer.

2:31:14Cory Doctorow:I mean, there's no license plates inside an Ulta, I don't think. There's a lot of shoplifting inside an Ulta, though. I guess so. Yeah. I mean, didn't those Flock cameras start like in Home Depot parking lots? I believe, I don't know. I believe it if you say so. I used to see them out there all the time because of all the stealing of high-priced tools. But they're also in places that they should, feels like they shouldn't be like playgrounds. Yeah, that's a big thing. I've even seen some people have turned down buying a property because there's now maps that you can go check to see where the flat cameras are and point it at.

2:31:49Every time you pull out of your driveway, you're on camera. Yeah, and so sometimes people will be on the camera and they're like, oh, I'm not going to buy this house because it's part of the angles on a flat camera.

2:31:57Cory Doctorow:Maybe you should get this car. which is painted to make flock cameras lose their mind. Bill Swearengin, he's the founder of Six Cyber. He spent the past year running 31 million tests, developing something he calls no recognition. It's a reinforcement learning model that generates patterns capable of defeating the algorithms inside flock cameras and other devices he actually has a a kickstarter campaign going no recognition that you could buy adversarial clothing so here's a i don't know would you wear this is actually pretty striking how do you describe your fashion sense adversarial so it's a so i guess if you're on you know the the this will make the camera crazy you know i should just get one of these you see what happens yeah But it's just one of those things where it kind of kicks the can down the roads.

2:32:59Like if your car looks like that, it's like, all right, we just now need to look for this really crazy. Look for the car. That's true. Wasn't it like in a naked gun or something like that where someone, they cut and copied the letters and wrote a letter so they couldn't trace it? And they're like, all we got to do is find the crazy typewriter that did this.

2:33:17Cory Doctorow:My ex-wife never liked coming by the studio because there were cameras everywhere and she didn't want to be on camera. and uh colleen kelly our uh chief engineer at the time wanted to build her a a ultraviolet light ring that she could wear around her neck like a necklace that would beam invisible light to you but light that would blind the cameras so that when she walked into the studio she was just like a glowing ball of light and be invisible i don't think colleen ever built it but she she worked at meta for a long time. Maybe she did. The no recognition Kickstarter also offers this. An elastic tube gaiter that you pull on so that you aren't susceptible to face recognition.

2:34:04Cory Doctorow:You may mock it, but notice it's sold out. He's sold out of them. You know what else has your face? A regular bandana. Well, that's true. Except that somebody might mistake you for an ice. officer. No recognition hoodie, 75 bucks. The flagship. I don't get it. You still see her face. I was going to say, is there proof? I need some hardcore proof. I need to buy one of these and go stand in front of my cameras. Just go, hi, hi, hi. How do you know if it works? Well, I have so like I said earlier, my cameras when I walk up in front of them recognize me and they'll say, you know, It's saying that just the pattern will make it go.

2:34:49It makes the camera go crazy. Right. Like a camera or something.

2:34:53Cory Doctorow:It's not that it's not seeing your face. It just makes the camera. Watch. So you can see it's detecting a person. And as soon as the camera, for some reason, it's like hacking the camera. Of course, this becomes a. Just having the pattern somewhere on you means I can't see you. Well, that's what he says. I guess it's a tit for tat thing, right? at some point i would imagine the engineers be like okay we'll try to code around that right exactly if you detect these kinds of patterns yeah like it's i don't know i love it that he's using ai to generate these like what can't you recognize and knowing the the country we live in now wearing that will probably get you stopped right like well what are you doing you wouldn't be wearing that unless you're doing something wrong so what's what are you up to but you know you know what there is good reason people are nervous uh 404 media has discovered uh the the dhs department of homeland security is doing predictive policing by analyzing americans financial data they they analyze the data to find people to pull over and uh investigate By the way, I don't know if that's legal.

2:36:13Cory Doctorow:That doesn't sound legal. Like it violates the Fifth Amendment or something. DHS and other LEAs, law enforcement agencies, need to have a reason to pull you over related to road behavior. But how do they get, maybe they can get probable cause. If you follow something long enough, you could find probable causes. You accidentally go over the line, that's a moving violation. Yeah. How are they using your financial data? What they think? Oh, they're so poor, they're likely to go. Or something like, oh, you're getting paid in cash or I don't know. I don't know. That's what I don't. We don't know. The predictive policing thing is scary.

2:36:53That's the minority report. Minority report. I was going to say like minority report was an instruction book for law enforcement, which is like, all right, we just got to wait for technology to catch up. And of course that was going to happen.

2:37:04Cory Doctorow:because you which does a face recognition they get a lot of trouble because their face recognition was a little racist shall we say uh now they're testing an ai tool that would let cops unearth your life online this is from wired inquiry iq a previously unreported prototype tested a model from xai to surface associates social accounts and other information about people identified through clear view so i guess it's the next step after face recognition is well uh let's go analyze their social media and find out and i bet it understands sarcasm i bet it oh it's so good understanding the sarcasm that i'm doing right now no which means you're in the database buddy i'm there now i was already there so it's the unreleased tool is designed to take details and investigator unearths from a clear view search a search of face recognition database which we already know sucks and then automatically fan out across the web opening web pages analyzing images and assembling what it finds into a profile containing possible employers aliases associates and physical characteristics of a person police are investigating.

2:38:23Don't they already do this? I mean, I feel like this is just an extension of the Homeland Security September 11th fallout, right? This is what they were already doing to try to connect dots. This is what happens when you prioritize fear in your society. Not that the Democrats don't do this, but Republicans are very good at fear. Everyone's trying to kill you. These people want you dead.

2:38:47Cory Doctorow:these people so in order to stay safe i'm going to allow you to do all this stuff take all the cameras around my house and use those in police investigations i'm then everybody acts surprised like what do you mean they're spying on me through my tv right well but you're safe gonna happen and you know what it's true it works you you know uh our local county our town our little town which has i think a half dozen flock cameras published a report on how many missing senior citizens were found because of the flock cameras yeah well that's great that's i mean literally the problem with all this yeah i mean i grew up in london we have cameras on every street corner and it's famous for that it's yeah and i grew up in an era when we had um people putting bombs in trash cans and blowing up um train stations and it definitely helped stop things like that but the problems you have are based on the government that you are under like do you trust the government to use this technology responsibly yeah when you combine it with deep fakes and the ability to like say the government goes we got you doing all this on video and they show video it's just like yeah that's not me and it's just like you know and we've seen the plenty of arrests by flaw cameras where the police go to like a woman's house and they're like we got you and from someone's house stealing this package and you know it turns out no it was wrong you know so it's just like strange new world well and then there was the nancy guthrie case where they had all the footage um from the the doorbell camera and then it did no good whatsoever so i mean it's a double-edged sword there's there are definitely arguments for how beneficial cameras can be in in solving some crimes not a lot of evidence but some evidence um and and not i think the biggest thing is that it's not really a deterrent i think they've proven like the fact that there are cameras doesn't really stop people from um committing crimes but the it does potentially help you find the person um but not always as has been proven but having some information is obviously better than none it helps police but when it's abused if the police abuse it or if your government abuses it then this is there's all those cases right it's like the police it's like oh they've accessed uh they're tracking this person 45 times today and it's like oh who is that person oh it's an ex-lover it's like come on man yeah so that was pretty bad yeah i mean like i feel like the police have like done the most damage to flock it's just like you know where everybody here is like there's the potential for governmental abuse.

2:41:24And here's the government out there literally abusing it every single day and it's all just come out. It's like, okay, that's why people are reacting to this stuff. There's not the potential. They already are using it for the dumbest things. It's just like, you know.

2:41:39Cory Doctorow:Well, I just have to point out, we say don't let the terrorists win, but that's the point of terrorism is to terrify you. And what do people do when they're terrified? they give up their civil rights yes they uh they uh they lose their freedom uh yeah sounds like the terrorists won sad to say yeah yeah i think that is a lesson from 9-11 literally everything did change from that time and we live in fear now yeah kids don't everybody uses that anymore yeah and and that's the thing kids don't go outside anymore and yet the crime rates between now and then have gone down. It's safer in New York City than ever before in history.

2:42:25And here in war-torn Portland, it's very safe.

2:42:28Cory Doctorow:Well, I may not like surveillance, but I am putting a camera in my toothbrush. We'll talk about that. I should have known you were going to buy that. The second they launched it. I've got a flock camera in my toothbrush. We'll talk about that when we continue our last segment. Your cavities are illegal. You've been very patient. Jennifer Pattison-Tui, Daniel Rubino, and Micah Sargent, wonderful to have you on the show. I really appreciate it. Our show today brought to you by Bitwarden. I have to say, when it comes to trust, there's no better way to get my trust than to be open source. And if I'm putting my passwords and all my secrets in there, I want it to be open source.

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2:46:41Cory Doctorow:That's worth it right there. The price of admission. Oh, it's free. Save your seat. Just go to opensourcesecuritysummit.com. Just one more way Bitwarden is committed to you, open source and security. We love them. Bitwarden.com slash Twitter. Do me a favor. Go there. Tell your friends, tell your family. If you have family members, I know you use a password manager. You're smart, obviously, but there are people in your family, I know there are in mine who just say, oh, I don't want a password manager. And one of their big objections, I don't want to pay for it. Tell them Bitwarden's free for you.

2:47:15Cory Doctorow:It's done right. It's secure. It's easy to use. And it will protect you, please. Get started today with a free trial of a Bitwarden Teams or Enterprise plan or get started for free across all devices as an individual user. Bitwarden.com slash twit. That's Bitwarden.com slash twit. Thanksgiving's coming that's going to be the that's the big password discussion meal tell me about your password security dad huh all right dyson announced this uh i think september 1st it's sold out almost instantly it is a 500 toothbrush with a camera in it it also has a reservoir because is this your finger i recognize your finger that's my finger are you using one of these you already have it i can't get one of these you gotta review down there's a video of me no this was at i went to the launch event which was i i called an iphone-esque launch event for a toothbrush it was like they had a big room like all beautiful like really well lit like well that's dyson they're the The apples are vacuum cleaners.

2:48:30Cory Doctorow:They are, yes. And the toothbrush was... Did they allow you to brush your teeth with it? No, I wouldn't want to. Are you afraid of the... So the theory is the camera in the head is taking pictures really rapidly, looking for gaps, and when it sees a gap, it fires... Mouthwash. So the little reservoir... So, yeah, I was able to brush on a fake... You could see the fake teeth there. Yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, and it was shooting out. Every time you could see. Oh, that's the other thing. On your phone, you can look at your teeth. You can look at your teeth with this 100 ,000 pixel resolution, which is like nothing, right?

2:49:12That's really, really, really low resolution. I don't want any more than that. That's fine. And that's the camera there at the top. And it has this little reservoir. And then I also, those were the fans.

2:49:21Cory Doctorow:You also had to stand in front of the fans. They look like the sandworms. Thousand dollars. it does it looks like a sandworm it does oh my god i know they're kind of freaky looking and those things kind of open and close like the teeth oh lovely um but the toothbrush shoots so it uses something called gap optical targeting um which analyzes 28 live images from the camera every second to find gaps between your teeth and when and as your as the toothbrush passes the gaps it shoots the mouthwash oh like a floss like it's like those um hydro flosser things yeah water picks water picks thank you um but see i use a water pick i thought oh this would be great it'll be all in one all in one that's the idea plus i'll have videos i can send friends and family i'm worried it's gonna think my throat instagram i just don't want to think my throat is a gap and then i'm going it was very powerful like it was you like my hand kind of shook every time it was a water pick it was sandblasting your teeth yeah and it's a much apparently a wider jet than the water pick so it's meant to be more effective so um and it does and it's supposed to shoot out um my dentist told me to use a water wash yes but but i don't think they say a water pick is better than flossing i think they know i do both that's true they don't they say and you know when i go in they say oh you're using both aren't you i say yes i am they oh my dentist said leo leo they said good boy leo they said he said you're going to keep your teeth till you're dead oh which well i thought was like a threat sweet thing to say but you have great teeth you got there sorry the idea is that um you also can see inside your mouth so if you have any issues and you can take videos and send them to your dentist i mean no my dentist loves it when i do that it is all local so there isn't any flock integration um it does it is all like just how long before dhs has videos of my teeth let's face it between your phone and the toothbrush um and very low resolution and then dyson has formulated some special toothpaste that's the no you need to buy dyson toothpaste and tooth and mouthwash and and obviously the heads as well and you you can use other mouthwash it it's not but if it foams then the camera won't be able to see the toothpaste yes is low foaming but who really needs to see you don't really need to see the camera i can imagine that would be fun once and then you're not going to i had i had a toothbrush that uh it didn't take pictures but it would tell you where you were in your mouth you know had this app and all this stuff i used it once it does all of that and i said i don't need that i just brush my teeth it's so but the thing the interesting thing is so these did you said they sold out but actually i mean the the theory is um some early people got hold of theirs i think they sent some to influencers and also um a few people got them in that first week and within days uh they started failing oh no because it sounds like something wasn't properly waterproofed and water was getting into it to the battery compartment and causing it to fail within like 30 seconds well so i'm glad i didn't get mine yet i mean i ordered it that day but it well so i think i mean so i reached out to dyson and they said that there there have been some complaints um that some of the early batches of dyson's new is called camera jet is the name of product, may have experienced a component issue.

2:53:00So they weren't very specific, but basically, water is getting into them. And a lot of them, it sounded like judging by Reddit, there are a lot of people that have had issues.

2:53:09Cory Doctorow:It's not even on Amazon anymore. It's gone. So one of the conspiracy theories is that they've pulled it because they've realized there's an issue and they're going to have to fix it before they sell them again. And yeah, so they've been out of stock on the uk and the u.s sites pretty much since the second day um they went on sale so we will i would probably wait also they won't let you return it if you use it because oh yeah it's a used toothbrush you know what it's not on my amazon list anymore oh wait there it is it's all it says is order received temporarily out of stock yeah dyson did say they They are working with customers and will help.

2:53:50Cory Doctorow:Of course they're going to replace it. Yeah. A few people reported saying they were having issues because the support was saying, well, you can't return it because it's a hygiene product. But if it's failing right out of the box, they should be replacing it. I want a new one. I'm not returning it. I'm kind of surprised. It doesn't feel very Dyson. No. Unfortunately. Well, you know, their new vacuums were all made. Have things changed? Well, so I've covered the robot vacuum space and they released their first robot vacuum, not their first, their first robot vacuum mop last year. They had been doing robot vacuums for a while.

2:54:26They did it different from everyone else because they're Dyson. And they were actually very good at vacuuming, very good, but they were not good at being robots. They couldn't find their way around anything. Bad robot. Bad robot. And so this new one - Robot, you suck.

2:54:43Cory Doctorow:That's good, but you're stuck. You need to actually move. And so they launched a lot of fanfare last IFA, a new robot, completely new design, looked like all the other robot vacuum mops out there. And it took a while, but they have finally admitted to us that they developed it in partnership with Picea, which is the company, the Chinese ODM that bought a robot. and also makes robot vacuums for Shark. Well, they partner with. Isn't Shark like Dyson's arch rival enemy? Main competitor. So Picea, so all of these companies say, you know, we partner, we use components from not necessarily, you know, so these are Shark Design, Dyson Design, iRobot Design, but they are working with Picea, all three of the companies.

2:55:40And you can see the products look very similar. You can Picea that they all... You can Picea. Yeah. And so this was the first Dyson product that didn't have a Dyson motor in it because they actually used a Picea motor. That's like the one thing that you want to be other than the cyclone. You also want a robot vacuum to find its way around your house. And that seemed to be a problem that Dyson wasn't able to solve on its own. So they use this technology. The Chinese companies, the Chinese robot vacuum companies have definitely nailed navigation in homes. And so, you know, I guess this was their way of getting into the market because their previous models had not done well.

2:56:18And they've now released the second generation. There were three of them that they launched at this event of their robot vacuums and mops. So and those are all they look very similar to the first generation. They've added the green stain detecting light, which it uses UV to find stains. I love that from myself. Yeah. And well, this is, this is, so it's not just looking like the green thing helps you see, right. But this actually looks for stains using UV and then goes back and scrubs it. But Shark does the same thing. So like that, it's kind of a shame because Dyson has always been known as very innovative.

2:56:57Oh yes. So here's the, this was the real excitement from Eva.

2:57:01Cory Doctorow:This is what, this is a vacuum on a vacuum. It's like the vacuum with two backs. What's, what what's happening this was the duo that i cared about leo this was the duo for me this was the room ladies and gentlemen so okay so it does look a little like r2d2 what's going on it does so um births a baby robot oh here it comes here oh there it goes so it is for those listening, it is a larger robot vacuum that has a smaller one on top and it uses a mechanical arm to lower the smaller vacuum to then send that off. So the idea is you have larger spaces in your home that need more deeper cleaning and most robot vacuums aren't powerful enough to really clean deeply.

2:57:55This is like a steam clean. You've probably seen when you like if you're in Vegas that you'll see these robots roaming around, like cleaning the floors, like floor washing things. Yeah, they used to have people attached,

2:58:07Cory Doctorow:but they've stopped doing that. Now it's just robots. So this is kind of like an industrial strength cleaner. It's a floor washer, steamer, and a robot vacuum. So it's not for consumers. No, it is for consumers, but it's industrially. With carpets. It's much more powerful. It's for carpeting. You need carpeting. Yeah, so it actually, in the video, you can see it sucks up some pasta. So it actually like it'll take, it's not just - I suck up pasta. What does it need? What do I need a vacuum for? That's why I've got dogs. I don't want the vacuum competing with me. It's too big to get around a lot of places in the home.

2:58:42So then when it gets to an area like around a table, it spits out the baby vacuum.

2:58:49Cory Doctorow:Does it pick up the baby vacuum after it's done? That's a good question. Yeah, the baby vacuum goes back into the robot arm and then it lifts it. That seems destined to fail. It's vastly overengineered. It is a concept. It is not actually for sale. They were waiting to see what reaction would be. I think the good thing here is I like the main vacuum. I'm like, actually, that is very similar to the Matic, which actually is one of my favorite robot vacuums. That one's getting a lot of attention. It has the big wheels so it can actually get around. And it is more powerful because one of the problems with today's robot vacuums is they talk about their suction power and stuff, but they're actually not as good as just using a stick vac.

2:59:35But if you run them every day, it will keep your house cleaner. But this one is designed to really tackle more dirt and grime in your home and bigger messes. It's a wet, dry vac. So that part, I think, is quite interesting. You know, you don't need the little baby one on top. I mean, that just seems a little... I kind of want one that has like maybe six DVD-sized robots that it sends out and they all just go around and clean. Little flying ones. Yeah. Drone robot vacuums that can just go up the stairs. Sort of sporing my house, you know?

3:00:07Cory Doctorow:So this isn't Roomba the Roomba we know. This is a Roomba that went bankrupt and was bought by a Chinese company, basically. Yes, correct. So Roomba does still... put out of business by chinese vacuums they were um they were so they went bankrupt basically well irobot is the company and um irobot was tried to be purchased by amazon and then that fell through um this was about three three years ago now um because of government um in the was it the fcc one of the government organizations the ftc ftc thank you getting my f's confused um ftc blocked the merger, as did some of the European equivalent.

3:00:50They said it would be too likely to create a monopoly for Amazon. And that basically was the nail in the coffin. Because at this point, iRobot had been declining its market share. It used to be the dominant robot vacuum company. They invented the category, didn't they?

3:01:07Cory Doctorow:I mean, they were the first. Very much. I mean, there was an Electrolux one that came out like a few weeks before. But yeah, room the room bill was the main the main one so yeah they went bankrupt at the end of last year and they were bought by their major supplier which was picea um and but the company irobot still exists they still have their boston headquarters but the majority of their development and products and all the people at this booth were all picea engineers um so yeah it's pretty much been they have a new ceo who's from picea so it's been very much taken over by Can you even buy these?

3:01:43Cory Doctorow:Didn't they block? Doesn't the federal government? Yes, this is the other thing that's happened to robot vacuums and robot lawnmowers and all robots. If you were hoping to have the humanoid in your home next year that everyone's promising us to do your housework, the FTC has banned. No, now this is the FCC. Sorry. No wonder you get it confused. The FCC has banned all mobile robots manufactured overseas. Does that include robot vacuums? Over a certain weight, yes, it includes robot vacuums and robot lawnmowers. So I was at EFA this last week and several of the robot vacuum manufacturers were there and they said the majority of the products they're releasing right now have already cleared FCC because they went through before the ruling came down, which was in July.

3:02:33um this is they've been added to the um the what is the list it has a name the list that this is the same for the drones covered covered the covered list the same for the drones and for the routers um and now mobile robots and so this is all robot thank you for protecting us from the

3:02:55Cory Doctorow:assault of the robot vacuum cleaners well i mean if you are concerned about privacy a robot vacuum yeah but that's privacy security they're not concerned about privacy look at the clock cameras look at that clear view ai this is what they said they don't care about look at data brokers they don't care about privacy so the fcc did say um you know privacy and security these mobile robots have cameras and oh my god but none of the ruling actually prevents and there's nothing in it that makes the company have to secure or do better privacy. You just have to ask. You just have to promise to start making your products in the U.S.

3:03:40Someday. Someday. But that's essentially what they're asking. And so it's more of the sort of the economic side rather than the privacy and security.

3:03:49Cory Doctorow:And this is why I don't want the federal government to nationalize AI, because if they were halfway smart, okay. but they're just greedy sons of bitches and they're just stupid well didn't so one of the rata manufacturer um so was it uh tp link he got he paid he bought the ceo of tp link did the golden ceo ticket thing yeah and then they got there yeah they got approved look at that oh would have thought it i think they did how much was it five million dollars just a little bribe is all it takes. And then ASUS just got it this week. And then the very first robot got it. Husqvarna, the Husqvarna law.

3:04:27Cory Doctorow:Which is it, by the way, that's a Chinese company, right? So they're originally Swedish. Swedish. Oh, the Swedes are hacking us. We're in deep, deep trouble. But they do have rather large American operations. Actually, they're in North Carolina. So they're Swedish from North Carolina, but they're hacking us. How much do they pay to get approved so yeah and they didn't the interesting thing about the robots is there's no uh limit so husqvarna now has just they're fine with for all of their products going forward whereas the routers um have a limit i think it's 2028 i think your your coverage expires but like everything else they're made in china so that's the issue right everything's made in china everything's yes everything's made in china and but and so i think what when you fill out these forms you have to promise to try and start building your products and show some kind of roadmap for building products in the U.S.

3:05:26But it doesn't sound like anyone's really done that.

3:05:29Cory Doctorow:Well, what's hysterical is in this press release from the FCC, it says we have a determination by the Department of War that these devices do not pose risks to national security. I mean, if there's any robot that poses any risk, I would say the one with the camera and the blades probably is fun. Yeah, that's true. We could be the attack of the killer lawnmowers. So the whole thing is kind of a farce. I spoke to a number of robot vacuum manufacturers at IFA and they were all just like, we're just going to wait and see because we think this is all going to change at some point. I think they were quite, the Chinese ones in particular were thinking, hopefully, that the, because there was a summit between Trump and the Chinese leader coming up.

3:06:11Yeah. And I think they were hoping that something might come out of that. to address this because it does all feel like politics rather than any actual consumer. They're not protecting us. They don't care. And, you know, taking away people's robot vacuums is going to make them mad. Yeah, exactly. You're coming into my home and taking away my robot vacuums. I've got five of them right now. I bet they've done research. They will not take, it will not come and take your robot vacuums. They're not going to come and take it. First, they took the robot vacuums. Oh, I forgot. And I didn't care because I wasn't a robot.

3:06:44The flock doesn't understand sarcasm. But yeah, the Roomba Duo may not be duoming into your life anytime soon because it is both not a real product yet and would not be covered under the current exemption. So they would have to get an exemption from the covered list in order to get this one into your home.

3:07:06Cory Doctorow:So you have to send one to Pete Hegseth so he can verify that it is not a national security threat and then we can get it. Maybe that's what it was. There's some leader out there who really wanted it. Get all the Hagsets have the cleanest house. Yeah, exactly. I've got a mansion. I need one in every room. I saw so many robots at Aoife this year, which was weird. You don't normally see a lot of robots there, but the humanoid thing was definitely... Did you see a lot of bipedal robots? Yeah, lots. They had a robot runway. They had them going down the runway, doing backtracks. Tackling people. Do you think this is a category, really, or is this like going to be like nerd helmets it's just going to be something the companies thought we wanted and nobody really wants that nobody wants a giant super strong humanoid in their house no i actually wrote a piece last week before ifa saying the headline was the robot butler revolution does not have legs um because i wouldn't be i wouldn't be unhappy if it didn't have legs so i don't i really don't think that was my point at least you have an escape route

3:08:17I think home robots are going to take off. You do, but they won't be bipedal humanoid. I don't think the full-on humanoid is really ever going to happen. And they're too complicated. They're too expensive. They don't do individual jobs well yet. Every single one I saw was remote controlled by a PlayStation controller. So, you know, they're not, you have to train them individually. Oh, that's an improvement.

3:08:40Cory Doctorow:I'm not going to do the laundry myself. I'm going to use a PlayStation controller. Use a PlayStation controller to control the robot to do it for me. And every time I see these robots doing laundry, filling dishwashers, folding clothes, they do it painfully slowly. Very, very slowly. It's like, get out of the way. Just let me do it. Get out of here. This is the problem. So this is what the companies say, is we can train these robots to do the specific tasks. There was even one booth where they gave me like the controllers and the headset and the idea is, you know, you go and do the task. Do it a thousand times and then the robots learned how to do it.

3:09:13I'm like, this isn't a plug and play consumer robot device. If I'm going to spend$3 ,000 on a robot that's going to do my laundry, I want to come, I want to just press a button and it goes and does it. I don't want to have to spend three weeks training it. So I think I'll get a dog if I need to train something. I think robots that are going to be able to do specific tasks well, we're going to start to see more of. I mean, we've seen the laundry folding robot at CES for like 10 years. Eventually, we will get to one that actually works. They will get there eventually. Dreamy has a robot that can, Dreamy is the robot vacuum manufacturer.

3:09:50They have one they showed off that can move the laundry from the dishwasher into the dryer. Oh, thank God.

3:10:00Cory Doctorow:I hate doing that. I hate doing that task. So I think we'll start to see more of those. lg has its cloyd um robot which actually uses its it connects to all the smart appliances in your home and communicates with them and sort of gives them commands so it's more like a smart home hub but it can also move around but it's on wheels not legs i want cloyd the robot barber that goes okay to give you a haircut yeah no thanks so i but people it's like ai though people well it is ai because this is why we're seeing so much development here is because the world models that they're able to start to train these robots on, we're seeing, I mean, physical AI, this is the manifestation.

3:10:44But so people are throwing an awful lot of money at these companies. Whether anyone's actually going to come out with something that a consumer level is going to be useful, I'm still very skeptical of. No, me too.

3:10:57Cory Doctorow:I'm glad to hear you say that. I mean, I love AI. As you know, I'm kind of all into AI, but this the bipedal robots nobody wants that in their house it's terrifying yeah i i having gotten up close and personal with some of these robots yeah you've been tackled by i could see it in an industrial environment yeah and i know when i'm in the nursing home they're probably going to be caring for me they'll be helping you stand up yeah i imagine 20 years from now i'll be going hello robot, but... Well, the companion robot thing is the big push we're seeing. A lot of, you know, the robot that will communicate with the senior living alone, sort of give them companionship, help keep their mind.

3:11:43Yeah, I could see that. There's a lot of that. And we've talked about LEQ on the show before. That's one that has done really well in this space. And there was one from Tuya at Aoife that was a companion robot that can actually move around and follow you and see if you fall that's funny because that's how i thought you pronounced

3:11:59Cory Doctorow:your name for years yeah yeah yeah devices somewhere in my house i have a two year device but i don't have any two-year labeled stuff some company has in something is using two you but i don't know what it is two years like they're a big cloud platform and they yeah yeah i mean but you don't actually buy that it's a light switch or it's something and i'm not sure i don't know i see it on my home assistant but i you know i push the button and nothing happens i don't know what it's probably bought it off aliexpress didn't you because it's yeah it was the guy who built the house did yeah hey i feel bad this has gone on way too long but it's so much fun going on robots sorry it's so much fun talking not just you i mean the whole thing i appreciate your very dear patients this is a world record beating show uh and we've practically lost daniel i don't know if he's still alive it's actually frozen that's not secretly having dinner and he's put his picture up and uh no it's so nice of you to be here daniel rubino from windows central thank you so much we really appreciate it he's editor-in-chief there your insights are always welcome and i knew that you would have some smart things to say about this ai doom that we are all facing thank Thank you, Daniel.

3:13:14Cory Doctorow:I appreciate it. Thank you, Mike. I am thrilled to have you as a partner at Twit. And of course, can't wait to see Hands on AI October 1st. Do you know what your first show is going to be? Yeah, it is going to be a basic understanding of LLMs. We got to lay a foundation. How these things work. Yeah, how they work. Yeah, I don't think it's widely known. And we just assume you put something in and something comes out, but I think there's more to it. I suspect. I may be wrong it's a black box there's got to be something in there thank you marka appreciate it see you soon and of course jennifer pattison tui and her robots and her is this oh is this going to talk to me this dog well this one's running out of battery sorry oh but is it growl does it purr does it look at me this is the ecovacs little milo it's a companion robot and it does bark and growl when it's not run out of battery this is the reason why they will not take over the world because they'll burn out the batteries.

3:14:10That's true. They don't have nuclear batteries yet. Yeah. Although I'm excited to see the Clara and the Sun movie that's coming out.

3:14:17Cory Doctorow:I loved the book. The book was wonderful, but I love all of, was it Ishikuro's books? They were just right. He wrote The Remains of the Day as well. Yes. And Clara and the Sun was just wonderful. It's about a robot. Mm-hmm. A companion robot. A companion robot that uses the sun, hence. Yeah. Thank you, Jennifer. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you. Thank you, Micah. Thanks to all of you for being here. Special thanks to our Club Twit members who make all of this possible. If you're not a member of Club Twit, please consider joining. Without you, there would be no Twit. $10 a month gets you ad-free versions of everything we do.

3:14:55Cory Doctorow:Special programming in our Club Twit. The club is a Discord server. It's really a fun place to hang out. But also, that's where Micah and I, for instance, did the Apple event. If you are not a member, I urge you to visit twit.tv slash club twit. If you listen to our shows and you want to support what we do, you want us to keep doing it, it's going to take your help. Twit.tv slash club twit. And thanks to all the members. We appreciate your support. We do twit every Sunday afternoon, 2 to, well, 5.30 in the afternoon Pacific time. That's 5 to 8.30 East Coast time. It's bedtime, practically, for you East Coasters.

3:15:31Cory Doctorow:We also do it at 2100 UTC. You figure out what your time zone is. You can watch us live on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, Kick, or if you're in the club, in the Club Twit Discord. After the fact, on-demand versions of the show are available at our website, twit.tv. There's a YouTube channel with a video. And, of course, the best way to get any of our shows, subscribe and your favorite podcast player. let's keep podcasting free and rss based and that's the best way to do it no spying on you just just content at your convenience um so please subscribe we appreciate it thanks for joining us everybody we'll see you next time another twit is in the can