Transcripts

This Week in Tech 1014 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. Oh oh, make some time for this episode. We've got one of our best panels ever. Father Robert Balasera is here, the digital Jesuit from Consumer Reports, Nicolas De Leon and Cory Doctorow with his brand new book. We have lots to talk about, Of course, a CES post-mortem Maybe mortem is the right term term too. We'll talk about the big hack turns out, pretty much all of the apps you use on your phone are leaking your location to data brokers, and cory doctorow explains why we need a privacy law. Bad, it's all coming up.

00:42
Next on twit podcasts you love from people you trust this is this is twit this week in tech, episode 1014, recorded Sunday, january 12th 2025. Just say it's capitalism. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news, and there has been a little bit of tech news. Father Robert Balliser is back from ces. He is, of course, our very own digital jesuit. Actually, you're not back, you're still in. Uh in uh, nevada, as you said for another month I'm on parent duty.

01:37
Oh, good for you. Well, love to your folks, uh, and I hope they do okay. Um, we just put one of ours in uh hospice, so I know how it is. Yeah, uh, anyway, it's great to see you. We will get all your ces report. You're still editing the uh, the clips which we will put up when they many clips, many and actually some interesting stuff.

02:02 - Padre (Guest)
you know I have to get by this, this basic negativity I have because I've seen it before, because for some people this is amazing technology that made its way over to Vegas.

02:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, well, I'm going to be the guy you have to talk out of Skepticism. Also, nicolas De Leon is here from Consumer Reports. He's their senior electronics reporter. Did they send you to Las Vegas?

02:23 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
No, I asked. I basically asked not to go this year. I went last year. I try to go like every other year. That's good kind of the cadence. We sent a bunch of folks, but I stayed home, uh, here in arizona.

02:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, yeah, yeah and I see that stacy higginbotham printed out a cr for you as well. That's nice. Do they send those out? When you, when you start working for some reports, they give you a little uh, then they send.

02:47 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
They sent that one to me, I think, during the pandemic at some point for like yeah, because things like this like little media appearances and stuff yeah, hey, look who else is here.

02:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really great to see cory doctorow from pluralisticnet, uh, the bezelorg. Although there's a new book and uh, we will, we well, let's plug it. You got it right there. I don't have it yet.

03:09 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Picks and shovels it's a marty hench mystery from the 80s the early 80s, the era of the weird pc, uh, and I'll point out that I also have an eff back there. Oh, you do so. Okay, it's lost in the noise.

03:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have the traditional podcaster, uh, color bars behind because my, my, uh, my pixu has died, so I'm supposed to be a clock. For people who, who miss the clock, it's, uh, it's 224. You could just do your timing from there, nice. So where should we start? We can either do Facebook or CES, which would make you happier. Let's start with CES and we'll do Facebook a little later. I'm not. I have to say I'm like I'm with Nicholas. Going every year seems a lot to me. I haven't been since COVID and it seems like there's a. You know, there's always going to be new tvs, there's going to be a lot of concept stuff, um, but is there something? And today, this year, of course, it was ai everywhere, right? What did you?

04:18
see that was good, that was was important yeah, that's about it.

04:25 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, so I mean, look, look, every year we can tease a couple of interesting things out of ces. But I was just. I was speaking to bonito before we started the show and we could have replayed the package I created for last year and it would be exactly the same as the package I create for this year, because it's evs, uh, it's ai. Yeah, some new screens, and then the rest of it and the the rest of it wasn't really great. In fact, some of the biggest motion that I saw at ces came before the actual show started. It was during the press days. Sony announced some new partnerships. They announced that their, their new vehicle, their their collaboration which is by the way, 90 spoiler thousand dollar car is crap.

05:09
Uh, oh, really it's. It's. Sony is doing a grand experiment to see who will pay ninety thousand dollars for a forty thousand dollar ev with a playstation. That's, that's.

05:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's probably the best way I noticed that nicholas has a stuffed ps3 controller on his sofa york.

05:28 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Well, ps5 but yes, all right. So maybe maybe you're the one. Uh 90 000 feels a little expensive. I remember I I'm pretty sure I saw the sony concept car at ces last year as well. Maybe it was a different uh model or whatever. But I don't altogether hate the idea of a sony ev.

05:47 - Padre (Guest)
Uh, that's kind of interesting, but not for ninety thousand dollars ninety thousand starting, if you wanted in any usable trim, you're looking at a hundred, ten hundred and twenty. Oh yeah, for that ninety thousand you get terrible range. You get a terrible power system. It does not charge as quickly as like a tesla or even a nissan leaf. You get styling that I get a terrible power system. It does not charge as quickly as like a tesla or even a nissan leaf. You get styling that I think they want it to be futuristic. It's got a dash wide screen where you can put up the different apps that you want to run. But other than that it's, it's not a great car. I mean it's an okay car, it's a decent ev, but again, it's like a forty thousand dollar ev. But they think you're gonna pay more because it's Sony Honda, not so much yeah, maybe like 1990, when Sony was still like.

06:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah it's not the brand it used to be.

06:34 - Padre (Guest)
Oh no, by the way, leo you're gonna love this, because their big announcement was all of these features like driver assist and self-parking. It's absolutely free for three years yeah, first three years.

06:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's the new. This I think it's inevitable we're going to see subscription cars.

06:50 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I mean, everybody wants to do it the only reason there's such a thing as a subscription car is that the digital non-name copyright act makes it illegal to reverse engineer it and just make a mod that lets you turn that subscription into something you own. If we had functional markets for this stuff, the way these guys who claim to be capitalists say that they want, then the fact that you could buy a $1,200 a year subscription to your accelerator pedal would prompt someone to make a $200 mod that just gives you your accelerator pedal.

07:23 - Padre (Guest)
Right, reverse engineer it it, but you can't because that would be wrong and actually on the ev panel that they had on monday um, one of the speakers she did this thing about because it was a question and answer, and someone in the audience said what do you think about the trend towards subscription everything? It seems as if ev manufacturers are adopting what the software industry has done. Everything is now as a service and there were so many ways she could have answered the question. The way she answered it was. I think consumers are getting used to it and they actually like it. I'm like whoa, that's like the one wrong answer wow, yeah, they actually like it.

07:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We like spending money. Why not more money for simple basic services like car seat heaters, that bmw?

08:08 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
tried. Actually, your boss is right, that's that, that's the official, the official, that official mode of just that's right.

08:16 - Padre (Guest)
Actually, your boss is right, you do like that and actually the other ev trend is, if you went to the west hall, which is where most of the evs were located, it was china, china and korea.

08:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the next question I was going to ask, because it used to be, the fun thing at ces was to go to the hall where all the international, especially chinese, crazy stuff was. But now, given that we're going to probably see 60 tariffs, uh, with china in the next couple of months and that, you know, china may not be the easiest country to buy something from in the next couple of months, you still saw a lot of Chinese presence there, huh, oh yeah because, remember, it's an international show.

08:56 - Padre (Guest)
Oh yeah that's true.

08:57
It's only the US that won't be able to get it exactly and when you looked at the Chinese offerings, yes, okay, we could make lots of fun about how Chinese vehicles have developed over the years and there's some safety concerns that have to be addressed, but the vehicles that they brought looked good. They looked really, really good, and they had models like an EV minivan with chairs that swivel around that started at $30,000. So it's sort of like okay, well, get a luxury Eevee from Honda or from Sony or from Tesla, or you could buy an Eevee for everybody.

09:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why are Chinese cars less expensive? Are they subsidized by the government or are they legitimately less expensive? I know the market and yes, wants them to be less expensive. Right, I mean you can't.

09:40 - Padre (Guest)
I mean it's uh some. At least three of the companies were either state or heavily backed by the state, so there's a lot of subsidy there. They're in deployment method, they're all in startup method, so they're trying to get a customer base starting in China. So they're trying to force out Tesla. They want Tesla to no longer be the status symbol for EV luxury, and they might actually have it.

10:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But also Ironically, with Elon Musk in the government, it looks like Tesla might lose his government subsidies with, along with all the other EV manufacturers, which is pretty hysterical, really weird, uh. But he also, I think, is lobbying hard and Trump has said this to ban Chinese vehicles in the United States yeah, I'd heard that, uh, chinese vehicles are also shorter range and that oh interesting they.

10:29 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
They enjoy lots and lots of advantages because it a shorter range car is a smaller battery, it doesn't weigh as much.

10:35
Lots of other things in the material bill become cheaper and, given that you know, the very large majority of the of the trips that most people take are quite short range, you know this is we have. We have a car with a 200 mile ev range, uh, which turns out not to be as useful as we thought it would be like it's not enough to get us to san diego and it's way more than we need to get to, like anaheim. So we end up renting a car when we go. You know, if we go skiing or something, we'll rent a car. We don't, we don't try and get anywhere in our 200 mile EV and we paid a substantial premium versus, say, 150 mile EV to get that, to get that 200 miles. And you know, honestly, if I had it to do over again, I would get a 50 mile EV.

11:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the number one complaint I hear from Americans about EVs is the range and yeah we have a 90 mile an hour. Mini Cooper 90 miles range Mini Cooper. That's fine for getting around.

11:30 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Where are they going? I mean, sure, some people have very long commutes and that is a legitimate thing, but it's common, statistically they don't have long commutes. Statistically, their commute is not longer than the range of a bottom of the barrel EV.

11:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And the savings are gigantic to drive one of those. Well then, I neglected to ask you before we go on. You're okay.

11:50 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Right, you're in the la area I know yeah, we're not in the bit that's on fire that we. The hollywood hills fire was close, uh, but it's out, um and uh, you know there's more winds coming and a lot of the stuff that's on fire, that's upwind of us, is super toxic. Not just the houses, but there's a lot of industrial sites that have burned, and so we're masking up out of doors, we're running our HEPA filters, been there.

12:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We did that in the fires up here. Yeah, I know how you feel it's awful.

12:21 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
My kid's school was shut last week and my wife's office and I swim in the pool across the street for pain control and that was shut all week. It's, but they all say that they're reopening tomorrow, but the winds are going to kick up again tomorrow and last till wednesday, so it could get bad again our deepest condolences. I should have started the show with this and I completely I mean thankfully, we don't need any condolences, but there are lots of people who do Well.

12:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kevin Rose is one, Kevin, is fine and Daria is fine and their kids and Toaster the Dog is fine, but they were burned out of their home in Pasadena, Palisades, which they just built.

12:55 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
My wife took a load of non-perishables and PPE and medical supplies and water to the Rose Bowl yesterday and I guess, if anyone is within sound of this voice and you've got things to donate, they've got all the clothes they need, but everything else they're short on and they're collecting it at the Rose Bowl.

13:13 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah the two big Jesuit schools, loyola and Loyola Marymount, have opened up their doors and they're taking in people who just need a place to stay. They're making sure they're clothed and fed. So it's, it's bad. We, I think we lost one of our communities and then my family. We lost two of our family members lost their houses. So it's it's big. I mean the area that's already been burned is bigger than the entire city of san francisco. Yeah, so I mean it's not small yeah, just uh.

13:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know all we can say once again. You know, hang in there. And we have a phrase here Sonoma strong. After several years of fires, we're going to have another very, very dry January and February, which puts us also at risk, and it's really a scary thing because you're not safe.

14:04 - Padre (Guest)
So we're just thinking of you and it is weird that January is now fire season. Yeah, that doesn't seem right, does it right?

14:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, that's not normal, that's not okay yeah, I think we probably have, and I don't know, but I imagine we have a few listeners who are also displaced.

14:23 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I'd be surprised if there weren't. Yeah, I mean, the evacuation zones were quite large, the plate much larger, obviously, than the zones that burned.

14:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, you know, um, I've been using watch duty ever since our fires up here and I know that a lot of people in the southland also recognize the value of watch duty and um they're. I think they are a non-profit as well. Scooter x says you can support them uh with donations as well, so this is a very useful uh tool for keeping an eye on. It's actually what the firefighters uh use to keep an eye on what's going on?

15:01
um, and it is a non-profit, so donate if you can. Everybody needs it. Over a million people downloaded watch duty in the last couple of days. I would imagine most of them in the los angeles basin.

15:16 - Padre (Guest)
Ah, all right back to the toy store way to bring the show down, leo, I'm sorry, I should have started with this I.

15:24 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I apologize for not, you know let's talk about carbon intensive semi-disposable electronics I agree, yes, you could if.

15:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you bought it, you can toss it, and that's the most. That's the real thing to remember you never have to keep those america. Oh beautiful, you sent me, corey, a great link the Worst in Show Awards, worstinshowcescom. This looks like an EFF joint, but it's.

15:54 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
You know, the leaders of it are the Repair Coalition and iFixit, but Consumer Reports and PERF.

16:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I see Stacey Higginbotham on environmental impact.

16:06 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Kyle ween I'm usually a judge for this and I had to buy out this year because I had a busy schedule. I haven't even had a chance to watch the videos yet. But uh, the you know, having judged it, that's pretty rigorous criteria. You can see, I actually have a worst in show award up there on my shelf. It's uh. We don't actually send them to the companies. We ask them if they want them or none of them.

16:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I also see you have a mug that I think maybe Posey made saying best of. So that's good, you got both. Best dad, best dad, oh good you are. You're the best dad, absolutely. So what did they yet name the worst?

16:44 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
in show. Oh yeah, they have have, but I haven't seen it. It's in the videos.

16:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you gotta watch a video. Yeah, yeah, they, uh, uh. My favorite category is who asked for this?

16:57 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
that's half of ces yeah, who who did ask for this, so last year I did this for BMW, when they put heads up displays with like ads on your windscreen.

17:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's Stacy participating in that. These are the judges. Um, yeah, it's uh, I mean especially at in, you know. I mean this does tie into the fires, especially in an era where the climate is uh, is going downhill thanks to consumption of uh oil products and then and of course there's going to be people listening to this show we're going to just turn it off. Turn it off because they say how dare you? Um, I think it's the, the. It's a pretty good that it's happening. It's not Jewish space lasers, it's happening. It's not Jewish space lasers, it's not Governor Newsom, it's called climate change.

17:47 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Now, as a Jew, I have to say it might be Jewish space lasers You'd like to take credit.

17:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But no, you don't get to Corey, you don't get to, I mean everyone talks about the Jewish space lasers.

17:58 - Padre (Guest)
No one talks about the Jesuit space lasers. I mean. Ours are way more powerful, Much more sophisticated.

18:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're going to? Yes, drink, nicholas. I agree, corey, on that worst of list.

18:14 - Padre (Guest)
It would not be a complete list unless it includes that it was at the Samsung booth their AI refrigerator.

18:21 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I've not looked through the video yet. I don't know who won this year.

18:25 - Padre (Guest)
I mean, if there was ever a product that didn't need ai, that's it. They the way that they were trying to sell it is oh, the ai has cameras so it can see what's fresh and what's not.

18:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm like what they've been talking about a refrigerator that would open your order your groceries for years yeah, I know they never work and sam, by the way, is famous for selling a refrigerator with an internet browser in the door that doesn't work anymore because they don't keep it up to date.

18:50 - Padre (Guest)
The Samsung booth this year was probably the best microcosm of what's wrong with CES. It was huge, it was glitzy, it was bright, there was a lot of blinky things and there was nothing of substance in there. Half the booth was just hype, not actual product. But oh, wouldn't it be nice if we did this and this and this? And that's like the worst of CES. It's like, look, actually show me something, rather than trying to get me excited about something that might or might not happen in five years.

19:26 - Worst in Show Lady (Announcement)
Cindy Cohnhn, who is, of course, the eff director nominated a in order to suck in a bathtub and their money. That's why, when I polled my co-workers at eff about the worst in show for ces for 2025, they suggested the increasing trend of smart infant products, which, oh god, those were everywhere. Parents, those were everywhere. If you read the comments often end up traumatizing those new parents yes, because you think you're don't put your baby in the robot.

19:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The robot. And the worst thing is, not only is the robot not really doing a good job of caring for your baby, it's collecting all the information it possibly can.

20:05 - Padre (Guest)
They had a baby monitor. They said the selling point was oh, and it stores all your audio and video safely in the cloud. I'm like, no, no, no, don't do that Safe?

20:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you kidding me? In the cloud, it's safe. It's safely in the cloud. What are you talking about?

20:21 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
We store this data safely in this package. We've made out of Saran Wrap you talking about.

20:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We saw this safely in this package we've made out of saran wrap, nathan proctor, who is with the public interest resource group and nominated the product, uh no, who asked for this?

20:35 - Worst in Show Guy (Announcement)
why your washing machine couldn't make phone calls? Now, with their new bespoke ai appliances, you won't have to worry about keeping your pocket-sized phone on you to take phone calls. I missed this one. Your fridge or oven can handle those duties instead.

20:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This sounds like the.

20:49 - Worst in Show Guy (Announcement)
Samsung. According to their press release, it's a bold step forward in realizing it. Screens everywhere vision Now considering Samsung's well-litigated patent on the screen technology this might be appealing vision to their show.

21:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who asked that's the winner and who asked for this? I won't keep playing it because, uh, I don't want to take away views from them. Go to worst in show cescom. Cindy cone. Uh executive director of eff on privacy. Uh, paul roberts, who is a founder of secular repairs on. Stacey Higginbotham from Consumer Reports on Environmental Impact. Kyle Weems of iFixit on repairability. Nathan Proctor from PIRG, with my favorite category. Who asked for this? And I will leave a cliffhanger. Overall worst in show from the executive director of repairorg, gay Gordon Byrne. I can only imagine If thesung is not the worst in the show, if the bassinet that spies on your baby's not the worst in the show, what could it be?

21:53 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
this is the show that has seen the debut of laparoscopic sex toys.

21:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So oh, what do you mean?

21:59 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
no incisions what are you talking about? A dildo with a camera on the end of it? They used to call that teledildonics yeah. No, no, no, no, no. That's remote operating a dildo. This is a leaky Wi-Fi enabled camera.

22:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, no, no, no, no In your most intimate moments. Oh no.

22:21 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
It's all. Password is password, password.

22:27 - Padre (Guest)
At least change it to password one, two, three, four.

22:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No one guesses that, admitted men come on there must have been something you saw, that is world-changing father Robert uh, no, I mean, okay, there's a. There was a few things that I thought were interesting um, that's you know in years past, when we had a studio, you would bring a trunk full of garbage to put on the table to show off. What would you have brought this time, since you can't.

22:54 - Padre (Guest)
I still have the trunk full of garbage. It's just none of it I really want to show. Okay, there's a few that are interesting.

23:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a couple of constant glucose monitors, the cgms yeah, I'm excited about that, although I'm still waiting for non-invasive right. I have type 2 diabetes. I would certainly love to have something like that in a watch.

23:12 - Padre (Guest)
They have that and that will actually be in the packages I'm putting together. There's a company that is in the last stage of FDA approval and so they said within a quarter. And it's a scanner that uses near IR, it's non-invasive, no prick, no nothing. It's basically you just put your hand under there and it. It worked, because I I had a scan with that and then I did one of the, the pinpricks and the numbers matched up. So that's, that's decent that's.

23:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's pretty exciting, that's world-changing, in fact.

23:39 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
The interface with a, an insulin pump, though no, so this one was just.

23:44 - Padre (Guest)
They probably could, because there are a couple of companies approval on that.

23:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, imagine you can get de novo approval for something that does you. You know that's how the Apple watch stuff works because, right, they don't want somebody to rely on this. You know that could be problematic, especially if it's got an insulin pump attached to it. Imagine the security concerns no, it's not to.

24:04 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
It's not to make an insulin pump, it's one to the other to do a closed loop. Right, there's a lot of t1. Parents of t1 diabetics are really interested in this, because very hard to monitor a toddler's glucose. Well, right, you know, I have a good friend.

24:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have a good friend with a t1 diabetes and, uh, her daughter rather has t1 and exactly right, it's very difficult and plus they they've run out of places to put the monitor because you know you try to move them around and uh, you know they, yeah, it would be nice to have a non-invasive system of some kind, would be fantastic one that.

24:38
I also a big money, because there are millions of type 2 diabetics and then many, many others would like to know ahead of time pre-diabetic Elon Musk's uh, next spouse, I think, was shown. Uh, this is the robot.

24:52 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Girlfriend Aria, oh uh, they call her a companion, a companion delightful they finally figured out how to get around the ban on booth babes they make them out of rubber.

25:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, that is actually horrific. The uncanny, the uncanny Valley. I like the way the camera followed you on that one, corey. That's good.

25:15 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I have one of these dumb AI cameras. I know I love it.

25:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love it, but that's what you need it for the face palm uh you can't get away no, um, yeah, real uncanny, valley on this uh it was horrible, it was what I went down there.

25:32 - Padre (Guest)
I didn't even want to film it yeah, just lots of robots, tons of robots, for everything from pets to robots. That actually the most useful robot was at the ZTE booth.

25:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It might've been, it was a robot that did the dishes for you, another Chinese company that is not allowed to import into the United States.

25:52 - Padre (Guest)
Exactly, that was something that was actually useful Dishes it would automatically take dishes out of the sink, give them a rinse and put them in the dishwasher and turn it on. I'm like, okay, that I could see being useful.

26:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But really a a human could just, instead of putting them in the sink, put them into the dishwasher I see you have never met my daughter oh yeah, what was I thinking? Teenagers, we forgot yeah is she a teenager?

26:17 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
she is 16. She's going to university next year because she started.

26:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my, goodness, when she was born? Yeah, wasn't that long ago. It goes so fast doesn't it, corey?

26:27 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
yeah, it's pretty amazing. She's had some pre-acceptances. She's thinking about the university of hawaii. Nice great, I lived there for two years. Did you major in pineapple studies?

26:38 - Padre (Guest)
that's what we're hoping I didn't, I was actually. I was one of the ministers at the uh, the chapel that was at the edge. Is it in a university of hawaii? Oh, wow, yeah, is it north shore?

26:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so because then you could major, I was actually one of the ministers at the chapel that was at the edge of the University of Hawaii, oahu. Yeah, is it North Shore? Because then you could major in surfing.

26:49 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, she's interested in surfing. What she's really interested in is environmental studies and environmental economics.

26:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh perfect, I bet you it's a great environmental studies program. Yes, yeah.

26:58 - Padre (Guest)
Actually their environmental studies program, especially their oceanographic studies program, is second to none. I mean, they, you can. They will actually take you on some of the research vessels that go out of hawaii and you can do research. That it's.

27:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's quite nice yeah, oh, that would be so awesome. Hono studies I. I would do that in a heartbeat. I love it. Anything else to say about ces before we move on from this tawdry topic?

27:23 - Padre (Guest)
something that was useful specifically in my situation, when you know I'm dealing with with elderly people. Uh, there's a company from canada called is it humans in motion. They brought out an exoskeleton. That is production. You can actually buy it today and the woman doing the demonstration was paraplegic and she was walking around she was interesting yeah, so it's got enough of the smarts that it will steady you and it will not accept any input that would make you fall over so you know, with my, with my father and Parkinson's and his inability to move around.

27:57
I mean this is something he could actually use this has been long promised.

28:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, yeah, yeah, of course, often with Mech Warriors, but I think this would really be incredible, wouldn't it be amazing?

28:08 - Padre (Guest)
well, a lot of times when they show this tech, they show that it could be used to, like, help warehouse workers, you know, because it actually actually adds upper body strength things, yeah this is stability. This is purely. I want to give motion back to someone who doesn't have motion anymore and it's it.

28:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice people, they're nice people, yeah, corey. I hope you never have to wear this, but it's nice to know it's there.

28:30 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, I mean if it's a subject you're interested in. My friend, liz Henry, is a crypt tech person. She uses a wheelchair and she's really into open source hardware for assistive devices, a lot of user maintainable stuff. That's obviously a really major thing.

28:49
You may have seen this year there was a big story about a jockey who had broken his back in a horseback riding accident and who relied on an exoskeleton for many things I mean for mobility, but also to avoid, like bed sores and blood clots. And there was a tiny piece of bent metal that holds the battery in the cage it's a watch battery for clots and there was a tiny piece of bent metal that holds the battery in the cage it's a watch battery for the remote and it got metal fatigue and stopped working. And the manufacturer said well, this $100,000 exoskeleton is now five years old, so we've end of life debt and we won't give you the bit of bent metal. You can spend the rest of your life in bed or find another hundred thousand dollars. And it took a big public name and shame campaign for them to agree to repair the remote so that he could get out of bed again they did fix it, though I remember reading that story yeah, that's good.

29:38
I'm glad they we made a big stink yeah, horrific, but that's so, let me see if I can find her site. Uh, liz henry uh has a real emphasis on maintainability, uh and uh, I mean if you just type liz henry into the search engineer choice, you'll find it, uh, but she's also she's got small grants, sort of $3,000 ish grants for people who are doing early stage crypt tech development and can help you out with that stuff. Yeah.

30:14
Book maniacorg. That's her, yeah, yeah. So somewhere in there there will be something about her crypt tech work.

30:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Interesting she's at Mozilla. Yeah, only the bug master at mozilla, now senior firefox release manager, and she is partners with danny o'brien, my former colleague at eff, who's I'm?

30:33 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I'm the godfather of his daughter, but he's the guy who also coined the term life hacking yeah, and she was a developer for blog her.

30:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh you know, it's funny how the good people all mesh somehow in some interesting way.

30:48 - Padre (Guest)
That's great uh, all right, how about? How about some good news, leo? Yeah, so the representative from open ai? Uh, she was part of the. The aarp had a huge section of the um, the uh, the venetian uh innovation pavilion, and uh, yes, they brought up.

31:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We have we can't quite get there from the lvcc, but that was nice of them, exactly, but no, but, but it wasn't by the way I am in the aarp and I am well old enough to be in there, so I'm not mocking anybody that's because one of the topics that they brought up was the education of the elderly and safeguards so that the new generation of deep fakes and AI scam calls don't affect them.

31:32 - Padre (Guest)
Can you imagine? Yeah, so there was this big call. She's like look, we need companies to help us with this because we know it's a problem and we're enabling it and we don't know how to how to not enable it. Yeah, so that that was. That was interesting a little admission from an up and coming company that their product is being used for wrong.

31:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

31:49 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
That's interesting. I ARP are getting on the forefront of this stuff. I was at a hearing for the consumer finance protection Bureau. They have a rule that will effectively ban data brokers that they're finalizing and they were collecting data stories and one of them was from the AARP and you can buy as an ad target seniors with dementia Great.

32:11
Are you kidding me, Dementia you know and also like results from the Pentagon talking about ad targeting for service people with gambling problems, and also, notoriously, facebook was advertising to, or was was offering um uh, teenagers with depression as an ad targeting body what is the status of that regulation?

32:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is that going to happen before january 20th?

32:37 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I don't know if they'll finalize it before january 20th. You'd like to hope that there'd be continuity. I don't know if rohi chopra is going to step down or not. I haven't followed that. But the interesting thing about the CFPB is there was a Supreme court case about their authority to do rulemaking that you know. There's been a lot of erosion of the authority of the executive agency yeah.

32:57
And it was a nine to zero unanimous decision that the CFPB has good rulemaking authority. Good, so in theory they can do it. And Chopra's a powerhouse. He's made so many amazing rules. There's been such a flurry. The people who stayed into the bitter end Khan at the FTC and Chopra at the CFPB have introduced just a flurry of rules, investigations, cases, and I think what they're doing is saying to their successors you know, like the ball is in your court now you get to decide. Like these are things that materially negatively affect americans, where the government can step in and make a huge positive difference to their lives. Are you gonna? Are you gonna rise to the challenge or are you gonna let americans suffer? And you know there's been some bipartisan support for some of these enforcements, so maybe we'll see, at least congress has had the devil of a time creating a federal privacy law.

33:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah, if you could do it 1988, the last.

33:55 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
The last consumer privacy law we ever had was one that bans video store clerks from telling the newspapers with vhs cassettes you have thank goodness, thank goodness, that's been, we've been protected uh there, you don't have to worry about your video.

34:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do worry about the cfpb. However, I think that it's on the chopping block for sure, so I'll be right. Yeah, I ordered two ai devices from the ces pile the b, which is a b ai. Is-i is a b-e, like a bumblebee that you wear on your wrist, listens to everything that's going on, but but does? I think it's illegal because it will provide you with a text transcript, which means it is recording it, so it's violating two-party recording laws that's not a great start to the device.

34:44
Yeah, well, and then there's another one that doesn't that you. You let me see if I can find the picture you put on your temple. It looks like it looks like a giant, uh pearl, that, uh you you stick on your temple and then it doesn't. It just gives you notes. It doesn't. It doesn't necessarily record, it just says, oh, and the reason you're wearing your temple this is, this is snake oil. It can monitor your brain waves.

35:13
So instead of having to say you know, hey hey, omi, you just think, and the Omi will do something. You don't think? So, corey, corey, it's not going to work.

35:25 - Padre (Guest)
The Omi is taking notes. Why did I buy this? Why did I buy this? This is so expensive? Why?

35:29 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
did I buy this? Why oh, why, oh why. And then the ladies in the background are kind of laughing at him.

35:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They are, they're mocking him, they are mocking him, aren't they?

35:47 - Padre (Guest)
But he's cute, cute, even if he has a pearl stuck to his temple. He's so dumb. And what they're saying is do you remember when we thought google glass was the stupidest thing people would put on their face?

35:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, so I did order both of these. Um, they weren't very expensive. I mean, I think they make their money on the monthly subscription, so, um, this one makes a little more sense. These are. I did not order these. These are earbuds with ai, but I mean, I think apple's gonna give us those at some point, so right, the voice cloning stuff was pretty cool.

36:13 - Padre (Guest)
There's at least two uh different translator companies that not only do they do a decent job of translating from one language to another, but they will translate you into another language using your voice, which I'm like. Okay, that's.

36:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love that well, and I think google's promised that with gemini, so that we can make podcasts. In fact, I've even seen them. They have the lip sync and everything in a different language in your voice. I think that's pretty cool. That'll happen, and then this at that point, we'll start offering our shows in other languages languages I don't speak if you're going to do that, though, you really need to cut that.

36:48 - Padre (Guest)
Well, we have to cut down our use of idioms, because idioms don't translate well into other languages mama, I don't know.

36:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I I'll think of an idiom in a moment. Why does that man keep talking about horses and bonds? What's?

37:05 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
going on. I just ran into this because I've got an enshitification book that I turned in to my editor at Forest Racial Room. We're going through edits and I use the phrase they're getting worked like government mules, oh yeah, which my editor had never encountered and he was like I don't understand this simile and I think we should replace it with one that's more obvious and I'm like it's, but it's idiom, it's very old there are many variations. They beat you like a government mule. They worked you like a government mule.

37:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They rang you like even if you don't know the long and sordid history of government mules, that simile kind of works okay, that's what I thought yeah, let me give you an example of not too long ago.

37:47 - Padre (Guest)
I was working on a project with a very important religious leader, and the idiom that he used was one from Venezuela, and the translation in English is something like when the chicken sees the pot boiling, it might as well jump in, which we can kind of get that. It's like, well, when it, when it's a done deal, it's a done deal, right, yeah, but when, but when? A? I translated that into Italian. The translation was something along the lines of the chicken gets mad because it's being murdered, and it's like whoa, oh, what that sounds like Apple notifications to me exactly, so not always, not always.

38:22 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
It's a hit or miss thing and yeah, there's a central american idiom tengo solo mi tripa. There's a, there's a fox in my fright. Exactly right, it means I've got a stomach ache and then, uh, siento como un perro embenado. I feel like a poisoned dog, which means I'm hung over. No, yeah, I'll use that mama.

38:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why does the? Why does the podcast keep talking about moodles and dogs? Uh, let's pause, uh, for a moment and talk about something um more commercially, uh interesting. And then we will continue with a great panel cory doctoros.

38:56 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Here, nicholas de leon is just enjoying his beverage go ahead yeah, no, I actually wanted to ask before we jump ahead was CES always this silly? Was it always this hype?

39:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's a good question.

39:07 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I remember reading one of my favorite magazines as a kid was Sound and Vision magazine, which is like a home theater magazine and you'd always read the dispatches of, like you know, all this new TV tech, plasma on the horizon. I don't remember them really like dunking on too much stuff, like just seems to be what people do now. On too much stuff, like just seems to be what people do now. So did it just become kind of like a parody of itself, or was it always? I don't know.

39:34 - Padre (Guest)
It changed with Apple?

39:35
Okay, and while T's that, while Leo does the ad, no, the whole idea was so. When Apple started doing their new Jobsian release cycles, they were releasing all the way throughout the year. Ces used to be the time where the last four months of the year all of the new tech releases were held in secret because they wanted something for the show. And so when the show actually came around, there was a reason for the hype, because this was really stuff no one had ever seen before and you had to explain it. So it made sense Once they started copying Apple's year-long release cycle, where there was nothing being held back, it was always on their own time, yeah, and they had to hype up stuff that either they had already released, was already ready or might be ready in the future, that there was nothing saved up. So I'd say, probably for the last 15 years is what you're talking about, where ces, the hype scale has gone so far off the the range because they don't have anything held in in the backup and the big companies don't even go anymore.

40:37
So that right takes some of the seriousness microsoft's not there, intel's not there. I mean, they're actually they are, but they are off the strip. They're in sweets. Yeah, they're in sweets because it's cheaper for them and they get much better effect.

40:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, apple doesn't need to go to CES. That's silly. They don't even need, but they didn't even need Mac World Expo anymore. Right, yeah, they killed Mac World Expo. Robert, I forgot. Speaking of silly, you used to have a thing that told you you had to go pee. Did that ever work it? You read that back from ces a few years ago, I remember it did, it, did, it, did, it did.

41:07 - Padre (Guest)
Okay, it was called the d-link and um, it totally worked. It was it. It went around your bladder and you got a little app on your phone. It would tell you because it was like it was a sonogram, so it would tell you how full your bladder is.

41:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's useful it.

41:21 - Padre (Guest)
Well, the idea was they were going to sell it in nursing homes I'm sorry. Yeah, okay, that makes sense yeah, so for people who have lost the ability to know when they need to go to the bathroom, they could. They could and also in a nursing station.

41:34
Yeah, you could tell which your patients are having trouble. They just released the new version. This year they had a very small table. No one was there, but it's. They've shrunk it and they've made it much easier to use, so good yeah, there, that's not silly, that's serious, that's not right.

41:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um anything else you'd like to know Nicholas.

41:53 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I'm just trying to make this and I can't think of any.

41:56 - Padre (Guest)
Something about IP addresses address yeah, ces, ip, something like that all right.

42:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, we really do have to take a break so you all can do whatever you need to do. Father robert balisar is here, the digital jesuit. Great to have you. His app is jesuitpilgrimageapp, which I didn't know. See, I asked you about some other projects. You said well, we don't take we don't take credit in the church for that, because it's a big team. But you do take credit for this and I don't take a credit in the church for that because it's a big team. But you do take credit for this.

42:26 - Padre (Guest)
And I didn't realize it because you did it yourself yeah, I've got bored, made something and I had to register a name for the app when I bought the license to to develop on uh from Apple. Is it on iOS?

42:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's on iOS, it's on Android and soon it'll be coming to the palm OS and soon it'll be coming to the Palm OS, which means I can put it on my LG TV. That's good. Also, nicholas de Leon, who is the senior technology reporter, electronics reporter for the consumer reports. Geez, you think the senior electronics reporter for Consumer Reports would go to the Consumer Electronics Show, but no, nicholas is too senior for that. That's how you know somebody's senior when they can go. Yeah, not this year well, it's fun.

43:09 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I like ces. I I've been to many of them. I always like party it's a fun show. It is very, you know, depending upon your role, it's like a ton of work, it's not just like a fun you're going, it's much more fun when you're not reporting, when you're just going I would imagine.

43:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, yes, I've done that actually the one thing I did wish I had gone to see. I guess the delta used the sphere for its keynote and they used it to good effect.

43:34 - Padre (Guest)
That big giant sphere inside has a is a giant projector and they sounded like it looked like and you know what they announced that delta was no longer partnering with lyft and they were now partnering with uber. That was, that was their announcement they bought they.

43:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They rented the sphere for a day, put up tons of decorations, invited the press and, I'm sure, offered them poo-poos and that's it no, it was worth it to go in the sphere. This is also a thing creators got very excited because they also announced they were going to start putting some creator content in their uh seatback entertainment yeah, that was a waste, but the sphere was cool.

44:14 - Padre (Guest)
The sphere was did you get?

44:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
to go. Did you get, of course, yeah I'm so jealous that I wish I'd seen yeah, I bet cory doctorow also here. His new book is coming out february Picks and Shovels. Now it could be two things it could be about infrastructure or it could be about Levi's.

44:33 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
It's about grifters. Why am I not on the camera?

44:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What has happened to my camera. The AI decided the book was more interesting. I hate to tell you, Corey.

44:40 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
It's about grifters. So it's Martin Hench, my forensic accountant. It's his first adventure in Silicon Valley Love it In the early 80s, you know. He drops out of a CS program at MIT because he's too busy programming computers to go to class, ends up becoming a CPA, follows his roommate out to San Francisco looking for gold and his first job is working for a weird PC company. And this was the golden era of weird PCs. Oh yeah, making a weird PC company, and this was the golden era of weird PCs.

45:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, making a weird PC, halt and catch fire, era right.

45:08 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, the Halt and catch fire. Exactly that era. And the weird PC company he works for is called Fidelity Computing and it sounds like a joke. It's run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an Orthodox rabbi. But the joke is that it's a faith-selling multi-level marketing scam and they are preying on their parishioners. And he very quickly realizes he's working for the bad guys when they hire him to destroy a rival firm that was founded by three people who've left the firm. One is a nun who's fallen in with liberation theology Marxists in Central America. One is an Orthodox woman who's been kicked out of her family because she's gay, and one is a Mormon woman who's left the church over its opposition to the equal rights amendment. And so he joins with them and they get into a trade war with this weird PC company, which very quickly becomes a shooting war, because it turns out that these guys aren't just scammers, they're mobbed up. And so it's a high tension, high stakes, mafia thriller about-. Are there any chase scenes?

46:18 - Padre (Guest)
So it's a documentary. Basically, there's nothing you mentioned that I haven't seen in the church.

46:27 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
So Jello Biafra is in it. You you know. This is the era when he's like running for mayor dead kennedy's, yeah, yeah they're doing shell pro unix, shell programming on eighty thousand dollar workstations, and this is awesome hands soldering their own floppy drives and doing all kinds of fun things. And it's it's a real, it's like a version of the startup narrative that's that's built around the the busting, the grift, instead of like faking it till you make it.

46:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Love that. Let's bust the grift Stephen.

46:54 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Levy, or Stephen Levy said nice things about it. Stephen Fry wrote a long. I asked him. He sent me like a page of love notes to the book. So it's had great early notes. Uh, all these computer historians claire evans, who wrote broadband, and, um, uh, stephen levy. As I said, john markoff, were you around in that era?

47:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was a pc kid yeah, so you're a kid, but you were that you were into it, I was a modem using pc.

47:20 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Uh right, my, my dad was a computer science teacher, so we had terminals in the house in the seventies and then an Apple two plus and 79. And I would say that, like I didn't have lowercase letters for four years because we could either use a modem or a 80 column card and there was no way I was taking my modem out of my computer, so was just, I had 40 columns of all capital letters so that I could dial up bbss wow, that's great. And I was running those bbss.

47:51 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, we can hang five, yeah, yeah, that's good memories uh, I can't wait to read it.

47:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I tried to buy it and I they said no, february 18th, but there is a kickstarter.

48:00 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
You go to the kickstarter and uh, that's dot com that I will redirect you to it.

48:05
Oh good, martin hench h-e-n-c-h dot com and, and, as with all my books, I've done my own audiobook for this. So, because audible won't carry any of my books, because they're drm free, I have to make my own audiobooks, uh, and sell them myself, and so the the way that I I recoup the substantial cost of hiring Will Wheaton and getting a professional studio and a great editor is by pre-selling a whole ton of them on the Kickstarter, as well as hardcovers and e-books and so on. And if there's a tech scam that you really like from the last 40 years and you're feeling very spendy, you can commission a short story about Martin Hentz busting that scam. Oh, that's brilliant. It's not cheap, but it's cool.

48:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is Corey's version of Cameo. He won't do a video for you, but he will write a short story for you.

48:59 - Padre (Guest)
What's the link? Again, I'm going to get that right now, martin.

49:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hentz dot com. Dot com. I'm scrolling down. Get that right now. Martinhenchcom Dot com. P-n-c-h. Wait a minute, I'm scrolling down because I want this.

49:09 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Let Corey write a book for you. I just got to tell you, Leo, it's $10,000.

49:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, but you know I wouldn't mind a short story written by Corey. There it is. Commission of.

49:18 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Marty, I had a couple of these from a Kickstarter I did for a little brother novel and I wrote those. They came out this year. They came out really well, oh nice, and I'm one story away from having enough little brother stories to do a short story collection. I'm probably going to do that next year.

49:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very cool, some really nice. As you said, stephen Levy, stephen Fry, john Scalzi all love the book. This is a must, martinhenchcom, especially if I mean if you listen to the show, I'm sure you're a fan of that era. If you didn't live it, at least you know of it.

49:54 - Padre (Guest)
You had me at gun-toting. Nun, yeah, that does it for me.

50:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm in. It's your fantasy, isn't it? Martinhenchcom. All right now. I've tried to go to a commercial now for half an hour I keep talking to you guys because you're interesting darn it, darn you, uh. But we will be back with more and the interesting stuff will continue. I promise our show today, brought to you by coda. We love this sponsor. We love this sponsor.

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51:07
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52:00
Go to Codaio slash twit today. Six. We offered this the last time they were on and people jumped at this. I hope you take advantage of this. Six free months of the team plan for startups. That's enough to get your startup off and running. Frankly, codaio slash twit Get started for free and get six free months of the team plan. Codaio slash twit. Get started for free and get six free months of the team plan. Codaio slash twit. Thank you, coda, for your support of this Week in Tech, and you support us when you uh, when you go to that address. So they know you saw it here. Codaio slash twit uh, we are actually seeing a little bit of the b-roll from ces that father robert was you're going to edit up, uh, your, your thoughts and your comments and give us a little mini tour.

52:52 - Padre (Guest)
Oh yeah, I'm doing a couple of different versions. I want to do like ces in 60 seconds and then do a longer version yeah, that's probably all I could tolerate. 60 yeah, 60 seconds pretty much gives you everything you need to know about my feet hurt just looking at that video it well, I, I okay. 200, 136 steps. How many miles? Is that? Too many too, especially since I'm carrying around the equivalent of a tesla on my torso.

53:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And why do you do this? Uh is jenny fun because you like penance. Um no, I mean look c l a's and a cover and two ces's.

53:28 - Padre (Guest)
Right, that's I, I have been going to ces for decades, same thing with defcon, and so, yes, right now I think it's horrible and it's terrible and I never want to go back to ces because I got nothing out of it this year. Give me six months and I'll feel different, because every once in a while, something wonderful happens at CES, something incredible, something fantastic, something very cool. Just, I haven't seen it the last two years.

53:53 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
You're basically explaining why people have a second child.

54:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every once in a while, every once in a while, every once. Notice, corey has one, just one. Yeah, that's, that is fair. That is fair. I had two and uh. The second, by the way, is opening his restaurant in Nework city in a couple of months and I invite you all to go to salt hanks on bleaker street, uh, on the, uh in the west village. It's in the former slutty vegan slot right next to john's pizza when does it open?

54:28
uh, well, you know, with restaurant openings, uh, it's, but uh, he's hoping to open in the spring, early summers they're gonna do a soft open right. A soft open first right, a soft open first. You will hear a lot about it on our shows because I will be all excited and I'll be going out to New York and we might even do a show for you.

54:44 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
February 26th we're doing a book event at the Strand with John Hodgman, but it sounds like it will be open.

54:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, how fun.

55:00 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, it's going to be really fun. That's fun. Is it sagal or sagal sagal from from?

55:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
wait, wait, don't tell me yeah, I thought it was sagal. No, sagal, it's sagal. Okay, yeah, I know who he is. I love him. Yeah, um, by the way, we were speaking of DEF CON and Corey sent me this toot from Jeremiah Kimmelman at journahost, thinking of Aaron Schwartz today, and I'm stuck on this photo. This is a photo we've showed before. This is a class of people at Y Combinator. I don't know, was this 15 years ago? Something like that? You see, see a young sam altman who still looks the same age, by the way, standing right next to a very young aaron schwartz. Yeah, america's. Uh, what do they call him?

55:48 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
boy, he's yeah, the internet's own boy. Wonderful brian nappenberg documentary.

55:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah uh yeah, and I think the point Jeremiah's making is actually really interesting. He says he and the guy next to him, OpenAI's Sam Altman, each scraped thousands of documents. Remember Aaron Schwartz got in trouble with the Computer Fraud Act for downloading papers. We paid for.

56:18 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
We paid for it. Scientific papers we paid for. We paid for it. Scientific papers we paid for. He was allowed to download. The charge was that he was allowed to download them, but he wasn't allowed to write a script to do it, and on that basis they charged him with 13 felonies and threatened him with 35 years in prison.

56:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and he took his life as a result. So Jeremiah says, thinking of Aaron Schwartz today, stuck on this photo, he and open ai ceo, sam altman, each scraped thousands of documents. One did it to make knowledge free for all, while the other did it to make money through probabilistic plagiarism. The usdoj only came after one of them, the others feted by tech bros and executives. Thank you so much, aaron, for rss, for markdown, for creative commons and more. I'm sorry our society failed you, that is.

57:01 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
That is very poignant and very true yeah, yesterday was the anniversary of aaron's death, and it was. It was a rough time. I will say that no one aaron, never told anyone why he downloaded those documents. To my knowledge, he might have been planning to make them available, but he had previously done something else where he'd scraped the whole purpose of law review articles and then compared, uh the um, the kind of publications that uh academic lawyers did before and after their departments got giant donations from oil companies to see whether they started arguing that oil companies shouldn't have liability for climate change. And unsurprisingly, they did. And so it's. It's not. It's not beyond the you know, uh the the possibility that Aaron was scraping all of those JSTOR articles to do some kind of big textual analysis. He might not have intended to republish them. If he had, I would have supported him, but we don't even know why he downloaded them. We don't even know why.

58:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He was at MIT right. He was at Harvard.

58:04 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Harvard. He had an account. He was at MIT and he was allowed to be there. He was allowed to use their Wi-Fi and when he was on their Wi-Fi that he was permitted to do. But rather than click the links one at a time, when he accessed JSTOR he wrote a little script, as one does, and that was a violation of the. Computer. Fraud and Abuse Act, a law that Ronald.

58:33
Reagan passed in a panic after watching War Games in 1986. Oh my God, because the computer said we can't do anything about this stuff because there's not enough laws for it. You need to make a law. And so Reagan signed. Well, he whipped his Congress to pass the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and then he signed it in 1986. It's a ridiculously broad law. It's been narrowed recently through a Supreme Court case called Van Buren, but it's still way too broad, and it basically says you can't exceed your authorization on a computer. And so what the prosecution argued here was that Aaron was authorized to access every file that he accessed, but he wasn't authorized to access them with a script, and so he exceeded his authorization.

59:13 - Padre (Guest)
They just tried to use that in Georgia Was it three years ago? Because somebody, they said, oh somebody breached our security and they got addresses for all of our state employees because they hit F11, because it was included in all the comments of the HTML page and they were saying, oh well, that's, and then it was struck down. So obviously something has changed, but I did not know the backstory about why Ronald Reagan did that. That's crazy.

59:39 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
The CPA was absurdly broad. So we had a client who was using the iPad version of the AT&T billing app and he looked at the URL it was loading and it just ended in a serial number and he was like, is that a globally unique number or is that a serial number? So he added one to it and he was looking at someone else's billing data and he realized that he could enumerate several million AT&T clients billing data, their personal home addresses, financial data and so on and he published that AT&T had this leak and he was actually criminally convicted and went to prison and we ran his appeal because we did not want that precedent being set that's our own, randall schwartz, who for a long time hosted the floss weekly uh was convicted under the cfa, uh, uh, for three felony counts and five years probation.

01:00:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, he did get the feloniesed, thank goodness, but still, and he never did. It was the same, it was very similar. He said he was working at Intel and he said trying to help Intel by revealing a problem in their security. They didn't like it too much.

01:00:53 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, I mean there's a broad sense among vendors that bad news about their company should be theirs to time and release and that if they don't think this bad news should be in the public eye, then no one should be able to say it. I mean there might be circumstances in which certain bad news might not be something that you'd want to publish right away. I'm thinking of things like Heartbleed, where maybe you want to wait for it to be pushed where maybe you want to wait for a patch to be pushed.

01:01:21
But vendors whose stock prices go down when the bad news is published are not the people who should be the custodians of the decision about when bad news can be published. They are not neutral arbiters of that question and they routinely and continuously make bad choices.

01:01:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I thought that they'd have been somewhat fixed by laws requiring them to reveal breaches, don't they have to, at this point, have to breaches? That's not bones. Ah yeah, you can hide the vulnerabilities.

01:01:44 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
So if you've got a continuous glucose monitor and you've hooked it up to your, your your insulin to make a closed loop artificial pancreas and there's a volume that allows you to wirelessly dump all the insulin into your bloodstream all at once, as there have been many of for medtronics pumps. Uh, you might want to know about that, right, because, like, someone can kill you where you stand, uh, with like a little wi-fi device and that might be something that you enters into your consideration before you buy that device or use it or wear it in public or whatever, and, uh, the idea that the firm gets to decide who, who, when you get to know that is, I think, very bad well, that uh brings us to this uh story, that train hackers.

01:02:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, the new mag DRM disclosure. What's that all about?

01:02:40 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
So this is this gang of hackers in Poland called Dragon Sector that's the name of their capture, the flag team and they got a call from a state train operator saying we bought these trains from New Vogue. It's a Polish word, so the W is a V, pronounced as a V.

01:02:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
New Vogue.

01:02:55 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
It's from New Vogue and we put out the maintenance contract to tender and Nuvog was not the best bidder so we have someone else. But every time we take it in for service or bring it to the depot or just park it, the trains brick themselves and we can't unbrick them. We think something weird is happening. So they went and they looked at the firmware and it had been booby trapped. Nuvog had had logic, bombed its own trains. So if the train entered a geo-fenced area that included a third party service depot, or if it was stationary for a certain amount of time, or if there was a third party component that was installed in the loco, then the train would brick itself.

01:03:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, in other words, they wanted to prevent somebody from taking it to a third-party repair facility. That's right.

01:03:43 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
They wanted to prevent their customers from using these third-party repair depots that had won the competitive tender for maintenance service on these trains, and so they revealed all kinds of crazy things, you know. So they went into this. It turns out that there was like a way to override it, where you would go into the toilet in one cabin and then lock and unlock the door twice and then press the emergency call and the train would be up down down left right, left right.

01:04:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:04:10 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Only in a toilet that the um, that there was a guy. Uh, there's another state-owned train company that, um, every time they took their train to this one uh station, just on the track, it would freeze, it would brick itself like it would literally stop on the track filled with passengers.

01:04:30
Wow and just stop dead right. And when they decompiled the software, they saw that the geolocation rectangle for a nearby service depot had been sloppily drawn and included a little section of track, and so that track was like booby trapped. It turned out that this third party train company had never revealed this, because what they ended up doing was removing the GPSs from their trains. Hey, that works.

01:04:57
We fixed it they presented this at ccc, which is the chaos communications congress which is held in germany every year, and it's how it's the most hardcore of all the information sector conferences I think, I think somebody in our chat, I think galia, was there.

01:05:10
Yeah, yeah, last couple of weeks ago, yeah the thing that makes it so hardcore is it's held between christmas and new year's yeah, that's hardcore willing to like talk your family into saying hey, instead of going to see your family at Christmas or going skiing or whatever, how about we go to this hacker conference in Hamburg?

01:05:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sure, and Hamburg is so lovely that time of year, I must say.

01:05:29 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah. So they presented in 2023, which was like the end of the year and then they got sued repeatedly by this company and there have been multiple parliamentary inquiries and so on. And one of the causes of action here is that the law in America that bans reverse engineering Section 12.1 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the DRM law that says that removing DRM, trafficking, the device to remove DRM is a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. The US trade representative went to Europe in 2001 and got them to transpose that into the European Copyright Directive. Article 6 of the Copyright Directive says the same thing. And of course, poland is part of the European Union and you know Poland has been like a source of amazing hackers doing incredible things for many years During lockdown.

01:06:20
Medtronic the company with the dodgy insulin pumps. They also make the world's most widely used workhorse ventilator. So if you take a dead ventilator with a live screen and put that into a live ventilator with a dead screen, because it's not serialized to the central computer, unless you're an authorized Medtronic technician who types in an unlock code, it won't recognize the screen. It's the same thing, john Deere tractors do. It's the same thing cars do. It's called parts pairing or VIN locking.

01:06:55
And this Polish hacker got really pissed off because there were hospital med techs all across the world who are like I'm trying to keep my ventilators running during the pandemic. Medtronic can't even send a technician to type in unlock code. There's no planes flying. And so this Polish hacker, who used to work for Medtronic, made like a Raspberry Pi or e-prom based authorization gadget, uh, and made a bunch of them and uh put them in whatever housings he could find during lockdown and started mailing them to hospitals. And so hospitals were opening the mail and there was like a guitar pedal with a usb port epoxy to it that would unlock your ventilator after you fixed it, or like a clock radio or a bedside lamp, uh. And no one knows who this guy was, because he was or woman or non-binary person. They were totally anonymous because article six of the copyright directive creates criminal liability.

01:07:51
Yeah for them for doing this. And you know these are the. These are the hospital's own ventilators. They don't lease them from medtronic or whatever. They belong to them. You know people who say if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. They really misunderstand what cause causes companies to abuse you? It's not paying for the product. That makes them treat you well. It's fearing that you know you can retaliate against them by getting a regulator involved or switching uh vendors or whatever. If they're not afraid of you, they will treat you like the product all day long.

01:08:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Father Robert has a good coda for this. He says shall we hack a train? So they revealed this hack and gotten a lot of trouble with Nuvag. Hack and gotten a lot of trouble with Nuvag. Nuvag weaponized this DMCA provision. So this is the talk at the gas, yeah great talk.

01:08:49 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
One of the things they reveal in the talk is that the majority of customers for trains in Poland are publicly owned firms, and the publicly owned firms have strict procurement rules statutory procurement rules and when they put out a tender for new trains, nuvog often is the cheapest option and they are legally required to buy the train with the cheapest option. And so nuvog is still selling tons of trains in poland, even though they're doing this nonsense yeah, and they deny that they know anything about the locks, even though, yeah, they say three.

01:09:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They say train operators revealed they paid nuvog more than 20 000 euros for unlocking a single train, which they were able to do in 10 minutes.

01:09:30 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, they probably went to the bathroom and opened and closed the door twice so what was happening is trade operators called nuvVOG and say our train has stopped working. And they would say ah, it sounds like you need your security resynchronized. And they would say oh, okay, what does that cost? And they said 20,000 euros. And they said okay, well, I guess we've got to pay you 20,000 euros because we need this train. And then they would just remote into the train and go like, make train, go and collect 20,000 euros.

01:10:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right to repair baby, yeah, uh, all right, I next. Uh, since your blood pressure probably isn't yet high enough, we're going to talk about meta. Stay tuned, oh good, yeah, nicholas de leon, here from uh, consumer reports, fighting the good fight. You are, I know, are big on the right to repair, movement, as is consumer reports, and uh, and you know this is. This is the kind of silly nonsense that goes on. It's great to have you. Nicholas cory doctor. Of course, his new book picks and shovels go to martyhenchcom martin. I call him marty for some reason, martin he goes by marty, but it's martin.

01:10:38
I just wasn't going to register two domains, but yeah, martinhenchcom my friend marty, the cpa forensic accountant, his new book, martinhenchcom, to get on the kickstarter so you can read it the day it comes out. And of course, the digital jesuit father, robert Balassaire. Great to have you. You're going to be another month in Nevada and then back.

01:11:02 - Padre (Guest)
Correct. So the agreement that I've made with my big boss is I can come back for roughly three and a half months a year so I can take care of my parents. Give my sister a break, my mom a break, et cetera. Good.

01:11:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's nice to know the vatican has uh families leave something.

01:11:20 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, we're like.

01:11:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're like a vin diesel movie you know vin diesel was uh, was at the golden globes last week and it said among his credits he that he was uh in the guardians of the galaxy. And I said to lisa, I said I don't remember him in guardians of the galaxy. She said yeah, he was groot. Yeah, yeah, he had one line he's there, he was there perfect, perfect casting.

01:11:51 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
That's all I'm going to say did he voice it over and over again or did they just record it once?

01:11:55 - Padre (Guest)
take one yeah, that's no, no, no he did every single line and it's a. His lines were I am groot, we are groot and I love you guys. So the only three lines.

01:12:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He said the entire series he had some trouble memorizing the script. I understand, but in fact they put a little thing in his ear, so eventually he got off book though.

01:12:16 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, he got off book, or should they? You know if you?

01:12:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
listen to all this stuff, you might be thinking I really think I little thing in his ear. So eventually he got off buck. Though, yeah, he got off. Look you know, if you listen to all this stuff, you might be thinking I really think I should have a good vpn in my back pocket. Well, you should, and the one I use and recommend is expressvpn. We love this sponsor.

01:12:31
Going online without a expressvpn is, um, I don't know. It's like driving without car insurance. Right, it might be a great driver with all the crazy people on the road these days. You don't want to go out there without car insurance. You don't want to go on the internet without encryption. Every time you connect to an unencrypted network and that's everywhere, from a cafe to a hotel to do to not use the free airport wi-fi. I've been told that many times, especially during defcon in vegas, but I'm you know. I'm just saying they just found out that there was a um, uh, you know the fake cell towers, what they call those shark, sky rays, stingrays at the democratic and national convention snarfing up IMEIs. They don't know who did it. Every time you connect to an encrypted network I was saying cafes, hotels, airports your online data is floating out there, steve Gibson.

01:13:31
On Tuesday. This shocked me. I thought, well, at least we don't have to worry about our email passwords anymore. Randall Schwartz, my, my favorite hacker, I remember uh, he used to go on these geek cruises with us. He went on a geek cruise and won. The first day he was going around with a piece of paper to people. He came up to me and said is this your email password? I said yeah. He said you're sending it in the clear. He said you're sending it in the clear. But that was a few years ago. I thought every email server now by now was encrypted. No, turns out steve gibson was talking about there's. There's tens of thousands of email servers still running. In plain text, that means not only is your email flying through the air unencrypted, but your password unbelievable, any. And that's the worst thing, of course. If somebody hacks your email because that's where all of your I forgot my passwords go I mean this is you're you're pwned by then any hacker on the same network can gain access to and steal your personal data. And it's not always https, it's not always TLS encrypted and, frankly, it doesn't take a lot of technical knowledge to hack somebody.

01:14:39
We had Alex Stamos on the other day, formerly of the Stanford Internet Observatory. He teaches classes in hacking and he brings this Wi-Fi pineapple to class and this cheap thing it's a hundred bucks or something and and all you need is this wi-fi pineapple. You sit in an open access point at the airport or whatever and you can see what people's wi-fi connections are. You can pretend to be their house. So your you know your laptop. You're sitting here and your laptop says, oh, we're home, joins the fake wi-fi access point. Now every bit of your traffic's going through the pineapple. A smart 12 year old can do it, and there's a lot of money in this, of course.

01:15:25
Hackers can make up to a thousand bucks or more selling your personal data on the web. In fact, in many cases, we know it's not even illegal. This is okay. So have I made the case? You need a VPN and I think you need ExpressVPN. It stops hackers from stealing your data because everything you do is encrypted from your device to their servers.

01:15:47
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01:17:14
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01:18:15
So I have a friend who used to work at meta is still on a number of message boards of former meta employees and as soon as mark zuckerberg announced that meta was going to stop doing fact checking and stop moderating at least in the us a variety of content, the boards went crazy it turned out. I did not did not know this, but he informed me. One of the reasons Mark did this it wasn't the Biden administration, it was the employees at Meta who said "'You can't let this stuff, this anti-LBGTQ stuff "'you can't let this hate speech. You can't let "'the stuff that happened in Myanmar and the Philippines "'you can't let this happen on Meta. We don't want to work for a company that enables genocide. So Mark did two things In the short term, he did fact-checking and moderating. In the long term, he fired them all. So there isn't, apparently, the same internal pressure anymore, and that can combined with the fact that, uh, there are certain people in the new uh administration who hate mark zuckerberg. I think donald trump said, uh, in fact, that he was going to throw him in jail. Now he likes him. He says I have a warm spot in my heart. I like Mark Zuckerberg.

01:19:39
We found out Zuck met with Trump right the day before announcing that in the US, uh, mehta will get rid of fact checkers, replace them with community notes. Actually, I'm not. I'm not sure. I hate that idea. I think community notes is a is a, but I'm sure you guys will have an opinion. He's also going to move. This one kind of frosted me a little bit the firm's content moderation teams from Blue State, california, where they're inevitably biased, to Texas, quote where there is less concern about the bias of our teams. To Texas, quote, where there is less concern about the bias of our teams. He admitted to the changes, the changes to the way Meta is. This from the Guardian Meta's filter content would mean we're going to catch less bad stuff. All right, so there is a story, corey, first of all, let me ask you I personally think that content moderation at scale and fact-checking scales in the scale of meta is huge. It's very, very difficult to do. I'm not sure that I hate the idea of community notes.

01:20:47 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I don't hate the idea of community notes either. They're a perfectly good way of doing some kinds of content moderation, some kinds of content moderation. I think that by the time you're arguing about whether or not this one guy, who no one ever voted for, who bought all of his competitors and who used all kinds of anti-competitive conduct to drive his competitors out of the market, whether that one guy has the right idea or the wrong idea for how 4 billion people can talk to one another and consume the news, but you're too far down the stack right.

01:21:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're focusing on the wrong problem, I assume.

01:21:27 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
You know. So look, the old content moderation policies were anything but great, right? People who survived genocides, who uploaded video of the war crimes committed against them, found that video being deleted under content moderation rules. People who'd experienced racial slurs and discussed the abuse they'd experienced had their content removed for containing racial slurs ones that were not just you know kind of weird edge cases but, like people who supported Palestine independence or who opposed genocide, had their content removed, and so on. So there was all kinds of stuff where Facebook made very bad moderation calls and, you know, there are lots of ways that Mark Zuckerberg could have announced that he was getting rid of this broken system. The most offensive, worst, most terrifying way to do it would be to include a long list of incredibly offensive, disgusting things you're allowed to say about trans and gay people and immigrants and say these are now all okay, which is what he did. He basically said that was weird. It was very weird. Right, it was very, very weird.

01:22:35
It's okay to say this now it's okay to, it's okay to foment genocide against the Rohingya now or whatever right. Very weird it's okay to say this now. It's okay to, it's okay to foment genocide against the rohingya now, or whatever right like it's the most like it. Really I don't know if you can call it saying the quiet part aloud. It's like.

01:22:46
It's like, uh, standing at the top of a mountain with a giant pa stack and try this kids yeah, like like getting getting like the app that you know makes your phone go nap, nap, nap, and sending an alert to it that says the quiet part, right, it's like tiktok saying it's okay to eat tide pods, go ahead. Yeah, like it was very it's a very terrible and disheartening thing. But you know, I think that the right answer to this, or the right way to think about this, is that, given that Facebook has been so bad at moderation that all of the moderation that we're mourning the passing of was at best fixing a few things around the edges on a platform that is just irretrievably toxic, is why are people on Facebook? And I think the reason people are on Facebook is because they love each other more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg and by making it hard to leave Facebook, by not having you talked about the Anatevka problem on Twitter last time you were on.

01:23:46
We're all in Anatevka. Yeah, the people in Fiddler on the Roof love each other more than they hate being beaten up by Cossacks. The only thing worse than living in Anatevka is being forced to leave Anatevka. And so if there was interoperability, if there were APIs that let you leave Facebook, go to a rival platform, exchange messages with the communities that you left behind, and so on, people would leave right and they would go somewhere else. This is what Facebook did. I'm sure I said this the last time I was on. When Facebook started, they had a billionaire problem named Rupert Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch owned a service called MySpace. Myspace was the most successful social media network in history. Everyone who wanted a social media account had one already on MySpace, and they didn't say hey, leave Facebook, go to MySpace. Never talk to your friends again until they get wise and come with you to Facebook. They gave you a bot and you gave that bot your login and password and it went to myspace and logged in as you scraped all the messages waiting for you I don't remember that.

01:24:44
Wow, wow and so like this, you know they. They gave people a way to ease their passage so you didn't all have to agree at once that you were all going over to myspace, you know, or to facebook I to continue the anatevka metaphor, my grandmother was soviet refugee. She was a child soldier in the siege of leningrad. Oh, she got evacuated to siberia, eventually got knocked up by my grandfather, deserted from the red army, went to azerbaijan and then decided not to go back to leningrad. They destroyed their papers so they could become displaced. People made their way to to Frankfurt and got in a displaced person's boat to Canada.

01:25:20
And the thing is, no one else in our family did that. All the ones who stayed behind in Leningrad stayed behind, and the reason they did that is because of each other, right, all the old people had young people they were looking after. All the young people had old people they were looking after. They couldn't afford to leave. And so here we are, a couple of generations later. I've got a great life. My father had a great life growing up. He was born in Azerbaijan, but he grew up in Canada and had a great life. My family in Leningrad. They're screwed right In St Petersburg they're all worried about being-.

01:25:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Your grandmother made a huge sacrifice in her life so that you could have a good life.

01:25:59 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
And she lost touch with everyone in her life. So my father talks about a decade after they landed in Canada, the phone ringing and it was my grandmother's mother who she didn't know was alive or dead, right, so why didn't people leave? Because they knew it was a one-way journey, because they knew they would lose touch with everyone. Because they would lose touch with everyone because they would lose everything. If you make it possible for people to go to one place and then another you know, I'm a canadian, I lived in central america and then I lived in san francisco, and then I lived in london, then los angeles, and then in san francisco, and then in london, then in los angeles again, I might leave. You know, again next year when my kid goes away to university. I've got a Canadian passport, a British passport, an American passport.

01:26:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where would you go? Well, I'm working on a.

01:26:40 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Polish passport so I could go to the EU and cause my grandfather was a Polish citizen.

01:26:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I hear there's a train company there that's looking for.

01:26:48 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, exactly. So I wouldn't necessarily go to Poland, but there's 27 countries that it has.

01:26:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All you need is a Schengen passport and you're anywhere.

01:26:57 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, so so you know, making it easy for people to leave means that they don't have to put up with the bullshit of the people running the place, and the fact is that Mark Zuckerberg has made it as hard as possible for people to leave. So you know, mark Zuckerberg has these incredible moderation, free speech, absolutist policies where you can talk, you know, foment genocide. But if you mention pixel fed, which is an Instagram competitor that runs on the metaverse, on the, on the, on the Fediverse, if you mentioned pixel fed on Instagram, you'll have your account suspended. If you tell people how to leave Instagram, they'll suspend your account. If you tell people to murder their neighbors, they're like no problem.

01:27:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's important too. This isn't, this isn't just facebook. This is all of meta, so it's threads, it's instagram, it's facebook. Um, yeah and no. So x, you're still on x. For the same reason, you don't want to leave x uses community notes and they seem to work okay. Some people we were talking about this on wednesday on this week in google and paris or jeff said well, what about brigading community notes? What about, you know, moderating? That's possible too, right?

01:28:07 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
it's possible and moderators make mistakes. I mean you don't. What you want is defense in depth. What you want is community, more than one set of community notes, potentially, you know, minority report. What you want is, like, you know, you think about all the stuff slash dot did for moderation, where you have an independent panel that's evaluating moderation and so on. So, like, your chance of getting to be a moderator goes down if your own moderation calls are down ranked by meta moderators and whatever. It's a lot of different ways to design this and some people, that's the game they want to play. They're not on twitter to talk about twitter, they're on twitter to like, think about how twitter works, and same with flash dot back in the day, and they'll happily do this all day long. Let them, you know, this is like for a certain kind of person, this is model un the truth is, mark's not.

01:28:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is lip service. Mark doesn't care about that, whether it works or not, right, yeah, no, he doesn't care about that, whether it works or not, right?

01:28:57 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah? No, he doesn't care at all. Mark wants to make a lot of money and have no accountability.

01:29:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The main thing is to avoid accountability, to be able to say something that makes people go. Oh, okay, good, there's a thing called Wilhoite's Law.

01:29:10 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
That conservatism consists of one principle that there are in groups whom the law protects but does not bind, and out groups whom the law binds but does not protect. Mark zuckerberg wants to live in an environment where all of his rights are protected, but he does not have to respect anyone else's rights and everything else, but not for roots for me, but the, but not for me.

01:29:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, uh. I love, by the way, that law, the hoist. Yeah, whose law is it?

01:29:35 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
will hoit, frank will hoit and not the frank will hoit. Everyone knows the other, frank will hoit. There's two the guy who everyone knows in his wikipedia entry has an entry for will hoit's law to say this is not the guy who came up with will hoit's law. One one l and will hoit, uh. Well, uh, it'll probably come up, that's it. It'll probably come up, that's it.

01:29:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Francis W Francis, wilhoite, wilhoite.

01:29:59 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, that's not the guy.

01:30:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is not the Wilhoite. But this is the one that has the entry that says this quotation is often incorrectly attributed to Francis Wilhoite. It was actually a 2018 blog response by a 59-year-old Ohio composer, Frank.

01:30:15 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Wilhoite, frank Wilhoite, they're all called Frank Wilhite.

01:30:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a, it's a very. I like the. I very much like the law. So you're still on meta, aren't you father?

01:30:30 - Padre (Guest)
I am on no meta platforms whatsoever. I'm not on Facebook, I'm not on WhatsApp, I'm not on Instagram. I haven't been for about 14 years now I call that being a zucker vegan. I know I was big into it and my job required it for a while, but once I was able to separate, yeah, that's kind of my attitude is I don't want threads, instagram or facebook, but I have to kind of.

01:30:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I kind of have to be there at least things to see, like, for instance, how community notes are going. So I have, I maintain journalistic accounts there, but I I I don't enjoy it. Uh, I did get rid of my Facebook account for a long time, but I realized I was missing the the story sometimes. How about you, uh? Are you, uh, nicholas? Are you, uh, you, a facebook user or just like me, a looky lou?

01:31:19 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
uh the actual blue app, facebook, I don't use very often actually. Uh whatsapp I use every day. I use uh talk to some friends back in new york and all my family, crucially, is all on whatsapp that's the problem, isn't it? Yeah, well, I mean it's funny like if you were to ask them about any of this, like content moderation stuff they would have no idea what you're talking about. Even if you can explain it to them, they would be like I don't want to hear this.

01:31:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I get the same thing. When I say, oh, look how awful Twitter's becoming, People say what are you talking about?

01:31:47 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Yeah, no, I'm still on X too. I feel like one of the few remaining. You know quote unquote journalists on X, but a lot of the sports guys you know Fibitio, romano, like a lot of the kind of mainstream I'm on if I'm on the X for any like actual reason other than like sending silly Seinfeld gifts or whatever it's like it's for sports report, and they're all still there and none of them are. I don't see any of this sort of like discussion.

01:32:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, honestly, when the fires were going on, uh, in LA, the most up-to-date, fastest info was coming to me on X and, by the way, faster than the news networks, for sure. Yeah, so there are reasons. Uh, it's still there. Maybe we can save it. I don't know. Should we try to save meta? No, what happened, by the way? I thought meta was all about the metaverse. What happened to that?

01:32:40 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
You're not in the metaverse Leo, don't tell me, you still have legs, I still have legs. Jesus Christ, Leo, actually.

01:32:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wish to God that the metaverse lived up to its promise, because once we close the studio, I am living in a virtual world. I'm all alone in my little attic and, uh, all of you guys are out there in the, in the, in the verse, whatever verse, the zoom verse, and um, I would like some friends I feel like I did a metaverse story for cr uh right around that time.

01:33:15 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Basically zero people read it like it was just not a it's not, it's even like a nerdy, even like a nerdy topic. It's like way down the list of like things people were into that's actually something I grapple with all the metaverse users.

01:33:28 - Padre (Guest)
Read it zero, perhaps, actually, yeah, I, I have abandoned the metaverse for um for all of my relatives over the age of 70 who now use that almost exclusively. So they, they're in there, they're.

01:33:41
They've got their, their whatsapp, they've got their posts, not the vr stuff, just not the vr stuff they wouldn't know what to do with the vr stuff honestly, and just like most of us wouldn't know what to do with the vr stuff. Right, it's look, have moving over to blue sky slowly. It's made me realize I spent the better part of two decades building up social media presences for companies that I now despise, and I really don't want to do that again. I really don't want to do that.

01:34:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah you were an unwitting pawn. You thought you were putting content out, but in fact it was building them their businesses so I want to be on blue sky really badly.

01:34:19 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
It sounds great, but I feel like they have built a nightclub, they've invited 17 million people to it and they haven't installed any fire exits yeah right the fact that they they say that they're it's, they're gonna have Federation someday, but they have not prioritized it in their development timeline and they have made it so that if the ceo gets kicked out by their vcs from blockchain capital, uh, and replaced with someone who starts doing the same stuff that elon musk did, then, uh, there's no way for you to go. You have exactly the same anatevka problem and what's you know. Really worrying about this is if they actually did have federation that, like they keep saying they were going to have they've said this since day one, that they were going to have this. They've never delivered it.

01:35:03
If they had real federation, then if the VC came along and said, all right, you've got to make everything worse, you've got to un-shitify it, you could imagine the CEO saying well, you know that if we do that, everyone's going to leave. Right, right, right. One of the reasons that vcs ask you to do this is they don't think you'll lose, user lose users as a result yeah, you know, and everybody loves stickiness yeah uh, I mean ironically, threads is more federated as blue sky.

01:35:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ironically, there's been a bit of stuff on mastodon about what are we going to do about threads because there's no moderation, with threads existing and being federated with mastodon about what are we going to do about threads because there's no moderation?

01:35:39 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
with threads existing and being federated with mastodon. I know that's not a popular opinion in the fediverse, but I feel like it makes it easier for people to leave facebook and go to mastodon exactly that's providing a path out I do not block uh threads on my uh social uh, because it's a way to follow people who are not elsewhere.

01:35:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't have a problem with that. Uh, it's a lot of. But if you know, like I moderate pretty actively and if somebody, if some, some, an account is appalling, I just block it, and you can easily block an account rather than block the server.

01:36:11 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
So yeah, do you guys get any sense that people are tiring of social media?

01:36:17 - Benito (None)
like it feels like I am. It's like, oh, I gotta leave x.

01:36:19 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Now I gotta join blue sky, like I don't want to join another thing to have to leave in two years, like it's. I've been doing this for what? 20 years of like popping between it's like I don't know. I'd rather like go on a walk with you know, with my dog or whatever. I agree with you.

01:36:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I want a social group and unfortunately I don't have one locally, so much I'm building as fast as I can. But most of the people I know we are united not by geography but by interests, and that's where I meet those people. So I need something like that.

01:36:53 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
When I was a teenager, I was huge into pro wrestling, and so some of my first kind of like online social interactions were like pro wrestling dedicated message board. So it's like I don't know these people. These people were all across all over the world actually, but we had a thing in common we liked watching, and so that was like how you formed friendships, and now that's way easier. You don't have to jump on Usenet to do that anymore. Now you can open up threads or whatever the instagram, whatever the case may be.

01:37:24
So there's clearly like people want to do something like this, where you hang out with folks who are into what you're into, but it just feels, like the experience is just so like bad a lot of the times that's like you know what you can't crack this nut I'm just gonna.

01:37:31 - Padre (Guest)
I'm gonna reopen my old bbs and that's the only social I'm gonna do and people can dial in and let's go, yeah.

01:37:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you know, two lines though, because otherwise it gets too busy.

01:37:41 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
It used to be that you know, in the days of BBSs and magazines and whatever is that, although we didn't have social media, if you're interested in wrestling, you can get a wrestling magazine and then maybe find a wrestling fanzine in the back pages and so on Exactly in the back pages, and so on. And if you were someone who wanted to write about wrestling, there was someone who might pay you to do it or at least an audience for it. And now all of that stuff is on social media. So I think about books. I write for one of the big five publishers.

01:38:08
I'm a Macmillan author, and there aren't hundreds or dozens of newspapers and magazines that review science fiction novels anymore. There used to to be. There's one science fiction trade magazine holding on by the skin of its teeth locust magazine. I write for them. I've written a column for them for 15 years, uh, and they're just just eking by. And so the thing is, if we get rid of social media, it's not that it's not that we won't get rid of something terrible. There's lots of terrible that we'll get rid of. But how will anyone sell a book and how will anyone write about a subject of interest Like, how will we? What's the transitional phase between social media and?

01:38:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
if we get rid of AM radio, how are you going to sell a record? It's?

01:38:53 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
well, the problem is this is a roach motel. Communities check in, but they don't check out, right? So if you can move the communities off social media, if you can move them to more what?

01:39:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
would it be, though, corey? What would it look like? Would it look like Usenet? Would it look like Slash? What would a successful social media, a safe, successful social media network, look like?

01:39:21 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I think it would be a protocol that would federate Mastodon, blue Sky and whatever comes next All of them and you could just follow people wherever they were and you'd be on Blue Sky because you like the Blue Sky vibe, but there'd be a hundred people. Is that Posse? No, posse is different. I do Posse post on site share everywhere or syndicate everywhere where I have a canonical link. That's my own website. Pluralnet right yeah, I copy and paste into tumblr and mastodon that's not good, you know I use microblog.

01:39:44
I use mantan reese's microblog and it does post to mastodon does this is my posse mastodon threads it at linkedin, I think they just added, so he's slowly building something that will post everywhere does it look good, because my experience has been that every time I do this it doesn't look good, it doesn't feel like a native post. Oh yes, it does.

01:40:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh it does it, does a nice job of it. Yeah, yeah, he's really thoughtful, uh, you know he's part of the automated tools. He's part of the decentralized web movement, you know, and uh, he's done I think it's been around almost 10 years now microblog, and I think he's got the right idea and he's quite accomplished at it, I think.

01:40:26 - Padre (Guest)
Anyway, my organization has been doing really good social media for a very long time. It's a way that you can get information you can get out, you can touch grass.

01:40:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, if you just build a building in every community where people can gather uh, there was.

01:40:42 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
It was really good, except for that one period where they got very angry about some books well they had the same problem they you know is they didn't.

01:40:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You could check in, but they didn't really want you to check out.

01:40:54 - Padre (Guest)
That's right oh no, we have people checking out all the time.

01:40:56 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Now you know you're being facetious check out, that's right, oh no, we have people checking out all the time.

01:41:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now you know, you know you're being facetious, but actually that's what we're trying to duplicate. Yeah, is that is the community, the kinds of communities we had in religious communities, uh, or communities of any kind? We don't really have communities anymore.

01:41:13 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Kiwanis lions, yeah, yeah anymore.

01:41:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kiwanis lions yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean there is a. There is a Lions Club and a. My the moose Lodge in town yeah, was was kind of thinly populated by people who were super annuated and I had a bunch of friends in their 40s who said, you know, if we all got together we could actually take it over.

01:41:37 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, and they have a nice little clubhouse. And they did yeah, they've got. They've got prime real estate, they've got cheap beer, yeah yeah, there's.

01:41:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The only bad thing was, in order to become, uh, official, you had to go to the big moose convention. Oh, really, yeah, and there is an oath you have to give, pledging fealty to God or something that they were.

01:42:00 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, a lot of these are religious. A bunch of them also used to have really racist policies.

01:42:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and so I think there was some discomfort with the oath, but they got over the discomfort because the lodge was pretty nice.

01:42:13 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Well, the advantage in the era of COVID is you can go to the swearing in ceremony wearing a mask and not recite the oath.

01:42:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They'll never know. Yeah, and they'll never know. It's like eyes wide shut.

01:42:21 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Ask me about my US citizenship ceremony.

01:42:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, all the presidents Come on. Yeah, you know most.

01:42:31 - Padre (Guest)
US citizens couldn't pass the citizenship test? No, no.

01:42:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
US citizens could, but that's because we don't need to. We were born here.

01:42:38 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I got into an argument with my examiner because she was like what is the economic system of America? And I said I know the answer is capitalism, but it's technically a mixed market economy because the single largest employer is the federal government it's the Pentagon and you cannot tell me that a country whose largest employer is the federal government is a capitalist economy, is formerly a mixed market economy. Just like, just say it's capitalism I have to check this box.

01:43:04 - Padre (Guest)
I work for that group.

01:43:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I knew I saw the name cory doctorow on the list, I was gonna have some problems. That's hysterical. Did you really say that?

01:43:14 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
yeah, yeah, we had a whole discussion.

01:43:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
God bless you. I love it. Uh, it's a mixed Market economy, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fair. I think that counts. They should give you credit. All right, let's, let's take a break. Uh, we are doing a wild twit. Let me tell you, as always, father Robert, I should have known Corey. Father Robert, uh, nicholas, it was going to be crazy, it was just going to be the day after. Yeah, see, yes, it was going to be in the computer chaos Congress. Well, did they change the name? The chaos communication Congress?

01:43:52 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
it's. The club is called the chaos computing Club. The conference is called the chaos computing club. The. The conference is called the chaos communications congress.

01:43:58 - Padre (Guest)
It's very confusing yeah, I always just call it the chaos computer conference, but okay by the way, corey, you know that you were evoked in the uh this year's defcon badge right yeah, I saw that there was an identification.

01:44:11 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I spoke at defcon this year. I guess we missed each other, but yeah, yeah, so what?

01:44:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
how was he? Uh, there was an thing in the defcon badge.

01:44:18 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, so the badge this year was every other year is an electronic badge and they built it off of a newly released raspi right, I drove a little screen and there was a mini game and in the mini game corey doctorow is mentioned several times and the theory of education very flattering.

01:44:33 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
That badge was also the source of a giant controversy, which I guess it was yes, yes contributors got paid and whether they turned over their source code the way they were supposed to, and there was just a whole like I could just tell you for sure I was not mentioned in the GitHub badge no, so the, the creator of the badge, actually did a talk and was escorted off the stage from his talk because it was a bad blood going on Complicated.

01:45:02 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Yeah, that's good.

01:45:03 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I couldn't figure out who was in the right. I spent 10 minutes trying to figure it out and I was like nope, Yep.

01:45:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've heard both sides and they both sound good. You ought to know that. That's important. Yeah, that damn Martin Luther guy.

01:45:20 - Padre (Guest)
We'll never get over that, I'm still trying to fix the door.

01:45:22 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
It's got a big nail hole in it racist views yeah, he was a.

01:45:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He was actually an anti-semite, and yeah, it wasn't so great. I have access to all the works and all the letters and yeah, when I found that out I was kind of disappointed a little bit, but it's also that okay. It was a different time it's a different time.

01:45:41 - Padre (Guest)
I read the archives from jesuits who were on mission in asia and there are a couple there who, if they were alive today, you'd be looking at them going. You are the most racist person I've ever met.

01:45:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They had good intentions but crazy racist well, look what they did with the indian churches in the States, or the Indian schools, rather, in the United States. I mean it's tragic, it's horrible, it's horrific.

01:46:02 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I hear he was good to his mother.

01:46:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mrs Luther loved a little boy.

01:46:09 - Padre (Guest)
That's for sure, Marty. Come here, Marty.

01:46:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She used to nail his chores on the door. You and those theses Again with the theses Over and over. Stop touching your theses again with the theses, over and over more to come, you'll go blind okay, you win, cory.

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01:50:26
This is really upsetting. Uh, the heritage foundation has decided that if they can't control it, they don't want it and they are going after Wikipedia editors. They told the people planning to donate to Heritage Foundation that's part of their work to combat any Semitism. It is not to combat any Semitism. They're going to target volunteer editors on Wikipedia, the folks who have made wikipedia one of the most six biggest successes of the internet. The heritage foundation, which is, of course, a conservative think tank, says that those editors are abusing their position by publishing content the group believes to be anti-semitic. What it is is, by the way, heritage foundation created the project 2025 uh policy blueprint for the trump administration. What it is is uh, just like elon, they want you to. They don't want any independent media. They want you to get your information from approved sources, not this wikipedia thing. Do not fall for this. Uh, corey, you have anything? I see a link here popping up.

01:51:40
I dropped in a link to molly white's commentary on this this is where I found out about molly is a long time editor of wikipedia. She started when she was a kid. Yeah, she is just the greatest. She, of course, created the web 3 is going just great website and and her citation needed newsletter had this article Elon Musk and the rights war on Wikipedia.

01:52:01 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, she's really, she really nails it. I mean, obviously we're talking about a real mismatch here, where you have individuals who are volunteering in their spare time so not proposing to unmask astroturfers who are paid contributors, who you know sneaking in and and and uh making edits in bad faith, whatever. These are people who are pseudonymous or sometimes even reveal their real names, who are in their spare time trying to take one of the best things on the internet and in the history of the internet and keep it good and make it better, and they're targeting them. It's really quite uh disgusting. I have a great bit of trivia for you about Molly White.

01:52:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you'd like, I would love it. She's been on our shows. We love her.

01:52:44 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
So I had breakfast with her at South by last year or the year before and we had a lovely chat and she said at the end you know, I'm, I'm, I'm so ambivalent about copyright and it's weird because I'm about to become the executor of my grandfather's literary estate. I said, oh, that's interesting. Did he write a memoir? And she said no, I'm Molly White, he's EB White.

01:53:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's EB.

01:53:07 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
White's granddaughter. She's the elements of style.

01:53:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Lady, you're Oxford commas I got the book right here, not to mention the Once and Future King.

01:53:20 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, Now do you have Elements of Style or Charlotte's Web right here.

01:53:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't have Charlotte's Web right here, but I do have Elements of Style right here Very good. I love Charlotte's Web I have Charlotte's Web.

01:53:31 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, right next to the giving tree.

01:53:38 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
And Father Robert, I suppose that the very definitive views that uh eb white had about whether jesus takes an s after the apostrophe bears on your work every day.

01:53:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And he said it's something I consider every morning. Let's see if I can remember this. You always have apostrophe s, even if it's the, you know the joneses, but well, that's not a good example. But uh, even if it ends with us, except for jesus, because ancient names, you could have just an apostrophe. Is that right, cory? Am I right? Am I remembering?

01:54:00 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
that.

01:54:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That is my recollection wait a minute, let me go get she's, eb white's granddaughter. Yeah, how amazing is that? Well, and I think, if eb white wants to copyright that, all this stuff to hell, I think, go right ahead actually it started entering the public domain this year, that's right 1924 and 1929 for music right yeah, yeah, so the first.

01:54:22 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
The first eb white works into the public domain and to the public domain.

01:54:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's awesome, so it won't be for very long, so she doesn't have to worry about it for too long. Yeah, um, he did write the once and future king, right, I think so. I think that's my favorite arthurian legend book, it's, it's wonderful. Uh, of course, charlotte's web is probably his best known work. Um, and, and every writer. No, that's th, white th, you're right. You're right, I got the wrong white, okay, sorry, what else do you write besides, uh, charlotte's web then?

01:54:55 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
uh, evie white, I'm working it up on the old Wikipedia.

01:54:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sure Molly's weighed in on this he wrote the great Stuart Little, stuart Little. Yeah, great Stuart Little, what a great yeah, he's got a math bibliography yeah, yeah, one of the great, one of the greats. Uh, oh, geez. And he, you know, his haircut looks just like molly's.

01:55:18 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
So I think, well, they do both have shapes and they kind of look alike when you look at them they do.

01:55:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a, there's a resemblance. So she is a perfect example of why wikipedia works, um people, really, who are committed, and, yes, they have a mechanism to handle bias, to handle cheating. Um, you know, and I think it's, it's a remarkable uh document that is on the moon now.

01:55:47 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
it's not like there haven't been problems, it's not like there haven't been shills and it's not like there haven't been bad calls on wikipedia, and I think there's room even for legitimate debate about, kind of, the standards for notability and all that you know, you often hear from people is like well, I know a thing is true about me and Wikipedia won't let me. Yeah.

01:56:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
For a while. My article said I'd written written for Hustler magazine and that was right.

01:56:10 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
But those are all legitimate things that I think Wikipedia should strive to improve, and I hope they will. They do, and I don't think that doxing and terrorizing volunteer Wikipedia editors is going to help.

01:56:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's talking about the tweets that came from Elon Musk on Christmas Eve. Yeah, stop donating to Wokapedia. What is wrong with him?

01:56:36 - Padre (Guest)
I think it's all the Diet Coke he bored. He has a lot of diet. Did you see the picture of his?

01:56:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
bedside table. It's like litter. It's like littered with diet coke cans.

01:56:46 - Padre (Guest)
It's just a zempic zempic vials and diet coke oh, elon, oh um I mean, w Wikipedia is so transparent. That's the thing that makes it work. You can see the edits, you can see when they were made, you can see who they were made by, right? So I never stop at the document when I'm looking at something that might be controversial. I will always look at what edits have been made in the last couple of months and that gives me a really good indication of whether or not this is information that I have to have to fact check again and again and again.

01:57:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean I don't know of any other source that lets me do that. It always bugs me when I hear a school banning the use of Wikipedia for school papers. It shouldn't be your only source.

01:57:31 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I went to NYU for college and they were very. I remember the journalism program.

01:57:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They were like if you even like go toipedia on your, your laptop, you're in trouble. I was, I guarantee you the same program is saying but chat gpt, no problem.

01:57:46 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I don't know.

01:57:47 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
It is today, this was a while ago was that when clay shirky was running the j school, or or before this would have been 2005 6, so I don't know who was in charge I think that was before. I think he was still just itp then, because I cannot imagine clay sanctioning that policy.

01:57:59 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
That would be oh yeah and I was, like you know, a huge nerd obviously.

01:58:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was like, are you like, okay, you know you can't really fight your professors and that type of thing, but it was very discouraging, yeah, I believe it um yeah, so one of the things they're spreading is the lie that when you donate to Wikipedia, you're not donating to the online encyclopedia, but instead the Wikimedia Foundation, which is some sort of left wing, you know like.

01:58:29 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
If they identify areas that are systematically undercovered in the corpus, they might try and figure out how to encourage more contribution. I don't think they pay contributors. I wouldn't swear to it, but I don't think they pay contributors. I think they do have a pretty active program, as you'd hope they would, of trying to figure out how to get more contributors to the under-contributed areas and under-resourced languages. You know, outreach, that kind of thing. How do we get these experts to to, to come and be a part of our project? You know.

01:59:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, of course, people in power don't like Wikipedia or the Wikimedia foundation because they stand up to power. In 2017, they denied Turkey's attempt to force the site to alter information about the turkish government's support for terrorist organizations. This is molly white writing um. The foundation has likewise resisted threats from the us, refusing to submit from legal threats from the fbi in 2010 after they demanded wikipedia stop using an image of the fbi seal. Let's see what we all paid for, by the way. Yeah, public domain. And in 2015, filing suit against the NSA over its upstream mass surveillance program. Yeah, the powers that be don't like that. They're uppity, this uppity Wikimedia Foundation.

01:59:51 - Padre (Guest)
I'm not allowed to make any edits to anything about the Vatican or the saints or the Society of Jesusesus, because all when I'm at my workplace I come up with a vatican ip.

02:00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You come up from dot v yeah, dot va uh, so they block you they block me and that's fine I understand it, I get it, yeah, I yeah, now they aren't quite as effective in blocking like in theory they they can't stop me from editing my own article, but I never would. Yeah, exactly, you know, and, but you can and, by the way, you can always tell when somebody's doing that.

02:00:22 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
You know, leo laporte is the good-looking podcaster who's been dominating the podcast airwaves since 2005 and I think we can all agree that, like the, the publication, irrespective of how it's made, should strive to get better, and none of them are perfect. And Wikipedia is imperfect, but it's imperfect in ways that are different from the ways other media are imperfect and it is complementary to them in many ways, because it doesn't have the same blind spots. There may be some blind spots, but they're not the same ones, and so there are a lot of gaps that Wikipedia fills that other publications wouldn't. I do think it's an unalloyed good, which doesn't mean it's perfect, and I don't think there's a single Wikipedian who would say it was perfect, right.

02:01:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But we need more sources of information, not fewer, and we need more independent sources of information, not fewer. I mean, anyway, I think we're preaching to the choir here If you support this independent source of information. I think one of the things that we do that's really contrary to the general flow of online media is we don't do link bait. The closest I do to link bait here is, uh, is the crazy headlines, and my staff hates it because they say it doesn't reflect the content. I said well, how do you reflect the content of a three-hour show with 10 words? You can't, so I gave up on that entirely. Uh, we believe in spreading more light than heat and we really appreciate those of you who support our work here. Of course, we're ad supported, but ads don't cover the entire cost of what we do not even close. Our club is a huge part of our revenue stream. In fact, the club pays about half of our payroll, which you know is vital to keeping this going. If you're not a member of the club, we try to make it affordable only seven bucks a month. We try to make it easy to join and we give you benefits. We give you ad free versions of the shows you're paying us so you don't need to hear ads, although you can. There are a number of people who still subscribe to the ad laden feeds because they like the ads. Uh, thank you. Uh, you also get access to the club twit discord, which is now there's a community I can get behind. Uh, I love the club twit discord. You've got a bunch of really interesting, smart people talking not just about our shows but about everything that's going on in the world of geeks, and you can see here's somebody talking about the suno theme I just posted there. Are you interested in the US Open? I don't know what you know. There's all sorts of stuff going on in here. But you also get special events. Stacey Higginbotham's book club is in here every other month. I think we're going to end up doing Orbital, which Stacey warned us is a difficult book, but I think it's going to be fun to talk about micah's crafting corner every month a cozy, chill crafting session. You can bring your own craft. We also do a photo time with chris marquart. We just did ours last thursday. Lots of other events, special events. We put on uh in the in the club to make it a club. Right, it's a club. That's the whole idea. If you're not a member, become one of us. Twittv club, twit and thanks in advance. We really, uh, we really appreciate our club members. They make it possible for us to stream. Uh, oh, and joe is volunteering. Thank you, joe, for we had a wonderful photo walk when I was in new york city a couple of months ago. And, uh, I guess I'll be back in new york city when hank opens his restaurant. So, yeah, we'll do a photo walk for and, and maybe I'll even throw the sandwiches in. So join the club so you can hear about those and other events. Twtv club, twitter.

02:04:16
And a happy birthday to roberto, who is now a senior citizen, 65 years old. You still seem as youthful as ever and just as handsome. Let me see if I can find the uh, find your um post. Look at you guys. Is that your friend Pete? What did you have? Did you have pizza? And now Roberto would like you and me to sing happy birthday. If I had my keyboard here, roberto, I could play that. That is one of the songs I can play. I'll sing it. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Roberto. Happy birthday to you. You're a senior citizen now and you are actually starting to look your age. I've known roberto for quite a while. Happy birthday, roberto.

02:05:09
Oh, one more thing while you're there, club member or not, we do our annual survey at the first month of the year every year. It's the only way we can. We don't spy on you. We can't. It's a podcast. Rss doesn't give us any way of monitoring you, uh, so we ask you to fill out this survey. We're not interested in you as an individual, but as an aggregate audience, because we like to be able to tell our advertisers. You know, 75 of our audience it's more like 80% are IT decision makers, things like that. It also helps us tailor our programming to your interests. That's at. Twittv slash survey Shouldn't take you more than 10 minutes and it really helps us out a lot. So if you haven't yet taken the survey, a couple more weeks to do that. I think we'll stop at the end of the month. Twittv slash survey. Thank you for doing that. We'll be back with more of this week in tech and and our amazing panel.

02:06:00
But first a word from our sponsor, us cloud. Now, I love these guys. I had never, I can be honest, I had never heard of them, and I got on a phone call with them and I said well, what do you? What do you do? Us cloud we? Well, we are the number one Microsoft Unified Support Replacement. We do Microsoft Support. I said, oh, that's cool, and why would people use US Cloud? Well, they gave me a bunch of reasons. We've been talking for a few months now about US Cloud. They are, besides being the global leader and third-party Microsoft support for enterprises, they support 50 of the fortune 500. But one of the things they told me is switching. The us cloud can save your business 30 to 50 percent over microsoft unified and premiere support. I said, well, that's great, but if it's cheaper, it's not as good, right? They said, no, it's better, it's less expensive and it's better, it's faster, in fact, twice as fast in average time to resolution versus microsoft. Two times faster, uh, and they're better because they're engineers. They recruit the best engineers with, with huge experience, so, and they're all based in the us. You're talking to people who really can help you fix the problem and they do it faster. Now they can save you money in a new way.

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02:09:29
Visit uscloudcom. Book a call today. Find out how much your team can save. Uscloudcom Faster, betterrosoft support for less. Hey, here's something the cfpb wants to do, which I think is great. They want to protect your robux, yeah, good. In a new proposal issued friday this is from wired magazine the consumer financial protection bureau seeks to regulate virtual currencies like my uh simpsons donuts, uh, or your roblox bucks leo, I have to ask, in your best estimation, how many donuts?

02:10:11
did you buy three hundred dollars worth of donuts and I and I can't get them back? The problem isn't so much idiots like me spending money on virtual stuff that I shouldn't be. The problem is scammers and hackers. Yeah, uh, the. The proposed rule from the cfpb would interpret terms in the electronic fund transfer act, which will protect you against things like umCHs and Zelle and stuff like that, to include some virtual currencies supplied by gaming and crypto companies. It is not unusual that you will lose assets, hackers will steal your assets as you're transferring them, and so forth. In fact, roblox can be converted into US dollars, so we're not just talking donuts here. This ain't just donuts. This is money, real money. Another nice move from Rohit Chopra. So we don't know what's happening with this.

02:11:10 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I don't know. Someone probably knows he might have announced it. We're getting close to the wire here on January 20th, so there may be an announcement, but I have not seen it a week from tomorrow I've been pretty busy. I've been. I I'm writing a documentary series for the cbc, the canadian broadcaster, and I've just been heads down on what are? You. What is that about? Uh, about, in shitification.

02:11:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's called who killed the internet you know we're going bad, yet it's not.

02:11:36 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I'm not dead yet but we're going back and forth on the, on the structure and kind of what, where I think we're probably going to end up landing. I'm actually writing something about it for pluralistic today. Let's just point out that a lot of the decisions that we see in our history that are, um, you know, really, uh, disastrous in retrospect, like you know section 12, one of the DMCA or whatever that they were warned when these policies were being discussed that it would come to this and then it came to this, and you can't really say, like well, who could have predicted why? Why blame us? Because they're to blame. And so we're going to point out that these people are alive, they're around, they're here in our world.

02:12:18
We're going to point out that these people are alive, they're around, they're here in our world, they're often very wealthy and respected, and they made these bad calls and never took any kind of heat for it. And we're going to put some heat on them. There's a couple of Canadian lawmakers who consulted on Canada's version of the DMCA. They got 6,500 comments saying that it was a terrible idea and 50 comments saying that it was a good idea, and the minister responsible, guy called James Moore, is now very wealthy white shoe lawyer gave a speech where he said we're going to throw away those 6,500 comments because they are the babyish views of radical extremists. Oh, of course.

02:12:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like Cory Doctorow yeah.

02:12:55 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, so we should just take these people and hold them to account. When, when, when you make a decision in the teeth of expert advice and then it's a disaster. Someone should point that out in the future by the way, congratulations.

02:13:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, I know, and shitification was the official word of the year last year. Macquarie dictionary has named it the word of the year 2024 as well.

02:13:16 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, and the new scientist made enchita scene its word of the year as well. Is that our era?

02:13:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
have we decided. It's not the anthropocene, it's the enchita scene.

02:13:25 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Okay, I asked cory a question uh as it's not really something we talk about at cr really, but, like, is there a single moment or single event that you could point to, when the internet because now I feel like you log in everyone hates the internet. Who likes using this anymore? Was there a decision? Was there a company, something that clicked and it's like the BCAD of all this stuff, or is that the wrong way to look at this?

02:13:49 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
So I think that what happened, the gentrification at its root, is about the idea that people who are no better and no worse than they were 25 years ago, who were running these companies, lost the constraint that used to stop them from wrecking things. So they used to have to worry about competitors and regulators and their own powerful workforce and interoperability, and each one of those things kind of disappeared. They were all eroded, and they were eroded because of policy choices. Right, the decision not to enforce antitrust law, the decision to, you know, make weaken unions, the decision to expand IP law to block interoperability, the decision to allow these regulators to be captured and not to update privacy law, and so on, like these, were all choices that were made and they got easier to make. Right, the more power these tech firms had, the easier it was for them to secure policies that gave them more power still. And so, as a result, what you see is something like a doubling curve, where for a very long time it's very shallow and then it gets steeper and steeper and then it just takes off.

02:14:55
And so, you know, I think most of us would say that the last like eight years or so, have been pretty bad, and what I think makes this different from other times in history where you've seen individual platforms go sour, like MySpace or LiveJournal or whatever various e-commerce platforms, is that they all did it at once, like everything sucks all at once.

02:15:16
There's no refuge from it, and and that's the, that's what I think we're living through now, and I think that that it's because the constraints have collapsed across the board sectorally and because, uh, digital stuff has moved into the real world and so you can turn cars into subscription services, which is just not a thing that was like technically possible, right, and you know, labor is now being mediated through apps in a way that they weren't before.

02:15:42
There was a an amazing report last week about how or no it was in december about how nurses increasingly, rapidly, increasingly are not hired by hospitals anymore. They're they're brought in through apps that do gig work, and these apps apps are buying commercial data on the nurses who work for them, and nurses who have higher credit card debt are offered less wages, because the app assumes that if you're broke and if you have a big bill, you'll take a lower wage, and so this is just not stuff that was technically possible, because our labor markets weren't mediated through apps in this way, and it was the systemic erosion of labor rights by gig platforms like Uber that opened the door for doing this to nurses, you know it's.

02:16:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's coming from both directions. You know this is their capitalism. There we incentivize this and then the means became available and the two together and you've gotten shitification. You know it's not just nurses. I've seen evidence that you will pay more when you're online if your IP address comes from a wealthy location.

02:16:54 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, 100% Personalized pricing is on the buy side and on the sell side. Uh, and with, you know, e-shelf tags and so on, uh, it's going to be in the retail environment as well.

02:17:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
New york city's started surge pricing after the hue and cry on that you know because it costs more to get into manhattan, uh, during certain times of the day, uh, I thought, oh boy, they must be 50, 60 bucks. It's six dollars. Yeah, what it's not. I mean six bucks. We pay that much to go across the Golden Gate Bridge.

02:17:26 - Benito (None)
No, we pay double that to go across the Golden Gate. Yeah.

02:17:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What People are upset about six bucks to get into Manhattan during nine to five. I don't have seen any of the videos like it looks like yeah, that's that's disinformation. I don't think it's a ghost town no, not a good, but like it.

02:17:41 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I'm saying like a lot of the advocates are like oh, it appears to be working. Uh, you know well, right, and then.

02:17:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then others are saying, depends where you are.

02:17:47 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
If you're on x, you see, it's killing the city exactly it's restaurants are dying one side will say exactly that, and then the other side will say this is good because it's easier for yeah, I don't want people.

02:17:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I think it's.

02:18:00 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Uh, I think frankly they should ban private vehicles in all cities, but that's the problem is it's not a progressive tax right, so there's a large group in like a very some people.

02:18:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Six bucks is a lot.

02:18:11 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yes, yeah, in a very unequal society, six bucks is a lot, and then for another group of people it's nothing. And so you don't want it to be nothing and you don't want it to be a lot, right, you want it to be some friction, and it's not just some friction where you have this very, very, uh, unequal society where some people are a little poorer every month and some people can just light hundred bills on fire all day long and I don't know how you solve it.

02:18:35
This came up in lond, london. I mean, obviously bankers coming in from Chelsea had no problem with the congestion charging and now they've got the utilize, which is the the ultra low emission zone. It's still not a big deal. You know people can afford bankers can afford it to come to the city. But you know, if you're a man with a van who does odd jobs and you come into the city's true vehicle, it's, it's a big hit and I don't know how to resolve that because I don't want to surveil people. It means testing sucks, you know, like it's just, it is what it is but I understand.

02:19:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Our manhattanites have corrected me. Professor, band of panda bear says it's nine dollars sorry about that and uh, trucks and buses are 14 dollars. Uh to 21, but still 21 divided among a bunch of truck deliveries. I saw restauranteurs saying well, we're gonna have to pass this along to customers.

02:19:27
Really if you've got one customer and they have to pay nine dollars sure at least nine customers, the extra dollar will probably be fine you know, like I said, hanks open up in a restaurant in Manhattan and I don't know if he's addressed this yet but, uh, those sandwiches are gonna have to cost more. I'm sorry, it's not my fault. Blame gatherer Hulk Joel. Um, all right, let's see Twitch streamers returning home. Talk about the rich getting richer. Uh, people like uh ninja uh, who left twitch to take a lot of money from microsoft at mixer I forgot what ninja got. It was millions of dollars. Uh, he left twitch in 2019 for a deal with Microsoft's now defunct, by the way Mixer for $30 million.

02:20:22 - Padre (Guest)
And he got to keep it.

02:20:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He got to keep it the entire package.

02:20:25
He got to keep it because Mixer flopped. He went back to YouTube. Myth received $4 million from YouTube over his two-year contract, but they've all gone back to Twitch because the contracts ran out, they took the money and Twitch is the place to be, apparently, even though amazon's twitch is apparently losing money right and left and they've been laying off people used to work at twitch, right, benito, but you know, gonzalez, I actually used to work there at this very moment, at that moment when they were when all the big ninja was abandoning them mixer had just come up and they were, they were starting to buy up all the streamers.

02:20:58 - Benito (None)
I was working there at that time and, uh, yeah, that was definitely happening. And then, but this was inevitable, this boomerang was inevitable because those companies don't you're losing money on those contracts well, this is what they said.

02:21:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They said youtube doesn't care about live streaming anymore. Now they're all about shorts yeah, that's exactly it right. I mean, youtube could afford 30 million. It's not. That's not the issue. Microsoft can afford it but, uh, but. But they've changed their priorities every five minutes when you look at valter is going back after uh uh she. She left for five years and three contracts on youtube. On wednesday she moved back to twitch. But is twitch gonna survive? Benito, what do you think? I mean, you know a lot of people.

02:21:44 - Benito (None)
I mean, it's a culture thing and like to amazon, it's not a lot of money. No, they're not losing a lot of money. They're probably losing more on the web store.

02:21:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Still, you know yeah, they're losing more on alexa.

02:21:54 - Padre (Guest)
We know that I want the gaming streamers back on twitch because when they started finding lucrative deals elsewhere, that's when we started seeing the rise of the nuisance streamers, uh and their channels, right. So if, if the gamers come back, maybe we get a little less attention paid to the people who really should have no attention paid to them yeah, and I'm glad that these people like uh phase swag from phase clan.

02:22:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, he says he he got generational wealth from his youtube contract. This is from a bloomberg story. His father had two jobs. His mother worked the night shift. Youtube's offer for him to live stream call of duty allowed him to help his mom retire. Yeah, and now he's back and I mean it's.

02:22:41 - Padre (Guest)
It's work if you've got a successful live streaming channel. That is a lot.

02:22:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, you know my poor son, my poor son is, you know, stressed through the roof because every minute you need to post another, another piece. Now and, by the way, I give uh tick-tock a lot of credit because, uh and I mentioned this many, many times, we're the. The oral arguments, uh, for whether or not to ban tick-tock were heard, uh, on Friday for the Supreme Court. They're going to have to rule in the next week if they're going to stop the forced sale or closure of a tick-tock. The deadline is January 19th, the day before inauguration. Uh, the trump incoming trump administration filed a brief for the supreme court saying hey, give us some time. I, I think we can make something happen here. Um, but those who listen, we will have kathy gellis, who is a attorney, admitted to the bar at the supreme court, who, of course, listened to the oral arguments. We'll get her opinion on wednesday on this week in google.

02:23:37
But, um, the general press said that it seemed like the justices were pretty much ready to ban Tick Tock. There wasn't a First Amendment issue in their mind. Should it? Should it be banned or sold? Does it matter? You know who benefits Instagram? Just in time to save Mark Zuckerberg.

02:23:59 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Well, might we all benefit if the guy who destroyed the Los Angeles Dodgers ends up owning TikTok.

02:24:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's one of the possibilities. Now, are you not a McCourt fan?

02:24:09 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I don't know. I think that the current thing, his blockchain-based social media thing, is just nuts. It doesn't make any sense to me at all.

02:24:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He uh, he says he's got 20 billion dollars in commitment, which is, I don't think, enough. And, by the way, the chinese government has already said uh or forbade, uh bite dance from selling the algorithm, so I guess he'd be buying the he says he doesn't want the algorithm anyway how hard could it be? You, just if you notice somebody watching a video, you give more of that well, look, I think there's.

02:24:44 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
There's like tiktok did do a pretty good job, better than its predecessors, of figuring out, uh, things that plausibly you might like. So, oh, they're brilliant, the virality.

02:24:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is this is exactly why people go back to Twitch for the the ability to make it to be a king maker or Queen maker. The ability to take somebody like yeah Salt Hank, who's making sandwiches to 5 000 people and promote him in the 4U tab and suddenly he's got two and a half million followers incredible.

02:25:15 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
So what's interesting is not just that they could do that, because anyone who's got a lot of users can do that, so, like c cnn could put you on the news right and you can do well itunes.

02:25:25
Apple has the power to make any podcast to hit what they were good at was guessing which users to show that to. They weren't just having a megaphone. This was why there was such a scandal when emily I've forgotten her surname, uh at at forbes emily white did a story on the heating tool which was a secret tool at tiktok that they would use to do just that to just give a bunch of uh traffic to a to a performer. And they would do it tactically. They go like there's not a sports bros on the platform. They pick a sports bro, they make him king for the day. He's getting bajillions of views. He goes around like a judas goat and says to the other sports bros they love sports content on tiktok and then people like retool as tiktok users. Falsely right, they think that they're doing well.

02:26:12
I call this the giant teddy bear strategy because when I used to go to the canadian national exhibition or Kearney that used to come to town every year. If you go to the Midway at like 10 in the morning there's a guy with a giant teddy bear that you get by getting five balls in a peach basket, but like no one's ever gotten five balls in a peach basket. What that guy is doing is he's saying like hey, I like your face. Come over here. You get one ball in the peach basket. I'll give you this key chain. We'll trade two key chains for the teddy bear. And that guy wanders around all day lugging this galactic scale teddy bear and people are like, oh, I guess I can win a giant teddy bear. Are you telling me it's a profit thing? Is that what you're telling me? But it's not just that it's a profit thing, it's that it's deceptive.

02:26:50
Yes, right not in fact round. Oh, you mean the basket? Yes, that too, but I mean the heating tool, right, right, like when, when uber, you know, there are all these stories in the new york times about uber drivers in new york 10 years ago who are making a hundred thousand dollars a year, or you know, a hundred dollars.

02:27:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You see the billboards outside of every casino in las vegas sure, and they're giving them john.

02:27:14 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Well, no, but it's different, because in vegas they just one player out of X will win a jackpot. But, uber, what they're doing is they're saying you, you, individually, we are choosing you to give you a jackpot. Actually, if you did that in Vegas, the Nevada Gaming Commission will put you in prison. They don't have to.

02:27:34
You win, because the psychology of gamblers is always oh, that's me Right, and so then you get these people out there, out there sort of bigging up the service, claiming that it's very lucrative. They're speaking from their own kind of worm's eye view. They don't know that from the God's eye view, that someone has reached in and said you're going to do well. And you know, vina Dubal is a lawyer who's done some ethnographic work on uber drivers. She talks about how these uber drivers are pulling down like two and a half shifts a day, sleeping in their car.

02:28:03
People live in like the outer, like way outside of san francisco, drive in for three days a week and sleep in their cars to drive. And they're on the message boards with people who are making a hundred dollars an hour right, and they're making eight. And they're like I, I'm doing Uber wrong. I don't know what I've done wrong. And what they've done wrong is they're not the one Uber reached in and touched and said you get a hundred dollars an hour and for Uber it's a bargain, and so I think that you know it's exactly right, because as soon as Henry hit it, there were a dozen ASMR sandwich making TikTok, feedsok, feeds.

02:28:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
right, because they saw he was doing well and they, they copied it now I don't know if the heat tool hit him or or what I tried to do the same thing with twitter.

02:28:45 - Padre (Guest)
When he went to x, he was offering some of the bigger influences influencers, including mr beast massive payouts, just a lot of money, because he wanted them to post about how much money they were making so that it would lure other content creators back to x so yeah, it's par for the course now.

02:29:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah so I ain't gonna work on maggie's farm, no more.

02:29:03 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
That's all I'm sorry the thing about, about, about, um, I almost said flickr. The thing about about is that is that they they have both things running in parallel. Sometimes things go viral because they're really good at predicting that there's a latent audience for a thing and they show it to those people and those people are like that's amazing.

02:29:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And sometimes things go viral because they're cheating, right, and that's what makes you don't know the difference, and you don't ever know the difference. I can't tell. So frank mccourt is actually paired together with shark tank's kevin O'Leary, which immediately sets off alarm. He's done so well since he was orphaned and wrote that memoir uh, they're gonna, they're gonna, uh, and the White House has given its go ahead. Uh, make an offer. I don't think somehow, I don't think tick-tock, it doesn't make sense for tick sell.

02:29:56 - Padre (Guest)
Why would they sell off a competitor to their service? They know that they can still get plenty of business outside of the United States. It doesn't make sense for them to have a clone inside the US that they don't control.

02:30:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well then there's also the question and you'd probably be an expert on this, father of how do you ban TikTok. One thing they will do on January 19th barring a sale is tell Apple and Google take it off the store, but they can't say unload it from the phones, no, and you can't blacklist their IPs.

02:30:28 - Padre (Guest)
It can go, basically, from anywhere. So I mean it's essentially giving businesses the ability to tell employees that using TikTok on a device can be a fireable offense. That was one of the scenarios that we had to game out, because if the ban takes hold, we've got a lot of HR departments that want to know if they should enforce that, if that should be part of the employee handbook.

02:30:54
Okay. So remember, when we say the church church, there's a lot of businesses that operate under the umbrella of the church. Well, okay, so let's say we've got a a one of our research centers in los, in los angeles, um, and tick tock is now illegal. Tick tock has now been banned. Does that go into the employee handbook, that we do not allow the use of tick tock?

02:31:15 - Benito (None)
I guess we'd have to do that too wouldn't we over our network?

02:31:18 - Padre (Guest)
yeah, it's, it's. It's one of these weird things where we're like we don't really know what a ban would look like. We don't know how serious they want to be about the ban. Is it just going to be you can no longer get the app on a new device if? If you have the app, will it still work? Will it still update? So it's all hypothetical right now, because, unless you want to fragment the Internet, you can't really ban a service.

02:31:43 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Well, I also think that what they'll do is just kick it out of the app stores, and that's going to do 90 percent of the work.

02:31:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, they will do that. That's actually in the law. But the law also says you can't tell ISPs to block it.

02:31:55 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Right, Because I think there's a strong First Amendment argument about that. I want to say that it may not be as easy as you think for TikTok to walk away from the US market, not because there aren't lots of other people everywhere, but the US has the combination of being rich, populous and having no privacy law. The most valuable users that are large, but they have privacy laws. There are lots of poor countries that have bad privacy laws and there are lots of small rich countries that have weak privacy laws.

02:32:22
I'm counting on France, you know no privacy vacuum, wealthy nation and normally.

02:32:27 - Padre (Guest)
Normally I'd be down with you, except for the fact that by dense does is very close with the state. So I mean, if, if they have any poll whatsoever, the state is not going to take it the state's chinese communist party right, the chinese communist party. They see it as a strategic asset. They're not going to clone off a piece of their strategic asset.

02:32:48 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah that's a. That's a better argument than the argument that they can just make up the revenue somewhere else, that they're that they're geopolitical or realpolitik things. But I mean America is unique. I mean I think that we underestimate how contingent so many of our weird technological factors are. I had a conversation with Bunny Huang, the hardware hacker, about the CHIPS Act a little while ago and he said the reason the CHIPS Act is going to fail is because Taiwan is so distinctive.

02:33:16
It is a country with an amazing education system and a bad passport, and that is why you have PhDs, with PhDs in electrical engineering, who will work in the chip fabrication facility, where they make $50,000 a year and sit in a bunny suit for an eight-hour shift, without a toilet break, overseeing five nanometer scale chip fabrication where, like he was just describing it's crazy you at you, uh, vaporize tin into an evacuated chamber. You track, you track the droplets. You hit them with one laser that smashes them into a coin shape, you hit them with another laser that vaporizes them, and that's how you get the light wavelength needed to do the fabrication. Every wafer is balanced on two platforms that spin. To stop any vibration, they have to be exactly the same size and weight, and this whole thing has to be recalibrated constantly. It's not a it's not a science, it's an art, and you need a PhD in electrical engineering to do it, and the people who do it get $50,000 a year.

02:34:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And so like that's just not a thing you're going to do in america, right, and I'm like, well, you're right, there's like that seems plausible wow, you just don't have the, the, the climate to. I mean tsmc is building a plant. In fact they're doing foreign nanometer chips, they said in their arizona plant up in phoenix.

02:34:31 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I bet they're going to pay their phd electrical engineers more than fifty thousand one fifty, a lot more than fifty.

02:34:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, let's take a little break because we're going long and I saw corey yawn, so I know it's time for a nap so long, long, long days, short nights, these days.

02:34:46
Yeah, I, I know you got stuff to do. Uh, we're gonna wrap this thing up, but what a great panel. I am having so much fun. It's always a a pleasure to have nicholas de leon, corey doctorow and Father Robert Balliser in the same Zoom. Thank you, thank you, guys. I really appreciate it.

02:35:03
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02:39:38
404 Media. We'll do this quickly. Candy Crush, tinder, myfitnesspal all spy on your location and it's not because the guys who write the apps or the gals who write the apps have put that spying in, but because they're using ad platforms that automatically send location information back through the advertising ecosystem. Data brokers can listen in on that process, according to 404 Media, and harvest the location of people's mobile phones. Here's the pull quote from Zach Edwards from Silent Push, a security firm. This is a nightmare scenario for privacy, because not only does this data breach contain data scraped from the RTB systems, there's some company out there acting like a global honey badger, doing whatever it pleases with every piece of data that comes its way Tinder Grindr, candy Crush, temple Run, subway Surfers, harry Potter Puzzles and Spells, data that comes its way tinder grinder, candy crush, temple run, subway surfers, harry potter puzzles and spells.

02:40:42
Move it my period calendar and tracker 10 million people use that, by the way. Uh, my fitness pal tumblr. Yeah, my favorite tumblr tumblr. Yahoo's email client. Microsoft 365 Office app, flight Radar 24. Multiple religious-focused apps Muslim prayer apps, christian Bible apps, various pregnancy trackers and, yes, many VPN apps.

02:41:15 - Padre (Guest)
There are no ads on my app, so no one's tracking you also? Safe. Thankfully, I don't have to worry about tinder or grinder or uh any of the fitness apps. How do you get dates then?

02:41:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't understand okay, no fitness, I know I'm me neither. Yeah, not so much yeah, but I do. I do love tumblr. I do, um, I'm a very avid Tumblr user. I don't want to go for another two hours, so I'm not going to ask you about Matt Mullenweg. We'll just save that for.

02:41:44 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I wish I understood what was going on with him. I hope he is well and figuring stuff out for himself.

02:41:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's getting worse too. They're starting to kick people out. What do you say? What do you do?

02:42:01 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Muslim pro, which is is good because you don't want to use the amateur muslim app.

02:42:04 - Padre (Guest)
You don't need muslim light.

02:42:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wait is that is that much is that much much, much no. Muslim pro is a muslim prayer app. Okay, it said they didn't even know about gravy. Yeah, we display ads through several ad networks to support the free version of the app, but we don't authorize these networks to collect the location date of our users well, yeah, you do, of course you do when you it's in the fine print somewhere there.

02:42:29
Uh, gravy's been hacked, by the way, which is part of the part, of the part of the hair on fire in this story. Uh, joseph cox writing in 404. I don't know what the answer is to this. I mean, it's just a privacy law, a privacy to this.

02:42:45 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I'm sorry, it's just like not that complicated a privacy law. Put these guys out of business. A privacy law, a privacy law that's all we need a privacy law how is it possible?

02:42:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this is legal, you know. I just saw the other day the CFPB proposing that it would be illegal to sell someone's social security number.

02:43:04 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
It's legal, yeah, no, I mean.

02:43:07 - Padre (Guest)
Congress. Yeah, I can buy it from the AARP right now. It's legal.

02:43:14 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I mean yes, Is it Congress or?

02:43:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is this CFPB regulation going to be sufficient?

02:43:20 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
The regulation won't be sufficient. We need a federal privacy law with a private right of action and no preemptions.

02:43:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because the Supreme Court that threw out Chevron deference is going to absolutely throw that out as well, it's just.

02:43:32 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
A regulation does not have the same force that a law has. We should have a federal privacy law. So one of the things I don't think the cfpb can do is create a private right of action. That's really important. That's when you, as an individual, are you in favor of those?

02:43:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I that it bugs me because the texas texas uses that a lot uh oh, that's but.

02:43:52 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
But that's not a good private right of action. The americans with disability Act is a good private right of action.

02:43:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, okay, Well, there are those who I mean. I know, a lot of small businesses that have been very much harmed by-.

02:44:05 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
If the contours are poor of the Americans with Disability Act, then fix them. But I mean, I think that you have to distinguish between people who receive baseless threats and people who lose lawsuits Right.

02:44:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because baseless threats and people who lose lawsuits right, because I do. But there are a lot of businesses there are. There are ambulance chasers in the ADA root.

02:44:24 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
The American with Disability Act says if you do renovations then during the renovations you have to accommodate people it doesn't say you have to do anything appropriate if you're. If you're. If you're changing the steps, you have to add a ramp.

02:44:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you're not changing the steps, you don't have to add the ramp right like it's, but there are people who go around and tell you that you do, and that's the problem okay, but like that can bear it right like that yeah, you know that.

02:44:48 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
What we don't want is a world in which you only get privacy if a federal prosecutor or state attorney general thinks you need one.

02:44:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The cfPB does not have a big enough enforcement arm.

02:45:00 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Antitrust law is going to do reasonably well under Trump because of private rights of action. So the case that Epic just won against Google over monopolizing the payment system, that's a private right of action right Like you have even with trillion dollar companies. You have a lot of billion dollar companies who are angry about being exploited. Who can use.

02:45:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So explain what a private right of action is, so people have a right to sue Right.

02:45:22 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
So under most federal statutes only give the federal prosecutors, or sometimes state attorneys general, the right to to enforce them. But if you have a private right of action, then you can say oh, you violated my privacy. Sure, I'm going to send a letter to the state AG and say you violated my privacy, but I'm also going to file a lawsuit. Right, and you know, in those cases ambulance chasers are great the no win, no fee bar actually goes out and finds people who have been screwed over and says I tell you what you don't need money.

02:46:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And in fact the bigger and richer the company is that screwed you over, the more money we can get out of them for our fees if they fight it, and so we're going to go after them if you're for it, I'm for it and I am absolutely for a federal privacy law.

02:46:09 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
That's and no preemption. So we need to keep the state laws intact, because what they really want to do is preempt those laws. Yeah with the.

02:46:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, get rid of the illinois biometric privacy that's what marsha blackburn's all for yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, I couldn't figure out why marsha blackburn was supporting a privacy law until I understood that it invalidated all the state laws sure, sure, and they're like oh, we'll have a patchwork of laws, just don't violate people's privacy.

02:46:33 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
It's really straightforward, you know oh cory, the, the.

02:46:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My theory has always been that we would never get this because law enforcement goes sub rosa to the congress and says, no, you can't do that. Because we need that information, we buy it that that's been the historic story.

02:46:50 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Right that they're. You know, for years I've gone to silicon valley and talked about privacy and had you know googlers. Googlers say well, like all Google wants to do is show me better ads, I don't give a damn, but like those govies at the NSA, they're all too stupid to get a job in Silicon Valley. I don't want their thick fingers on my data. And then I go to the Beltway and I give that talk and they're like well, those Googlers would sell their mothers for a nickel. I don't care if Uncle Sam knows my information. I got security clearance. I trust the government.

02:47:19
I'll manage everything right. They've got it already. But what they don't understand is that there is no private or public surveillance, there's only public-private surveillance, that it's the intervention of the public sector, of safety and security agencies, that actually allows the coalition of surveillance uh, of the surveillance industry to successfully resist privacy law.

02:47:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's that that is the unbeatable combo we got to get marty hench in on this yeah, maybe that I'll bring him out of retirement for one last job. The new book, picks and shovels, comes out february 18th. Go Go to martinhenchcom and you can get in the Kickstarter for it. That's the best place to buy it, right, corey?

02:48:03 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Right now Because it supports you. Yeah, it's great those numbers. It doesn't cost more. It doesn't cost more. No, no, and you know you can get it signed and whatever. Oh, I like that E-book. I.

02:48:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I like that ebook.

02:48:14 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
And. I have a few of your autographs Ebook or the audio book from the Kickstarter. They come without a EULA, so it's not just that they're DRM free, but they're also EULA free, so you have all of your copyrights intact, so you get the right to sell it, to loan it, to give it away, just like. Don't violate copyright law.

02:48:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, it's funny.

02:48:40 - Worst in Show Guy (Announcement)
I went to the Kindle store to buy it and they said the publisher has demanded no DMA on this. We aren't going to copy protect us.

02:48:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sorry, I think we just brought martinhenchcom to its knees. So wait wait a minute or two, go there. It's a Kickstarter.

02:48:53 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
No, it's working. Is it working?

02:48:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's just me.

02:48:57 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
It's just a redirect at my domain registrar. I use hover. No, hover should be able to.

02:49:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like them smush it right through to kickstarter, or you can just go to kickstartercom and search for martin hench, yeah. Or cory doctorow cory, always a pleasure. Uh, good luck on that documentary. That sounds fantastic. You always have like 18 different things you're doing, don't you?

02:49:18 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I know book tour coming up, big one, lots of cities, so many cities. Uh, uh, let me see, do I have that tab open? Uh, it's uh, boston, san francisco, la uh, seattle, toronto and some city in the prairies, we haven't figured it out yet. Uh, and then, uh you mean the flyover prairies.

02:49:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that what you?

02:49:40 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
mean either winnipeg or calgary, oh sorry, we call those the prairie prairies. Uh new york, uh penn, uh penn state, a college station, and then on my way to dc I'm going to do a day in doylestown, pa. Uh baltimore dc. Uh Richmond, virginia, places I've been in years South by Southwest and a bookstore event in Austin. And then San Diego, burbank, chicago, bloomington, illinois never been there. And then one more.

02:50:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Bloomington's nice yeah, and I lied, you can read the first chapter. Yeah, you can get the first chapter, and the audiobook is up there too pluralisticnet Corey's website has the uh, has the uh picks and shovels, chapter one uh so if you want to taste it up there too, so oh nice.

02:50:36 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, all of will's stuff thank you, corey.

02:50:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Always a pleasure to have you. Thank you, good luck surviving your long march. Yeah, yeah, wow, the bezelorg for all the book information, pluralisticnet is his website. He's on the mastodon at pluralistic. Nicholas de leon, what are you working on right now for a consumer report?

02:50:59 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
oh, I am. I spent all day friday doing stuff on coffee makers oh yeah, you were doing that.

02:51:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, did you come up with a winner?

02:51:07 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
related to anything we've talked about did you come? Up with a winner. Uh, I don't think that's. The purpose of this article is like how to like pick one.

02:51:15 - Padre (Guest)
Okay, like that there was so much coffee stuff at ces. Oh, you should have come for that, do you like?

02:51:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
aero presses yes, my christmas present for lisa was the new aero press pro, or whatever they call it, the metal glass one. I just have my old one. Oh no, get it's glass's. Glass and metal it's beautiful.

02:51:37 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Oh yeah, I like the old French press. I'm very old school.

02:51:39 - Padre (Guest)
I think that makes me I have a Bodum. I'm with Nicholas I have a Bodum.

02:51:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have 13 ways to make coffee actually in my house.

02:51:47 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
A lot of people have a lot of way. I didn't know that people had so many ways and opinions about making coffee, until very recently actually. So this is all kind of new to me. But in terms of tech, we'll have something this week on all the AI PC stuff. You know, we saw some of them at CES this year. Well, at last year as well. You know, one of the things we do maybe it's struggles, not the word, but like there's all these little AI applications and services. I don't know what the consumer use is for. A lot of this stuff is yet like I use chat gpt.

02:52:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you see a pearl on my temple, and then you can ask me I'll interview you then for that story that's going to be this stuff.

02:52:24
I keep buying stuff that's going to record my life and then tell me what happened because I figure I'm not, I don't remember it right, but it never lives up to its uh promise. Good, I will look forward to that. I've been a subscriber since the 80s, so uh, I will. I will get my consumer reports and I will look for nicholas de leon. Senior electronics reporter. Corey, this is the aeropress premium which now is back yeah, it's back ordering it.

02:52:50 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I think I might ask my birthday I think william sonoma has it.

02:52:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got it from william sonoma. They have seemed to have some sort of exclusive with a number of coffee companies, but it's beautiful. It's aluminum and stainless steel and glass.

02:53:05 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
It's just beautiful if I buy something aluminum, I have to argue with my wife about whether it's aluminium.

02:53:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's british, I take it. Are you who's who? She's british, yeah, but you're canadian doesn't don't canadian say aluminum.

02:53:20 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
We don't.

02:53:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't insert random syllables, good because it'll make it much easier to absorb you into the 51st state if you, that's right, pronounce aluminum properly, thank you so long.

02:53:29 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
So long as it comes with like 50 electoral college votes, I'm in, wouldn't that be?

02:53:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
nice. Yeah, hey, I never thought of it that way.

02:53:37 - Padre (Guest)
I mean, you don't want to do you're gonna get two, just like everybody else that will bring in canada and puerto rico and yeah, I'm cool with that. Let's do that and greenland, greenland greenland yeah, let's do greenland, why not do?

02:53:49 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
you know it goes already in the electoral college, isn't it? If they sanction denmark for not selling greenland and don't allow imports, where america will cut off its supply of ozempic.

02:54:00 - Padre (Guest)
No, no, we go for you elon will fly his private jet over there and grab his his weekly supply father robert balacera.

02:54:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They call him the digital jesuit. He uh is, of course, uh a priest, and his app is called jesuitpilgrimageapp, and you can follow him on blue skies, padre sj, and he's doing amazing things that he can't tell us about because god would get mad well, you know it's, it's a team effort and I don't want to put one single face on the team effort it's kind of a Trinity yeah, yeah, there's three of them now, sure why not yeah? It's a group. I'm sorry with the sacrilege. I apologize. I've stayed side.

02:54:45 - Padre (Guest)
I've stayed side for another month, so it's all good. It's not until I have to go back that I have to, you know, get holy again but, normally you can find me, uh, just outside my residence, up on the roof. So if you're ever at St Peter's, just look for the rooftops and you'll probably see me with goggles. Look for the one with the white smoke Is that what you're saying, that's what I do. That's pretty much what I do.

02:55:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have got to come out and visit you and get this special tour of St Peter's. We were there last year, unbelievable and I would like to do what you did, corey, and see a Christmas Eve mass there.

02:55:18 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
That would be pretty amazing. I mean, I was 12 and I still remember it.

02:55:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you'll never forget it.

02:55:30 - Padre (Guest)
Now, leo, what I can do is my access card allows me to bring in two guests, so we could just sit near the train station, which is right next to Pope Francis's apartment, and, you know, you can just watch him come in and out.

02:55:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Use his Wi-Fi. Can I use his Wi-Fi? That's the question. I bet you Robert knows the password.

02:55:45 - Padre (Guest)
I know all the passwords and I have them someplace.

02:55:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What a great show, man. I just want to keep going. I'm sorry I've kept you so long, but you know it's always when it's a show like this, I don't want to stop. Thank you, robert, thank you, corey, you guys are the best. Have a wonderful evening and I'll see you soon, I hope. On this week in tech, and thanks to all of you who watched.

02:56:08
We do this show, as you probably know, sundays, uh, 2 pm pacific, 5 pm eastern, 2200 utc. You don't have to watch then, because it's a podcast. You can watch or listen whenever you want, but we do a live stream of the show in its production on eight different platforms. Club members get to watch in discord, but there's also because I've I'm trying to be a big youtube star youtubecom slash twit, slash live. It's not gonna happen, is it? Uh? We're also on twitch, uh, twitchtv slash twit. We also are on kick, because you know I want to cover all the bases xcom linkedin. We're even uh streaming live on facebook and tiktok, at least for one more week, uh, you know what? Come to think of it, I think we could continue to stream on TikTok even after they're banned. They're not going to prevent that, so I don't know what we're going to do after January 19th, but I think we'll just keep streaming on those eight platforms.

02:57:07
If you don't want to watch live, I understand. In fact, I encourage you to either go to the website, twittv, or to our YouTube channel, tw, twittertv, uh slash twit. There's actually links to all the shows. Have a dedicated youtube channel for the video. That's a good thing to know about, because it's easy to share a clip if you want to take a little bit of you know uh eb white's uh bibliography and send it to your, your friends. You know, molly white's grandpa wrote some books. You could just clip that on youtube. They make it very easy and send it off, and that's a good way of sharing what you see here. Maybe grow our audience a little bit. Best thing for you to do, though, in general, is subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way you'll get it automatically. You'll have it, it'll be downloaded and ready for your Monday morning commute.

02:57:53
Thanks to everyone, thanks to our wonderful club members. We appreciate your support. Thanks to all of you for watching we are. This is a. This is a special year for the network. We are in our 20th year now. Our 20th anniversary is coming up in April. 20 years of doing this show and every single show for the last 20 see 20 years I've been at the same way. My name right now thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can Bye-bye.


 

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