This Week in Tech 1013 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Twit this week in tech. We have a great panel for you. Stacey Higginbotham is here, richard Campbell is here and, from TechCrunch, anthony Ha. Of course, we're going to talk about what to expect at CES this year. Of course, stacey is all about IoT. We'll talk about matter, we'll talk about AI and then the banned words of 2025, words we never want to hear again. All that and more coming up next on Twit.

00:32 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Podcasts you love from people you trust.

00:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is Twit. This is Twit this Week in Tech, episode 1013, recorded Sunday, january 5th 2025. Calamari in crisis. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news, brand new year, brand new news and a lovely panel assembled for your delectation. Stacy agobotham is here, long time host of this week in google. She still does stacy's book club in our club and she's now a policy fellow at consumer reports, where she just wrote a lovely piece on why all iot devices should have updatable firmware.

01:26 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
they should have an expiration date yeah, yeah, that was my 2025, like big. Thing. That's all I'm going to talk about next year.

01:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, actually brought you here to talk about matter, because you're also a home, or at least you do you talk about that too do you still do iot stuff. You don't do stacy on iot. You don't do the website, do you?

01:46 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
pay attention to it. I, oh, yeah, I totally pay attention to it. It's like still my job to pay attention to it, okay, but most of my time is like cyber security and then, oh, iot devices.

01:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know it's weird there's plenty to talk about in that area, goodness knows. Wonderful to see you again. We had a fun book club a couple of weeks ago, uh, and we are now voting on the next book, but I gave everybody plenty of time to vote. So if you're in club twit um, go to the stacy's book club section and you can look at the four books who's winning? Oh, I haven't checked I should check.

02:24 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I'll check.

02:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I always save a credit on Audible so that I can get the book if I haven't read it yet.

02:32 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I can never find where the poll gets.

02:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So the hum by. These are the various things Hum by Helen Phillips, those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson. The those beyond the wall by micaiah johnson, the practice, the horizon and the chain which sounds a little bit like the cook, the thief and her lover, by sophia samatar. And orbital by samantha harvey.

02:57 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
13 days left to vote I have orbital in my stack to go to mexico. Oh yeah, you're going to read it, yeah, yeah, yeah, on paper too, just because she, who must be obeyed, suggested I read something on paper that's Richard Campbell. Oh, you should read it on paper.

03:10 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I listened to it and I felt it was so literary and possibly beautiful, and I missed a lot of that beauty.

03:17 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Well, right now it's. I'm going to read it.

03:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I normally read Kindle, but actually read on paper papers, paper papers, really.

03:31 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
That's Richard Campbell. You may remember him from Windows Weekly Run as Radio and from the last episode of Twit.

03:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's great to see you Feeling a little fixturist here, leo. We like you so much. We brought you back. Great to see you. Actually, we had Paris inked in, but she's not feeling well. So thank you, richard, for filling in at the last moment. We appreciate it Also here from TechCrunch. She. Thank you, richard, for filling in at the last moment. We appreciate it Also here from TechCrunch. She's their weekend editor, anthony Ha. Good to see you, anthony. Thanks for having me back. I'm excited. Are you in San Francisco? Where are you located?

03:52 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
No, I'm in New York, new York. I'm filming in my beautiful Harlem apartment.

03:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is beautiful. That's why I asked, because San Francisco is famous for what they call the railroad apartments, where it's just it's.

04:05 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
It's narrow but long, right, and it looks like you're in a railroad room narrow but long yeah, this that my apartment is like that too, and and there was definitely a period in in 2020 where we would experiment with different zoom setups and it would either look like I was in the longest part, like the apartment, where there was all depth, or no depth, and ultimately, I just gave up on having a good setup and I just I like this spot and you know, that's, that's how it is I think every uh, every zoom backdrop should have a con.

04:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What do they call that convergence point in uh perspective? It should have that.

04:42 - Benito (Announcement)
I can't remember what the name here for the vanishing point?

04:45 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
vanishing point there we go, yeah that's even better.

04:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every, every room should have a vanishing point. I like that so well sits yeah, that's the black hole, did you see? Now, uh, because they've been looking at black holes, they think there is no dark matter, that time is variable and that explains the lumpiness in the universe wait.

05:09 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
When did this happen?

05:10 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
just the other day I literally just read the paper, like this weekend actually they had us.

05:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was a study a few years ago that indicated maybe this was the case and they've done some more work and now they're pretty convinced that uh it's a very good theory and it's an old one.

05:28 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
It's been around for 20 years. This idea that applying general relativity, including mass, in your time calculations when you get to extreme numbers, means that between the galaxies and then in the void expansion is much faster than where gravity is present it. It slows expansion and that actually, when you start adding up those numbers, gets awfully close to the dark energy offset.

05:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It matches what we? Yeah, but the dark energy was just something made up, just like dark matter. They're all fabrications to solve for problems.

05:58 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Right, In the case of dark matter, it's like and 70% of everything is something we don't know.

06:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And they're saying that this new model fits a little bit better than the dark matter uh model, which is very good. And you know what I'm surprised they didn't come up with this sooner, because that makes sense. We know that mass slows time, right, yeah, that's always good science.

06:16 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
It just once you figure it out, it makes sense.

06:19 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
You're like oh, that's right, that's a good point. Until the j James Webb Space Telescope, you couldn't measure it well enough to prove it, and so this is a fallout of the third wave of the JWST measurements that started to be precise enough to say, hey, this might be correct Some science projects are really good. Yeah, that's a good science project, we create new senses for our civilization.

06:45 - Benito (Announcement)
Isn't that amazing, we measure things.

06:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Back to the somewhat less interesting CES. It starts tonight with CES Unveiled, the Consumer Electronics Show's official kind of mini show, and then tomorrow is Pepcom and Showstoppers, and then the doors open Tuesday or Wednesday. Stacy, you were looking up the schedule none of us are there. That's the key point. Uh, and Anthony, you kind of succinctly put it succinctly I'm now senior enough I don't have to go.

07:20 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
I don't know if I use those exact words, okay.

07:22 - Benito (Announcement)
Okay, that was the implication.

07:24 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
Yeah, I don't have to go anymore, which is nice. We have a huge TechCrunch, has a huge team there. Sure, you know it's always a little bit miserable, but you know it's also a great usually. I mean, it's always a mixed bag. It gets exciting because there's always like new stuff and it's always like such a grind because there's so much trash there.

07:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know. So Lisa and I have a kind of ongoing debate. It's expensive for us to go because we have to bring stuff and you know it's tens of thousands of dollars. So we haven't gone since before COVID. The last CES I went to was January 2020. And I'm kind of of the opinion you don't really see a lot of important stuff there is. Am I wrong on that?

08:05 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I think, okay, look, it is a grind. And I will say, last year I went and I didn't have to cover anything and that was like the best CES I ever had. Cause, like you just want to get to walk around and be like, oh my God, that looks so cool. So I think there are two like it's easy to be, like, oh, it's a grind, it's not a lot of cool stuff. You can probably cover it better from far away, and that is true. But hidden inside some of the techier booths, if you go to like Qualcomm's booth or even Intel's booth, you go to like these weird Eureka Park booths, you can actually see the future of technology. And I'm not paid by Gary Shapiro at all.

08:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Head of the Consumer Electronics Association.

08:48 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah, you can see trends and things emerging very early on, and it's a great time as a reporter to talk to people in ways that they normally won't talk to you, in ways that they normally won't talk to you. So you know, you can casually have conversations and learn more in like 10 minutes than you could in like a 30 minute interview with a PR person involved. Right, you may not be able to quote it, I mean you, you actually totally could, like I loved it. I mean I hated it, but I also loved it.

09:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and certainly if you're covering IOT and home automation, even if you're covering I mean home automation.

09:26 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Um, even if you're covering, I mean I, I feel like tvs for sure, yeah, but but what else?

09:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, like the last time I was there in 2020, there were a lot of things to make food like bread makers, but then there was don't look at don't look at the finished technology, look at the building.

09:43 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Ah, that was my. You go to, yeah, go to the chip guys, go to the satellite guys, go to anybody like you see what they're pitching to their customers. That will be in your devices in three to five years maybe yeah, because there will be.

09:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There always is at ces kind of a trend.

10:00 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
There will be this year a lot of there will be this year, a lot of stuff with unnecessary ai glued into it. Right, that'll be the thing. Yes, this year, like, I'm not gonna say, okay, ignore it if it has ai, but yes, everything's gonna have a thin wash of ai, the same way it used to have a thin wash of, like, madam a, and blockchain or blockchain or whatever. You can just safely I mean, you mean you can't ignore it as a journalist, but as someone who cares about technology, you can totally ignore all that and you can say, okay, if everybody's doing AI, let's talk about energy savings, because that's a big, huge problem in cost center. So let's go talk to the chip guys about how people are tweaking silicon to make that run more efficiently. Are there cool cooling Technologies that you can find?

10:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's where you go yeah, yeah, I agree, that would be. That would be of more interest. But you see, you are an actual reporter and capable of digging deeper. I am a superficial guy and I go there and I see the robot that delivers toilet paper rolls and think I never want to come back here again. I don't. And all the local news, by the way. They go to the events on monday, sunday, monday and tuesday with their camera crews. They do an interview with the first thing they see in the door, which one year was the haptic fork remember that the buzzing fork and then the last time I actually used what that's, a real tool.

11:25
That, oh no, that's for people who have uh stability issues yeah, yeah, but no, this wasn't for that.

11:31
This was a, this was a haptic feedback fork. It's like it's gonna do a diet, right, yeah, it was dopey. And then, and then the last time I was there, kohler had a robot that would bring you a roll of toilet paper if you ran out, which, no, was never intended as a product, it was a. It was really about getting the local tv crews to do us a bit on it and then you get some publicity. So that's why I kind of have a nervous and negative reaction to but you're you're, of course, as always, stacy. I feel chastened.

12:02
You're right, we should celebrate sorry, I just feel like um the worst excesses of uh, the tech industry are shown there, but then of course, there are people who are doing important work, you're right and you're totally.

12:17 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
You are also right, leo. The worst excesses of the tech industry are there. How did, can I ask you?

12:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
a question, though on a technical thing. How did you get ask you a question, though, uh, on a technical thing how did you get the cr and consumer reports to flip around? That's amazing.

12:31 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
It was backwards the last time it was, but I I manually flipped it oh, you did really I have a kohler robot back there did it bring you a roll of toilet paper?

12:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, exactly, it's like toilet paper, Actually that would be one of the things that you would go there and I'm sure so would Anthony and Richard and say, hey, all this AI is nice, but who's going to pay for the power? There was a story this week in Bloomberg that said AI is using so much power, it's degrading the grid. The headline AI needs so much power's degrading the grid. The headline ai needs so much power, it's making yours worse. Uh, what? What people don't realize is that, you know, am I showing the wrong screen or is that? Yeah, that was my fault, my bad.

13:18
Okay, the, the, the ai data centers are distorting. Now, richard, you're gonna have to explain this because you're the, you're the autodidact. They are distorting. Now, richard, you're going to have to explain this because you're the autodidact. They're distorting the normal flow of electricity, and so there's a map that shows you where there is brownouts, in effect, from these AIs which cause damage to home appliances, especially in areas like Chicago and Data Center Alley and Nova North Virginia, where distorted power readings are way above normal, especially in areas like chicago and data center alley and nova north virginia, where distorted power readings are way above normal the problem here and it'll get resolved is that the data centers aren't reporting their consumption dynamically back to the power system because their consumption levels are hard to measure.

14:01
They're not like regular humans well, and also we have a dumb grid right. They've talked for years about making a smart grid.

14:07 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
The grid's getting smarter but major power consumers, like an aluminum smelter is a great example of this massive consumer of electricity and they actually converse with the power company before they crank up the inductors. For exactly that reason. It's hundreds of megawatts and you'll knock the grid over here. You've got these data centers in neighborhoods and their consumption behavior, doctors. For exactly that reason. It's hundreds of megawatts and you'll knock the grid over here. You've got these data centers in neighborhoods and their consumption behavior is unusual. It's kind of symmetrical, but it does have its own peaks. It was the same all the time. It wouldn't be a problem, but it's not, and it doesn't follow the normal shape of humans, which is more power consumed during the day, less at night, and so the impact on the grid is that it sags the cycle rate. Normally we're running at 60 hertz, so when you overload the grid before it actually trips, it'll drop down to 59. You know 59 is actually disaster.

14:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
59, you know 59.6 is bad enough and that can damage certain coils and certain it also gives you a good excuse for being late for work if you have an older electric clock, because the older electric clocks used the 60 hertz per second for their timing, and if it's off, the clocks get off.

15:12 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I think modern clocks are a little bit more sophisticated than that, but I have an iot device that can help for protecting your your home appliances and could report your fluctuations back, if you would like this comes from a company called whisker labs.

15:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They have sensors that's it yeah, yeah yeah

15:31 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
so so they have. You were a data source in this stacy probably I was a hundred.

15:36 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Well, my power doesn't go out for this, but yeah it doesn't have to go out.

15:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's. That's the thing, it's it, you know we're used to brownouts or blackouts, but bad harmonics may not be visible to you until your refrigerator fries it is visible to me because I have a ting. They alert me aha, so you have one of these whisker devices on your uh, it's a ting um you're.

15:58 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
We've talked about it on prior shows. It's uh, it's called ting it. You plug it in, it's fifty dollars a year, or if you have certain insurance companies, they actually pay for it because it's designed to detect.

16:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, they say it's for electrical fires.

16:13 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah, they detect, but they also can detect problems with your power coming into your house. Not just what it detects, issues with your power throughout your house and coming into your house. And since I do my own wiring, I like that sounds bad that kind of wiring. I have an electrician. If I'm going to like, oh okay, you know, swap out my electrical panel.

16:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm just visually walking around in rubber boots.

16:39 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
No, just like when I'm replacing, like light switches. Yeah, yeah, you're always doing that.

16:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the ting does the ting uh. So I'm looking for something central. Is there something you could put centrally on your um uh system that would then monitor the whole system, or does this have to go in each outlet?

16:58 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
no, no, ting just goes. It just sits on one outlet in your home, oh okay, oh, that's cool. It's just tracking it, though. It will let you know if there's an issue, but it doesn't stop anything. It's not like a breaker.

17:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but it'll let you know. That's the point. It lets you know.

17:14 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
It's like hey, by the way, your power is really yucky, it's $100. It's $100 now.

17:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah. Well, it comes with something called a fire prevention service.

17:24 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I don't know what that is oh, it's, if they detect problems, they actually call you, for you to. They call you and pay for an electrician to come out.

17:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, nice, all right, I'm gonna buy one hundred bucks not to have a fire sounds good it's one kind of fire there's other fires yeah, I was like just so you know like, oh, don't like you may still have a fire. I mean I I shouldn't have candles on my Christmas tree. Is that what you're saying?

17:48 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah, I was like your. Christmas tree, If it's still there probably we'll go out.

17:52 - Benito (Announcement)
It's probably time to get rid of it.

17:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Cooking with grease clean your grease traps during the break I bought a blanket that you throw over your grease fire. Fireman dan recommended it, so I thought well, I can't that's got to be good.

18:09 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Do you clean your grease traps?

18:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
because that's a what's a grease trap?

18:13 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I mean, we don't have those things that are. You know those? Okay, you do know, never mind, I'm teasing uh, anyway, so, yeah, the so.

18:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you think, richard, that this is a short-term problem that we're going to fix this.

18:26 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah, I think what you're going to see is a mandate now for pa for these um data centers to start reporting their intended consumption in real time back to the power grid and lots of real issue, lots of new data centers, going online courts uh, about to only get weirder, leo, because now this is where you get.

18:45
Why is microsoft leasing three mile island reactor one and and amazon is talking to new scale and like? What's really happening is the tech giants just are going to put their own power on and are very likely going to make excess. They're going to sell back to the grip ah well, they've already spent.

19:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In between january and august of 2024, microsoft, meta, google and amazon spent 125 billion dollars on ai data centers, according to jp morgan, and that's probably just the tip of the iceberg. Right, that's just those four, um, and I'm sure there'll be lots more uh to come, and let's hope they're building them uh with appropriate harmonic controls, something reporting that with fire blankets? I don't know something. They need something. Maybe they should have a ting in every one of them well, I'm sure they do.

19:39 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Quality of their power is very important, which is one of the reasons they're stressing the harmonics of the rest of the grid right so is it's a reporting issue or is it a filtering issue?

19:48
no, I suspect this isn't it. If you can warn the grid that you're about to increase consumption you know what your real-time consumption is the grid can can respond right. But, like I said, it's not. This is a normal industrial problem. Major power consumers normally report into the grid when they're going to increase their demand meaningfully, and the idea that we now have enough data centers that run in the megawatt class, like they should qualify, should be getting into that reporting mechanism. So that will come. But again, the relationship between the tech giants and the power industry is about to get really convoluted if they start producing their own power as well power as well.

20:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I know our local power company, which is not government run, as a private business, government regulated private business Pacific Gas and Electric, doesn't like us. They they forbade us from putting too many solar panels. They didn't want us to compete with them that you can only put enough solar panels on your roof to to accommodate your own projected needs. You couldn't, you couldn't put more power back into the grid.

20:46 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
This is an issue that's even bigger in australia and it's got more to do with destabilizing the grid right oh really, it's not about money no, the power. Power doesn't flow symmetrically. It can't go back up the transformer the same way it came down. And so what does happen? When there's so much residential solar and in places like Sydney they're close to 25% They'll actually blow transformers off the poles Because they're putting too much power back in Is that the jump down from like voltage yeah.

21:15
And so now the requirement in New South Wales, which is where this region has the largest problems, is that you can only put solar on if the power company has the option to disconnect you on demand.

21:26 - Benito (Announcement)
So if they're having great destabilization.

21:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They just pop you off the feedback loop, right like they stop that problem oh see, and I thought it was just a greedy corporation trying to keep us from competing with them well, there are ways to aren't there.

21:41 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I mean, there's technologies that we're not investing in that can allow for that two-way flow if we decide we want it. We. Just that requires billion. I mean, that requires upgrading the distribution grid all the way down to like transformers, all the way back to like the big I don't know what they're called in the power world I think of them, as I bet richard does static like a d slim what is the big, big station that you see? That would be like a C-Leg.

22:11 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
It's basically along the same line. There's this idea of doing community electricity so natively those panels aren't putting out good house power anyway, they have to step down.

22:20
And so if you could feed, them into a community management tool so they could be pushed onto the grid and can be pushed to any of the houses and then are stepped down at point of use. You get a lot more flexibility. So community power source is a really interesting idea because now you can build a reasonable size wind turbine in that mix as well, or two, and you would have batteries and power conditioner. Yeah, primarily for for conditioning, but just for stability's sake. But it's just. You know that the solar on that roof was is a real easy solve, especially a place in california to get you off there's not a good way to support the grid.

22:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, that's good to know I didn't even know that you were an expert on this, richard, but I knew that you I knew that you would know.

23:02 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
You know I've Richard's the guy you go to.

23:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
whatever the question is, he's barred local AI, basically.

23:08 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
This is just a set of talks I've done on energy.

23:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know you're an expert.

23:12 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
And so I specifically did a study for New South Wales and we went over all the power production in New South Wales and that's why I was completely up to speed on how they were compensating for the solar utilization. Interesting, they compensating for the solar utilization interesting. Uh, they've now asked me to do victoria as well, so now I'm going to do the state of victoria next, uh, this spring.

23:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's nice to have a smart person on the show, isn't it stacy? Fellow smart person yes, get a lot of smart people on the show it's good to have three smart people on the show.

23:40 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I'm the one I'm pretty sure anthony is smart too. I know you are. That's why you're on.

23:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why I always say this is the week's tech news covered by the smartest people I always feel awkward when there's someone who actually knows things on the show.

23:52 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
Yeah, it's always good it's always good and, to be clear, I'm not in the business. I'm like what am I doing here?

23:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You know something?

24:01 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
tell us what you're an expert in anth oh, nothing, I mean, I guess I'm really good at a trivia, at like naming the years that movies came out, and I can always tell you a year a movie came out.

24:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's you know I have a little rolodex of people in their expertise, so I'm gonna. Richard's got eight cards in there, but I'm gonna. I'm gonna add to your card, that's the one line in my card on, uh, on Windows Weekly, our Richard's co-host on Windows Weekly, paul Theriot's, only expertise is Call of Duty, so it's perfect. You know, one thing is good. That's all you really need. That's my one thing. What else are we excited about at CES? Is there anything else we're expecting?

24:40 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
You were excited about Matter Well.

24:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think, should this not be a coming out party for Matter? I know so. The idea was Google, apple, a bunch of others with the Zigbee Alliance involved. A few of the big players in home automation realized that having a tower of Babel with each of them speaking a different language Samsung with its smart things was not a good idea. That there should be some unified standards so that a homeowner can, instead of having 15 hubs to control all the different devices, have something like Apple's HomeKit or Google's Home to control it. Matter was a consortium of these companies to try to solve this problem, but in their first specification they didn't seem to solve much, did they stacy?

25:34 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
no they well, I mean, it was the first thing, and what they? Were what they promised was like a lot, but yeah, no, it was terrible.

25:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's so is matter 2.0 coming out at ces.

25:45 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I believe it is right I believe maybe I don't know about that I I truly don't sorry.

25:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm like is matter of two, is the official matter 2.0 3.0, I don't know um I I got the impression that matter was going to matter a little more this year and they are doing doing.

26:04 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yes, they are doing more stuff. It is two years. They planned a six month kind of cycle for updates. I just don't know if we're at 2.0 or 2.1 or that. That's the media. I'm not covered. But Matter it's uses Wi-Fi and thread. It's uses wifi and thread, and so what's happened is a lot of the really terrible things that matter was bad at was because thread didn't wasn't really good at them.

26:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And that was a Google radio technology right Thread.

26:35 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yes, thread was yes, thread was. Tony Fidel pushed that way back in the day, yeah, but they, they all added to like the, the thread consortium has not just Google, it's an open consortium with lots of people in it for lots of companies. So they're fixing Thread, which will then in turn fix Matter, and presumably the biggest complaints that we've had about Thread have been fixed in Thread.

27:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good and Thread is in a lot of devices, including a number of Apple devices, and Amazon's been putting them, I believe, in their Amazon Echo.

27:13 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Thread is just it runs on top of the Zigbee protocol. So if you have a Zigbee radio, well, it runs across. Sorry, not the Zigbee, it runs across 802.15.4. I always, I always mess that one up. But which is the at the mac and fi layer? That's what zigbee so what?

27:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is that a wi-fi standard um?

27:36 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
or no no 802.15. 802.11 is wi-fi oh, okay, right um, anyway, so yeah, but it is an ieee standard, right?

27:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, the underlying mac and fi layer, those, those radio layers, the silicon, generally speaking, I always think that ces is best at home theater stuff there's always when you go in the main hall at the beginning and they open the doors and everybody flows in, there's always a giant. I think it's Panasonic. Does it right, anthony, with the giant TVs? Yeah, the arch of TVs.

28:12 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
I know what you're talking about. I don't know who does it. Yeah, maybe it's.

28:15 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
LG, maybe it's LG. Didn't they do the transparent one last year? So yeah, huge wall, it's a and then and then and then.

28:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All the tv guys are in one kind of sony is sony's in the back, but there's lg and panasonic. They're all there and usually you go there to see what's new in tvs. But we haven't seen since qd oled a couple of years ago a lot of progress in new tv standards. We're still waiting for micro oled to kind of take you go.

28:42 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I don't think you go to CES for TVs.

28:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like TVs are such an all-star.

28:46 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Oh okay, I'm like you. Go to CES for TVs, oh I haven't been since 2020.

28:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know why? Because Scott Wilkinson, who does our home theater geek show, is famous for bringing a pedometer and walking miles and miles at CES to see all the TVs In 2020, we walked along with him. It was very fun. You can go back on YouTube and see it, but there hasn't been a lot of new stuff since then, discord's reminding us that HDMI 2.2 comes out at CES.

29:14
Oh, thank God 2.1 has been such a disappointment. How many different standards for one kind of cable can there be? How many different standards for one kind of cable can there be? 1.4a, 1.4b 2.1.

29:30 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
That's DisplayPort.

29:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a different thing, oh okay, but it probably gets you 8K at 120 or 144, though is what that does. I think that was the key right is more bandwidth across these HDMI cables, and now they can do 8k. So so, uh, 2.1, a keith 512 is saying 80 gigabytes a second, which is all the gigabytes. That's a lot of gigabytes, I guess enough for 8k uh, one of my first ces was the?

30:00 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
uh one of the years of 3d TV and, just you know, caught my first PCS it was like this is going to be it 3D TV.

30:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was a revolution, yeah, and remember, I mean for a while everybody thought mixed reality VR was going to be the big thing. That was a couple of years ago. That's why I don't get too excited about new technologies emerging in CES. But I will be just for you.

30:27 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
I will be uh, just for you.

30:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I will be excited about hdmi 2.2, just just for you there's one thing who's producing an 8k? Uh, nobody wants an 8k. 8k at this point is really for, I think, for vr more than anything else, because unless you're sitting that close to the screen, you're not going to see the pixels on a 4k well, more saintly, who's recording anything right?

30:47 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
well, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, I'm like well in japan, you know if all these standards emerged in japan at first.

30:53 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Right, yeah but I'll tell you, you know, when they get accepted, when the nfl implements them that's right, and nfl is, I'm sorry to say, barely hd yeah, so they're still fighting for 4k because bandwidth problems, right, it's just a lot, a lot of that's right all around.

31:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have to say though, uh, occasionally I'll get a 4k uh game on my YouTube TV. I paid extra for that and it really does look fantastic to see 4k not great for motion yet is that why all of our TVs come with motion smoothing turned on? Yeah, that's right.

31:27 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Because that is, staying in hotels over the holidays. I was like, oh, isn't it awful.

31:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you can't get like it's made of plastic inside a hotel room you can't.

31:37 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Their TVs have are running their special proprietary software, so you can't access the individual TV channel or I can't turn it off. Yeah, I was like oh my god just give me your settings.

31:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I remember when uh the hobbit was came out and uh and uh, as you know um, he's very much peter jackson's very much into high frame rate, high resolution, high frame rate he was pushing the 4k 120 and even higher and somebody said, yeah, I saw it in 4k 120 and it looked like gandalf got his staff at wizards r us. It looked like made out of resin, which it probably was. Right. That's the problem, you know, you gotta all the props have to be upgraded, all the makeup has to be upgraded.

32:23 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
That was the problem with the original 1080p right. Nobody looked good enough for 1080p, that's right.

32:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I remember doing live with Regis and Kelly back in the day and Kelly had just started doing a sitcom in 4K and so they brought in her makeup artist and they were airbrushing the makeup on you. They just said sit back, go like this, and they go with the airbrush. They did that only lasted once. They didn't. They didn't keep doing that. Asus is going to showcase a 6k, 216 pixels per inch television, the pro art 30, 32 qcv, uh, but again, yeah, where's the content? But that's always the problem, isn't it? Maybe this is, maybe this is more for, uh, computers. That might be. That might be actually what we're looking at. This looks like a computer monitor.

33:13 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah, icons smaller than your fingernail yeah, would you, yeah, yeah. That's why we have to double the pixels yeah, I got 216 ppi, but but I got to run it 200% to see it.

33:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Exactly. So what have you gained? What have I gained? What have you gained?

33:33 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
Although I will say that I felt the same way about 4K, where I was just like this is ridiculous and then now like if?

33:36 - Benito (Announcement)
I try to watch a 1080p thing on my TV.

33:37 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
I'm like, oh, this looks so, you know, old fashioned and dinky and you know everything should be 4K now and dinky and everything should be 4K now. So maybe that's how we're going to feel about 8K next or 6 or whatever.

33:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You do get the habit, don't you? And everything is just super crisp. It feels like you're looking through a window.

33:59 - Benito (Announcement)
Not my windows, my windows are very dirty.

34:02 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
That also underlines that for me. I like that Stacey has like a serious purpose at CES. For me it's actually fun because it is this sort of becomes this like graveyard, of like abandoned technologies, of futures that never pan out, and I think that's just as interesting as the futures that do pan out.

34:17 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I'm with you, anthony. I rock around CES looking at all the stuff that's going to amount to nothing, yeah.

34:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because I mean and I always try to warn people about it we'll probably do a c. I should warn everybody. We'll do a ces show next weekend. I'm sure father robert will bring a bunch of crap back, as he always does, from ces and he gets so excited. You know about the six speaker system and that kind of thing. But uh, almost always these are things that aren't even necessarily going to be in production, unless enough dealers order it in january so that they could sell it in december. So you're looking at stuff that, even if it's a success, won't be out till the end of the year and in many cases never gets made because there wasn't enough interest. So it's a very speculative show, but if you know that it's's kind of fun to go see it.

35:05 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah, I wonder how many companies are showing up at CES with like six months worth of ramp left, right, like either.

35:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
CES goes well, or?

35:14 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
we're done.

35:14 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah, I've seen it. Remember the speaker system that was able to do 3D modeling to shape the sound to your ears? And it won all the awards at CES a few years ago was huge. Six months later, they're out of business yeah, I think you're right.

35:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think they probably had a very limited runway.

35:31 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
They had burned everything to get to that point. They spent a huge amount of money on ces they want. They obviously had the right pr teams. They run all the awards. They did all the things. They just didn't get the sales they were going to need, or they just didn't. Maybe they did and they couldn't build it.

35:45 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
They couldn't get the credit I was going to say they probably had the interest but then they couldn't get. I mean, it costs money to fulfill those big sales like if best buy is like, I would love to have you in the store all right, let me give you from last now we need 50 000 units exactly, and we need three months get going and yeah, this loans for that this is gonna arrest my case here.

36:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is last year's wired magazine's best of ces 2024 the vivo you uh uti tracking kit.

36:16 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Those are available now and their costs have gone down considerably okay good years.

36:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there is a particular brand. Yeah, yes, there's a huge market okay, so maybe that wasn't so bad. Maybe that wasn't so bad. Did you buy the eureka dual washing bot? I don't know what that is. It's uh, say more. She said it is a robot vacuum in the pedestal, there it is, of your washing machine oh, so it pulls the water from the washing machine so you don't have to plummet.

37:03 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
So then you've got basically the Roomba plus washing capabilities that you don't have to maintain the robot mops.

37:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
dirty water tank drains in the same pipe as a washing machine.

37:13 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
So you won't see something like that for like five more years, because that's something they're showing as a concept that then gets picked up and think how often people replace their washing machines. But that's not a terrible concept, it's an interesting idea.

37:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, here's the adobe edge camera. Maybe they shipped that. That's the abode. Oh, oh, that's the abode never mind that they do a little dyslexia here. I'm sorry, I think it was an intentional.

37:39 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I think that was an intentional confusion they did there.

37:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe so is the Aboda out there. Is it good? It's got a crazy Wi-Fi range, Wired says.

37:50 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Did they do Wi-Fi Halo Was that like nifty things. Oh, Wi-Fi Halo is never going to happen.

37:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It has a mile of wireless range.

37:58 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah, I don't know. They may have produced it, but I don't know if people are super stoked about it.

38:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, this was 2024. This was last year. They are still for sale.

38:06 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Oh, there you go.

38:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Along with their security system, the best transportation and I'm sure we'll see it again in CES this year is the Helipersonal Drone VTOLs First Vertical Takeoff Landing, most of which are now bankrupt. Supernal EVTOL, tall sa2, and they're bankrupt. It was from one, hyundai, I don't know if this one's bankrupt. You see every year at ces you see these, yeah, not in the sky, but it was hyundai's concept vehicle, so there's never meant to be produced? How about the milo action communicator? This is all from last year.

38:42 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I'm just pointing out that oh, those are real those are real okay um well, milo is real again. Oh, I remember this.

38:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was a walkie talkie, but it doesn't talk to you.

38:52 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
It's like a really stupid, simple, like you can only call one person yeah, I think it's designed to just it's like a walkie talkie that does. I think he uses like it's hands-free still for sale 225 dollars yeah, there you go, bet they're selling like hotcakes they might be. That's actually a pretty good niche if you can uh, the milo berry red is out of stock.

39:15 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
In fact, all of them are out of stock yeah, because that's the end. That's the end right there somebody has taken the website down that's anyway. I don't want to, I don't want to belabor this, but but I I appreciate you thinking there, uh, uh, stacy, that it's the concepts.

39:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're not for the look for breakthrough concepts, not breakthrough products. I think that's smart, yeah someday your robot vacuum will be living under your washing machine.

39:42 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
That's not. I mean, that may not be the way it goes, but it's valuable to have people thinking and offering things like that. It's quite sensible, yeah, and that's why I like the show because you can like see that and be like. You can test that concept out and be like, okay, if that's going to work, what needs to come into place? So why didn't you go this year, stacey?

40:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because go this year stacy, because technically I'm not a reporter anymore. Oh yeah, this isn't, but doesn't consumer reports have a presence?

40:09 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
of some kind. I would imagine they do and I could have gone and justified it. But I you know what. I went to istanbul, I went to philadelphia, I did all this dc travel.

40:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm, I'm and, on the whole, you'd rather be in in Philadelphia, wouldn't you All? Right, right I?

40:25 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
do love Istanbul.

40:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I, like Istanbul, we're going to take a little break. You're watching this Week in Tech, first show of a brand new year, and some interesting topics still to come, I promise you, including the closest to the sun we've ever gotten. Richard Campbell is here from Windows Weekly and Run as Radio, our official polymath of the Twit Network. Anthony Ha, weekend editor for TechCrunch Great to see you, as always, anthony. And Stacey Higginbotham from Consumer Reports, where she is a policy fellow, a longtime friend of the network. Our show today, brought to you by Zip Recruiter, another longtime friend of the network, longtime sponsor. It's a brand new year, 2025.

41:16
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43:25
Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. For us, it's often within an hour or two. See for yourself. Go to this exclusive web address to try ZipRecruiter for free. When you go to this address, you're telling them you saw it here, which is important to us. Ziprecruitercom slash twit. Ziprecruitercom slash twit. Zip recruiter dot com slash twit zip recruiter the smartest way to hire. We're so glad to have them and partner with them in 2025. Zip recruiter dot com. Slash twit the parker pro. You suggested uh, this, uh, as a story. Richard, I think you're right. This was. This is kind of the big thing it happened on. Was it Christmas Day?

44:06
Christmas Eve, yeah it was our closest approach, the Parker Solar Probe. Now, when I say it got within 3.86 million miles of the sun's surface, you might say, well, that's not that close.

44:21 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
It's really close, isn't it? Well, yeah, considering how far are we from the sun, we're 150 million kilometers from the sun, so, right, it got awfully close. It's the closest we've gotten anything, and it survived it too, which is interesting. Yeah, and we're now a week after that event, so we're finally getting telemetry back from it, because while it was doing that, it was too close to actually send any data tests. It was. It was on the wrong side, but now it's swung back around.

44:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it was heavily armored, I guess, to survive the heat it yielded.

44:50 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
But you know what? You don't need a lot of solar panels, just a little bit is enough, yeah.

44:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It got really 6.1 million kilometers. It got really close. This was the 22nd time it actually made a close approach and this is the closest yet 190 kilometers a second. That makes it the fastest human-made object ever.

45:14 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah, that's moving. It's weird to think in terms of getting closer to the sun means going really, really fast, but that's what happens.

45:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, but if you've ever put your hand in a flame, you realize speed is of the essence, isn't it? Yeah, you don't want to spend a lot of time there in that hot environment?

45:30 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
yeah, well, and it's that. It's not just that, it's just the gravitational effects, or so so being easy to make it accelerates it excessively so yeah, so they have to.

45:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, I would imagine they're kind of glancing off of yeah they're skimming through the corona, yeah, of the sun to take and hoping to have enough speed not to get trapped?

45:49 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
well, they definitely do. It's actually really hard to be able to slow down enough to actually impact the sun. Then that whole trope of just throw it into the sun turns out really difficult thing to do. You can't, yeah, you couldn't. You couldn't get your speed right enough to actually get in there. You'll just get slingshot around and throw them back out, even if you aim right at the middle.

46:05
Yeah, it's not that easy to aim at the middle. You've got to really okay, turn a lot of delta v to do that, so uh so this is?

46:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this is a pretty big deal.

46:15 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I guess they said it's a remarkable machine and it's doing its job brilliant. Yeah, like you know, not every one of them works out as well as this one did, but it did a fantastic job in what nasa calls a hyper close regime.

46:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Parker cut through plumes of plasma still connected to the sun and close enough to pass inside a solar eruption. Nasa said it's like a surfer diving under a crashing ocean wave 500 times the hottest summer day we can witness on Earth. What are we looking for?

46:48 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
We're trying to understand why the corona is much harder than the interior of the sun. We're trying to understand the plasma regime. The behavior of the of the protons at this energy level is weird. We don't really understand all the magnetic effects, so we're just trying to measure that.

47:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And what kind of instruments does parker have? Do you know?

47:07 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
most of the electromagnetic, because that's the main thing that they're dealing with there.

47:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's, it's just a huge level of field they're not like they don't have a little scoop to capture some plasmon no, you could scoop once, but you're not going to have a scoop for very long after that and we're not bringing anything back right.

47:21 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
This is not coming back to the earth again, so they're just taking measurements and sending it back.

47:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're sending telemetry, uh, telemetry back. That's exactly right, very amazing. Yeah, it's a great, great mission. Yeah, um, also, uh related to that, we're gonna have a new director of nasa come a couple of weeks from now.

47:43 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Presuming it's confirmed.

47:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have a feeling he will, because he, first of all, he's an astronaut, right.

47:52 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Well, Jared Eisenman is a kind of astronaut. He has paid to go into space a couple of times. That's more than I've done. Well, you know, that's one way to spend your money.

48:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He is probably.

48:03 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
He rode, of course, on a spacex vehicle, so he's twice twice only and and has done a spacewalk, which that's puts him in very rarefied atmosphere. A few hundred people have ever done that right, jared isaacs isaacman. He's a tech billionaire, yeah, but with a four is his company, what is, what is a ship for do uh transaction, uh processing?

48:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
okay, yeah, so not nothing associated with space, nope, no.

48:28 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
But then he's, he's got a side business providing, um uh, adversarial flying for air forces, so he owns his own air force, because things well, that's right, right, he's got a collection of migs and a4s and a bunch of other aircraft. So he provides services for I forgot about that I imagine this is.

48:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is of, of the various trump nominees, probably the least controversial he has his own air force yeah, yes this implies that it's for defense or for something as opposed to like.

48:57 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
He has a collection of planes he's gotten past the collection of planes, has a, has a crew of pilots and flies adversarial flight services for air forces. They do training air force training.

49:07 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Okay, so he's like a mercenary with his own so far he hasn't taken any missions so far.

49:12 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
He flies unarmed against other countries air forces normally probably beats them too, but that's part of their training process so, okay, that's actually.

49:20 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I just wanted the I wanted the distinction. I was like Air Force versus just own a lot of cool planes.

49:26 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I always keep a matrix of which tech billionaire is closest to being Dr. No, and like, owning your own Air Force is a good one.

49:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's not in a mountain, but he's close.

49:36 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
You have a volcano is a good one too.

49:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He would only be the fourth NASA Administrator of 15 who has actually been in space, who has actually been in space. I think the only question would be if he would and this might be a question for Jeff Bezos, who was competing with Elon Musk with his blue origin is if he would favor SpaceX, because both of those trips to space and the spacewalk were in SpaceX's Starship.

50:00 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I don't think that's the only question, but that's a question.

50:03 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah, in the end, a NASA administrator's job primarily is to manage the bureaucracy of NASA.

50:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And to go to Congress and say give us money right. I mean, getting funding has got to be.

50:14 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Is a tech billionaire used to running a startup from the top of the stack, well-equipped for the negotiations that are required.

50:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would say so Between these bureaucracies.

50:20 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I would say not. No bureaucracies, I would say no.

50:26 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
No, okay, you're kind of used to saying this is what we're going to do. And people do it and right, it's not the environment you're in anymore. Yeah, there is definitely a sense in a lot of these appointments where people are like, oh well, this person has actual experience doing xyz and I'm kind of like, yeah, but when you're administrators are different yeah yeah, well, and then the current bill nelson, current administrator, did fly in space also.

50:49 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
He flew on the shuttle, but he also spent most of his time at NASA as an administrator, right? So you know, he kind of makes sense as the NASA administrator because most of his experience has been dealing with bureaucracy he's most of his experience has been dealing with bureaucracy.

51:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, bezos, did not uh have anything to say about isaacson's nomination according to cnn.

51:12 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
Um, I mean, if he's going to become the nas administrator, you're jeff bezos. You probably don't want to piss him off, so that's true too have anything to say that's a good point.

51:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, interestingly, and not unrelatedly, elon Musk has said let's not go to the moon. Nasa, of course, has been working to go to the moon. He says let's go straight to Mars.

51:37
Now he also has the current contract for the lunar lander, so I don't know what he it's a strange thing to say yeah, nasa's planning to go to the moon with the Artemis mission and the lunar lander is made by SpaceX. It's actually the. The lunar mission is kind of a beast of many backs, right. I mean they've got Boeing is involved. I mean a bunch of companies are involved in this.

51:58 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
The backup lunar lander. The alternative besides the SpaceX one is Blue Origin. Oh, OK, so the human landing one is Blue Origin.

52:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ah, okay, so the human landing system is from SpaceX. They also supply food, cargo and other logistics services to a lunar gateway in orbit around the moon. Why would Elon privately? According to Wired, Elon has been critical of NASA's plans, suggesting the Artemis program has been moving too slowly I don't think a lot of people would disagree with him on that and is too reliant on contractors who seek cost plus government contracts and are less interested in delivering results. That's actually a consensus opinion, I think, Right.

52:36 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Well, and NASA has for many years tried to push these non-cost plus contracts, these performance contracts. That's how COTS, the resupply of the space station, is done. That's how Crew, dragon and Starliner were supposed to be done. But you do have these institutions that are built around cost plus contracting, especially when you're doing truly innovative stuff. The James Webb Space Telescope was a cost plus deal. Why they were only going to make one. Nobody really knew how much it was going to cost. Admittedly, there were folks with you wasn't going to be a billion dollars when they originally said a billion dollars. But it turns out if you spend a billion dollars, it's hard to cancel it after that yeah, you kind of, uh in for a penny, in for a billion, yeah or eight as the case.

53:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Eight eight christmas day, elon uh posted on x, quote the the Artemis architecture is extremely inefficient as it is a jobs maximizing program and that, by the way, is probably the case. That's what Congress does, right, not a results maximizing program. Something entirely new is needed. Then, the following Thursday, the next day, he said no, we're going straight to mars. The moon is a distraction.

53:48 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
Now, admittedly, these are just tweets, so they don't necessarily have the power of policy although I think it takes on a lot more weight now than maybe it would have taken a year ago, and and I think one of the things the the, the wired piece that you guys linked to in the show pointed out, was that part of the context here is this is kind of the first time. I mean, I haven't followed this closely, but it seems like this is the first time that Elon has really been so open in criticizing a NASA program and so before, like, oh, he wants to stay on NASA's good side, and now he feels confident that you know the person right nasa and and that person's boss are both going to be buddies of his, and so he can say whatever he wants the wired says although musk is not directing us space policy, he certainly hasa meaningful say in what happens it's good to be the first that cool thing.

54:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't imagine, though, that Artemis would just be canceled, as you said, what? And for a couple of billion?

54:51 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
it's kind of hard to withdraw, especially since Congress has to do, if authorized, tens of billions, tens of billions, and, arguably, nasa has attempted to drop Artemis, going all the way back to the constellation program and, uh, the Congress keeps putting it back into the budget because they set the budget.

55:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Trump created the Artemis program at his last presidency, although he was probably never happy. He was calling for, wired says says, a major course correction at NASA. Vice Mike Pence said in 2019, I call on NASA to adopt new policies and embrace a new mindset. If our current contractors can't meet this objective, then we will find ones that will. So this has been something that's been going on at least since 2019.

55:40 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
are we not concerned about having the geopolitical factors at play, with India and China landing on the dark side of the moon? Access to water, access to mineral rights, things like that on the moon?

55:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, don't you I think you said this before the show, Richard Don't you need the moon to go to Mars?

55:59 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Well, there's a few cases. The silly part about going to Mars is what we already know from the International Space Station. The silly part about going to Mars is what we already know from the International Space Station the fastest we can get humans to Mars about six months, and we routinely put humans on the space station for six months at a time. They exercise two and a half hours a day every day to slow the rate of bone loss and when they return to the Earth they can't walk, they can't stand. In fact, it takes almost a year of rehabilitation to get your balance back and your eyes to recover, for your whole body to recover, to be functional. So you're going to fly a group of folks to the mars in free fall for six months. Then they're going to arrive on mars. There's nobody there to help them. We need artificial gravity now.

56:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That means creating a spinning structure, which we've can do but have never done it's so funny because every single sci-fi show ever has a centrifugal thing that creates, never done it?

56:54 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
do we know how to do it, or is it? Is that sci-fi?

56:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's sci-fi, but did you read the book a city on mars, richard? I'm sure you did. Yes, yes. So not only are there the technical issues, or is that sci-fi?

57:02 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
That's sci-fi. But did you read the book A City on Mars, richard? I'm sure you did, yes, yes, so not only are there the technical issues that they just like demolish pretty utterly, then they go into the exciting psychological issues and the reproductive issues and all of the other. Like it is an amazing book for it, like I just like giving it to people when they're like we should go to Mars and I'm like read this.

57:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mars is not the kind of place you want to raise a kid. Is that what you're saying?

57:32 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Like Mars is not the place you want it.

57:34 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Like I mean, as a woman, I think about all the like drama that happens in Antarctica and I'm like there's no way you would send people up there that aren't yeah and you can get people out of antarctica in a few days, right, if you had to, you can well, and it's the thing is, the route back from mars is registered in a year plus, so no, wait a minute.

57:57
It takes six months to get there, but it takes a year plus to get back well, you either wait a year and a half to get a six-month window to come back, oh, or you take what's called a mars cycler orbit and then it takes a year and a half to get back this is the crux of the martian yeah so it's, really it's a?

58:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's right, I did read that. Yeah, so it's really a one-way trip is in all likelihood.

58:19 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah, let's grow potatoes then we could talk about we've never built a life support system that lasts more than a few weeks without external inputs. Um, you know, we don't.

58:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're not ready that I remember daniel suarez told me also that the mar or maybe it was andy weir actually that the, the martian soil, is deadly to humans.

58:42 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yes, the perchlorates in it. They can. They can be removed. When andy wrote that book they didn't know there were perchlorates in it. They know now. Um, it's treatable, but yes, it's very dangerous and it also means no spaces inside the hab, like that's not a thing are those the perks that are around every dry cleaners in the united states as well?

59:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
your suit will be clean, but you'll be dead yeah, is what you're saying.

59:05 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Don't, don't inject that stuff.

59:07 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
The ones that the epa, just literally like two weeks ago, was finally like oh yeah, those are real bad you gotta get enough, that's so.

59:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's interesting. When we when he wrote the martian, we didn't even know there were perchlorides in the regolith got that report back yeah, but we doubt now know there's perchlorides in the regolith. So the regolith, he told me, was so fine that you inhale it. You would die instantly anyway.

59:26 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah well, but now there's also the issue there's nothing to inhale there's also the issue with the poison yeah, the the issue here is that you go out in your space suit.

59:35 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Then you get, you go into an airlock and take the suit off and it's on the outside of the suit, it's on the suit that's right.

59:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't get rid of it, yeah so it's.

59:43 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
There's a huge set of problems there, and the moon is an excellent place to practice a lot of this and as well as just learning how well do we function in one six of g? And, you know, is that more sustainable, because it's a lot easier to build a rotating structure if we don't have to put a whole g is elon's notion of being an extraplanetary species pie in the sky, as it were, as it were.

01:00:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, that's really what he wants. Right, that's what he's saying. We need to get off the earth, we need to be a multi-planetary species.

01:00:16 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
It's pie in the sky, in the sense that it's not something that we can do the way we're like. It's not a short-term solution to what is a very real problem that we should be solving right. It feels like a cop-out and I think this like just like going into space initially, launched a bunch of new technologies. I don't think it's crazy to like test this and like put research dollars towards this sort of thing, but I do think it's crazy thinking that Elonk is going to have him or his children be.

01:00:46 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah on mars. That timeline's pretty impractical, but when are we ever expected elon to have good time?

01:00:54 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
I mean although I mean, you know, if it means if, if he's one of the first, then I assume he's probably not coming back.

01:00:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know, make him that way he wants to live he wants to mars yeah, he also has a timeline that's insane like it's five years off or that. I mean he wants to live. He wants to mars. Yeah, he also has a timeline. That's insane, like it's five years off or something.

01:01:07 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
I mean well, I think to stacy's point also like it. I think that it's. These are worthwhile goals, but I think part of the implication sometimes is like anyway, that'll solve our problems and, like you know, I think I forget exactly when this was, but I think around the same time, elon was also, you know, posting stuff on X about how we didn't have to worry about climate change anymore and that was just going to get taken care of by technology. And so, like you know, if yeah, like that's bad and not and his, his whole cadre of test.

01:01:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Creel believers like Mark Andreessen also believe AI is going to solve all of this. Creole believers like mark andreessen also believe ai is going to solve all of this that you know we're.

01:01:51 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Technology is going to work us out of all these problems and somehow will magically solve everything. Really think they think that? You don't think they believe it, they're just saying it I mean, if they do, they're absolutely not self-aware in but but I feel like they're, they are, they have smarts. So I feel like they must be aware that, like you cannot burn down everything in the pursuit of something that you hope may save you, right Like, which is kind of where we are right now, I feel like they're just like well, we're going to burn down everything, cause it's going to be great for us right now, and do you think it's?

01:02:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
a cynical point of view that really we just want to burn down everything because it's going to be great for us right now, and do you think it's? Yeah, it's a cynical point of view that really we just want to maximize our current uh wealth and so we're telling everybody a fairy tale that will be good for us yeah, hi, this is benito like.

01:02:35 - Benito (Announcement)
The thing is that we actually know how to solve this, we just don't want to yeah, we have the means I mean, is it sucky to?

01:02:45 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yes, it is completely sucky, but we kind of have to. I mean, you've read Kim Stanley Robinson's really incredibly boring climate change novel where he discusses all the crazy things? Yes, Amazing.

01:02:56 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
First chapter and then the rest of it is a policy proposal. Yeah, exactly.

01:03:00 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I mean I as a policy walk, I like, I was like this is cool, but this is not really the novel I thought it was going to be.

01:03:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I should mention Molly White had a really good piece a couple of days ago about Elon Musk's war on Wikipedia. Maybe you saw his, his tweets I'm going to call them tweets because I think that's what people think of them as, uh, his ex posts on christmas eve uh stopped donating to wikipedia, he said. Uh. Over the following week, the world's richest man unleashed a barrage of attacks aimed at convincing his 200 million twitter followers to boycott the wikimedia foundation, the non-profit supporting the volunteer maintained wikipedia project. I mean, my opinion, wikipedia is the greatest thing that the internet has produced.

01:03:52 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I mean we'd also point out that by saying that, wikipedia raised a record amount of good, good job maybe that was his plan people's response was uh, el Elon doesn't like it. I should probably support it.

01:04:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I think one of the things Elon's really been pushing is you shouldn't get your news from anybody else other than X. He also said he retweeted somebody who said Wikimedia blows $50 million on wokeness Turned out to be completely false, which is also a misunderstanding of what's going on. So, um, that that hurts my feelings, and it definitely hurts molly white's feelings, because she is a long time wikipedia editor, besides being one of the coolest people alive. Um, the creator of uh web 3 is just great, which is a wonderful website. She was upset by. This demonstrated that the information they were quoting was wrong. She writes Musk's recent Twitter rampage reveals a man with a grudge againstipedia, looking for anything to support his position. Regardless of accuracy, what's interesting is, back in 2017, elon tweeted I love wikipedia just gets better over time. And happy birthday wikipedia in 2021. So glad you exist.

01:05:18 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
So something happened there's like this arc that these people go through it's not to the case basically like there's like this arc that these people go through. It's not to the K, basically like, yeah, okay, special K, is that it okay? We can't, we can't.

01:05:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I think I think it's a I think it's a pill yeah, whatever the red pill, whatever's in the red pill, he got it he.

01:05:39 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I mean like, look all of these, I mean Trump, is the same way. Something happened. Yeah, the fact that we I mean we- kind of. I don't know what to do. We recover it and draw attention to it and validate it, or do we ignore it and just like the?

01:05:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
way. Yeah, maybe I shouldn't even mention the tweets, because what does it mean? Right? I mean everyone should donate to wikipedia yeah, I do, because I think, as I said, it is one of the greatest creations of the internet, you know, and I may have donated just recently, when a certain billionaire sent out a message. That is kind of ironic. That is kind of ironic.

01:06:18
All right, let's take a little break. We have more to talk about, in fact. The TikTok ban this is a story that just keeps on giving about. And collect, uh, the tick tock band this is a story that just keeps on giving. We've got, we've got the latest on that and I think we will probably cover in more detail in a week because the supreme court is going to be hearing oral arguments in five days, but we'll get to that in just a little bit. Great panel for you, smart people. Anthony haw is here from tech grunge. You, smart people, anthony ha is here from tech grunge.

01:06:49
Um, the wonderful richard campbell from dot net rocks and run his radio and of course, windows weekly and our our dear friend, stacy higginbotham, now policy fellow at consumer reports. Great to have all three of you for our first show of the year. Nice to kick off the. There's usually not a lot of news this time of year, actually I'm surprised there's so much to talk about. Um, but it's nice to kick off. There's usually not a lot of news this time of year, actually I'm surprised there's so much to talk about, but it's nice to kick off the year with some smart people and a good conversation. So thanks for being here. Our show today brought to you by Delete Me.

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01:10:30
We thank him so much for supporting this this week in tech richard, you were funny he said I hope we're not going to talk about tick tock today. I don't blame you, it's kind of an endless story. January 19th, uh, two weeks from today. Tick tock congress has said should either be sold to a us entity or we will shut it down. Tick tock, of course, has gone back and forth. They've, they've appealed and so forth and finally, uh, just before we broke for the holidays, the supreme court agreed to review the case. Oral arguments are on the 10th, uh, and presumably they're doing this in a rushed manner so that they can, and presumably they're doing this in a rushed manner so that they can weigh in by the 19th. President Trump has asked. Actually, his incoming administration filed a amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to pause the TikTok ban. He says he wants to see a negotiated resolution.

01:11:32
We've talked about this, for it feels like years on the show and a different. It's interesting. Everybody has some seems to have a different opinion. You know, I admit a conflict of interest because my son's got his you know business started on TikTok. It was really valuable to him. But so I like Tiktok for that reason as a creator.

01:11:56
Kathy gellis, who's our expert on on law she's a lawyer and also is admitted to the Supreme Court and files briefs regularly on on subjects like this says it's a First Amendment issue. Uh, the government cannot ban Tiktok, but there is a history, or of this. I mean CFIUS, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, just told Nippon Steel they could not buy US steel. So there is a tradition in this country for our own national security we can prevent foreign entities from owning companies in the US. I don't know what the supreme court will do. We will have kathy on, is she? She might be on next week, she might be on the week after, but she will be, or maybe she's gonna be on twig to discuss the oral arguments, because you can't always tell from oral arguments yeah, she's gonna be on the twig the the week after the the week after, so a week from wednesday.

01:12:48
She'll be on this week in google to talk about the oral arguments. Um, I imagine that president trump asking the supreme court give me some time, we'll carry some weight. He has said he has a. He was the one, by the way, who said we've got a band tick tock there, a national security problem, in the last, in the last time he was president. He now says he has a warm spot in his heart which may have something to do with the fact that uh andy, yes, a giant donor to his campaign and the Republican Party in general has something like a 15 stake in Tick Tock. That may have, and yes, met with President-elect Trump shortly before. Trump said I have a warm spot in my heart.

01:13:30 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
But Andy, yes, also stands to make a lot of money if they sell it to an American.

01:13:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would think so. Right, yeah, it's jeff yaz, right, jeff, not andy. Sorry, I was thinking of, uh, andy, yassi jassy, I confuse them. Yes, you're right, thank you, jeff. Yes, um, anthony, where do you come down on this? Does tiktok pose the grave national security threat that the Biden Justice Department says it does?

01:13:55 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
I mean, I feel like I could imagine that there maybe is some, you know, evidence that hasn't been released to the public that paints TikTok as a bigger threat than we've seen. I think, from like what is available publicly, I feel like it definitely feels a little bit overblown and feels like TikTok has become sort of like the receptacle for all this kind of general panic about social media and propaganda. And so it's yeah, it's weird, because I I feel like the TikTok thing, like you were saying, is people fall differently and it's not along sort of traditional political lines, and so I think Trump's reasons for opposing the Tick Tock ban are probably really self-serving. But I also am opposed to the Tick Tock ban, yeah, for other reasons, for other reasons, yeah, I, you know I.

01:14:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If there is evidence that it's a problem, I I don't think there's a problem with banning it. I mean, kathy gellis argued very strongly a couple of twits ago that there is a very strong constitutional argument against banning it. It's a First Amendment argument. The people who are on Tick Tock American citizens are. Speech would be, you know, hampered, although my son has moved to Instagram like everybody else.

01:15:15 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
It's funny advertising is not to ban it. The goal is to get it us owned. Right right band is just the threat to try and persuade them okay but well.

01:15:24 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
But I think that part of it has been that there was this that that has, and it's fair right, it's the law, is not a ban, it's, it's sort of a sell or ban law, um. But I think then that's also a way to sort of make it go down easier, because I think a lot of the politicians supporting it were like oh no, no, this isn't um, this isn't a ban. Tick tock will continue to be available, it's just going to be under us ownership, um. But then it's not a lot of discussion.

01:15:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The scenario of bite dance, whether or not from pressure from the chinese government, was like yeah, we're not interested, bye the government, yeah, the chinese government says we won't sell and, furthermore, will forbid tick tock from selling the algorithm, which I mean. If you, if you don't sell the algorithm, what have you bought?

01:16:05 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I don't know and if we just make us own it, like a us owner owns it, but you don't deal with, like the back-end infrastructure and code and I know they're going to host it there, but if you're using, you know, the code that they use to build the mobile app, are you going to redo, basically recreate tiktok from a us perspective? And I and I bring this up because I've been somewhat radicalized about the chinese and the cyber security threats and efforts that they have been making to infiltrate like the treasury really deep into, like crazy, like like the more I'm like, oh man, that is like super nefarious, we don't have anything like they're in our phone system.

01:16:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they just exfiltrated. What was it? 300 documents from the treasury department? Yeah, the beyond trust, yeah, so so this is a problem yeah, so there is.

01:16:58 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
There is possibly a national security threat here. That is valid. We don't have proof of it. We may never get proof of it. I don't really think we got great proof around huawei, for example, but we it's generally accepted that Huawei's networking gear is a threat.

01:17:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every country in the West is removing it now.

01:17:20 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
But, as a people, we have not seen proof. Now there could be actual proof and, like China, we're actually looking right now at or the US government is looking at TP link routers, for example.

01:17:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they're just banned, or thinking about banningning those right?

01:17:35 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
there. They've subpoenaed them and that's an interesting case because actually tp link switched their ownership structure and they have us owners there. There are brothers who created the company and they they created a us entity to sell gear in the us that is owned by one of the brothers.

01:17:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's interesting still in china they make them in china, but then everything's made in china, right? Um, that's interesting because tp link is the number one router brand in the united states by far. Yeah, it's the one wire cutter has been recommending for years yes, see, our, our number one pick is that.

01:18:11 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
So I said it. I was like guys, guess what my next big project for 2025 is? Y'all what? Router security. Oh, good, good.

01:18:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is there a way to make a TP-Link router safe?

01:18:26 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Well, we don't know if it's unsafe. That's the hard part. Like, yes, there is, you can disconnect it from the internet.

01:18:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but then it's not much of a router. I have a beautiful router that does nothing. I have a great paperweight.

01:18:42 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I read the security analysis paper from the uk uh group that studied the huawei gear and their point was the software was so apparently intentionally convoluted, so complex, that they could not be certain that there wasn't telemetry being sent back to China, that there wasn't a kill switch and so forth. But they couldn't find them, but they couldn't prove they weren't there.

01:19:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, there's also the threat that a firmware update could suddenly introduce those kinds of threat that a firmware update could suddenly introduce those kinds of.

01:19:17 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah, we don't know if there are backdoors. And the other thing is china was caught trying to build backdoor, like participating in the 3gpp standards group to build a backdoor into right I, I think it was five at least they went through a standards body.

01:19:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm just uh happy to hear that I mean.

01:19:31 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
So there is definitely, and China is also doing its darndest to. They have, oh, is it Blue Star? Is that what it's called? It's Starfield. They've got their own version of Bluetooth that they're pushing, for example. So if you think about what's happening there and the separation of the tech stacks between, like what's it called Star flash Star flash Sorry, I was like that's, that's a very spooky thing to, I mean in spooky in the traditional, like quantum sense, like you just don't know is it, isn't it like? But by the time we know, we're probably going to be hosed. So I, yeah, that's how I feel.

01:20:16 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
So you've got this problem here, where we have plenty of evidence that they've tried this in a lot of other folks, other places, and now we're looking at the position of a bunch of other, their other products and going, hmm, what are the consequences that this is happening here?

01:20:29 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
And the consequences are bad.

01:20:31 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Significant yeah Now.

01:20:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And interestingly and interestingly, uh, the way the chinese state sponsored hackers breached the treasury department was they went through a security tool the treasury department used um for its own security. So they didn't they didn't actually breach this, the treasury department. They well, they did, but they did it using, uh, something called beyond trust.

01:20:55 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah this is effectively a supply chain hack. Go after one of the vendors that really should have been more robust than this, and then uh they had a remote support product and, beyond trust said, a limited number of customers were involved.

01:21:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just happens, one of them was the United States Treasury Department. So that's the point, though, is it doesn't have to be a first-party attack. It could be a supply chain attack.

01:21:25 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Well, and TikTok's interesting because you have so many people using it. So if you know that the daughter of the US, right uh, is on tick tock ella, what's her name? Like you can start determining things about, like where people are in space, where do they go, just by having this app on their phone.

01:21:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But then the reasonable thing would be and the government has to some degree done this uh, ban these apps on phones, uh of government officials and uh military and so forth, right, I mean?

01:21:59 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
yeah, everybody's running their own servers and has their own phones, because they don't think. I mean, like are you going to tell your teenage kid not to have a phone running?

01:22:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, if you're the vice president of the united states, yeah, that's going to go over.

01:22:11 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Sorry kid canadian government. Mobile devices are not allowed to run tech talk, so they've right most.

01:22:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would think that that's a reasonable precaution and legal no, no issue of challenging there do you do it to all the staff?

01:22:27 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
do you do it?

01:22:28 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I mean like yeah, how far do you go down?

01:22:30 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
how far do you go down this chain? Because like.

01:22:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't this generally a problem with business in general? Is BYOD right? You start to be a problem because you can't control your employees bringing in their laptops and phones.

01:22:43 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah, BYD has sort of fallen by the wayside for exactly that problem. It was so difficult to make BYOD mobile devices work with business safely and appropriately that it became cheaper to just give them a phone.

01:22:54 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
The iPhone was the original sin. The Apple apple.

01:22:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was the apple in the garden oh my god, but who was the serpent? Uh, president, yeah, oh no, I'm sorry he's winning theisa. I apologize, um, anyway, uh, you know this is a hard one, isn't it? Because we don't have the information and, unfortunately, the level of trust people have now with their government has kind of gone to it's kind of close to zero. So, uh, you know, if a senator comes out and says, well, I've seen the paperwork and TikTok is a nightmare, nobody credits it.

01:23:39 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
And it's also hard because we haven't divorced the legitimate security concerns from just straight up racism. So it's very hard to talk about this or xenophobia, yeah, yeah. Yeah, without like appealing to the basis, basis jingoistic impulses of people and that's, that's awful, like right.

01:24:00 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
My feeling is that I think there's a lot of legitimate concerns and also a lot of the people who are most enthusiastic about the ban are doing it in bad faith reasons, whether that's because they're racist or because they think it'll be good for their business, or some combination of the two it sure benefits Mark Zuckerberg's business.

01:24:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If Tick Tock gets banned, instagram gets it all right which is one of the things that Trump brings up and he doesn't like by the way, he doesn't like Marcus like a bird currently is doing everything he can to convince Trump that he likes him. He's giving him money, he's changed is the.

01:24:37 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
He'll have a warm spot in a minute. It'll be easy that's.

01:24:41 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
It is pretty easy we need just maybe a little bit more than the other people.

01:24:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I need to put a chart up of tech executives who's in and who's out. We need a. We need a whole.

01:24:52 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
There's only in and unknown.

01:24:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah state of california has. Uh, uh, where a judge in the state of california has blocked the law that protects kids from social media. It was supposed to take effect on wednesday. A federal judge tuesday said you cannot enforce the protecting our kids from social media addiction act or poxma, finding it infringes what first amendment rights for tech companies. Um, however, it wasn't a complete win for the tech companies.

01:25:38
One of the things that was in there was a requirement that kids not be able to use social media between midnight and 6 am and during school hours between 8 am and pm. That actually, uh, violated first amendment. So he said you cannot prohibit companies from sending push notifications to miners phones during those hours. No, uh. However, uh, oh, and you can't say how many miners are on the platforms. You can't demand that. However, he did request reject the request for an injunction of provisions for parental controls and restrictions on personalized feeds. Actually, I think that's. I agree with him, right, it's. I think it's appropriate to say to instagram, for instance, you have to provide parental controls, and I'm not sure about restrictions on personalized feeds.

01:26:39 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
That's a little parental controls come into play as being a problem for kids who are in households where their parents don't like. If you're like lgbtqia and your parents are not, yeah, but what are you going to do?

01:26:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, um, we have a long history of parents getting to choose what happens to their kids. Admittedly, that's problematic, but what are?

01:27:03 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
are you saying our laws in efforts to do this sort of thing are maybe inconsistent?

01:27:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, the judge recognized the need to protect children from the effects of social media, which I'm not sure I agree with, but, uh, he found that the law was not properly tailored because it wasn't inclusive enough of different notification types.

01:27:25 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
So it really is kind of a technicality so it almost feels like a punt, just sort of kicked it back yeah, it's kind of a more and we'll try again.

01:27:33 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, I think so well, it seemed like and you mentioned the, the, the algorithmic thing, and that seems to be like the one thing that is sort of sliding through and and that it seems like people are focusing on that. Well, you can try to, you know, stop that from happening and on some level, maybe, that I mean not a lawyer, uh, that's like it seems like the judge was okay with that, but is that just sort of a proxy for like, is that really going to fix anything? I think was sort of the, the subtext of the way you said it, leo, which I do think you know a lot of. The algorithmic stuff is pretty harmful, but obviously it's not going to solve all these problems in as much as they need to be solved.

01:28:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think I've changed my tune on this. I was one of the people who said oh, the problem is algorithms, whether it's YouTube's recommendation algorithm or the algorithmic feed on Instagram, that the algorithm is the problem. But the problem really is you have to have some algorithms. A purely chronological feed or no recommendations at all is not. Nobody wants that.

01:28:40 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
When people are given a choice between an algorithmic feed and a chronological feed, they almost always choose the algorithmic feed in the long run yeah, I mean, I think I mean blue sky is sort of testing out whether or not you know you can, how big you can get and to what extent people will stick to chronological if you emphasize that.

01:28:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, but there's all that. Jeff Jarvis's uh contention is there's always an algorithm, so it's kind of hard, it's you're, you're slicing it. I mean, there's always an editor. Right, there's an algorithm in the New York Times. Are you saying the new york times, you just put all the stories on the front page.

01:29:15 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
No, I, I think there is, and we haven't figured out how to do this or even how to talk about it because we hate nuance. But understanding, like I, I have a pretty good sense of how the new york times picks its stories and, for example, I I they're editing, I have a pretty good well, and they're a publication, so they're publishing, example I, I, they're editing, I have a pretty good.

01:29:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and they're a publication, so they're publishing their own stories.

01:29:37 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
So Well, and they're publishing it for everybody, right? We all? So like it is deeply harmful to have.

01:29:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't see something different than your kid. That's a good point, yeah.

01:29:46 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
A very private, heavily focused algorithm that is designed to maximize, to benefit a company, right? So maybe it's maximizing engagement, Maybe it's designed to make you want to buy, you can think about. So those are probably the factors. One, that it's highly personalized and no one else can test and see what's happening right, so you don't know that someone's behaving poorly. Right, you don't know if the algorithm is grooming someone or whatever. And that it's designed like the New York Times. Yes, they want to make money, but they still have this like goal to inform people. They have this like weird journalistic ethos they're still living with.

01:30:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, don't, yeah, let's. Maybe I made a mistake. I shouldn't have said the New York Times, let's say Taboola. But I think it's a nice example in the sense that, like that is we don't hate algorithms, I think is what I'm kind of saying we want curation.

01:30:51 - Benito (Announcement)
We want some curation.

01:30:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think we'd like human curation though, too, like that's something that we've lost a lot A human programs, the algorithms, it's all human curation, yeah, but a human programs the algorithm for a purpose.

01:31:01 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah, think about reinforcement learning for learning how to play Go, for example. Instead of learning how to play Go, you're designing for engagement or profits. Right, if that's your reinforcement mechanism, then you don't care what you're sending the kids or adults well you do care, just you're sending what they need to to make the most money right you're not cared about the consequences of the what actually happens to those people and that's capitalism.

01:31:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We are a capitalist society, isn't the algorithm? Capitalism is make the most money.

01:31:32 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
We also don't allow you to put formaldehyde in milk, just because it preserves it, and there's lots of laws about how we advertise to children, right, that's true too, they're much less effective, but yes, they are.

01:31:43 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
They are being gutted and and I I do think there is definitely a problem, like kids see some really upsetting stuff and you see these stories and I'm like I would like there not to be dead kids as a result of like, oh, of course, shown certain types of content, right, Like. I like I don't care what how much money Facebook makes up.

01:32:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is this is hard, I agree yeah.

01:32:10 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah, yeah. But, I don't even think we're talking about it in the right way yet. Yeah, yeah, but I don't even think we're talking about it in the right way yet.

01:32:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what's challenging we're we're not figuring out how to think about it yet well, and experts in child development like candace audgers have said we're focusing on the wrong thing and by doing so we're going to ignore the things that can make a difference. You know, um, it's often the case, right With legislatures, that they pick something that's easy and popular, that doesn't fix it, but everybody's happy, and by doing so they they really make the problem worse because they funnel all the attention and money into the wrong thing.

01:32:50 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I think a lot of them try to do. I become a little less cynical about that. I think there's a lot of effort to do the right thing. I think there's a lot of money going towards scare tactics like stifling innovation and things like that that even the basic populist thinks Like again, I don't think we're talking and I don't think the media is serving people correctly. Anyway, if I were writing a book, I would spend my next 10 years thinking about writing this book, because I think it's a real I mean.

01:33:27
What would you, what would it be like? What the media should be doing or what do you want to? It's not just the media, it's like how how we understand what technology is doing to our society, what we want as a society right, and then how to frame that issue so we can actually effectively regulate around it. And right now there's so much money going into stopping that from happening that, yeah, money from the big tech money from big tech that doesn't want to be regulated at all they don't want to be regulated.

01:33:59
But it's not just big tech, it's also like private equity firms. There's a lot of money in keeping things right the way they are the firearms industry, you know yeah yeah, it turned out well oil and gas industry right.

01:34:13 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I mean, we made this business where people didn't have to pay for internet services by collecting their information. It turned out we could make a ton of money from collecting and using it we kind of blew it, didn't we?

01:34:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wish honestly, who's the?

01:34:26 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
we making all the ton of money, not us, yeah.

01:34:30 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Just tech giants.

01:34:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, just tech giants. Yeah, I, you know. It's probably the case that if we really thought about it, we might have designed the internet differently. I asked tim berners-lee once uh, or no, I'm sorry it was um uh. Vint surf once what he would have done differently when he created tcpip said I would have built encryption in, but we didn't know. Yeah, didn't need it. Was it? Didn't need it then? Just universities, yeah a bunch of scientists talking to each other.

01:34:54 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Um, that's the problem, and you know it's a little hard to after the fact, as we've learned with encryption, to add it. Yeah, the counter argument. But if you had put it in in the beginning, you probably wouldn't have succeeded because it would have been too complicated to use and it wouldn't have gotten the wide adoption. Because it was simple to use, it got the wide adoption and now you have the problem if everybody who used email was forced to use pgp, there would be no email yeah, you know you don't be okay to that critical mass part.

01:35:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, all right, let's take a little break. More to come. You're watching the first show of the new year. We're so glad you're here, um, and I hope you had a good holiday and a good break. I have to say, two weeks without doing shows. At first I thought this is great and then I kind of missed it, so I'm glad to be back. I hope you're glad to have us back here.

01:35:45
Our show today. We have a great panel and I'm really thrilled to have anthony hoff from tech crunch, from consumer reports, stacey Higginbotham and our very own Mr Know-It-All, richard Campbell. I just watched the 39 Steps, richard, and the plot of it is there's a guy who memorizes 50 facts every day and you can ask him any question and he will answer the question, and so the spies used him to memorize the secret plans. You don't know any secret plans, probably, so If I did, would I tell you Only if I asked the right question. Our show today, brought to you by Thinkst Canary.

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01:40:37
The Thinkst Canary Love this thing. Canarytools slash twit. The offer code is twit. Thank them for their support when you talk to them. A ruined company of great people. On we go with the show. The Russian Shadow Fleet Oil Tanker. Uh, on we go with the show the the russian shadow fleet oil tanker. This is another case of undersea cables being cut. This time finland seized, uh, this shadow fleet oil tanker. It was like, like previously, it was dragging its anchor and it cut the Estlink-2 subsea electricity cable. So it wasn't internet, it was electricity in the Gulf of Finland. Tankers register in the Cook Islands but carries oil from Russia to Egypt. Finland said they believe the vessel's anchor which they did find on the ship was, uh was cutting the cables.

01:41:40 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
This is not the first time this has happened, not even the first time in that area that's right. We're two uh undersea cables cut by a chinese container ship, connecting finland and estonia right, the swedes boarded that one, and then the chinese showed up, and pretty quickly after that they were on back on their way again.

01:41:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah last year, a chinese container ship cut a gas pipeline between finland and estonia. This is a new form of warfare. In a way, isn't it infrastructure warfare? In a way, isn't it infrastructure warfare?

01:42:19 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
uh, so uh you made a good point. This, uh, this tanker is full of oil. It is, and it's a poorly maintained ship. Right, these are ships that are not running in the public register, they don't have ais indicators or they turn them off. Um, there, there's been four of them have broken up and sunk in the black sea recently, oh dear, uh, so there's a lot of oil spills going on the black sea. This is all a side effect of the war and, uh, russia being outside of normal trade chains, so they have to keep their stuff secret, and so these ships are not good ships. And uh, yeah, you don't lose an anchor. That's weird. That's a lot of money, it's an expensive thing to lose, so it's, uh, it definitely seems interesting you're also seeing it with gps, like the fact that they're turning on the gps

01:42:57 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
yeah, trackers. Yeah, for I mean it's making and jamming them. Yes, it's making global trade just dangerous these.

01:43:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, yeah, that's right, because if you're a ship and you're using gps and suddenly you don't know where the hell you are, that's problematic.

01:43:21 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
It's a nice reminder that we depend a lot on laws. It's kind of like every time I drive on our streets I'm like I'm really just relying on the people around me to behave the way I expect them to behave, and for a long time we have, but we're kind of it feels like that is less true it feels like that is less true.

01:43:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Perhaps and and we talked about this on twig, uh, and I'm sorry you're not on twig anymore, we loved having you, but we talk about this a lot it's not just laws, it's norms, because not everything is regulated by a law, but there are norms of behavior that we just expect as civil society, that we're going to, you know, behave and no one still puts on their headphones when they're in public.

01:43:58 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah, but, there are a lot of ports that won't allow these ships on in, right, yeah, they the the reason that you get a place like egypt where they're getting a bargain on that oil, and so they'll, uh, they'll, tolerate these, these shadow ships. If they couldn't land anywhere, they wouldn't be, around, but the shadow fleets grown immensely since the Ukraine war started well, it isn't there?

01:44:21 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
a Chinese, the, the Chinese shadow Fleet, just isn't just destroying, like internet and electricity cables, it's also like delivering, like the majority of like calamari to the US isn't it?

01:44:32 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
yeah, the the dark fishing Fleet. Yeah, wait a minute slow down. Hold of like calamari to the us, isn't it? Yeah, the the dark fishing fleet.

01:44:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, wait a minute slow down hold on what calamari you mean squid yeah, yep, there's unregulated fishing being done extensively.

01:44:45 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
It's not even just the chinese. You know, the canadians were up in arms about ships in the in the restricted cod zones. Like they they. There's a lot of malfeasance going on in marine these days because there's far less enforcement than there used to be. There used to be a time where if you didn't have a registered ship, you would be boarded by a Coast Guard Right and bad things would happen. The Finns are doing the right thing. They're holding the ship, which means it's not going to deliver oil, and time is money in these scenarios uh, yeah and of course, uh.

01:45:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The other side effect of this is Estonia has to make up for the electricity it's not getting from Finland now by buying it from Russia well, probably Belarus, but yes, that's close enough close enough, but I want to know more about calamari. Should, should I not be eating calamari Stacy? Is this, uh, is this unregulated calamari, or is this, uh, black market calamari? What are we talking here?

01:45:45 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
oh, it's, it's calamari from all. I mean, it's calamari that you find in like legit places, um so.

01:45:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love fried calamari. Should I stop eating this? I stopped eating octopus because I found out they're smart oh yeah, I had to stop eating octopus, yeah it felt bad after my octopus friend. I thought I'm not gonna eat that let me find.

01:46:07 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Let me find you a definitive article that will help you because time piece on it a couple of years ago so it's, it's, it's calamari, it's harvesting calamari in areas that are protected, or over harvesting it they're over harvesting or doing it in, but in your right I mean other countries do this too. It they were shining a light on chinese ships, okay, well, they have by far the biggest fleet.

01:46:34 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
It's like 500 ships. It's massive.

01:46:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a fishing fleet.

01:46:40 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
They're not just catching the calamari, they're cleaning and processing and flash freezing them into packages that look like any other package and then mixing them with the regular supply.

01:46:51 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
The New Yorker had an article the squid fleet wow, um, this is, this is a focus on. It's a film. Oh, that's an article about a film here's an article for taste calamari.

01:47:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, apparently the the the calamari fishery in rhode island is in deep trouble. I know we don't get dungeness crab anymore at christmas time in california because it's been overfished and they're trying to build.

01:47:30 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Well, that's a climate change thing, is it like yeah, because you can get plenty?

01:47:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
of it in oregon, it's just you can't get it down here as well as overfishing too yeah, there's overfishing, but we also like the, I can't.

01:47:42 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah, the water got real warm with all the heat waves up here, and it makes it hard for them to breathe.

01:47:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're about to lose all of our apples too now that I could live without calamari, but I can't live with your cosmic crisps. They're in danger, man, man I well, I, I gotta have apple pie. Uh, you may remember that there was a. There's been a battle over the last couple of administrations over net neutrality. Um, under, uh I the under trump, under Trump, I believe, the FCC decided that Internet service providers could not be regulated.

01:48:20 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
It was a law passed by Congress. Congress did Congress actually, in one of their budget acts, did the.

01:48:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it was the Restoring Internet Freedom Act actor the idea is that an internet service provider should be agnostic about the kind of traffic it's carrying and shouldn't favor netflix, let's say, because netflix gives it money over, uh, amazon prime, because amazon doesn't give it money and and and so that net content and comcast shouldn't favor nbcu, which is right, yeah, right, um, so it's been kind of back and forth.

01:49:00
Uh, the biden administration made restoring internet neutrality a priority. Uh, in 2021, he signed an executive order encouraging the fcc to reinstate the rules. Uh, they did, but the US Circuit Court of Appeals, the Sixth Circuit, has said the FCC doesn't have the authority to do so. Obama implemented it in 2015. Trump repealed it in 2017. Biden brought it back, but the court says that it's up to Congress to decide this.

01:49:38 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah, and it was the Lopez.

01:49:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it Lopez? Loper Bright, loper Bright.

01:49:42 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I was like not Lopez, sorry, loper Bright is what they cited.

01:49:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the deference to government agencies. Right yeah, this is the reversing of the Chevron. It's like Chevron deference, yeah.

01:49:54 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Is what people tend to know it as. Yeah yeah, it was a pretty brutal opinion.

01:50:03 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Well, and and and Loper bright's going to come down like like citizens United. This is one of the undermineings of the mechanisms that have allowed experts to help protect us. Yeah.

01:50:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean, I understand that there are people who think that government bureaucracies overregulate or overreach, but, as we've learned, first of all, congress doesn't have the bandwidth to regulate everything that needs to be regulated and, secondly, they often don't have the bandwidth to regulate everything that needs to be regulated. And secondly, they often don't have the expertise and and they're and the courts are even worse, frankly um, and and so, yeah, this is, this is bad news. Go ahead.

01:50:48 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you no, I was just going to say congress can't do anything because they're so you. No, I was just gonna say congress can't do anything because they're so stuck with all of their donors.

01:50:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah, this is but let me ask this question because you know, I remember, under the obama fcc, they, they introduced this concept of net neutrality by defining I think by defining internet service providers as telecommunications providers so they were.

01:51:12 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
This is actually. It goes all the way back to 1995 and not, uh, michael, michael powell, who it's not colin powell, he was the general colin powell. Michael powell, no, no, michael powell yeah, um, so this was actually bush's original fcc. They were like hey, we should, we should in. He created the first principles of net neutrality. This was actually done under a Republican.

01:51:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
FCC? Well, and it wasn't an issue until 1995. I mean, but as soon as you started seeing, for instance, zero rating, where your phone company says we're not going to charge you for Netflix, Well it became an issue in like 1996, 97.

01:51:52 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
And that was a big deal because we saw the telecoms suddenly realized that the services running over their pipes were going to make a lot of money. So you had Ed Whitaker who at the time was the CEO of AT&T SBC I think it was SBC as he was the CEO before it merged and he was like look, we're not going to have dumb pipes, everybody's going to pay us. You're going to pay us and the content company.

01:52:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They want to get it both ways. That's right. They want Netflix to give them money and us to get to.

01:52:18 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Netflix Because they were like we own this infrastructure. I mean, he knew he was a monopoly, basically, and so then it started becoming an issue, especially and it became an issue with Skype originally, and it was because a tiny little ISP in Madison, Wisconsin, was like we're blocking Skype.

01:52:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We offer telephone service. That's right.

01:52:44 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yes. And so suddenly the FCC was like what? No, no, you can't block all these cool money-making internet services like Skype. And then it became a thing, and it became a thing. It just became more and more of a thing as more and more services started competing with over-the-top television was when it became a real big thing, and that was back in like 2010? 2010?.

01:53:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, sorry, I've covered this for 15 years. I know this is an ongoing, but here's my question. And I'm you know, I'm a big supporter of net neutrality. I have been, I mean, really outspoken. I think this is obviously at least abstractly the right thing. But at the same time, once those were repealed in 2017, did we see suddenly all sorts of negative impacts of of not having those rules.

01:53:46 - Benito (Announcement)
It's been seven years without net neutrality.

01:53:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Has it been a problem?

01:53:51 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
um, I don't know. One there have been states that have repealed it. Two, I think a lot of companies have been on the better behavior. Also, there are consent decrees in place there.

01:54:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There were consent decrees in place governing so maybe we don't need uh the comcast to to regulate this.

01:54:13 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I would argue that, now that it is definitively up to Congress, we probably will soon see things, and we're probably going to see it first at zero rating. So what you're going to see is like what Timo tried to do with Spotify Right, and people love zero rating because it gives them stuff for free.

01:54:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right. Consumers think it's great. They don't understand that what it does is it means Spotify is the winner. Because they're not.

01:54:40 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Nothing new will come up. Nothing new will ever come up Unless they can pay AT&T.

01:54:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right? Well, that's the current state.

01:54:48 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
It's a hard argument but that's what I would look for.

01:54:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is conceivable. This is the story from Reuters. The Trump administration is unlikely to appeal the decision, but net neutrality advocates which, by the way, include Amazon, apple, alphabet and Meta, could seek review by the Supreme Court. The problem is this is the same Supreme Court that threw out Chevron deference. So I mean it seems pretty clear. In fact, the Sixth Circuit said this is the same supreme court that threw out chevron deference. So I mean it seems pretty clear. In fact, the sixth circuit said this is because of the loper bright decision. The fcc doesn't have that authority, only congress has that authority. The supreme court said so.

01:55:29 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
So I can't imagine a supreme court appeal will have uh any well impact on this this, yeah, yeah, but Stacy you were saying that there are specific states that do have um net neutrality protections in place. Is that right?

01:55:45 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
yes, washington State allows for net has a. Yeah, let me see what I want to say they're like 10 California does yeah that's what I was wondering.

01:55:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah so if big states like california and washington have those rules, that in some way protects us, because even if you live in new jersey, uh, at&t is not going to do something to new jersey that it can't do in california, or no?

01:56:10 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
california, oregon, washington, colorado, new york, maine all have enacted net neutrality legislation. Montana's governor did issue a net neutrality executive order, as did. I don't know if that's vermont or new hampshire. It's vermont. Sorry, I was like I'm looking at an unlabeled map. It's the one on the left okay, okay, good.

01:56:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah it's the one next to New York, and Rhode Island. I'm impressed that you were able to do that without labels on the states. You did very well.

01:56:43 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
It still comes down to enforcement, right Like the upside to a federal law is. Then you have federal enforcement that covers the whole area. Yeah, it's very difficult to do a state byby-state thing, and violations of net neutrality are difficult to detect. It's easy if they're marketing a zero rate, but there's lots of more insidious things that are harder to measure.

01:57:05 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, look at peering I have to like if I want to, when I was writing those stories about like peering issues.

01:57:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hard to explain, isn't it? It's hard to explain isn't it?

01:57:13 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah, it's hard to explain and that's only sort of tangentially. It's like their way around. Net neutrality was what peering was, but I had to run like trace routes on all of my. Yeah, I mean that's, it's a lot of work.

01:57:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Fortunately they're. The big tech companies are the ones who want net neutrality, because they want a pipeline to you as a customer and they don't want these gatekeepers to get in the way.

01:57:36 - Benito (Announcement)
Oh, maybe not in the long term I think they just they don't want to fight in another reason. They just don't want another fight with each other in another like place. You know like they're already fighting each other in so many places.

01:57:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They don't want another one but you know you've talked about net neutrality before because you grew up in the philippines, where there were no net neutrality rules.

01:57:53 - Benito (Announcement)
Yes, there's no neutrality there. So you know, when you get your phone plan it comes with like unlimited access to facebook, because you know your it doesn't count against your data stuff like that.

01:58:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, yeah, does. What is the impact of that?

01:58:06 - Benito (Announcement)
um well, every for one thing is like the internet in the philippines to a lot of people is just facebook.

01:58:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's facebook that, yeah, that's one of the and I'm sure WhatsApp has a leg up on any other messaging platform.

01:58:18 - Benito (Announcement)
That's not true actually. Actually, in the Philippines it's Viber for some weird reason Viber. Yeah, it's a Rakuten project. I didn't know they were still around Rakuten property. Yeah.

01:58:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, wow. Maybe Viber has some deals with it. How many? There are a lot of carriers in the Philippines, I think.

01:58:32 - Benito (Announcement)
Yes, there's two majors and then some smaller ones.

01:58:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, let's take a little break. A few more stories, including the words that Lake Superior State University say should never be uttered in 2025. But first a word from Zscaler. Zscaler is the leader in cloud security. You know enterprises spend a lot of money on firewalls, on VPNs, and that's really done nothing by 18% year over year in ransomware attacks a $75 million record payout last year in ransomware attacks. So I think we maybe need something a little bit better.

01:59:23
The problem with the perimeter defenses and VPNs the traditional security tools in a way they expand your attack service with public facing IPs that can be exploited by bad actors more easily than ever now with ai tools and they struggle to inspect the encrypted traffic at scale, allowing compromise. Vpns and firewalls also enable lateral movement. This is what we were talking about earlier. Once somebody's in the network, once you connect users to the network, they can go all over, and that allows data loss via encrypted traffic that you can't see and other leakage paths. Hackers exploit traditional security infrastructure using AI to outpace your defenses. Look, I think it's pretty clear. This is now's the time to rethink your security and not let the bad guys win. They're innovating, they're exploiting your defenses. What can you do. Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI stops attackers by hiding your attack surface, making your apps, your IP addresses, invisible. They don't even know where to start. It also eliminates lateral movement, because, even if a user is in the network, they can only connect to the apps you say, not the entire network. Continuously verifying every request based on identity and context. Simplifying security management with AI powered automation and detecting threats. Using AI to analyze over 500 billion daily transactions. Look, it's very simple. Hackers can't attack what they can't see. Protect your organization with Zscaler zero trust plus AI. Learn more at zscalercom slash security. That's Z-S-C-A-L-E-R Zscaler. I do the Z for our Canadian friends Zscaler or zscalercom slash security. Protect against AI cyber attacks. Zero trust is such a good way to do this. Zscaler Very interesting study in Harper's Magazine.

02:01:30
It's, I think, an excerpt from a book Liz Pelly is about to publish about Spotify and I don't use Spotify, so you tell me if this matches. If you ask your experience, if you ask for a type of music not, I want to hear music from the Rolling Stones, but you say I want to hear some focus music or relaxing music Much of the stuff you'll get in the playlist is phony musicians, cheap, fake artists. Pelly writes offerings created by Spotify, offerings created by spotify. Now spotify told the music press the reports were quote categorically untrue, full stop. The company is not creating its own fake artist tracks, but it did stop short of saying it's adding these to the playlists. And you can see it for yourself.

02:02:31
Um, articles about this from NPR and the Guardian started to stir up some interests. Journalists scrutinized the music of some of the artists they suspected to be fake. Before the year was out, a music writer named David Turner used analytics data to illustrate how Spotify's ambient chill playlist had largely been wiped of known artists like Brian, emo and bibio and John Hopkins music, replaced by tracks from something called epidemic sound, a Swedish company that offers production music, subscription-based production music, the stock music you'd hear in the backgrounds of advertisements or TV shows and so forth, of course. Why would spotify do this? So they don't have to pay royalties to the record companies, like brian eno's record company. Uh, this is a story that's been kind of brewing for some time and is now really becoming more and more of a story. I don't use Spotify, anthony. Are you a Spotify? You seem like you look like a Spotify user.

02:03:40 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
I don't know what that means, but I am a Spotify user. I know it. See, every year I sort of like feel more grudging about the fact that I still use Spotify.

02:03:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have you noticed that these kind of ambient sound playlists are filled with weird stuff?

02:03:58 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
I remember reading about this when there were some other reports. I don't know exactly when it was, but there have been other reports in the last few years and I think I first I was like who even uses Spotify in this way? But then I did notice over Christmas I don't have Christmas albums saved in Spotify. So you just type in Christmas music and then try to find music You're not looking for like totally generic, you know, but you do like you know probably which cover of Winter Wonderland you're listening to. You don't necessarily care, you don't care.

02:04:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is Pelly writes. According to a source close to the company. This is in Harper's Magazine. This is Peli writes according to a source close to the company. This is in Harper's Magazine. Spotify's own internal research showed many users don't come to the platform to listen to specific artists or albums. They're looking for a soundtrack. They're looking for wallpaper, a study playlist, a dinner vibes, right, and, as a result, the thinking seemed to be.

02:04:56 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
She writes why pay full price royalties if users?

02:04:58 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
are only half listening, not even. Yeah, it's background music. Yes, it's wallpaper.

02:05:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, it's not like spotify's paying artists that much money as well, hey, anything. Uh, you know they're very, very profitable.

02:05:08 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Um, yeah, you know they're creating something called their perfect time, profitable like this year weren't they the ceo of spotify has made more money than any musician ever, ever, oh yeah well, yeah, daniel eck has definitely, but that's not cash money, that's the value of the stock and like it well, that's the problem for spotify is they're always hanging by a thread because the music industry could cut that thread.

02:05:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they've always looked at ways to get beyond the big three record companies, right uh?

02:05:40 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
and this is one of the ways you call it the perfect fit content program.

02:05:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They started this in 2017, according to Liz Peli, as one of the company's new bets to achieve profitability. She talked to former employees, uh, who said, yeah, this is what we did. Editors were soon encouraged by higher-ups, with increasing persistence to add pfc content to certain playlists. So there was, in fact, according to this story in harper's, an increasing pressure to start putting this stuff in there. Uh, spotify denies the staffers were encouraged to add pfc to playlists and that playlist editors were discontented with the program. By 2023, several hundred playlists were being monitored by the team responsible for pfc. 150 of those including ambient relaxation, deep Focus, 100 Lounge, bossa Nova, dinner cocktail, jazz, deep sleep, morning stretch and detox. We're nearly entirely made up of PFC.

02:06:48 - Benito (Announcement)
These phony yeah, it's the Jazz that really pisses me off about this, because there's so much good jazz out there. There's already so much of that.

02:06:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right.

02:06:57 - Benito (Announcement)
You don't need the slop you don't need the AI slop jazz.

02:06:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ask for it by name, though I think not genre right, that's probably one way to avoid this.

02:07:09 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
The first row I get is like actual blues music. It's like playlists that are blues standards, blues classics, and they're real. And then there's a modern blues and if you look in there, those are actual blues artists. But then you get moods and moments.

02:07:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, there you go.

02:07:27 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Those are like. I look through some of those and I'm like no, some of these people may be actual artists that I don't recognize, so I would have to go through and scan them individually, but there are some that look suspicious, uh, but if nobody complains, they're gonna keep doing it yeah, and I don't think. I mean, I think people like my favorite, my child's favorite genre of music is like lo-fi, hip-hop beats.

02:07:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

02:07:59 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
And all of that is just-.

02:08:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And they don't care who made them right, it's slop.

02:08:04 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
It's wallpaper that and Tchaikovsky, so there is a large-.

02:08:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's not wallpaper, that's good stuff.

02:08:11 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Well, I mean, but what I'm saying is for my child. Those are equivalent because they're just background noise, right, um, and I kind of I think they should probably be transparent. Maybe, I mean, I don't know, should we be transparent about it they uh.

02:08:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Daniel ack in a 2023 conference call noted the boom in ai generated content could be quote great culturally and allow spotify to quote grow engagement and revenue well, yeah, and I think it's worth underlining that it's not just the these artists right is that there's ai content is sort of like spreading throughout spotify.

02:08:51 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
I mean beyond spotify too, but certainly within spotify, like all the like. One thing I have noticed is all these like genre and time period playlists that I used to listen to and they used to be sort of just the standard spotify playlist. Now they like really are touting oh, this is like personalized for you, um, and then you know the whole like year in review spotify wrapped um last year I think that's cool everybody's a cool idea right, but then what happened, I guess, was they.

02:09:17
I didn't even bother listening to it because it just sounded so horrible. Like, um, they, they, they like, did an AI generated podcast of people discussing your favorite um songs and people were just like this sucks that's, that's probably that notebook, lm stuff like this sucks, that's.

02:09:37 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
That's probably that notebook lm stuff.

02:09:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, yeah, and it sounds just like me, which doesn't make me have any happier. Yeah, I got an email that somebody said it sounds just like me.

02:09:43 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
It's just generic podcaster sound you know anthony's hinting at the future. The future is you will have a mood bot that simply plays music of whatever mood mood you want, by generating it on the fly from a generative AI data.

02:09:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean really the only people who are harmed by this are actual performing artists.

02:10:03 - Benito (Announcement)
Well, I think we're every human who doesn't get to listen to actually human generated yeah, like I mean if I, I used to hate Brian, you know right, but I don't know some.

02:10:14 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I flipped a switch when I turned like 35 or something and all of a sudden, I was like music for airports is my jam.

02:10:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a great, isn't that?

02:10:21 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
a great album. I love it. Eno mode on.

02:10:24 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah, so, oh, oh, sorry.

02:10:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Brian's calling.

02:10:28 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Right, yeah, he's like thanks, stacey, but like I otherwise would have never have gotten that, and if I got, like some sort of AI generated slop, it's unclear you can't love that artist because it doesn't exist, so it's just right.

02:10:43 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
And if you don't have a you know, and if you just have more and more AI slop making the music industry more and more unsustainable, then the quality is just going to get worse for everyone.

02:10:53 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
But this happened before. This is Muzak from the 70s.

02:10:56 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
It is and people hate Muzak.

02:10:58 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Exactly. And I think it's going to happen again, right, like I think you're going to have exactly that period of this is new ways to lower the cost of music. It makes perfect sense to me that there will be an opportunity to create a brand around human music only Right for sure and to create a brand around. Human music only, Right for sure, and other kinds of content too that you'll have sort of like yeah, I think you're already seeing a wave of human created things only.

02:11:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I think a lot of podcasts are going to be created that way too.

02:11:28 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
I think part of the I think you're right that like this kind of it's well, part of what it speaks to is that music serves a lot of different functions and sometimes it is about this like incredible creativity, human connection. Sometimes it is just like I want noise while I'm writing a blog post, but it also, yeah, like there has been other like sort of filler music before. I guess part of the anger here is because there's this sense of a shrinking pot and then spotify is taking more of the pot itself through this mechanism that makes, I suspect, musicians particularly leave kenny g alone. Would you pay? How dare you, sir?

02:12:06 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
an extra two or three dollars a month for only human people in your spotify playlist.

02:12:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Spotify might agree that. So this is an excerpt from the book which comes out this month Liz Pelly, p-e-l-l-y, the author of Mood Machine, the Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. This excerpt is from Harper's Magazine. It will be published in January by One Signal Publishers. It's funny, it's been. It's sort of a scandal, but also most of the time people go. Yeah, I thought that was probably what was going on.

02:12:43 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I thought that was what was happening the amazon alkaline battery of music.

02:12:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, yeah, exactly exactly are amazon batteries no good no, they're the same, they're the same.

02:12:57 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
They're probably manufactured the same plant in china for crying out loud.

02:13:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just a cover on them, but it's I think that's what we're recognizing that you just wanted a battery I just need to sell you ours because so we can keep that 25 cents a battery yeah uh, if you own a vw, you may be a vw, audi or a skoda or a seat if you own an ev from those companies. 800 000 ev owners data was leaked, including their movements car scoops right from home to brothels, an unprotected, misconfigured cloud storage. How many times have we heard about misconfigured s3 buckets?

02:13:40 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
um, unfortunately, they cited evs on this because, well, this is a problem with any data set.

02:13:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do think evs collect more data, though, don't they about the?

02:13:50 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
driver sensitive data. If you think of location data sensitive, well, first, when that cyber truck uh blew up in front of the trump hotel.

02:13:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh tesla knew everything about its movements, you know but we already do. Tesla had that and actually yeah it's not a surprise, yeah, and I hope tesla protects it better than audi vw does.

02:14:11 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Let's put it that way tesla got in trouble several years ago for not sharing it with the customer and the customer wanted it to prove that they didn't like speed and like either red light cam or it was parking tickets or something, and tesla was like nobody gets that data yeah, but we do have a little god mode here in the company where we can watch you I just

02:14:36
bought a mini. This is related to this sort of um an ev mini countryman. Oh, the new countryman, yeah, yeah, the new cooper, she loves it but it doesn't have any uh range.

02:14:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yours probably has some decent range it has okay range.

02:14:53 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah, but I had to go through at the dealership six screens of privacy settings.

02:14:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

02:14:59 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
And what was really interesting to me is most of them. I couldn't turn off because I wanted the navigation functions, which totally makes sense but is also like you know. So, hopefully BMW Mini is not storing these in an unsecured AWS server.

02:15:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a nice car. I like that countryman. Did you replace your Tesla with it? I did, oh, nice, good. It's kind of embarrassing to be driving a Tesla these days.

02:15:33 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
It was a 2014 Tesla.

02:15:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's okay, it was time, it was vintage.

02:15:38 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
Vintage, not as embarrassing as driving a Cybertruck.

02:15:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That would be embarrassing. There's somebody in Petaluma who owns one. Every time I see it, I go. Lake Superior State University has been doing this since 1976, publishing a list of words that should no longer, ever, ever, be used. This is their 2025 banished words list. Are you ready? Cringe game changer era? That might have to do with Taylor Swift more than anything else. Dropped, dropped why can't we use dropped, oh, like a book?

02:16:22
dropped, or my album dropped, or Beyonce's latest drop? Yeah, let's not do that. I Y K Y K, if you know. You know they don't like that acronym. You know they don't like that acronym. Sorry, not sorry. That should have been dropped three years ago. Drop it. No more skibbity. What the hell does skibbity mean? No one knows. This viral word may have resonated with a younger crowd, but for many it's just noise. Agatha from denmark explains by the way they get international uh people on this. Nobody cares about a skibbity toilet, skibbity fizz or skibbity ohio phantom tax. At this point, nobody even knows what it means and it just annoys people skibbity is exactly they just call up grandmas and ask them what they think about the language.

02:17:10
All right you know youngito young person explain what is a skippity.

02:17:15 - Benito (Announcement)
It's nothing. It's actually the thing that kids use to piss off old people, that's all it really is.

02:17:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the word that pisses off old people. It's working. It's working. Agatha hates it. A hundred percent. Is it possible to be overenthusiastic about retiring the phrase a hundred percent? Absolutely. It's overuse has left no room for nuance or doubt Right?

02:17:42 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Nobody says 100%. Now it's like 100,000%.

02:17:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah right, you can't even say it anymore. You have to say 101%, 110%, 2,000%. Oh, by the way, pretty fly for a Psy guy. Our CIS guy has filled us in on the origination of skibbity in our club twit discord. This is why you join the club for valuable information like this. Skibbity originated as a dance song by the russian rave band Little Big, released in 2018. Yeah it's a part of it's a remix culture thing.

02:18:18 - Benito (Announcement)
It's like this song that they put it on this video and then it became this viral thing.

02:18:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then there was a YouTube series.

02:18:22 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Skibbity Toilet. Yeah, this is all. Your bass belong to us. 20 years later.

02:18:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, okay.

02:18:29 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Well, I like all your bass.

02:18:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't ban that. That's a good one. Uh, finally, in the top 10 utilize, I agree. Just use, use, do not utilize, utilize and period as in. I have had enough of this list period.

02:18:50 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
The top 10 banished words I can't believe they've actually gotten people to write about this for this many years. This is the dumbest thing I have seen. I'm so sorry. I'm like why don't I just talk to I don't know my grandpa.

02:19:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What should we ban grandpa? Well, you see, you got to understand. I'm that age, so that's why I like this.

02:19:12 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Don't be that guy man.

02:19:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You, young people, make up words I'm not that young my brother in my day it was 23 skidoo uh, public domain day january 1st 2025. A bunch of works from 1929 are open to all. Sound recordings from 1924 because it's a hundred years. A lot of, a lot of great novels, music, books, plays. Let's see some of the? Uh, some of the sound recordings. I can play these now. I can play george gershwin playing the clarinet and rhapsody for on in blue. It's a little scratchy because it's from 1924. Go ahead, take me down YouTube. That's one of my favorite pieces. Movies the Marx Brothers' Coconuts is now in. That was their first feature film is now in the public domain. The Skeleton Dance Walt Disney very famous. Yeah, I love the skeleton dance. There is some Mickey Mouse stuff. In fact, the first spoken Mickey Mouse animations 12 animations are now uh public domain, including the carnival kid, which was Mickey first talking appearance are you?

02:20:36 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
excited somebody on social media pointed out that it's worth emphasizing that this is public domain in the united states. So you know, don't necessarily try to crap make money off of mickey mouse cartoons in in europe, you may get into trouble we're gonna get taken down in estonia.

02:20:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Damn it, I knew it. Bitcoin, so is is now old enough to drink. The very first uh bitcoin block was mined january 3rd 2009 by, of course, satoshi nakamoto.

02:21:06 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
The genesis block happy birthday bitcoin old enough to drive it's only 16 years.

02:21:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, I can't. Well, it drinks in some countries. What's the drinking age in canada?

02:21:17 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
yeah, it depends on the province, but 18, 18 or 19.

02:21:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, you got drive, sorry. Yeah, don't drink bitcoin. Go home, bitcoin, you're drunk. And finally, uh, the end of the qr code. I mean the end of the barcode. Apparently, qr codes are preferable and barcodes will be gradually, over the next couple of years, replaced by qr codes. They contain more data. They do, in fact, a lot more data. You can put in a qr code things, uh, you know, like where it was manufactured, the data manufacturer the best by date, all of that stuff.

02:21:56 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
But I also put in qr codes are always I'm stealing your thunder stacy. You're going to same place you go. You're the professional here what no, you? What's wrong with qr codes? What they go? They automatically go to the cloud. It means we now have telemetry. Every time you scan a code, you mean I can't wait a minute.

02:22:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If I I scan a QR code, that has to go to the cloud yeah, it needs to check what the QR code is dude.

02:22:19 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah, it checks, it goes, it says, hey, this means what. And then that data like okay, and what I was actually going to say is it's not on device? No, how could it be on device?

02:22:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Your device doesn't have access to the data that the QR code is indicative of. Oh, I thought the QR code had the data. It's just a.

02:22:37 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
URL, and I thought this is what I was going to say. People can easily hack them by placing stickers over QR codes, and if barcodes are replaced by QR codes, if they're not printed on the package, that is dodgy. Couldn't you do that with a barcode? A barcode doesn't take you to a website, though.

02:23:01 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Well, I mean, qr code is just data, but usually that data, the normal scanning device, is your phone and if it sees a URL, it's a URL. Yeah, so it could, so okay, so I thought it would be like a barcode, where there would be data encoded, and that is true. It's just think about the normal mechanism for qr.

02:23:22
Normally, it's a url it becomes, it ends up being a url, and so it does definitely has more data into it. But yeah, all of these things have problems. The barcodes have these problems too. People hack barcodes all the time.

02:23:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
GS1, which is the international nonprofit that maintains the global standard for barcodes. Who are they when they're at home? Who?

02:23:49 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
is this cabal of barcode people. So they did this a couple of years ago. They started this process several years. Did this a couple years ago, they, they started this process several years, I actually met with someone at ces like in the one year ago, right after covid, talking about this very issue, and this was always their goal.

02:24:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So here it is, ces tech covered by the end of 2027, says renaud de barbois, the president and chief of gs1. By the end of 2027. We have defined an ambition. I don't even know what that means, that all retailers of a plan we have the concepts of a plan of defining ambitions. That all, it's not even ambition. We have defined an ambition that by the end of 2027, all retailers in the world will be able to read those next generation barcodes. We think it's doable well, and anything they can read.

02:24:39 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
A qr code can read a barcode, so there's not really any incentive to phase anything out. Just to push folks to put get the buy the new scanners.

02:24:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can read qr codes what is your objection to qr code stacy, besides the fact that they go to the cloud?

02:24:53 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
well that they can be, that people replace, replace what is the actual one with something that will lead you someplace malicious.

02:25:01 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
But QR codes are everywhere now.

02:25:03 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
And because the data gets processed on your phone. There was actually just a brand new hack that bypassed protections that were I can't remember the details of that because there have been like 50 brand new hacks of the last two weeks, um, but there there was one that was like pretty terrible and I can't remember what it bypassed a hack of the qr code um hold on there's so many.

02:25:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's so many. I know, I know. Here's a article on medium generate malicious browser isolation. Oh, that's a good one, which is important and here's an article from 2011 why the qr code is failing.

02:25:47 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I think that did not age well that was like that guy who said bluetooth was not going to do anything. Yeah, yeah, we just had to find the use case, which?

02:25:57 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
was.

02:25:57 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
COVID and restaurants.

02:25:59 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
From 2011. Menus.

02:26:01 - Benito (Announcement)
Yeah.

02:26:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so the stickers would be the number one way of doing that. But you could do that with a barcode, but it wouldn't Okay, but it would just have different information, okay.

02:26:11 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Right, it doesn't actually yeah.

02:26:16 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
And there'll just be an escalation of encryption games here. So the barcodes that the grocery store are putting on their things will have a code so that when they, if somebody, tries to replace it when they scan them, it's like that's not our UQR.

02:26:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah Right, they must do that already.

02:26:40 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Well, you could also. I mean, like if it's printed on the package, that is more likely to be secure than like what happens today is people will I mean you actually see it? This happens in Seattle quite often actually is you will scan. If you scan a QR code on like a poster on a telephone pole, it's even odds that you'll get like some, if not malicious than just a teasing website that's like you do this, you'll get Rickrolled yeah but Joe says no more QR code menus because covid's over and it's time to bring back actual menus.

02:27:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you agree? I love QR code menus in.

02:27:09 - Benito (Announcement)
Japan. Because in Japan really yeah, because you scan it to give you the English menu.

02:27:14 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Oh yeah, that's a good idea. I've also seen QR menus where you could say hey, just show me the vegan options or just show me no gluten Like. As soon as you have a digital menu, you can do cool things. Oh, okay, they've had ingredient lists and cooking methodologies.

02:27:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just, most QR menus lead to a PDF, pdf file, and that is hell. Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, this has been a lovely time. Thank you for us kicking off the year in style. Richard campbell, we'll see you right back here on wednesday for windows weekly and, of course, every week. Two podcasts a week with carl franklin. He does dot net rocks and he does run his radio. They're all at run his radiocom and uh, and he is officially canadian and at some point I want you to tell us about the canadian denmark whiskey war the hands.

02:28:05
Island battles yes it's a great story. I don't know where. I read about that just the other day. I thought I gotta ask richard, I've known for many years. Uh, uh, bless you rich, it's great to see you. Thank you for two weeks in a row now that's a new record. Thank you, I appreciate it. Uh, great to see you. Thank you, stacy higginbotham. Especially thank you for the work you do at consumer reports to make the world better for all of us. You're going to be all about router security this year. Huh, this is the year of router security.

02:28:34 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Router security and end-of-life support for your IoT devices, or rather, telling you about it.

02:28:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you'll have a sell-by date on all your IoT devices Basically, yeah, this is not going to work in seven years An expiration date?

02:28:49 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Well, it was not. Even it's called a minimum guaranteed support time frame. It's the worst naming.

02:28:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Minim minimum guaranteed support time frame. It's the worst naming Minimum guaranteed support time frame.

02:28:58 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
The sell-by dates were just banned in California because they don't actually mean anything Really. Yeah, they confuse the heck out of people.

02:29:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, they do. We're going to do another coffee segment and one thing I learned from Mark Prince, the coffee geek, is it's the roast date that you want to look at, not the sell by date. The roasted date, of course, if you're eating calamari, don't all bets are off. Thank you, stacy, it's great to see you. We'll do the book club in about a month. If you're a member of the club, go vote. There are four excellent books and it's neck and neck between orbit and, uh, another one.

02:29:33 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
So it's really you guys you don't want to.

02:29:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What do you want to do? What did you skew the vote? What do you want to? What do you want to read?

02:29:44 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I just I thought that orbital would be a hard sell for people and I apparently not.

02:29:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's. It's leading right now okay go. Uh, if you're a club member, go vote and if you're not a club member, join the club. It's only seven bucks a month makes a big difference for us in the, our bottom line. But it also gives you great benefits like stacy's book club and ad free versions of all the shows. You can find out more at twittv slash club. Twit anthony ha. Editor. You took the is the weekend over for you now officially.

02:30:17 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
I think that if something crazy happened, it would still be my responsibility. I think I would have an excuse that I was on the show. I was busy talking about the news. We've got a bunch of CES reporters on the ground right now. I mean, I'm off the hook.

02:30:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the fact that we've got a bunch of ces reporters on the ground right now means I'm off the hook. Yeah, nothing's going to happen today. It's ces day. It's great to have you on. Thank you, anthony really appreciate it. At original content is his podcast. What's that all about?

02:30:48 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
uh, I think actually I realized at original content was the handle on twitter, but then we made them. We were now on mostly on instagram. So we're at original content pod on instagram and it's reviewing all the new streaming shows. You know we're going to do the new season of squid game next, um we've never needed you more there are.

02:31:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's so much content and I and I and I can't watch it all. I need to know what I should watch that's, that's the idea behind the podcast squid game really squid game.

02:31:18 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
Yeah, it's back. I don't know, yeah, squid theme on this episode, but but it's, it's back second season not as good but that's uh, that's okay.

02:31:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, the first season was so incredible yes, all right, I'm looking forward to severance coming back in a week. That's going to. Yes, yes, I gotta know what happened. They better, they better say, because I'll be mad if they like lost. They just keep stringing us on. That'd be mad. Original content podcastcom, if you're. If you're, this is the audio program you're looking for. Thank you, anthony, thank you richard, thank you stacy. Thanks to all of you for joining us. It's good to have you back for a brand new year. I think this is going to be. I didn't ask you all this. I should have asked you this what the big story of 2025 will be. I think we'd all agree. It's going to be AI, right?

02:32:08 - Anthony Ha (Guest)
yes, right, certainly the investment into it.

02:32:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Whether or not? Richard says he hopes not. How many years?

02:32:15 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
in a row. Sorry, Richard.

02:32:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but this is the year AI gets smart. Sure, it was last year.

02:32:20 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
They said that last year. Oh, it was last year.

02:32:22 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
No, I think we're going to. The big story this year will be massive infrastructure failure in the United States.

02:32:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's good. You have bridges coming down and stuff like that.

02:32:39 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Oh, bridges coming down and stuff like that. Oh man, I'm not sure if it's climate change, if it's cyber security, if it's corruption, that just totally destroys the whole agencies, that.

02:32:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But like infrastructure failure, that's my vote. I hope I'm wrong. I hope I'm right and you're wrong. Thank you, stacy. Uh, on that up note, we do a little mary sunshine. We do a tweak. By the way, on wednesday a week from wednesday was gonna we're gonna talk about the supreme court and tick tock, uh, but all the shows begin up again. This is the first show of a brand new year.

02:33:03
We do twit every sunday afternoon, 2 pm pacific, 5 pm eastern, 2200 utc. You can watch us live on eight different platforms. If you're a club member, you get exclusive behind the velvet rope access in our club twit discord, but you can also watch us on youtube, youtubecom, slash twit, slash live. Twitchtv twit. We're on twitch as well. We're on xcom. Uh, easy to find us because we're usually the number one show on x, because there's not a whole lot of other stuff going on. So just go to your front page. You'll probably see us there. What else? Kik, linkedin, facebook and TikTok, at least for two more weeks. So watch us live if you want to, but you don't have to because of course, it's a podcast, so you can download the shows from our website.

02:33:51
There's audio or video. At twittv, you can watch a YouTube channel dedicated to this Week in Tech. Youtubecom slash twit has links to all of our shows. Each of them has their own YouTube channel, which is good for sharing. Like, if there's a little clip about calamari you want to share, you could just take that and send that off to your calamari loving friend, or you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That's the pro tip. That way you'll get it automatically the minute we're done every week, just in time for your Monday morning commute.

02:34:23
Thank you, stacey, anthony, richard. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We will see you next week. This is, by the way, this is a big year for Twit. This is completing our 20th year, beginning our, our 21st year. 20 years in podcasting, that's uh, that's the equivalent of I don't know what in dog years. It's 140, but it's got to be more than that in podcast years. Thank you all for being here. We'll see you next time. And, as as I have said for the last 20 years, another twit is in the can. Bye-bye.