This Week in Tech 1018 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, Lisa Schmeiser is here. From no Jitter Daniel Rubino. From Windows Central Attorney Kathy Gellis. We just learned the United Kingdom is asking Apple for a backdoor into its end-to-end encryption. What will Apple do? We're going to talk about the COSMA bill, which is a plan by Congress to ban social media for all people under 13. And we'll talk a little bit about what Doge is doing and whether it's legal. That and a whole lot more coming up next on TWIT Podcasts you love.

00:39 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
From people you trust. This is TWIT From people you trust.

00:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is TWIT. This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 1018. Recorded Sunday, february 9th 2025. Self-driving Government. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. Doing it a little early this week, uh, apologies to people who like to watch the stream live. I hope you got the message. The memo arrived because there's a apparently a football game on later in the day. Alicia schmeiser, are you all excited about the big Super Bowl?

01:30 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I like it better when the 49ers play, and the reason I like it better is because the roads empty out and I can go anywhere in the Bay Area without traffic.

01:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
True, this one is going to be so low rated, I think because it's a replay of two years ago, that I think your hike is off. Editor-in-chief at no Jitter, it's great to to see you, and I see more and more people using the blue sky handle nowadays l schmeiser at the blue, at the blue sky. Also here, daniel rubino. He's editor-in-chief of windows central. Hi, daniel, hello, good to see you. God, your hair looks good, are you? Have you been? Uh, what's your conditioning? Uh, routine I don't understand.

02:06 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It is a complicated, Is it? Well, you know you gotta have a regime, right you?

02:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
know, I just found out you can get a shampoo in a bar, like soap oh, and it's safe plastic.

02:22 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I know I still love it with guys. It's like they make shampoo, conditioner and body wash yeah, five in one. Baby Might as well. Just add toothpaste Irish Spring five in one.

02:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It cleans everything, including grout. Good to see you, Daniel. Thank you for being here. Also our attorney at large, IP attorney, a contributor to Tech Dirt. You probably were reading her somewhat upset. What's the word? Critical Posts on Tech Dirt, Critical chcgcouncilcom. Great to see you, Kathy Kell, it's always a pleasure.

02:57 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yes, although now I realize C-G-C-O-U-N-S-E-L.

03:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, we left out a C, it's in the letter. C. She's not a counselor. She's not. She's a counselor, that's right.

03:09 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I also recommend never get a domain name that is like oh I forget if it's homonym or homophone, but it was a bad idea.

03:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, well, if you get C-G-C-O-U-N, c-i-l and all of that M-O-U-S-E, oh no, that too Big story today. There are a lot of big stories today. Actually, we've got a jammed show, so we're going to jam along. Uk has ordered Apple to give it access to encrypted cloud data. This is from the Financial Times. The british government has ordered apple to grant secret access. That's the interesting part. You, how do we know this? I think there was a leaker to its customers encrypted cloud storage. This is from the snoopers charter, which was a bill passed, uh, the uk investigatory powers act. Last month, apple received a quote technical capability notice requiring them to create a back door to iCloud. Now, this was not. The government has not said this. Apple has not said this. They're not allowed to. It's one of those.

04:21
According to people familiar with the matter, the move would enable uk. Well, you know I started saying uk, but it isn't just uk. The move would enable global law enforcement and security services. Everybody would be affected. It's extraterritorial, which means uk law enforcement could access the encrypted data of Apple customers anywhere in the world, including in the United States. You know what this has been going on for years. The FBI has been asking Apple to do it. Apple said no, fbi hasn't forced them to do it. Australia has tried this, but this is the first time a nation state has actually, as far as I know know, told apple explicitly we need a back door I feel like it had happened before, a number of years ago, and I thought that it was kind of put to rest back then.

05:15 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So I was surprised to see this news where it just kind of came to the fore of like, oh yeah, we're revisiting this issue and ignoring every reason anyone ever told us for why it was a terrible idea so wasn't there a big deal about this with the san bernardino shooter yeah, and apple said no to the fbi.

05:29 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, go ahead, daniel I'll just say I think they used to have like kind of like holes in their operating system where third-party software was able to access this stuff, and then apple patched all that and like, yeah, well, so apple difficult apple has, in the past, been able to do this.

05:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact, they told the fbi in the case of the san bernardino terrorists that, oh, if you had just taken his phone home, it would have uploaded the contents to icloud and we could have given it to you. So, as recently as whenever that was eight years ago, ten years ago uh, apple would and did do that. Um, there, they've done it in other situations as well. Uh, trump's campaign chief was using whatsapp, which was encrypted to uh to message this is in the 2016 election. Um, but whatsapp uploaded unencrypted text to the apple icloud and the government got it. We know that that happened because, if you read the indictment, they quoted his, his whatsapp messages from icloud.

06:37
But apple patched they did, they patched that hole. They fully encrypted. As far as we know, they fully encrypted everything. In order for icloud to work, they have to have a key because, uh, you know, for a variety of reasons, if you have fully encrypted cloud storage, there's a lot of abilities that go away, which is why most cloud storage companies, including, I think, microsoft offer correct me if I'm wrong, daniel kind of an enclave, an encrypted enclave, and then the rest of it. Well, you know, you know, we have the keys to it, isn't?

07:07 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
that right. Yeah, they're called like vaults.

07:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Vaults. Yeah, Apple does not offer that. Apple just says we have the keys but we're not going to give them to anyone. This is a huge issue, as we know from back doors in the past. In fact, it's not been so long ago that it was revealed that Salt Typhoon Chinese hackers had access to the phones of many officials in government high officials in government because, going way back to the 90s, the government mandated that there would be wiretap capability in digital technologies. At the time, the FBI director said no, but don't worry, because this backdoor will never leak out. Well, it did and as a result, we've got Chinese hackers in our phone network and can't do much about it, incidentally. So this is always a bad idea. I think every real security guru says there, there's no way backdoors stay secret for all the security gurus this week.

08:13
They're having a bad week it's a bad week for security in general.

08:16 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, go ahead, daniel, I was going to say that. Um, you know, what's also scary about this is the fact that and you mentioned this earlier that you know, if they do this, then they can access data from Americans indirectly. Right, and this is what the NSA has always done. Nsa can't spy and, with the Patriot Act, can't spy directly on Americans, but if they're spying on someone else in another country who happens to have access to americans, that data gets collected as well, and so it's an indirect place. I wouldn't even be surprised if the us government is like shrugging their shoulders. Like you know, we're not saying you guys shouldn't do this, because it would probably help them as well.

08:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They want it, probably the whole five eyes, you know um, a consultant advising the united states on encryption matters, according to the Washington Post, who broke this story, said Apple would be barred from warning its users If this happens. Apple, you know, had rolled out and this is what started this couple of years ago advanced data protection, a switch you could turn on. Most people don't, because it it eliminates some of the, as I said, if some of the features of iCloud and other things, but they offered it and they specifically encouraged government officials to use it because they didn't even have the keys to this. This was fully encrypted. It had tried to do this a couple of years earlier, backed off, according to the Post, after objections from the FBI. This was back in the first term of President Trump.

09:44
The service is an available security option for Apple users in the first term of president trump. Uh, the service is an available security option for apple users in the us and elsewhere. I'm not sure if it's available in the uk. Probably what will happen is apple will make it no longer available in the uk, but that doesn't solve the problem in the us. Ron wyden, senator ron wyden of of Oregon, a Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the US has to dissuade Britain, trump and American tech companies. Letting foreign governments secretly spy on Americans would be unconscionable an unmitigated disaster for America. I know why you're laughing. Sorry, I know why you're laughing.

10:25 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
And I know why you're laughing and I bet.

10:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ron Wyden knew what he was saying Unmitigated disaster for Americans' privacy and our national security. Signal President Meredith Whitaker said using technical capability notices to weaken encryption around the globe is a shocking move that will position the uk as a tech pariah rather than a tech leader. If implemented, the directive will create a dangerous cyber security vulnerability in the nervous system of a global economy. And you you know why meredith whittaker is commenting on this because next it's signal. Because signal there's no backdoor and signal the uk's. I like mer, like Meredith, she's fantastic.

11:05 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
She writes a lot of great stuff on this topic, yeah, this.

11:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know. Given all the news coming out of DC, this will probably not get the coverage it should, but if you're watching our shows, you understand why this is such a big deal.

11:24 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, I think it's up for apple to somehow figure out how to resist on its own. We don't have a foreign policy at the moment. We don't. We barely have a domestic policy at the moment. So there's the. The conventional wisdom about how we would approach this is not available to us. This is not something where you get together, you speak to your government and you sort of point out like okay, I know you're tempted, but here's the consequences of if this happens. This is not a government that is equipped to consider the consequences of decisions that it makes. And at this point, given how much power is embodied in any particular administration and getting exercised in any particular way, it's probably all four incursions for privacy, shmivacy. It seems to be the administration's position in an awful lot of technology areas these days.

12:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Android is also, at this point, end-to-end encrypted in its backups. It does not offer. Android is also, at this point, end-to-end encrypted in its backups. It does not offer. It does not have the keys. So remember that this came out because of a leak. It's very likely that the same order went to Google and went to Signal and went to Meta for WhatsApp, because, I mean, why would they just target Apple? Google's been encrypting backups for Android phones since 2018. Google declined. This is interesting.

12:56 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Google declined to say whether any government had sought a backdoor. Google's turned into such a weird company, right, they were like the good guys for so long, and then, of course, they had that you know, we don't do evil thing and they got rid of that.

13:08 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
They actually deleted that. And now this week they're like we think it's fine to use AI to make super smart weapons. That's like, okay, that's a line of reverie.

13:16 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
They got rid of DEI. They're just going full-blown, like ass-throwing it.

13:20 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
No, like, no, it's like. I mean, the boys, season five is what's yeah right we don't do evil.

13:27 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, maybe a little evil.

13:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now we're all about the evil define evil well, to be fair, getting rid of dei seems to be the thing. It's interesting because it's in anticipation of of trouble from washington. Nobody's told them to do that yet, right, right, but Washington it's compliance in advance.

13:46 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It's compliance in advance and it's missing the states. So what I really like to gently push back on is, instead of calling it DEI, which reduces it to an acronym and a buzzword, let's just point out that what companies are voluntarily doing right now is downplaying or limiting efforts to make the workplace more diverse, more equitable and more inclusive. That's it. Companies are explicitly saying we no longer value diversity, we no longer value equity, we no longer value inclusion. Those are the words. Let's use the words, not the acronym.

14:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I agree with you, this is a softball. Why is it important that a company like Google be diverse?

14:28 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
McKinsey has done tons. Okay, sorry, I'm going to pop off for a minute and I hope that's okay, everybody.

14:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why I asked the softball question.

14:34 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Kathy and Daniel. Mckinsey has nearly a decade of research examining the performance of publicly traded companies when you have a diverse workforce, especially diverse leadership from management up to C-level and board of directors, compared to companies with a homogenous culture, and the difference in profit is in the double digits percentage, as is the difference in employer retention and the difference in overall productivity. It's actually in the best interest of any shareholder to demand DEI because it boosts overall company performance and the bottom line. Why somebody would attack diversity, equity and inclusion and say we would prefer to take these out of our company. You're basically saying we'd like a company that's less profitable and I think if we're going to talk about this, we need to talk about McKinsey's research. There's been research from Pew, there's been research from other institutes focused on taking a look at the participation of populations in the workforce and what the net effect and bottom line is, and the research. If you do a, what is it called? When you take a look at multiple studies and come to the same conclusion.

15:49
Yeah, it's fairly unambiguous Diversity, equity and inclusion brings to bear a wide variety of talents, of strengths, of viewpoints, of perception, of market opportunities that homogenous populations simply don't have. It's better for business, it's better for society, it's a win-win.

16:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And that's why it matters. And our discord says that this administration is exchanging DEI for homogeneity, exclusion and inequity in labor, which, interestingly, is Heil.

16:23 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Someone I wonder if that's a pointed satirical commentary on it but somebody also was saying how no DEI will just have merit, and I think what we need to push back on is this idea that DEI was foreclosing merit. Dei was a way of making sure you captured merit. Yeah, so that's the point they're making is you should.

16:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You should promote people. You should promote people. You should hire people based on ability alone.

16:48 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Talent yes, but that's how you get it by making sure that you're tapping into it from Tapping a wider net. From population.

16:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would also raise the point that if you're gonna develop AI and you do it only with white men, you're gonna have a problem. That if you make games and you only have white men writing them, well, we already know what problems you have. In fact, gamergate has now won.

17:12 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It's seven years later and gamergate won well, you take a look, I can remember going to ces a couple years and, um, by the way, none of the companies that I'm going to mention I'm not going to mention names, they're not in business mention names, they're not in business. I've checked, but I can remember going and taking a look at, just out of curiosity, or somebody who's like I have a smart sensor for a diaper, so when you attach it to a diaper, um, an alert goes off on your app and this way, you know, change the baby, which cause you're in the other room, in another state, you're out of town Because you're in the other room, in another state, you're out of town.

17:46
What, first of all, babies are not hesitant about letting you know when the day was uncomfortable. You know, trust me. You know. But I said so, does the sensor send an alert to every caregiver responsible for the baby? And they said no, it's a closed ecosystem. So it's one sensor, one app, one phone. If you want multiple users, you have to attach multiple sensors. And I was like have you been in a household that functions with people?

18:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why is that baby walking funny while she's got four sensors in her diaper?

18:16 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yeah, no, this guy thought this was a reasonably perfectly formula solution.

18:20 - Benito (Announcement)
Guy is the word and I was like you don't have kids, do you?

18:23 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Or a partner, or, and it was, like this.

18:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have you ever changed a diaper in your life?

18:29 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Well, it was a lot of personal technologies where it solved a very specific problem for a very specific demographic, or there was somebody who perceived a market need, but because they didn't have lived experience or access to people's lived experience, they went ahead and wasted time and money and effort creating something that was completely unusable for a target audience, and this is a core problem when you have a homogenous workforce is. They won't be able to perceive anything outside their experience, and they won't even know how to get outside their experience after a while.

18:58 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I want to make sure that I get out the whole idea about why merit and DEI are synonymous and not paradoxical, because somebody is suggesting, well, skin pure pigment has nothing to do with merit. Well, a DEI has more to do than just skin pigment. But sure, of course not None of these qualities that DEI make sure are mixed up in our company so that you have all sorts of people from all sorts of walks of life. So that you have all sorts of people from all sorts of walks of life, physiology, culture, religion, etc. The fact that they can all come together and bring their contributions is important because it also produces, as Lisa was saying, a more powerful company, because it knows how, it has a bigger bag of tricks to pull from to be able to produce, to do its business.

19:48
But also the reason why these efforts are important is because there are structural issues that prevent some of these populations from getting in the door to be able to make those contributions. And DEI was about removing those barriers, to make sure that those people could be included, because we need them to be included, because we'll have better business. I mean selfishly, the businesses will make more money if they have access to more people with more ideas and there's all sorts of things. When there's things interfering with that, it's good to knock down the things that are interfering with the percentage of our culture and country that might be more mixed up and equal.

20:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What is the percentage of women CEOs in this country?

20:26 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I don't know, but not high.

20:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's very low single digit. So the other thing some have pointed out and I agree with them is that a lot of the companies that had so-called DEI initiatives were just it was lip service. Basically, companies are companies, right, they don't have a heart. They don't have a heart, they don't have a conscience. They're there to maximize profits. That's almost their responsibility, their corporate responsibility so when the wind blows one way and everybody says oh, you got to do dei. They write up a thing and they put it in their mission statement and done.

20:58 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
They find the stock art where it's smiling people of different colors.

21:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, yeah, you see every front page of every website has a black person, a white person, a woman and a chinese person. It's just what you do. But is it lip service or is it genuine?

21:11 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I think in google's case it was somewhat genuine I think in a lot of the companies yeah, yeah, I mean, even in target's case it was genuine, like they had programs, they had shirts, they, they, they did lg LGBT outreach, like they understood. One of the other things about being a business that values D I just as values and not just an acronym is because they're your customers and they've got money and they can give you the money If they think that you're selling something worth them giving you money for.

21:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I remember Martin Luther King jr's son on TV saying well, if you're not gonna include us, we're not gonna include you, and I think that's a very important point too. A company that very kind of publicly says, ah, we're gonna roll back, uh, our hiring goals, uh, and this is what google did on tuesday, they removed the language in their 10k to the SEC, which said quote we are and this is all they're saying we are committed to making diversity, equity, inclusion part of everything we do and growing a workforce that is representative of the users we serve.

22:14 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
That seems pretty anodyne, it doesn't seem no, because that tells you who they want to. That tells you who their target audience, the users, are. I think you need to pay attention to that phrase. Ah, so, so the users are.

22:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think you need to pay attention to that phrase. Ah, so so okay, that's interesting. By the way, google's, google's efforts did increase the number of women, uh, the number of people of color, working at google by a few percentage points.

22:36 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It didn't it didn't overnight make it equitable I think one of the things you're going to have to look for in the next year or two. They've had a return to office push too, haven't they? Yeah.

22:47
I think so.

22:49
One of the emerging trends in workplace research, slack, has shown this. I wish I could pull the names of the vendors off the top of my head, but something that's coming up as people take a look at the impact of return to office policies is the impact disproportionately affects women, parents, because as they come back to the office, it's not as productive or merit-based an environment as it was when you were purely producing. In a collaborative, remote environment there's external social stressors, especially if you're a parent and you're responsible for childcare, things like that. So this is something I'd be very, very curious to look at with Google over the next few years is they might be coasting on numbers that were boosted by previous diversity, equity, inclusion initiatives earlier. But let's see what those numbers look like in 2026 and 2027 after a full year of RTO and after a cultural downplaying of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, because I think you're going to see a change both google and microsoft have said hybrids not going anywhere, yeah, but google does say you got to come to work three days a week.

24:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and I think microsoft what is it the same at microsoft, daniel, do you know? Because remember this amazon said five days a week. Amazon said you're back in the office.

24:26 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
You're sitting at that desk great way to shake people out well, I wonder how many people they lost and whether that um. What is the cost of having lost?

24:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, because they lost.

24:37 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I think that's why google and microsoft both before you lose the people you want to shake out yeah, like, the great thing about a layoff is you can target your cuts, whereas when you're trying to shake people by attrition, the best people leave the best people say no, I'm not coming back that's the most hireable well, that's right.

24:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what I mean, yeah yeah well, I'm not sure that that equates. But yes, it's the people who can get another job where they don't have to work in person who you're gonna lose so I still have.

25:03 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I have two. There's when you look at, okay, this is a collapse of a whole bunch of things that should not have collapsed. Um, but let's look at where the pushback power is, and so one of the places that there's pushback power is among consumers and the public, and enough people outraged about it that it can certainly, um, create some market force pressure, and we should look into doing that. But the other thing, hi, as a lawyer, I want to know is these companies who thought it was in their interest to do it.

25:34
I don't know if that quite plays out, because, even if they thought that their business depended on the benevolence and quotes of Trump, that's not the only authority that governs them. They are still exposed to states, and states have laws, they have enforcement powers and they've got courthouses that private aggrieved people who believe they've been discriminated against can still access. So all they've done is in trying to protect themselves against whatever they thought was going to happen or improve their position with respect to the Trump administration. They've really undermined their position with respect to every other power and authority and I don't quite know why they thought that, when they run the math on that, that they're going to be better off this way, and I think it's time to maybe make them see they are not, in fact, better off this way.

26:31 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
A discussion I had with a friend this week, because they were like, oh, I'm so worried that Apple is still sticking to DEI, and so is Costco. And I was like, don't be, it's a numbers game. And clearly they've done the math, they've run the math and decided that visibly sticking to this stance and appealing to a customer base is going to land with different state enforcements or even international enforcements, because, I mean, the EU is not shy about regulation.

27:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have to say there's a case to be made that EU regulation, especially their anti-tech regulation like this UK law, is harmful to the EU in terms of being an innovator. I think the EU is behind. Let's go back to England for a moment. The British public wants 87% of the British public would back a law requiring AI developers to prove their systems are safe before release. By the way, eliminates every single public ai that's out there because all of them have been jailbroken. Uh 60 are in favor of outlawing outlawing the development of smarter than human ai models.

27:58 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Good luck well, good luck in developing the models too.

28:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well you know we just we can dispute that, I think, by the. I think it's pretty clear to me that by the end of this year, uh ai coding will be equivalent of to the best coders out there right now, it will replace coders. Uh, coders will become something else. We'll see, you know, we'll see. Uh, that's that, that's the low hanging fruit. I think there's a lot of things that AI can do better than a human. So maybe not in Britain.

28:31 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Leah, when you launched the AI show, feel free to help me on this. We did, we have it's called.

28:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We took this week in Google and renamed it intelligent machines, and every week we're going to have a guest from the AI. This week we had a guy who was the head of sales at OpenAI. He was very aggressively, aggressively in favor of AI and AGI and all of that. We're going to have in a couple of weeks Ray Kurzweil, who, of course, created the term intelligent machines. On it he's been saying the singularity is near for decades. You may, I? I do not disagree with him at this point.

29:09 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I think we've seen amazing progress, don't you think in human intelligence and the weird thing about the ai stuff is once it gets to the point where it can recreate itself and create better ai from ai yeah, that's why an ai coder might be the first step towards a singularity, because then it's writing its own code and it can iterate much faster.

29:33
Yeah, the issue with all this is china. Right, because the eu, uk can talk about we need restrictions, we need laws, we need to slow this down. We We've got to monitor it. It's fine, sounds great.

29:45
The United States is a little bit in between there, because we stand the most to gain from having unrestricted AI, but China's just out there doing whatever it wants. And that's the problem. If you're going to have a system where everybody's like we need to have rules and regulations, and China's like go ahead, knock yourself out, we're just going to go ahead and just do our thing, they're going to end up winning. Whatever winning is here. I mean, you know, the more advanced AI system. They're just going to get there first and it's considered to be like the next nuclear arms race, right? Whoever can get the best AI and up to this point, the United States has had, it's been the leader in tech and Europe is far behind. And China is rivaling the United States at this point, and you know we saw with DeepSeek they have some tricks up their sleeves apparently. Now we can debate about how much of that was stolen or you know, some smoke and mirrors, but at the same time, they created a pretty impressive generative AI system. You know pretty quickly Well that's the point.

30:40 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Any law, any restriction a very, very attractive destination for researchers at this point, since we are currently in the US, embracing an administration and a culture of devaluing education in research investments. So where do you think the brains to develop this stuff are going to go?

30:57 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, nobody's realizing there is a ceiling on what AI can do. And I really want to push back on the term of best AI. You know it could produce certain amounts of code that will run sort of efficiently in a couple of contexts, but that doesn't make it best if the UI is terrible, if it doesn't understand all sorts of contextual parameters, if it doesn't understand how it ultimately interfaces with human behavior. Like you need the humans to be able to sort of direct it. You can't just kind of have it pull. We kind of treat it as a magic wand that just press this little button and all the problems that the human beings couldn't quite solve is going to magically be solved by a computer and it can do some stuff but it can't solve them, because where is it even going to have learned the understanding that billions of people haven't still managed to figure out?

31:46 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
so I think there's a ceiling, yeah, but best ai. I was just going to say it's just simply who makes the most profit from it. Right now, the systems aren't very profitable right, no expense.

31:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But that's what's interesting about china, right, that's the big story that's growing in enterprise ai?

32:01 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
yeah, is enterprise ai. There's been two years worth of dumping in all of this money and all of these resources into co-pilots and AI assistants and automated workflows and now so-called agentic AI, but no one's buying and workers are super resistant to using AI. So that's another part of the story, too, is it's not doing what people have been promised.

32:29 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
If you're not understanding the problems to solve, you're not going to solve them. And I shouldn't say none, because there are certain API applications that have taken the trouble to sort of figure out here is the problem and here's how AI solves it. I don't want to stand in the way of those, but that is not the buzz. That is not the thing that people are talking about. That is not where all the money is getting dumped into and all the essentially hysteria. We are growing the tulip bulbs around AI, which is not designed to be problem specific. It is designed to be magic wand specific, and if you think you've conjured one, I think you're going to be wrong. You're not going to solve the problems because you never understood the problems you were supposed to be solving in the first place.

33:11 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
The framing I like to use around AI is Bloom's taxonomy of learning, where you move from simply being able to remember and retain a piece of knowledge to being able to apply that knowledge in contextually appropriate situations, to doing more cognitively complex things which depend on application, synthesis, analysis and contextual flexibility. And, Kathy, I think we're in a little bit of agreement here. Ai doesn't show a lot of ability to discern and adapt to specific contexts or to even understand that problems exist in different contexts and therefore would have different solutions depending. It's super great for highly structured automated tasks or for queries where you need to find patterns and looking at those patterns helps you find a solution, but with really complex things, I don't know that. We're to the point where you have a set of artificial intelligence tools that are able to take a look at a problem like how do we free up more nitrogen for growing agriculture again, and understand the constituent parts, break it down, do the brute force computing and then put it all together.

34:21 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
And how do you abdicate so much control over our world to something that doesn't get hungry, doesn't get sad, doesn't grieve, doesn't love, doesn't have anything that is part of the human existence? It's going to be creating solutions where the solution may be offing, like entire populations, but human beings in theory would react to that and say we've got a problem here it's interesting that's uh goes full circle back to our dei.

34:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Except at this time we're gonna have to tell ais to start including us. I need to take a break. We have a great panel and lots to talk about. Uh, lisa schmeiser is here it's so nice to have you from no Jitter. Nojittercom, where she's the editor-in-chief. Windowscentralcom is where you'll find Daniel Rubino, also editor-in-chief Good to see you. And Kathy Gallus, who's a contributor at TechDirt, has been off the rails this week. I mean no, I don't mean what's a good way to say that? You have just been knocking it out of the park. Uh, talking about what's going on, uh, with doge and we'll. We'll get to that in a little bit. Lots more to talk about.

35:32
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38:39
So, as you may or may not know, only 38 states allow sport gambling betting, uh, on sports, uh, we had a referendum in california, uh, and it failed. I thought it would win for sure, because everybody likes to bet on games and if you see the ads on the on the super bowl today and every, every football game, every sporting event, it looks like draft kings is legal everywhere. Not exactly. You have to go to las vegas, and I think it was actually las vegas that got it overturned in california. They want you to come there. Well, the crypto folks have found a way around it. I don't know how legal this is. Cryptocom and calchi have both done an end around on regulations to allow you to bet on the super bowl, because they call it a trade robin. Hood thought about doing this and decided not to.

39:35
Uh, cryptocom, a singapore-based company, was inviting users in the us to quote trade their own prediction. No, not. The word betting is never used on sports events, including who will win the Super Bowl. So what happens is cryptocom has effectively created a contract, a swap contract. There's a market for yes or no positions in the outcome of the NFL playoffs, college football bowl games. For every yes, there's a corresponding no. Prices constantly move. Sounds a little bit like betting in January, for example, a yes for the Kansas City Chiefs to win this afternoon's Super Bowl cost $56.75. But if they do, you pay $100. The no side $46.75. And you get $100 bucks, the no side 46.75 and you get a hundred bucks if the eagles win and cryptocom gets the vig. I'm sorry, that sounds like a betting term. They get three dollars and 50 cents fees.

40:35 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Fees, it's just fees I have two comments to make. One. A lot of these. Oh, make all this money or do this one thing with this one quick trip. Like all these people keep like thinking they've discovered something and it turns out to be securities fraud.

40:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like a lot anymore, not anymore, not anymore. We got rid of gary gensler. I don't think the sec is going to get involved.

40:57 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I don't know this is no, I mean, this is what they're doing right, they started this in december, right after the election right, well, so maybe nobody enforces it, but basically there's there's definitely this ethos of like oh look, I have innovated a solution. No, you've basically figured out something that already was against the law.

41:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All you didn't realize is that you didn't know what the law was well, I think that's why robin hood decided not to right that's, that's possible, maybe it's more of a pr hit because I honestly don't think that the sec has now constituted is going to do anything well, that's a separate problem.

41:29 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
In fact, I'm wondering if I should even file taxes this year oh yeah, that's a separate problem too, but I I had that thought from before, seriously and again, who's gonna what's gonna happen if I don't? Uh, a little too soon to maybe wait a year.

41:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, I'll try.

41:44 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
No, I mean wait a week even, and see where we are.

41:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Will there be an IRS on April 15th? It's unknown.

41:52 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Do we have a Treasury Department? I think is exactly the bigger question.

41:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, the IRS is part of the Treasury right.

41:58 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, they give the money to the Treasury, even if they're that money.

42:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What department is the IRS under?

42:09 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's got to be probably, it's probably treasury, but I don't know. I didn't realize I needed to know. Um, anyway, that was one comment.

42:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sure we'll swing around back to that, but the other people will definitely get back to that.

42:13 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
You notice, I'm burying it a little bit because I don't want people to tune out too quick so the other comment I'm just going to make is I'm really not enjoying this uh, real life reenactment of back to the future too I don't remember what happened in back it's the one where they go off the rails.

42:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's dark biff tanner and he's basically made all this money illicitly because he was might be the ceo of cryptocom, I don't know. Cryptocom says, quote we don't offer sports betting products. We offer tradable cryptocurrency commodities and tradable financial products, which differ from products offered by sports books. That's and that's. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. By the way, this is the number one betting day on the US calendar. Estimated $1.5 billion in legal wagers on the Super Bowl. The Supreme Court struck down a federal prohibition you might remember in 2018, creating this $15 billion industry 38 states in Washington DC allow it. Billion dollar industry 38 states in Washington DC allow it, and Americans now legally wager more than 12 billion dollars a month.

43:32 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, the the social effects are really.

43:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have to think that this is that, that gambling addiction is going to become a real problem. And you know what is interesting? This came from England. This came from the. The richest woman in england I've talked about this before got rich because she, her dad owned remember, in england you're gonna have these betting shops, right, these bookie shops, and you can go and you could bet, and her dad owned a bunch of them. And she decided, well, let's get, uh, let's get digital. But she did something that was super smart that ended up making her the richest woman in England, richer even than JK Rowling or the queen I guess the queen is no longer with us but the king.

44:18
So Denise Coates is trying to get in the United States, but she created the prop bet. Is trying to get in the United States, but she created the prop bet. And you've seen, if you watch the ads on the football games, you'll see DraftKings and all these others Kevin Hart talking about. You can bet on whether that kick is going to be good. You can bet on whether the snow will hit the ground. You can bet on almost anything instantly and get an instant reward, and to me, this is a recipe for disaster. You know that's always been the. The story of a, of a real somebody with a real gambling problem is they'll bet on anything, anything at all, you know well, look at the positive side.

45:00 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
The younger generation has no money to really bet, so they're doing it on credit and debt, and that's even worse. Oh my god, and do you?

45:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
want to see this, the uh, the graph. This is this is the graph of legal spets of sports betting starting in 2018, when the supreme court made it legal yeah, that's a big problem.

45:23 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I there's very strong whiffs of things are going very wrong with the sports competitions themselves.

45:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, I've yeah there's a lot of there's. You know, my son, who is a huge fan of the green bay packers, is not going to watch the super bowl today. He says all rigged now, whether it is or not the fact, fact that the NFL profits from sports gambling. Remember, pete Rose never got into the Hall of Fame because he bet on baseball.

45:52 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I think your son's a really handy bellwether for how gambling is just going to undermine the nature of sports fandom and further sever it from being a community original thing to being a come on, make me some money thing.

46:08 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
That's something to worry about One of the things also I was thinking with that prop bet thing. You already have problems even with the stock markets, which, in their own way, is their own form of betting, but at least there's some form of asset underneath it in their own way is their own form of betting, but at least there's some form of asset underneath it. You have issues where the speed by which the information can get exchanged and the bet can be placed has distorting values, and there's money to be made by arbitraging the advantages that somebody has based on the speed that they're able to get things done, and we're talking like speed in terms of split seconds. So for all of these things, it's not that you're truly dealing with natural odds. You're dealing with something that is inherently. Those odds are flexing, based on advantages built in that people aren't calculating for and are not getting calculated for, so they aren't fair bets.

47:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I mean that's also the stock market.

47:04 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's also, but it becomes a big problem and it becomes a problem that the stock market actually has to try to solve for Well, that's true. And now this is.

47:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
These companies are regulated by the commodities, the CFTC. What does that stand for? The Commodities Something Trading Commission, which is a separate governmental organization which, by the way, elon Musk is trying to dissolve right now. The, uh, the commodities future trading Commission did actually sign off on what they call events contracts, allowing people to trade on whether Taylor Swift would announce her next album or whether a new movie would tank at the box office. Swift would announce her next album or whether a new movie would tank at the box office?

47:49
Uh, cryptocom submitted filings to the cftc. They didn't. They didn't ask permission, by the way, this doesn't work that way. They informed the commission of their intent and then it's. It's kind of there's a fast track process, these, these companies get to self-certify their derivatives contracts and then the cftc, if they decided to, could shut it down. Nobody did, of course.

48:13
Um, the firm filed its paperwork five days before christmas, probably thinking, you know, nope, nobody's to be there. Actually, it was the day before the big government, the threat of a government shutdown. Um, they picked the timing pretty wisely, said peter malyshev, a partner at a dc law firm, right before christmas, after the elections. So, anyway, uh, I thought, well, let me see if I can get a cryptocom account quick so that I can uh, just you know, show you what it looks like to trade on the result of the super bowl. Unfortunately, after submitting a picture of my driver's license, a video of me turning my head left and right, giving him my cell phone number, they said we'll get back to you in one to five business days, so I don't think I'm going to get to bet on the super bowl today I just at least got that, so there's some security.

49:14
I'm safe, you know yeah hey, good news there's going to be some good ads on the uh, on the game, the big game. Uh, open OpenAI is doing its first ad. There were, I think, three different AI ads last year, including Anthropic, but no OpenAI. Google, of course, talked about its AI. This year, google was going to run a Super Bowl ad. I think they still are. That said that Gouda was the world's most popular cheese. According to Gemini, it is not. It does not make up 50 to 60% of the world's cheese consumption. That is not true.

49:54 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I was going to say how many rocks are in it. It's a part of the glue, yeah right.

49:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is there Elmer's glue anywhere? Google has edited Gemini's AI response in a Super Bowl commercial. This is according to the Verge. To remove that incorrect statistic, the ad shows the small business owner using Gemini to write a website description about Gouda. In the edited video, Gemini's response now skips over the specifics and just says Gouda is one of the most popular cheeses in the world.

50:22 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
At this point. I doubt that. But yeah, this point, I doubt that.

50:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah, well, you know why? Because you know those little red wax covered baby bells.

50:29 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
That's gouda ah well, there you go and it's delicious, by the way and you're accepting sponsorship offers from uh baby?

50:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
baby bell all the I would love some cheese. Uh, I'll take my money in cheese. Google Cloud Apps president Jerry Dishler said it's not a hallucination. That's not. It reminds me Remember Martin Short used to do that lying lawyer. It was smoking all the time. It had this sweaty lip. I knew that. I always knew that it's not a hallucination. It's grounded in the web, apparently. Uh, this came from a website called cheesecom which is filled with, according to the verge, what seems to be seo optimized blogs. Uh, gouda is, according to the ev baker professor of agricultural economics at cornell, most assuredly not the most widely consumed cheese in the world. So they've edited it out. So you will see the ad on the super bowl if you watch that.

51:38 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
But uh, no, in fact, that business owner was real, the website was real and he has now removed the Gouda claim as well for the camera wasn't on me, but I'm sure our listeners could hear my eyes roll when you were talking about this in the SEO optimized blogs yeah, well yeah, cheesecom.

52:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
apparently not the cheese authority you might have thought. A disclaimer beneath Gemini's response says it's not intended to be factual, so maybe you're right about AI.

52:12 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Why would you Reminds me of Humane. Remember, humane had their pin. Oh, the Humane pin. And it made the prediction it had something to do with the stars or an eclipse or something. Oh, geez Well.

52:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Google rolled out Gemini. The demo had incorrect facts. Gemini hallucinated in its rollout. Now Gemini 2 just came out this week and people are saying great things about it. I don't know, See, I don't want to poo-poo you guys. We will find out but I honestly think that we are seeing such amazing progress with ai that it is almost inevitable that we are going to see human level intelligence in the next few years, maybe sooner than later something, but I am not entirely sure what that something is.

53:04 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Oh, I could be wrong.

53:05 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
We should actually want yeah, I can be as confidently wrong as people are, I mean they're from a pure computing standpoint.

53:15 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
This stuff is cool like and, and we are.

53:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's amazing.

53:18 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
We've not seen anything like this in the terms of is it anything? Is it anything that can substitute for intelligence? Is it anything that is useful, valuable and also not dangerous? I would not put all my chips on that prediction.

53:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not putting all my chips on it, but I feel fairly confident. I wear now this thing, I keep showing this.

53:41
This is announced at CES. This is the B computer. It's recording this conversation and everything that happens to me, and then it gives me an AI summary at the end of every day with action items and all this stuff. And, yeah, it makes a lot of dumb mistakes. When I was watching a movie the other night and it thinks I'm rehearsing for a role in Richard III. So it's a little confused because I'm not, but there's some stuff in it that's kind of amazing and I feel like it's making my journal for me. I honestly wish I'd had this for my whole life because it would be so cool, but there are mistakes in it. I think you have to understand how to use it really.

54:27 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I don't mind it as a tool that the humans wield. What I bristle at is this idea that it is going to be the tool that can just have a certain degree of autonomy, that humans do not need to wield it anymore.

54:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Especially when it comes to atomic weapons.

54:43 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Well, you also talk about transparency. Should be part of that too. At least with a human workflow, you do have certain levels of built in accountability, either in an implicit and social way or in an explicit organizational way, and one of the things that's super disturbing about the way we're mainstreaming utilization in in general is is the whole. It's a black box, Don't you worry, You're pretty little monkey heads about how it works.

55:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I agree with you.

55:14 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
There needs to be more explicit transparency and accountability, and not in a give us your trade secrets way, but rather when you do have a screw up like glue pizza. What are you doing about this? How did it happen? How, how can we be sure it will never happen again?

55:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I think that's the wrong attitude. To be honest, I just I respectfully disagree because, uh, that, first of all, you can't fix that. It is a black box, even to the guys who are writing this stuff it. They don't know exactly how it comes to these conclusions, and I think ai safety is a mistake, what we you can't expect. The first of all, we know it doesn't work. Every AI has been jailbroken. We did a whole show on it on Tuesday with Steve Gibson. It's almost impossible to have AI safety. What it requires is human intelligence intermediating it. So I agree with you you should not give control of the of our nuclear arsenal to an AI. There's got to be a human in between the AI and the launch button. But I don't think you can make the AI not make mistakes, not hallucinate or be safe. I think that that's-.

56:15 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
There just needs to be a built-in level of review and accountability. That's currently lacking.

56:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but I think what we have to do is train humans, train ourselves, to use ai appropriately. I really like the idea of dei for ai, by the way.

56:29 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I'm gonna diversity inclusion for ai. It comes down to data sets. Well, who's responsible for picking the data sets for training right and more?

56:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
importantly, how?

56:39 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
is their work being checked?

56:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but this was the breakthrough I think that made this all possible is that we have. I remember 30 years ago I did stories on it there was a woman who was trying to create an AI and had an army of 100 stenographers typing in every fact she could find. We did it for her.

57:02
We created the internet and put everything we could think of into it, and then the AI has access to it. So I don't think it's a question of data sets as much. I mean, it might be for face recognition, things like that, but generally, yeah, it's whatever they can get their hands on, right?

57:18 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, well, actually that's one of our stories is meta, yeah, with meta in the books, and you know, to our thing so meta what's the story here?

57:28 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
There's a really, really great book that I want to recommend to anyone who wants to talk about AI, called Code Dependent by Wired reporter Madhumita Murjia and goes to different countries where AI sweatshops are set up, where people are specifically tagging images or specifically tagging different pieces of data to train the AI. And she points out there is no. Unless you have people who dig into this, you have no idea what data is being used to train. You have no idea how it's being tagged, you have no idea how it's being structured or if it can be even used as we get to more and more sophisticated iterations of ai, because structured versus unstructured, I think we've run out of.

58:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think we've actually. The biggest problem is we've run out of stuff to train ai with.

58:17 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Well then, let's get to your next story, which is a doozy.

58:20 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Oh my gosh doozier, doozier things than the doozies we've done oh, we got big.

58:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what I'm I this is. This like show is like a mountain. We've started at the little tip of the iceberg. We're getting to the middle. There's. There is some stuff to talk about. What's going on in washington dc is somewhat shocking. Kathy, you've written quite a bit about that. Uh, we have lots more to talk about. Great panel it's good to have you, kathy gellis, uh, writing for tech dirt. Read her, her articles this week. I'm amazed that you're not apoplectic, that you're not like bouncing off the walls here I am apoplectic.

58:55 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I'm just amazed that I am still sitting here.

58:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But give it time I can see the apoplexy forming also here from windows central. Daniel rubino, editor-in-chief, always a pleasure to have you on. Thank you, daniel. And, of course, lisa Schmeisser from nojittercom, our show today brought to you by Coda. Have you used Coda?

59:16
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01:01:37
So let's talk about this meta meta story. Uh, I'm actually I'm not really kind of sure what happened. Of course, meta, like every other uh, ai company is trying to train on as much data as possible. There is a rich trove of data that isn't in fact on the internet. It's called books, and if you could ingest a library right, it'd be good for your ai to train on every possible book out there. Uh, and, of course, authors and publishers not too happy about it. Uh, there is a copyright case against meta raised by book book authors. They allege meta illegally trained its ai models not on books it bought, but on pirated books. Last month, meta admitted to torrenting controversial data set known as libgen. It has tens of millions of pirated books. We kind of knew this because you were able to find pits and pieces of those books. Uh, in meta in llama um.

01:02:42
Yesterday, meta's un well, actually it was, I think thursday meta's unredacted emails were made public for the first time. The evidence is meta torrented 81.7 terabytes of data through the site Anna's archive, including 35.7 terabytes of data from Z library and libgen. The court filing said meta also previously torrented 80.6 terabytes of data from libgen. Previously torrented 80.6 terabytes of data from libgen. All onto a laptop. Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right, says nikolai balashkov, a meta research engineer, writing in april. This was the message uh 2023 message, adding a smiley emoji. In the same message, he expressed concern about using meta ip addresses to load through torrents pirate content. Um, by september, uh bash lakov dropped the emojis, consulting the legal team directly and emphasizing in an email that, quote using torrents would entail seeding the files, ie sharing the content outside.

01:03:54
That's what. You don't have to do that, but that's kind of the the you know, polite thing to do. This could be, he said. He wrote legally not okay, man, this is why companies don't want you to put this stuff in emails, emails that Meta knew it was illegal. Bashlakov's warnings landed on deaf ears. The authors who are suing say the evidence showed Meta chose instead to hide its turning as best it could while downloading and seeding. They did, in fact, say you don't have to seed, by the way, if you download, but they did seeding terabytes of data from multiple shadow libraries as recently as April of last year. They didn't use Facebook's servers while downloading the data set to quote avoid the risk of anyone tracing the seeder downloader. This is from an internal message from meta researcher, frank Zhang. He described the work as being in stealth mode. They uh modified settings so that the smallest amount of seating possible could occur oh well um, I think they're busted.

01:05:04
Mark zuckerberg said I didn't do it, I didn't know anything about it come on, mark, where's, where's that masculine energy to meet the moment? He claimed to have no involvement in the decisions to use LibGen to train AI models.

01:05:19 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, it wouldn't really matter, I think, whether he did or he didn't.

01:05:22 - Benito (Announcement)
He is the CEO, he's so much the person of the.

01:05:25 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
There's some open questions whether the persona of the company really can be separate from some of its leaders, especially when their personal actions are so closely tied to them in a way that corporate structures are not really operable. I think for him he's in better shape than, say, Musk up the road, but that raises a question I don't think somebody will, I'm sure, try to pick at that.

01:05:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have a couple of concerns about the story and things that are in the story this is, by the way, I'll give credit to ashley belanger, a senior policy reporter at ars technica, writing this story. Go ahead I.

01:06:04 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So if they seeded I do kind of facepalm at them, but a couple of I don't necessarily have the same concern if they downloaded, because I don't think there should be a distinctive is that the right to read you've spoken about? It would still go into that, like if you were allowed to does it, change it that it's pirated material no, because it.

01:06:26
I don't think it's something that it essentially would be that the copyright holder could say no, you can't read this book unless you've paid. But the copyright really only applies to making copies of it itself. Maybe it kind of?

01:06:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is an AI ingesting something, making a copy? Isn't that making a copy?

01:06:42 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I don't. I don't think so, and the lawyers who are defending these companies are very clear that what you really have is not making a copy. You really have it learning and just storing information of what it learned.

01:06:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's no different than me reading and remembering something I read from a book. I'm not making a copy in my brain.

01:06:58 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, the lawyers are arguing that, but I think, based on how the technology actually behaves, that it's really more of a learning function, in which case if you're trying to create an artificial intelligence, it's going to function and learn the way a human intelligence would and store information that it's gleaned in some way that it can use it again. So in that sense, I think the downloading is not particularly dispositive. The seeding, you know I don't represent meta, so I can throw stones at it as much as I want, but yeah, my, my legal senses are like, oh seriously, dude, like okay, fine, if I had to defend it, I defend it, but I think it's a harder, it's a harder life I also I've.

01:07:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have torn it for years.

01:07:40 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
You don't have to seed, there's a checkbox in the client you as the lawyer, I don't want to blur these two things together. I think the legal analysis of whether downloading was okay is a different legal analysis for whether seeding was okay, and that's the point. I think it is definitely more okay that they downloaded and a little more of a reach for that they seeded. But one thing that bothers me about this case is some earlier reporting where some of these emails had been privileged and the privilege was essentially punctured through assertions of the crime fraud exception to attorney-client privilege.

01:08:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and I'm a little bit uncomfortable with, and maybe more than a little, but I all right, there would be more details about that happening you're an attorney and of course you're thinking like an attorney and that is important in the trial, but it's not important to our discussion, right? No, but it kind of let's well, no, let's stipulate that they, that they that they did in fact bit torn a bunch of pirated books. I mean, the discussion we're having is that is that okay or not?

01:08:43 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
you say it's okay no, I think it does matter, because the whole way that you could puncturing privilege is a really no I understand. From a legal point of view that's important, but it doesn't matter, we can still talk about it but it's predicated on the idea that it is so wrong what was being protected by this privilege that you could then have this. That could be the consequence of it, and I'm thinking that I'm not sure it is wrong enough that it should have had that collateral consequence.

01:09:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it may get them off the hook. We're not debating whether they should be, what should happen to the trial. We're just talking about the fact that they did it and whether that's okay. Do you think it's okay, Lisa?

01:09:23 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
You know, I am just going to be quiet and let the lawyer and let the Leo talk to each other about it.

01:09:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're going to stay out of it. How about you, daniel?

01:09:32 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
no, this is, this is a real lesson for me.

01:09:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is, this is a master class in legal excellence. I'm just here to learn, yeah I've learned from kathy about this so-called right to read, which I think is very interesting, and if you say an ai, is is not copying, but learning from something. That's something we do. Um well, kathy, is it illegal for me to read a pirated book?

01:09:55 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I don't know what right the copyright holder would be able to assert against you. They might try to say that your personal.

01:10:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They could go after the, the, the piracy site.

01:10:07 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, I think a lot of the file sharing uh litigation originally had been more that making available the thing that stepped on the copyright.

01:10:16 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
When it came to music reading is a lot harder, right. They never went after people for listening to Right, and it's a much harder reach to be able to do that, because that's not.

01:10:27 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
that's not controlling the copying in the same way, right.

01:10:30 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It's more incidental, it's in video games, everything that was torrented. They never went after the people who were just downloading it. And you know. Getting back to Leo, you kind of pointed this out the seeding part, that's the uncomfortable issue, right, it's just like your ISP If it catches you using BitTorrent, it's not so much because you're downloading, it's because you're seeding and you're sharing copyrighted material. That's the legality. So when it comes to this issue here with meta and facebook and books, it's the seeding that feels a little uncomfortable that they're doing. But the ability to and I think the courts have already kind of upheld this a little bit. Just getting back to that, you know, ability to read. Uh, it's true, ai, if you could ask ai, like, like Copilot or Gemini, be like, you know, give me the print up the entire book for Stephen King, his latest book, and it gave you the entire thing. Ok, that would be an issue, right, Because that would be then distributing the entire book for free, you know, free.

01:11:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it doesn't do that and really without a lot of. New York Times says that that that OpenAI did did in fact regurgitate new york times articles. But in order to do that, they had to jump through hoops. They had to print the first two paragraphs and say what would the third paragraph be? Things like that, right? So I, yeah, I'm not convinced that ai is there to, or is even able to make you know. You can't get war and peace out of an ai it's also worth talking a little well.

01:11:51 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Actually, I guess it was the Copyright Office came out with a study on its second level of study on on AI and where copyright law needs to be. Although I think actually the one that just came out wasn't on liability for output, I think it was based on potential protection available for output and it basically said it's going to be case specific and you'll have to look at how much originality went into causing it to generate something.

01:12:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just fascinating stuff. By the way, amazon is going to have a big event revealing something we've all been waiting for. February 26th you're going to see panos panay, the former beloved devices guy from, uh, from microsoft, show the new amazon echoes with ai. I think, right, this is panos. How many people has panos stolen from microsoft? Didn't more people follow him, uh, over to amazon?

01:12:51 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
yeah, r ralph grain recently went over there, their head designer, so we should see more german brutalist designs for alexa devices, which I'm all for alexa square it's like you.

01:13:00 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
How is that bad?

01:13:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that sounds pretty awesome because that's an awesome designer yeah, no, I love how surfaces look. I think they're great yeah yeah, I.

01:13:11 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
This is interesting only because panos, banana rough grain are now part of that division, because they do have some amazing ideas and they tend to be very innovative. And, if anything you know, amazon and alexa needs a real kick in the pants because they have some real issues.

01:13:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Their products are fine, but the whole point better than siri, which isn't saying much yeah, which doesn't say much, but the whole point of they're better than Siri, which isn't saying much.

01:13:32 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, which doesn't say much. But the whole point was to get you to use Alexa to buy more stuff from Amazon. It was supposed to be a shopping assistant. That didn't work. Everybody just ends up using it as a timer to play music and they're losing money on all the hardware. So there's no reason to use it. Yeah, they've lost. I think they said 10 billion or something over over, yeah, so they gotta figure out how to make this interesting enough to especially to charge, right, they said now in this article they're saying they're not going to charge initially, but they've explored charging people five to ten dollars a month, for that was the rumor yeah, yeah yeah, so like they got to monetize this right.

01:14:08
So how useful is this going to be in your house versus what's on your smartphone, which is real? You know? That's where the real war has been. But you have Android has theirs, and of course, you have Apple has theirs, but there's no room there for Amazon, just like there was no room for Microsoft a lot of ways.

01:14:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Would you? Would you panel? Would you pay five? Let's say it's $5 for a smarter Amazon Echo, would you pay five?

01:14:32 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
let's say it's five dollars for a smarter amazon echo I pay zero dollars for I don't want to neck you don't.

01:14:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't have any echoes.

01:14:38 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Anyway I have, I don't have any smart home devices because I don't trust the companies enough in terms of protecting my data or respecting my privacy so every room in my house has a siri, has an echo and has a google voice assistant.

01:14:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every room in my house, and I think that's great and I wear this bracelet that's sending everything that happens to some unknown ai in the sky. I don't even know where it goes we're going to, by the way, interview the creators of this on the 19th of february, and that's the first thing I'm asking him is where's this going?

01:15:10 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I think the privacy thing is an interesting discussion because it is, in theory, extremely important. In reality, though, it's not. We've seen over and over again, after years reporting on this stuff, that people really just don't kind of care. They'd rather have convenience or people are already saying they already put all their information out there online. There's not a week that goes by where you most of us don't get a letter in mail saying your data has been breached somewhere, right like this is I get.

01:15:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I stand in front of my echo show and dance naked just for the fun of it, right? Yeah, exactly hoping that somebody in china is forced to watch it there's a joke right with the younger generations.

01:15:52 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
They put so much out there when they're young that, like you know, for myself if something came out from photos of me in college doing some things today would be a little embarrassing, right because of my generation. But if you're younger you've already put everything out there and exposed yourself. There's nothing left you can really do. That's right.

01:16:08
Even you know nudity is not that big of a deal anymore, you know so it's like there is an interesting counter argument to this, which is, if you completely expose yourself as much as possible, there really is no risk of your data leaking ever, or privacy concerns, right.

01:16:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You just let it all go but of course people will be want that you know amazon's been talking about this for a while. It's been slowed down because, according to reports, it was incredibly stupid and just really was like so bad that they couldn't release it. According to reuters, executives have scheduled a go no go meeting for putting ai into echo for valentine's day. Reuters says there they will make a final decision on the street readiness of Echo's generative AI revamp, according to the people, and an internal planning document seen by Reuters. So it isn't yet known whether they'll release this and there have been, you know there have been reports of it not being very good. It couldn't get worse than Siri. Siri has literally gotten worse with Apple intelligence than it was before. John Gruber and another blogger post asked Siri to tell it who won every Super Bowl, from zero through 60. And it was horrible. It was terribly wrong, whereas in the past it would have just said well, I don't know, but look, here's what I found on the web about that, which would have been accurate.

01:17:38 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
There's a lot that's gotten bad, as AI has been, at minimum, sucking all the oxygen in the room, but also now also getting embedded in all sorts of software. I think if you counted what has not gotten worse, let alone what has actually gotten better, the count not very little has not gotten worse from all this. Well, remember you were.

01:18:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You were talking about eating rocks and putting Elmer's glue on pizza. That was a Google search result. Google has now again started testing a new search ai mode internally and the reason is there's intense pressure. I don't use google anymore, I use perplexity. I use ai search and I bet a lot of people do. The search results are better. Google's got to see this as an existential threat to its business google is selling.

01:18:30 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, google's existential threat is making its search engine, which had been industry leading, now crap.

01:18:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They did it themselves, didn't they?

01:18:38 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
They did it themselves they were doing. They produced a really good product for years and years and years and years and then decided let's not, let's go change it, let's give up on everything that made it good and instead of trying to make it better, we will just make it different. And they've made it different in a way that just can't compete with what they originally had. But they keep trying anyway and it's terrible and people just lose trust with the company and we don't like it as an ai company and we don't even like it as a search engine anymore from nine to five google.

01:19:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's a screenshot of it's, powered by gemini 2.0, which is the new Google model, which is pretty good. How many boxes of spaghetti should I buy to feed six adults and 10 children and have enough for seconds?

01:19:20 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
American or European?

01:19:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, really Americans. You need like 80 boxes. Adding the children's portions and the adults portions gives you a total estimate of 38 to 54 ounces. Increasing this by 25 to 50 percent for second servings puts you in the range of 47.5 to 81 ounces. Most boxes of spaghetti are one pound anyway.

01:19:41
It says you should get three to five boxes of standard size spaghetti to feed six adults this is an example yeah, or compare wool down and synthetic jackets in terms of insulation, water resistance and durability. That you know. That is the kind of search we would prefer to do. Then you know where can I buy down jackets? Yeah, or what's the best down jacket which we know is really gonna there's.

01:20:08 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
there's an that you know. You point that out, though, and now I'm thinking there's like Wirecutter and Tom's Guide and all of these other sites that are making their bones on offering that kind of evaluative buying advice is journalism, but they should be expert.

01:20:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They should be threatened now. Yeah, no, that's right.

01:20:27 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yeah, because this AI will combine all of those results it might give, I will take their content and mash it up and spit it out.

01:20:34 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, but badly so, actually, and as long as it's bad, no, they shouldn't be scared. Except it's very annoying because it's hard to find. My favorite way of searching google is basically to ask a natural language question and then, ideally, have google be smart enough to send me to the site that best answers the natural language.

01:20:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How's that working for you?

01:20:54 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Reasonably well. I mean, maybe I'm only using a narrow range of questions and it seems to go better with some than others, and sometimes that may be based on what is available. So I think the more interesting thing is what if, when there's something not on? If there's something on point, I really don't want Google to get in the way of it. If there's nothing on point, then the question is, what should Google do, if anything, to gap fill that Right?

01:21:19 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
The other issue that's going to come up with something like this, though, is you're going to see I mean, you're already seeing a flood of AI gloosh in terms of content writing, where there are companies devoted to using generative AI models to pump out things that can rank very highly in search results and say absolutely nothing of user value. There's no primary sources, there's no report and there's no nothing, and with this kind of search result that you've put in there, Leo, I didn't see any sources for citations. I didn't see any sources for citations. I didn't see any facts that backed it up.

01:21:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it actually was a screenshot from Google, by the way.

01:21:58 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
But no no, I'm just saying it would be super easy to game the results, just by, you know, just by having AI generate all sorts of of of all sorts of content that gets tossed into the pool of training data, or it gets tossed into the pool of training data or gets tossed into the pool of results that any sort of AI is going to use to try to aggregate, synthesize and put back a good answer.

01:22:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just saw an ad.

01:22:23 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
You have to take a look at the data and see where it's coming from. You really do.

01:22:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've got Fox running in the background. I just saw an ad for a company called Ramp featuring Saquon Barkley, and the whole thing it does is it looks at all the things you do, like. In his case, he had a leg day and it said, well, we didn't get a receipt, give me the receipt for that leg day. And Saquon took a picture of it and said, okay, got it. Now that's done with AI. But it's more than just ai. It's ai that's also watching you every moment of the day to see what you're up to, so it can say hey, you just took an uber. Where's that receipt? This this is, uh, the world we're getting into. And I I think you were right when you said, uh, people, daniel, people don't care, people I hate file expenses hey where's

01:23:17
the receipt for that and I take a picture. I'm happy.

01:23:20 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, yes, yes, I need someone to nag me on certain things in life and I'll gladly take that so oh my gosh, let's, let's take a break.

01:23:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I gotta take a break. We have more. You're gonna have plenty of time to smash ai. We got lots more ai coming up, including. Uh well, I I don't want to tease, I'll, I'll, I'll, let you stay tuned. We still haven't talked about tiktok kathy. We got a lot of talking to do.

01:23:43
We got talking to do cyber security senator josh hawley's proposed jail time for people who download deep seek not not an insignificant amount of daytime, it's jail time. It's the decoupling america's artificial intelligence capabilities from china act daai. No, you could have done better, josh.

01:24:08 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
You could, you could have done so many ways, so many so many ways uh you could be fined not more than a million dollars and imprisoned for not more than 20 years. Oh well, how?

01:24:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
merciful of him. No more than 20 years. Okay, just for downloading deep seek, which I have done now on many of my devices. That's the chinese ai that apparently josh is very worried about. Uh, great to have. All I wish we this is this should be an eight hour show. There is so much to talk about. Last night I said oh, do I have enough stories? And then I looked and I went oh, my god oh you, sweet summer child.

01:24:46 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
What were you thinking?

01:24:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh my god, do we have enough stories? Uh, but we we also want to get out of here in an hour because there's some I don't know some football game going to happen a little later on. You're watching this Week in Tech with Lisa Schmeiser of nojittercom, daniel Rubino, windows Central and our own personal attorney, kathy Gellis from Tech Dirt. Good to have all of you, by the way, not just Tech Dirt rstreetorg too right, you wrote a nice piece for them. That was really good.

01:25:15 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I wrote a erstwhile fellow with them and I wrote a white paper.

01:25:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I didn't realize you were a fellow there.

01:25:23 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, partially. I don't know if I have a permanent title, but I did. Under the auspices of a fellowship. I wrote a white paper about jawboning and the DMCA.

01:25:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, apparently jawboning whatever that is has a little bit to do with the TikTok case as well. Yeah.

01:25:40
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01:29:54 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I mean, we never resolved it, we just did something really stupid. And here we are.

01:30:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So just to fill you in previously on this Week in Tech.

01:30:09
Kathy is an adamant supporter of the the first amendment, as we all should be, and says that tiktok is protected by the first amendment. Not just tiktok itself, but every user of tiktok is exercising their right to free speech. Uh, there are many who say that or believe that tiktok is a security, security problem because it is a Chinese company. With it gives it presumably gives access. In fact, we had an open AI guy on Wednesday on the show said nobody should have, I don't have to talk on my phone, you'd be crazy. Have to talk on your phone or deep seek or any of these apps.

01:30:44 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
And I'm not disputing that I don't have it either, and for similar reasons. So let's just know stipulate that tiktok is as much of a privacy menace as it's been accused. That notwithstanding, the question is, what does the government get to do about that? And I think the first amendment says not this, but the supreme court disagreed, um, although they disagreed very narrowly, but it was nine.

01:31:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nothing, right, kathy? Were you surprised that it was unanimous?

01:31:14 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
um, I'm not exactly should mention.

01:31:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kathy was in the court during the oral arguments. We had you on shortly after that.

01:31:24 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Uh, she's admitted to the supreme court, to the bar, yeah so I wrote an amicus brief in the case arguing this is not how anything works, and I attended the oral argument. Listening to it I was cautiously optimistic because it's sort of. I think they kind of understood what the First Amendment issues were, but the whole thing was a mess.

01:31:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it's even messier now.

01:31:46 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's even messier now. And so you ask about the nine nothing. And I think the nine nothing is kind of a byproduct of they just wanted to get it off its docket for whatever reason. And one of the things that concerns me is I don't know why they thought they were unable to stop the clock on this and provide and enjoin things and then have things being briefed at a proper pace when they could read all the briefs and get all the full argument and get all the amici to have time, not over their Christmas break, to be able to weigh in. So they ended up because they didn't do that, they ended up with everything on a very accelerated schedule.

01:32:19
And then we're kind of like well, we heard the case, we got to do something, and I have a sense that the 9-0 decision that they came out with was the only thing they could kind of get everybody to agree on to get something out the door.

01:32:38
So it's got a lot of framing to say be really careful. We're only speaking to this particular situation as it applies to TikTok. You know, don't read too widely. We want to be cautious about not, you know, hurting technology, this and the other thing. They kind of acknowledge that they might be wrong, but they were wrong and they made a mess, and the only thing that I think is somewhat good about it is I think they could have made a worse mess depending on what their reasoning was, but they made a pretty big mess anyway, both legally in terms of how do we interpret First Amendment law going forward but also in terms of what now happens to TikTok itself and all of its users, and that is a practical mess that has not been resolved. But basically it is unavailable in the United States and American users can't use it, but some of them are Well they're doing.

01:33:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wait a minute? Didn't the president say we can he?

01:33:24 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
can't say that it doesn't help and he did. Well.

01:33:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
OK, I got it on here, I think it's OK. He did Well. Ok, I got it on here, I think it's OK.

01:33:37 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
He is capable of saying many things, there are words that he is able to project from his mouth, but in terms of any sort of lawful beneficence that he is legally and constitutionally and lawfully allowed to bestow, no, and it doesn't solve the problem because, as you were alluding to, the whole TikTok ban is yet another example of jawboning, because one of the things it does, what is?

01:33:55
jawboning. Jawboning is going after instead of going after the actual speaker that you're unhappy with and trying to regulate, which you may not be able to do thanks to the First Amendment it's to put pressure on an intermediary they depend on and make it so that that intermediary can't do business and support the actual speaker. So it's a way of hurting a speaker by sticking it to somebody in the middle, and that is basically what jawboning is. That's what they were complaining about had happened with the Biden administration allegedly leaning on the platforms to turn to delete some speech and delete some users. That whole bit of if you didn't like it, you didn't, you couldn't, you didn't go after those users. So because you couldn't, because that would be unlawful, unconstitutional, so instead you went after the platforms and told them to do it and you can and they did both.

01:34:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple and google have removed tiktok so and all the other bite dance apps, for that matter from their uh stores. Tiktok is now telling android users you can sideload the app. You can't get it on a mac I mean on an iphone in any form or fashion right.

01:35:01 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So the question so tiktok can't do stuff in the united states, but nobody in the united states can help tiktok do anything, including the app stores who had been providing it.

01:35:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Couldn't, though, couldn't Apple say well, the president said it's okay, so we're going to put it back in the store.

01:35:19 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I would not if I'm their in-house counsel.

01:35:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's the risk?

01:35:22 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Look at that Everything, that there's no way he could actually make it so that it's lawful.

01:35:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The law which was upheld by the Supreme Court has pretty substantial fines it has pretty substantial.

01:35:34 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
He can't, he can't forgive them of those fines. He doesn't have that power but who's gonna?

01:35:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
who's gonna prosecute them?

01:35:42 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
you are playing a lot of russian roulette if you basically rely on trump's representation and the fact that you think that pam bondi is going to just sort of let you get away with it and she is. That may be true as a practical standpoint now, but it's a rather corrupt result.

01:35:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know, I, yeah, by the way on it I understand why apple and google aren't, because why take the chance right? There's no, there's no, nothing, no, no downside to not having in the store. There's definitely a potential downside for having in the store.

01:36:13 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
And it's not just Google, it's the app stores, is the easiest target, but it also targets any of their web hosts. So there's also the issue of the CDNs and stuff, although I thought maybe one of them did come back online to help TikTok. But I think it's a really questionable, questionable move, and it was based on a promise that trump had at least originally made I can go right now inaugurated to tick tock dot com.

01:36:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Slash download, uh, and download this. You have to do it on an android device because it allows you to sideload apple iphones do not. Um, presumably there's a web host somewhere. I don't know if it's in china. Uh, there's a cdn probably as well.

01:36:53 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I don't know where it is well, I think what kids today are doing is vpn-ing and trying to use to get it from canada. But you have to. You don't have to a lot of well to do that. You have to go through a lot of hoops to be able to do it. But in theory, all of this is unlawful, because it's not just the app stores but also anybody who's involved with hosting also is running afoul of the law, and they also had to go down, even if they could rely on Trump's representation. He made the representation before he was technically president, so they were approving potential liability.

01:37:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, come on, that's a technicality.

01:37:26 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
And you know, if his presidency doesn't last four years, you may be inside the statute of limitations. You know it's a bet, the company decision on something that just really isn't worth it. But it also is reason why the law was jawboning and bad on that regard, because the way we decided to solve the problem of impinging on certain user speech is to, or even TikTok itself, like the people that we wanted to go after, is to, or or even tiktok itself, like the people that we wanted to go after. We did it by going after middlemen to make it impossible, you know, to just mess with the people that we were really so I just did a uh who is on tiktok and um.

01:38:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is uh. The registrar is gandhinet. It is on akamai. Is their uh cdn um?

01:38:10 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I think Akamai is playing chicken with law, but at this point this is not the biggest kettle of fish for anybody to worry about.

01:38:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just don't think Pam Bondi is going to go after.

01:38:21 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I don't think you can rely on anything and including, like I think I made the argument in my TechTurtle post to say, okay, let's look at what the math would be for how much you would potentially owe if you were found guilty of it.

01:38:35
So in theory, they can extract enough money. Just a dollar less than that, and it's a huge amount of money. And just for this and this is one law. What's the next law going to look like that? This idea that you could basically like hope for their benevolence when this is really extremely a corrupt offer to have been made, and the idea that, oh, we can rely on this and we'll be okay. It's not rational and, quite frankly, if I'm shareholders, I'm going to start wondering what these companies were thinking of this is. I don't think this level of decision making is cleared by the business judgment rule.

01:39:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It Daniel, should Microsoft buy Tick Tock? By the way, they're one of the companies that's being mentioned Microsoft Oracle. Uh, elon says no, I don't want it, so he's well you never know what he didn't want to he didn't want Twitter either, so I don't know so I've joked about Microsoft buying them.

01:39:30 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Whether it's good or bad depends on your opinion of Tik TOK. If you like Tik TOK but you wouldn't get the algorithm.

01:39:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's part of the problem. The Chinese government says the algorithm is not for sale and apparently they control that. So you wouldn't get the users, though, and that's not in an insignificant thing.

01:39:49 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
They're going to be looking for something.

01:39:50 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, users, though, and that's not an insignificant thing.

01:39:51 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
They're going to be looking for something new.

01:39:52 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
You're not getting the users. Portraying AI would be huge.

01:39:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're not getting the users. No, you're not going to get the users. I mean, I want to write a.

01:39:59 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Speaking of the list of posts in my head which have not actually been published on TechTurtle yet, because I have to finish writing them, I really think there's a question about how alienable a platform actually is, about how, when you sell it, how much can you sell? Because platforms are really not just a corporate asset, they are also, they are essentially, the community, and the community is not ownable.

01:40:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And all those choices yeah, but if you know to jump off of.

01:40:25 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
To jump off of Kathy's point, we don't have, in 20 odd years of Internet community aggregation and dissipation, social platforms rising and falling. We have no good example of any company successfully acquiring or monetizing a social network and having it remain half as useful.

01:40:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Elon Musk bought Twitter and got all of the twitter users for what she's saying well, daniel.

01:40:53 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I could argue, though, that linkedin, it's a social network in the capacity that people use it to network with each other to get jobs, but with something like myspace or something like twitter or something like tiktok, the value was in being part of what felt like a bigger community of affinity or a bigger community of lifestyle or a bigger community of social connection, and the shutdown and revival of TikTok has already rocked people where they're like oh, this isn't a tenable way to make a living, this isn't a tenable way to have a community. What have I been doing with my time? Like the bubble has already burst socially speaking. All of these people are going to be looking for new places to go.

01:41:34 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
And even if we accept LinkedIn as a rare counter example I would even say it's not a counter example, because a lot of what LinkedIn has grown to be now maybe have been, while it's been a Microsoft property anyway, that we probably did see a dip. But to the extent that it's been a Microsoft property anyway, that we probably did see a dip, but to the extent that it's something interesting and viable now it's interesting and viable under Microsoft stewardship, and if Microsoft divested and sold it to somebody else, we would see a shakeout and lose something really integral, not just in terms of what we can count on the platform operator to deliver, but that the community itself will be shattered and lose the value proposition for why they're there in the first place what about whatsapp and instagram?

01:42:14 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
instagrams. Yeah, oh yeah, they were both instagram meta bought instagram and actually it grew.

01:42:21 - Benito (Announcement)
Uh, I think, if microsoft or some credible company bought tiktok.

01:42:25 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
There's no reason people would leave tiktok people aren't building communities of affinity on instagram the same way they were. It's a business channel now, which is fine, but well, that's, that's how it's been mismanaged by meta.

01:42:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't think that's because meta bought them but that's always the risk, the issue with tiktok is mostly about.

01:42:42 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It's about where they're storing the data, right, yeah, and that's the whole argument here is that they want the data store the united states, so the? U has control over consumer data due to security reasons.

01:42:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
JD Vance has been put in charge of the acquisition or sale or whatever it is. Trump has talked about creating a sovereign wealth fund. The US does not have all of this is unlawful.

01:43:05 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Saudi Arabia has one. Given the time of day, all these things, who's?

01:43:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
going to stop him?

01:43:08 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, that's a separate problem, but assuming we still have any sort of constitutional order and functioning, law?

01:43:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't.

01:43:14 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, I'm not willing to surrender that yet.

01:43:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not either, but what are you going to do about it?

01:43:19 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
We are going to look for what vectors of power we still have to exert over things and just sort of saying, well, sounds good.

01:43:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, it's more than the federal marshal's going to do it.

01:43:34 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
We have. We have things like uh, we still have the ability to protest, we still have the ability to put that's all. We've got market power, so what?

01:43:39 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
happens if a court?

01:43:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
rules, if a court rules something. And uh, then president trump says yeah, no, I'm not ag bondy. Uh, general bondy, you're gonna do anything about?

01:43:49 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
it. Well then, we say goodbye to the union, but we are not there yet and I think there's a lot of people whose allyship they're counting on who are not going to necessarily go along with that. But we'll see. But one of the other things so we have, you know, just so, we still have power as a people. We have power to protest, we also have state power, and then we also have and so this was the other bits that I was writing on Tector there is the ability, there are other avenues to.

01:44:17
If we act soon and we start to impose and there's vectors of doing this legal liability on the people that Trump and Musk are counting on to do their bidding, they may see that it's not going to be worth their while, because if they have liability judgments against them, even if the courts can't, even if the federal courts can't enforce it themselves, those judgments are enforceable in states where they have assets. And that is a really critical leverage vector of power that we still have over these people. They can only take our country if they have enough people to make willing to help them do it. And if we act now, I think there's some avenues of attack that we can make it not worth the while of the people that they're depending on to do it so congress has introduced uh, something we had cosa, now we have cosma.

01:45:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, a uh a law that this came out of committee. I don't know whether it has much chance of surviving congress I have a feeling it might, in the current climate, preventing anybody under the age of 13 from using social media, just as it is in australia period uh. This uh also is applicable to a case that the supreme court just heard oral arguments about. In the state of texas, free speech coalition uh versus texas ag paxton. Texas uh passed a law requiring the age gating of certain internet sites. Um, do you think a the supreme court will overturn that law, which would probably then make moot any attempt to block social media for people under 13.?

01:45:53 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Is this the Texas law that you just?

01:45:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
had.

01:45:55 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah. So one interesting thing is just the other day they managed to get at the district court an injunction of yet another age gating law that came out of Texas that that had been challenged by not I think that choice was probably the plaintiff. It was, I think, the same lawyers by I think Nat Choice was probably the plaintiff. It was, I think, the same lawyers.

01:46:17
The thing that's at the Supreme Court right now is I do not like the level of comfort that too many of the judges seem justices seem to have about whether age-getting was appropriate for internet, for the internet. But what Justice Sotomayor pointed out was that is not the issue before them. The issue before them was that when it went to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the Fifth Circuit used, I think, a rational basis test for it. Maybe it was intermediate scrutiny, but it was. It was definitely not the level of scrutiny that attacks on First Amendment rights normally requires, and all we need the Supreme Court to do right now is say it was supposed to be strict scrutiny. Go back, Fifth Circuit, Try again. Now you review the district court and use the right standard, because they didn't do that with TikTok.

01:47:00
They didn't do it and well, so they sort of did it with TikTok, kind of. So what happened at the district court, at the appeals court in TikTok which is where it started, because Congress short-circuited the whole path and it began, the challenge at the district, at the Court of Appeals, was that court said, yeah, first Amendment rights are implicated and we will presume, without deciding, that strict scrutiny, the highest level, was appropriate to have to use to decide whether the ban was constitutional or not. But then, using that allegedly using that standard, they then decided, yeah, it was totally fine, which basically guts the utility of this very strict standard, because very little should be able to to leap over those obstacles.

01:47:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't want to have people to have to have a law degree to understand the conversation, so we'll kind of hold it at that point. Um, but something we've talked about quite a bit, uh, in the past with you, kathy, and I think I I'm starting to understand it, but, um, these are legal niceties and I don't know how much they have to do with what's happening in the political sphere but they do have a lot Well. I do, I understand, but I don't know if that's going to make any difference.

01:48:15 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Because, if every because the timing of when we all shrug and say, oh my gosh, we're screwed. There may be a point where that is true, but it is really important not to just shrug too soon and give up when we still have legal organs and legal principles that may still be operative. So the details do matter, because they also matter for when and how and where. When and how to get upset and how to base best apply that being upset.

01:48:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am not going marching downtown with a sign that says apply strict scrutiny.

01:48:46 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I probably would.

01:48:47
But I mean that may not be the thing that is necessarily going to save. Look, the TikTok thing is also from the aftermath of the end of the Biden administration and now we are in kind of in a whole new world. So if you want to say, like, does the TikTok ban matter? I mean so many other things have overtaken it. Where we have bigger fish to fry, I agree, but under the old fish market rules the old fish market is they really made a mess of things and that was a sort of mess.

01:49:13
That is why things like what we're seeing in now are more able to take root, but at least, like, we're able to talk to each other, organize, still have access to the Internet to do these things, because the First Amendment wasn't completely undermined when it came to, when it came to Internet speech, and so that's why those details really matter, because if we were still living in the old fish market, I really want to hold the line to not make it too easy for the things the government wants to do to be too easy for it to do, because if it can do them, then Trump legitimately can do them for us. Right now he's doing them illegitimately and that is really a significant difference in terms of what we're fighting for and what tools we have to do that fighting with the senate commerce committee approved cosma the kids off social media act on wednesday to ban children under 13 from social media.

01:50:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, lisa, you've got a young young person in your home. Should kids be blocked from social media? Uh, under 13.

01:50:17 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
the reason I'm hesitant to say blanket yes or blanket no is because I think it would be a disservice to any young person to block them and as opposed to teaching them responsible use and modeling responsible use.

01:50:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And who better than the parents? To do that what I is an arbitrary number.

01:50:46 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
A parent knows best what a kid can and cannot handle uh, also you have to point out, a lot of parents are not responsible social media users um well, whether that will work well or not, I don't know. Um yeah, but but one of the things I would point out is a lot of uh apps and services aimed explicitly at children are designed to boost engagement and addictive behavior and we banned uh.

01:51:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We banned uh advertising to children in uh on children's tv shows. I mean we've, we've done a lot of stuff sitting in a briefing with the head.

01:51:24 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Uh, I was sitting in a session one time where the person who was then the head of the YouTube kids app was happily chattering about how great it was that they had figured out a way to boost engagement. So kids just kept clicking on videos and watching and to them, this was a sign that the app was succeeding. Like it didn't matter what was getting poured into the heads of the kids. It didn't matter that there's a clear trade-off and if you're spending this much time online consuming other people's content, that's time away.

01:51:52
Like they were like we've succeeded with this app.

01:51:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I understand that, but I don't think government should get involved.

01:52:04 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
No. I do think, though, that you've posed an interesting question, which is if you have apps that are specifically designed to boost engagement, independent of what's actually being consumed. Is there a point where there should be regulation or there should be limits? The same way, there were limits on advertising to kids or the content of children's cartoon programs.

01:52:20 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
This is why, when I'm getting to talk about strict scrutiny, it matters, because if you're going to speak in broad terms of is there a point, those levels of scrutiny help you figure out where, constitutionally, you can get to that point. Because sometimes things can survive strict scrutiny where we have a compelling state, compelling reason for the government to act and they've narrowly tailored the way they're going to act so that it, like best deals with the problem they're trying to solve and without collateral damage to the rest of the right. That's why strict scrutiny, when it comes to the First Amendment and free speech principles, is so important. And that's why I'm like apoplectic, as the word is, about what happened with TikTok, because at the DC Circuit they said they were using strict scrutiny but they used something that was much, much lower. They're like, yeah, the government had a reason.

01:53:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sure everything they did was fine and they didn't look for any narrow tailoring. And then what they did is the supreme court is they even said we don't know what the reason is, but I'm sure it's a good one.

01:53:21 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I yeah, I mean they, they did a little bit better defending it, but I don't want to give them that many, many props. And then, what the supreme court did, which I think is both good and bad, is they still allowed it, but they used intermediate scrutiny and I'm really concerned that they used the lesser standard, because I think the situation really called for the higher standard. But they didn't ruin the higher standard by doing what the DC Court of Appeals had done, which was to use the very difficult standard and then just making it open season, in which case we don't have a really strict scam, so standard anymore cosma kids off social media act.

01:53:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh was sponsored by ted cruz and hawaii's brian schatz democrat and uh schatz said when you got ted cruz and myself an agreement on, you pretty much captured the ideological spectrum of a whole Congress.

01:54:14 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's a sign that he should be rethinking what he's doing.

01:54:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, I'm afraid not.

01:54:22 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I honestly think I think this law should go into effect. That people want and parent. It's going to help parents out, I don't see a problem with it. We have arbitrary laws for youth all the time.

01:54:32 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Not, they got pornography.

01:54:34 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
You can't buy, they can't. They can't buy cigarettes, they can't join the army, they can't drive a car. We have tons of these restrictions in place for youth, so not just willy nilly. One of the things that I find really interesting. The feedback that I get from every law is willy n.

01:54:52 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
The feedback that I get from kids is that they're actually kind of relieved when teachers take their phones in school, and the feedback that my daughter and her friends had with the TikTok ban was good. The people we know who are always on TikTok are super unhappy anyway. Maybe this gives them a chance to reset. It was really interesting to me that the proposed law seems to be more vibes rather than data, like you know with shots and crazy, and that's not supposed to be how to run the railroad.

01:55:19
Yeah, it's more vibes but data. But I would love to see some data that backs up when you have the people who are being targeted by the law going yeah, get the phones out of my hands, I don't want them. I want an excuse not to have them in school. Find us the data that explains why the vibe, why the vibe.

01:55:36 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It is there. We do have the data. We have the data that A suggests that the negativity is maybe overstated, and we also have the data to suggest that there's a ton of positive. And so basically, now we're looking at a season where we are about to lose our constitutional democracy and everybody needs to be able to kind of come together and push back against it, and we're talking about taking away the tools to do it. I mean, that's lunacy. If we think this is a problem, if we think dictatorship is bad, why would we make it that the dictator can lawfully suppress the ability of the people to come together and speak out against it?

01:56:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And even if you're under 13.

01:56:12 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, it isn't about under 13. It's about 13 to 18. So you actually are dealing with people who are growing into adults, very imminently. Adults there's no gradation between ages and at 13, are world aware enough to be able to start to make decisions both about their own well-being and also the world that they're living in.

01:56:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Enough to be able to start to make decisions both about their own well-being and also the world that they're living in. Australia's law is 16 and under and I be very it goes into effect later this year. I'd be very interested to see what happens?

01:56:38 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
there does not have a first amendment or any of no, and so a lot more can happen.

01:56:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do they have strict scrutiny?

01:56:44 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
no, they don't even have like an embodied right of free speech.

01:56:47 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
They have wallabies, though, that's I don't they have what's with the first amendment here, though, like I don't understand. Is it for we're talking about first amendment for the corporations or I, because, as a 14 year old I'm not sure what right do you have?

01:56:59 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
14 year olds have first amendment rights. This is not new.

01:57:02 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Sure ground to travel, but to post to instagram potentially potentially like speech. I don't see that argument Isn't that speech.

01:57:11 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It is speech, it's expression and the idea that youth don't have the right to free expression.

01:57:16 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
That has never been it doesn't agree on my right to moderate that free speech, then there's also First. Amendment rights to moderate that speech, that the platform. So, at the end of the day, though, their speech is moderated, which is not protecting their, it's moderated by private parties.

01:57:29 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
That is not.

01:57:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the difference, not by the government right.

01:57:33 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
The first amendment speaks to. The government cannot come in and decide what speech is good and what speech is bad, but a private party like. I just had to delete a troll on my facebook page like I get to do that.

01:57:43 - Benito (Announcement)
I have the right to cut your mic. You absolutely do but, it's my right.

01:57:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But president trump cannot come in here and say cut her mic Right. That would be. That's against the Constitution of the United States.

01:57:56 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Such as it is, you are allowed to card me, but he's not allowed to come in and card me and he's not allowed to say, if he's carded me, that oh you, is Elon Musk allowed to come in here.

01:58:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh you, is Elon Musk allowed to come in here?

01:58:11 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
now he. There's a really interesting thing about whether he has now merged himself in a way that he is a state actor. So well, no he wouldn't.

01:58:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hope he's a state actor because if he's not, how come he has access to our private information in the Treasury Department and the OPM? And I hope he's a state actor. You think he's?

01:58:31 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
not a state. I don't know if I and I hope he's a state actor. You think he's not a state actor. I don't know if I necessarily want him to be a state actor. I don't know if he necessarily is. But even if he's a state actor, he's not a state actor enough.

01:58:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If he's not, then he's in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as you point out.

01:58:44 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I have been touting that as a legal theory, and one of the leverages of power is if we can impose civil liability and get money damages from any of the people who are helping with this nonsense that are then enforceable not in federal court, but it's state courts, including blue states, where they may have assets that can scare the crap out of them, hopefully enough that they back off hold this thought because I do want to talk about dosh in just a minute we gotta take a break.

01:59:19 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Do we have to?

01:59:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, for long. Oh, you can exercise your free speech rights. Uh, just a little. Just a little bit. We don't have to, we could skip right over it. I feel like there is some. There is a tech angle a little bit a huge tech, absolutely yeah uh, we'll stick with that part. We won't. We won't talk politics so much um. Kathy gellis is here. She is an impassioned advocate of strict scrutiny.

01:59:50 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Okay For fundamental rights like free speech.

01:59:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, no, and so, as I understand it now, strict scrutiny really is you have the First Amendment rights, but there are some things that might curtail those rights and it seems sensible that that should be a very high bar. Right, exactly, and that's all you're saying. Strict scrutiny is the highest possible bar before you take away somebody's free speech rights.

02:00:16 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Because we don't want to just say, oh well, we like you know, it was kind of where the discussion was going Well, we've made exceptions for advertisement length and this than the other thing. And it's like the fact that we have made exceptions doesn't mean we just get to always ignore it. Exceptions doesn't mean we just get to always ignore it. What it means is that we looked at each exception and kind of quizzed it, for what is the reason and is it narrowly tailored enough? And then, based on what the answers to those questions were decided whether nope, unconstitutionally, you don't get to do it, or OK, fine, we will make this very, very, very narrow exception. But just because we made an exception once doesn't mean that we always get to make exceptions.

02:00:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they all have to be tested I think that's a very good way to put it. Thank you, kathy. Uh, also here daniel rubino, who thinks kids are stupid and should be off social media right away. Do you have kids, daniel?

02:01:05 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
oh no come on, I'm avoiding that whole mess.

02:01:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Editor-in-chief. Smart man. Editor-in-chief uh, windows central. You know I mean your argument completely credible. This is why this is so tough. This stuff, uh, it is. It is not an easy thing uh to understand or or act upon, and that's why we, you know, we chew it out here. That's the whole point of this. Uh, lisa Schmeiser is also here from nojittercom. I had a little jitter in my no jitter, a little jitter Just because of this kombucha. It really causes jitter. I have to stop the kombucha.

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02:03:25
We thank him so much for supporting this show, this contentious program. Actually, it's really good. I don't I hate it when a show everybody's just kind of yeah, well, whatever I, I think it's really important to fight for these uh issues. We really have a fight on our hands right now and uh, and we need to and we need to kind of think about it and talk about it. Um, there's a little.

02:03:49
I have a little concern about the young people. Elon is uh, is putting in uh. Our government institutions now some of them are are really geniuses. There's one of the uh, one of the doge interns is the kid who just decoded, uh, those scrolls remember that it was the $700,000 Vesuvius Challenge ancient scrolls that had been buried in volcanic dust the Herculaneum scrolls and he used AI and scanning technique to actually read those. I mean, that's a pretty smart kid, 23-year-old Luke Ferreter. So there's a guy, smart guy, but some of the team is not maybe the best in the world.

02:04:37
Um, one of the doge teens is a former this is from krebs on security former denizen. That's a that's a loaded word of the calm, which is an archipelago of discord and telegram chat channels. Brian Krebs writes that function as a kind of distributed cyber criminal social network and in fact, there's some evidence that this kid, edward Karstein, who is maybe you've seen him in the news as big balls, who is maybe you've seen him in the news as Big Balls he founded, when he was 16 years old, teslasexy LLC, which controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains. One of those domains, which is still active, offers a service this is the kid who's in the Treasury Department right now Offers a service called Healthy, which is an ai bot for discord servers targeting the russian market. Um, it's something that would have come up in a security clearance review, but of course, there are no security clearance reviews for the doge kids.

02:05:46
Um, he also someone using a telegram handle tied to him solicited a DDoS for hire service in 2022. And he worked for a short time, got fired from, as it turns out, a company that specializes in protecting companies from DDoS attacks. But this company, packetware or Diamond CDN, was actually full of former hackers, ddos, in fact, experts, because they had set up quite a few ddos operations. Uh, constein's uh, I'm sorry, coristine's linkedin profile said he worked at an anti-ddos company called path networks wired. You might have read the wired article described it as a network monitoring firm no, known for hiring reformed black hat hackers. Um, anyway, it goes on and on. I recommend reading the krebs uh article because there's a lot of stuff that would be, at very least, cause for concern.

02:06:53 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
All of it. All of it, I think there's. I think there's nothing that should be. You know, if they just the fact that they didn't maybe smash everything is no relief. The entire incursion and the mode and the method that the incursion was made, if not outright unlawful, was at least unwise. And I think unlawful because we have obsessed about keeping our most sensitive systems as protected as possible. We've passed laws that tried to punish incursions into them that were unauthorized, and what we have basically done is handed the kings to the kingdom of our most sensitive systems and our most sensitive data and we've handed it to people who did not have appropriate authorization in the way the law requires. That is bad, that is a problem. It has caused harm and we just don't necessarily know yet the full measure of that harm, but we know it's accrued and we know it's accruing.

02:07:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
To add to that, we had heard that the resignation, the fork in the road resumption emails would not apply to CISA staffers. In fact it did. And this is CISA, of course, very important part of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency Initially excluded from those fork in-road deferred resignation offers. However, on Wednesday, some CISA staffers were given the offer that gives them one day to decide by the way, just hours in fact, to decide whether to accept it. This is according to three sources who spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity. Cisa, I think everybody who listens to us knows, is extremely important to national security, um and and perhaps a problem for those Doge staffers who've been entering the State Department, the Treasury Department.

02:08:47 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
OPM, USAID, Now they're GSA and NIH and I think their sites are set on basically everything.

02:08:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

02:08:57 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
So remember that the Doge, no one associated with Doge, has any loyalty to national security whatsoever. They're not. They're not operating in the interest of the country. They're operating in the interest of the whims of elon musk, and what he's doing is the same thing that was extensively documented in the excellent ryan mack katie conger book, uh, character limit, where they talked about how, when he took over Twitter, the primary driving force behind everything he did was to reduce, to eliminate, to get rid of things, and call it change, and call it transformation, when instead all it was was just breaking things, with no understanding of what he was breaking and no consequence. That's what's happening here, too, and we can talk about the kid who decoded the scrolls, but just because you happen to be very good at one specific data problem doesn't make you smart in solving a question that shouldn't have to be asked, which is how can we eliminate entire departments of the government?

02:10:07 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, exactly, and the loyalties matter. I mean, what's ridiculous is we just got through banning TikTok by bending the Constitution, possibly to a breaking point, because we were worried about national security and China slurping its data.

02:10:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And so then, when we just went and handed all of the data to the gang of everybody, nazis, yeah exactly, yeah so we have people in our chat room who say they're acting in our best interest, despite your disapproval. Uh, they say uh, it's. You know it's. Nothing scares democrats more than full transparency. We don't have, and I don't think I would I would, what about?

02:10:42 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
this is transparent exactly what, what, in any part of this decision process, has been transparent. Also, it's a fairly rich allegation to make. The government is wasteful Screaming about AI and the government's. Not wasteful, though, if you take a look at the one, the one government that consistently fails audit is the Department of Defense. That's where your waste is. That's where the lack of transparency is.

02:11:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't see Doge sweeping through there they're going after places that are teeny, tiny percentages of the US. I disagree and put it back, but I would stipulate the government can be wasteful and has been wasteful, and undoubtedly there are government programs that are pork, that are boondoggles that Congress put in there to benefit, you know, their constituency.

02:11:27 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
But they, I mean, there is a legal way.

02:11:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a legal way to go through these and there's an illegal way to go through these.

02:11:32 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
This is what happens when you have 40 years of Democrats, republicans, exploiting government, growing the federal government, despite the fact Republicans forever were like, against federalism, know against large governments. And then they got into power, of course, and they spent like crazy as well and continue to grow. And we grew these institutions and we grew these bureaucracies, and the number one job of a bureaucracy is to protect itself.

02:11:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's to make sure it's still needed, so are you in favor of this? Is this a good way to to come in?

02:12:02 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
favor of it. Is this a good way to cut the fat? I'm in favor of it theoretically, Like this idea of going through and cleaning out and getting rid of a lot of stuff in a government and just being super aggressive. I'm for it the way they're doing it now. No, I'm not the way that. I don't care for Elon Musk. I don't trust him. I feel like a lot of the things that they're going after are self-serving.

02:12:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I'm really worried about that, yeah, firing the director of the FAA, for instance, because he was the one who stopped SpaceX's launches because they were unsafe.

02:12:31 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
And Congress's job is to oh sorry, go ahead.

02:12:34 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I was just going to say. The issue here is one thing I learned. You know a major in political science many years ago, but you study the French Revolution. The problem is is, whenever you have a system going to one extreme for a very long time, is there's always a counter revolution to it, which is often just as extreme and negative. And that's what we're seeing the reign of terror was not a great improvement over Louis XVI. Even though it was about freedom.

02:13:01 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I wouldn't stipulate to that pretense that that's what's going on here. Even if Congress was wrong, its job is to raise money and decide where it gets spent, and that's supposed to happen until we decide to elect different members of Congress. We didn't.

02:13:15
We did that slightly, but we didn't do that very much. But that's only the part thing, because you're talking about, oh well, we, maybe we've overspent, but we're also looking at Keynesian economics, which talk about that what we spend also has beneficial effects on the economy, and the real question really needs to be whether, in terms of when we evaluate whether we're overspending or not, is whether we're getting value for the money, and all of these programs that they're deciding are waste and want to gut are things where we're spending this money and it's reducing value to America's own interest. I mean, even if you just do it with how much we spend on, you know we pay American farmers for their rice so that we can feed hungry people around the world, which not only gives money to the farmers but also make sure that we don't have starving people, and people like America a little bit more. So the only question of its waste is are we spending money and getting no value out of it?

02:14:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But we're clearly spending the money and getting value out of it. So the whole idea. I don't want to debate that because, honestly, now this is political. So let's go back to the technology. Yeah, monday morning, thomas shed, who was appointed technology transformation services director and ally of elon musk, told gsa workers told GSA workers that the agency's new administrator is pursuing an AI first strategy. It's not a question of AI coming in and finding where the fat is. It's actually AI running the agency, the GSA, the government services agency. What does it do? It does a lot in what he described as an ai first strategy.

02:14:54
Sources say shed provided a handful of act examples of projects the gsa acting administrator is looking to prioritize, including the development of ai coding agents that would be available for all agencies. Gsa provides government services right. He made it clear that he believes much of the work at TTS and the broader government, particularly around finance tasks, could be automated. Automate the accounting, a cybersecurity expert told Wired on Monday. Eh, this raises red flags. Automating the government's not the same as, I don't know, self-driving cars. People, especially people who aren't experts in the subject domain coming into projects, often think this is dumb, dumb and then find out how hard the thing is really. Um, honestly, I I wouldn't let a tesla drive me around.

02:15:50 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I definitely don't want a self-driving government no, I mean, we're government by the people, for the people, and this is. We had systems for how it was supposed to work and we have systems for how to change it if we don't like the way it's working, and and none of them are this. This is something else. This is a lot of power that was usurped by people who don't have the authority to usurp as much power they've held themselves.

02:16:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can the president give them that authority?

02:16:14 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
No? I think the answer is no. There are statutes that constrain his power, plus the text of the Constitution itself, which tells him that his job is to enforce the law, not to ignore it. Between the constitutional text and the law that's actually been written, that prescribes how he can use his power, he doesn't have the power to say yeah, you guys are fine, go do whatever you want, because there are laws that say that's not how it works. Because the Congress, representing the people, supposed to be able to observe and keep track of what's going on and make sure that the power is being wielded in ways that the people approve of.

02:16:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is concerning that this is happening invisibly.

02:16:52 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's happening invisibly.

02:16:53
Without any transparency, without any transparency, because that's and that's what the allegations that Doge is illegal is that there were rules about.

02:17:01
If you wanted to empower certain people to do certain things, there were rules that had to be followed, manifested in different laws about which people and how do you empower them and what boxes do you have to check. And it wasn't just bureaucracy, it was to make sure that there would be that supervisory capacity to figure out how power was getting wielded and none of what Doge is empowered to do complied with any of those rules. And that matters for what I wrote about on TechDirt, which gets back into the technical, which is, I think, that the authority that the Doge brothers have wielded in these systems potentially makes them personally liable for Computer Fraud and Abuse Act violations, because I think it is inherently without authorization that they've been in there and demanded that access. And if, because the power that was given to them was not lawfully given to them in which case they're there like any other wrongful hacker would be there they just happen to have gone through the front door.

02:17:59 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
And if that is true, the problem with all this, though, is its perception, is the reason why people aren't in the streets protesting all this right now is because no one likes the federal government and a lot of people don't believe it works for them, and this is a perception messaging issue, right, because people aren't upset that a lot of these institutions are being undermined, destroyed. Granted, we haven't seen the ramifications of it, which I think could be definitely significant.

02:18:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They might have a different opinion when FEMA doesn't come to bail them out after the next year, Especially for the people who are especially for the people who are at the lower rungs of society, I think will be mostly affected.

02:18:36 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
But the reason why this stuff is happening is because Democrats have not done anything in the last 20 years to help STEM government, make it more efficient, bring it down in size. There's a lot of talk, you know, and people kept electing Democrats.

02:18:49 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
And the thing is they were in the street. There was a protest in front of Treasury that took place in the street and with Congress trying to get in the door and being shut out of a building that Congress funds, to shut out the officials that we've duly elected to run our country and not be allowed to be in the building that they fund.

02:19:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like that is a problem there, and you have people on the street and we're. Daniel has a point there, hasn't? Been a huge outcry about this.

02:19:17 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
There's been you know we're working on it, but yeah, I think daniel makes a really good point where there's a public perception that the Democrats are the problem because they made this government that's not working. So, oh, thank God there's change.

02:19:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, any change would be better than people just want to act, kind of.

02:19:35 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
But you know it goes back to the whole thing in character limit, where Elon Musk is like look at me, I'm changing Twitter. You are, but you're not improving it. You're just taking things away and then claiming that that's an improvement. Those are two completely different things.

02:19:50 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I do not like Trump, okay, but since his term, his second term in office here, he's done a lot. We can say. I'm not saying that's not a judgmental call whether it's good or bad, but he's doing, he's creating action. And for a lotal call, whether it's good or bad, but he's doing, he's creating action. And for a lot of Americans, they've just seen no matter who we've elected, year after year, it's always the same. They don't see change in their lives. And I think that's what people are voting for or wanting to see now whether it's going to happen, it's going to benefit them. I'm, you know, real skeptical of that. Right, I think this could be a lot going, a lot of bad directions, but that's why people are going.

02:20:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I completely agree with you. There's a complete dissatisfaction, uh, with government and a sense of, uh, helplessness, um, and it's pretty universal. I don't blame the democrats.

02:20:38 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
By the way, there were a lot of elections reagan started it with by saying the.

02:20:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, the worst, scariest words in the english language are I'm the government, we're here to help, um, which is a funny and probably popular thing to say, but I got to tell you, if hurricane helene devastated your community and fema came to help feed you and get you housed, uh, that is help. And um, you're right, daniel, we. I understand completely dissatisfaction, and I think you're exactly right. I also think, uh, I fear the consequences. We'll find out. We're gonna find out. We're gonna get to see, we're gonna take a break. Enough of that. We have other things to talk about, including xbox sales. What the hell, man? Uh, you, I threw that in for you, daniel. You're watching this week in tech alicia schmeiser, daniel rubino, kathy gellis great to have all three of you. This has been an excellent conversation, I think, a very important one too.

02:21:37
Our show today brought to you by uh, net suite name. You probably know well. What does the future hold? I mean, we're just talking about it, especially if you're in business. Ask nine experts. You're going to get 10 answers. Rates are going to rise, oh no, wait a minute. Maybe rates are going to fall. Oh, inflation's up, oh no, inflation's down.

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02:24:32
Because of our club members, we're able to stream our live shows on eight different platforms. Now in the club twit, discord, youtube, twitch, linkedin, tiktok x, facebook and kick, and I'm missing one. Did I say tiktok? Did I say x? Linkedin, tiktok X, facebook and Kik? And I'm missing one. Did I say TikTok? Did I say X? Yeah, everywhere. So watch the shows live if you want. This show is Sunday afternoon, usually 2 to 5 pm Pacific. We started a little early today because of the Super Bowl. That's 5 to 8 pm Eastern. That's at 2200 UTC. If you want to watch live, of of course you don't have to. You can always download a copy of the show. Uh, crypto, huh. Did you say kick? Yeah, kick street, where all the nazis are. So, uh, I haven't.

02:25:19 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
No, I've heard like I remember kick from like 2012.

02:25:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kicks still around, kick, still around. Funny, let me see if I can get it right discord, youtube, twitch I think I left out twitch tick, tock, xcom, linkedin, facebook and kick, yeah, there's the wow. We basically stream anywhere that allows us to, you know, to strength our pipe to their their stream. Uh, because we, you know, and we see the chat. I see the chat from all the different places. We don't get a lot of people from Kik saying hi in the chat, but I see a lot of people from YouTube. It's great. How many, benito? Do we know how many people are watching right now? Is there a figure? Oh, 1,249 people, it looks like, on those eight platforms. So the vast majority of the audience doesn't watch live, but if you want to, it's nice we get. I like the interaction. It's, it's very useful.

02:26:12
Speaking of ex-german, civil activists have won a victory against elon musk's ex. They sued uh saying we want information so we can track the spread of election, swaying information on the network. Uh, this is an urgent filing because germany has a national election, february 23rd, and, as you know, elon has kind of weighed in on the election in favor of the right uh, leaning right, leaning far right adf party. Uh, berlin district court said uh, you've got to give civil rights groups the information so that they can the data, so they can track misinformation and disinformation. X did not want to do that and if they continue to not help, I don't know what's going to happen. They have to pay six thousand two hundred dollars. That can't be right. Please tell me. That's not right. Um, I think that's just the court costs.

02:27:12
Uh, there is one court case that has gone away. Uh, president trump has ended his legal challenge over his ban on twitter after january 6th. Um, this was a long-running legal fight. The notice was released late Friday. Doesn't say how the case was resolved. My guess is it was just one of those handshake deals. Trump's lawyer declined to comment. X has declined to comment. It's over.

02:27:43 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
The one known from Facebook also went away with that $25 million.

02:27:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, wasn't that something that's an expensive dinner at Mar-a-Lago that Mark Zuckerberg had there.

02:27:53 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I don't think that the business judgment rule protects Zuckerberg from shareholder action for that, and it's a stretch of an argument maybe, but I think it will be really interesting to see if somebody tries. That seemed to be it was a winnable case by Facebook and I don't. They would have spent vastly less money.

02:28:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So was the CBS case.

02:28:11 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So was the CBS case.

02:28:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So was I mean there have been, so you know CBS wants the benevolent overlord to bless their merger.

02:28:17 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
That's what it is. So does Elon. It's all money I mean.

02:28:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so does Mark, so does Zuckerberg. I mean this is because you have a strong executive to say the least, it's not a strong executive.

02:28:28 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
That is not the word to use.

02:28:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That is a lawless executive and that is the word to use. You have a scary. How about a scary executive Then you?

02:28:36 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
fight, then you fight then you fight. Because if you surrender, you will be paying. It will not just be the $25 million, it will be $25 million, it will be 25 million and 25 million and 25 million and then that's going to come right out of shareholders profits and pockets.

02:28:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah well, the shareholders get to stand up if they want I hope they do uh, crypto stealing apps have been found in the apple app store.

02:28:56
This is the very first time there have been malware and apple apps. In the past, android and ios apps contain a malicious software development kit designed to steal your crypto. Current wallet recovery phases let me say that again because it came out wrong completely cryptocurrency wallet recovery phrases that made a lot more sense. Uh, it's an ocr stealer. So the whole idea is you pop up your wallet and it's looking at the screen and it's stealing your recovery key. Here's the scary part. The infected apps were downloaded more than a quarter million times on Google Play. Unfortunately, we don't have numbers for Apple's App Store. We don't have numbers for Apple's App Store, but I imagine it's a similar number. Anyway, sometimes this stuff sneaks through right. We will learn this week. I think. If Apple's going to release a new iPhone SE, that's probably going to happen this week, according to Mark Gurman, the rumor guru at Bloomberg.

02:30:13 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Okay, nothing to say there. This is very popular, I think that was. I thought that was walked by, walked back, was it?

02:30:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, yeah, well, it was just a rumor. Apple never announces, pre-announces, anything, so maybe apple said it's not going to happen, or did german walk it back? There are telltale signs. There are telltale signs. A room spokesperson for apple declined to comment. Yeah, oh, if it was walked back, then I'm sorry. I was getting all excited, uh, and here's a nice little apology from an ios engineer who leaked information, uh, about coming products to the wall street journal and the information. He was compelled. He said they settled with apple. Uh, he's. He's, of course, not working there anymore and apparently was compelled to post the following apology on x I spent nearly eight years as a software engineer at Apple.

02:31:05 - Benito (Announcement)
During that time, I was giving access to sensitive internal Apple information, including what were then unreleased products and features. But instead of keeping this information secret, I made the mistake of sharing this information with journalists who covered the company.

02:31:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I didn't realize at the time, but it turned out to be a profound and expensive mistake. Hundreds of professional relationships I'd spent years building were ruined and my otherwise successful career as a software engineer was derailed, and it will likely be very difficult to rebuild it. Kids leaking was not worth it. I sincerely apologize. I added the kids, okay. I sincerely apologize to my former colleagues who not only worked tirelessly on projects for Apple but worked hard to keep them secret. They deserve better. I have to say I'm just going to say to you blink twice if you're being held hostage.

02:31:59 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Lesson learned is you just have to be better at leaking material? Yeah, don't get caught. Yeah, don't get caught. Why do I?

02:32:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
mean you're journalists. Uh, at least lisa, and uh and daniel you are, I guess you. I guess you are too kathy. I don't know if you take tips or leaks why do? People leak that position yeah, I don't you know what. I occasionally will get, uh, an offer and I always, I always turn it down because I don't I will defend journalists ability to promise anonymity. Of course they're immune daniel, you said you, you, you depend on leaks.

02:32:32 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Oh yeah well, you know, we've exclusively been doing leaks for over a decade now. I mean, that's how I kind of cut my teeth in this industry. I used to leak nokia stuff all the time and things for windows phone. Uh, back in the day, it's the right of consumers to know right.

02:32:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I understand why companies don't want them to know, but if you're about to buy a phone and you find out that Tuesday Apple's going to release an iPhone SE, for instance, that's a benefit to you, and then you have the right to know that. Why do people leak? To you though, daniel. Why does somebody at the company given the risk?

02:33:04 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
why? Yeah? So there's a couple reasons. There's one reason is simply that employee is unhappy with decisions that have been made, maybe for a product, and thought and thinks it should go another way right. So they're leaking as a dissatisfaction because they know others will be upset about this and they're hoping that the blowback kind of influences decision making. The other one, of course, is sometimes there are internal conflicts on a topic within a company, on a product or a project, and so one group is trying to sort of get favoritism Right. So if something gets leaked and people are like that's awesome, they should totally do that.

02:33:43
They can literally go like back to a meeting and we know this happens and they'll cite an article of ours and read the comments and people are like look, people actually do really want this Right. So you help shaping the narrative there. Sometimes there are controlled leaks.

02:33:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You never really know about these Right, but I think a lot of times, apple goes to the Wall Street Journal, for instance, and says you know, don't tell anybody, I said this, but they want to control the narrative. Yeah, they control the narrative, exactly.

02:34:11 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
And some people do it because they think it's what they do is cool and they want to share it with other people. It's just literally that right. I met a lot of people. They're just super fans of the products that they work on and they're excited about them and they kind of want to get momentum going.

02:34:28
A lot of times, it works in our favor, like we reported in 2018 that, uh, microsoft and its partners are going to start working on dual screen and foldable laptops and PCs, and it happened. It was many years later, of course, but we helped start shaping that narrative for them by getting that info out there, so that when it happened, it wasn't even like people were starting to get prepared for this idea of, like, it will be these devices, right, so there are benefits to this leaking stuff. I totally understand why. Like, I can tell you for a fact, the surface division absolutely hated us for it. I've had personal callsrosoft over them, uh, and they are absolutely not happy. Xbox and the gaming teams way cooler though you know they're they're not just happy. Anybody's interested? Yeah, right, yeah. So you have different groups that are also, like I said, um, you know, panos panay is a. He's good at what he does, but he absolutely does not like or appreciate leaking stuff to the media at all.

02:35:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He very famously was. They were, it was doing a Microsoft Surface event and Paul Theriot tells a story came up to Paul and and took his laptop and started to use it. You probably were there. He's a great guy. Oh there. Um, he's a great guy. Oh yeah, he's a fascinating guy. I'm not crazy about how pumped he is about everything.

02:35:56 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I mean, he's a little bit very weird. Yeah, it's I. I've always told people I've had a personal, you know when he does those presentations on stage. I've had a personal one of that. It was for, I believe, surface Pro 7. It was just me, him and like 12 other PR and handlers in a row. Oh, that's a little weird. And he personally gave me the whole like Panos experience and it was awesome. But he's just very passionate about this stuff. So it's genuine. He works on. Yeah, oh, 100%. That's cool. Whenever you talk to him, he's one of the most sincere people I've ever met and talking to him it's almost like it's intense, but it's all in a good way, right, it's just someone who really enjoys his job. I mean, we've reported that one of the reasons why he left Microsoft was because they wanted to get rid of the Surface Duo and the Neo projects, uh, which were his sort of his. It was right, which is the number one thing he was actually really, really uh and enthused about working on and they said, no, you can't do those.

02:36:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's like well, if I can't do what I want, then I'm going to leave the duo was the phone right that had the dual screen, the hinge. Just, I bought one, I thought it was really interesting, but they never had a potential. Yeah, and they, they completely lost. Uh, the thread on that and the neo never got released, right.

02:37:09 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, um, another dual screen, right, was in another dual screen yes, that was another dual screen pc and with the phone they were going to go to a single screen, foldable there, like that was the third iteration. Uh, they were going to do and they were. They were improving dramatically. Like, had they got to a third one, they would have been in a place where I think they would have been in a much better position. But, like all things Microsoft, they have brilliant ideas that get cut off way too early and they don't allow them to mature, and so a lot of times they're so far ahead of things that they cut them back and then they miss the opportunity. And that's the story of mobile for them period.

02:37:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, then they missed the opportunity and then that's the story of mobile for them, period. You know, yeah, yeah, it's. It's really interesting. Uh, how mobile has microsoft just fumbled mobile when it has turned out to be probably the most important part of computing? Right, people don't buy pcs anymore, they don't buy laptops, even they've got a phone, although you could argue that smartphones themselves.

02:38:06 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
The market has flattened too right, because everybody has yeah, but it's flattened at 2.25 billion units, it ain't too bad. Pcs, laptops and pcs still do extremely well because they're extremely critical to everyday tasks, right, but these are both are now flat markets. We're not expecting necessarily, although I would say growth for pc market 2025 will be a thing just to refresh cycles for corporations and enterprise so that's interesting.

02:38:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We talk about this a lot on windows weekly and it was a very kind of anemic growth in the pc market this quarter. Uh, and it and it really is paul's theory that it's just people aren't buying compute.

02:38:48 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Businesses have to still refresh every five to seven years. Yeah, we're coming on the five-year cycle from the pandemic boost, you know, boom, which was huge. Windows 10 is expiring right. So if you're a consumer, not necessarily a big deal. If you're an enterprise, it's a really big deal and you can't upgrade a lot of your computers to Windows 11. So, yeah, those two things upgrade a lot of your computers to windows 11. So you have those two things and then the more dubious but I would say still critical ai pc aspect with npu is being more critical to these computers for enterprise again, more of a big deal. So I think you'll start to see this stuff. Um, you'll see growth in 2025. It won't be huge, but they are expecting all the companies I've talked to, positive growth in 2025 and 26.

02:39:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
sometimes it's not a leak, it's a partner that accidentally reveals things. In this case, take two, the game publisher. Yeah, kind of reveal a little something about xbox, uh, sales. Right, microsoft doesn't report xbox sales. They stopped reporting that nine years ago, which tells you a little bit, a little bit, uh something, something there. Um, take two in their q3 earnings report said uh, 94 million consoles from the current generation, not including the switch, are estimated to been sold as of November. Uh, since Sony has announced that it shipped 65 and a half million PlayStation 5, it would probably mean that the Xbox is sold, I don't know 28 million, about a third that number that number?

02:40:30 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
uh, it's, it's. Is that a surprise? Not really, right? No, um, in microsoft reported 29 percent revenue decline in hardware for yikes, they've been doing an ad campaign lately saying xbox is everywhere, implying that you don't need the console.

02:40:39
You could use it on your phone, your laptop, a tablet right, cloud gaming for them and the game pass grew two percent and they are seeing a lot of growth in cloud gaming, which is really kind of you know. Microsoft strategy for gaming, I would say, is more focused on one studios right, they have call of duty now, which is done huge, yeah, so they're making, they're doing very well with its um publishing arm for gaming. Uh, due to the Blizzard acquisition, their Game Pass is doing very well too, which isn't just Xbox because you can get it with PC gaming, which still continues to grow. And then you have handheld gaming, which is still very small but it is definitely growing. We've seen a lot of creation of new handheld gaming systems this year, so there's still a lot of momentum here. Consoles themselves are kind of you know, we're pretty old right now, you know old in quotes, but a couple of years into the consoles for this generation.

02:41:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Will there be another Xbox console you think?

02:41:35 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I think there will be, but I think it's going to. It might be conceptually a bit different in terms of what they're doing with hardware. I think they started this back with the Series X. You really a bit different in terms of what they're doing with hardware. I think they started this back with the Series X. This idea of merging or moving closer towards the PC model for console. I think they really want to have Xbox not be as distinct from PC gaming as it has been historically, which would save them money in the bottom line. But they're trying to do what's called play anywhere, this idea of a game that is coded for both Xbox as a console, but also PC. If you buy it once, you can play on both systems. So I think that's really going to be their value. I think console gaming is it'll always be there, but it's always been razor thin margins on the hardware end. Right, it's always been about the game, licensing and selling the games. That's really been where you make money on consoles. Hey, this is benito. There's also always nintendo.

02:42:28 - Benito (Announcement)
Nintendo will always make consoles sure, and then you're going to make a new switch, the switch will be coming out in a month or two and I'll probably buy it, they just write on their ip, right, their ip is just yeah who doesn't want to play final fantasy or, in my case, animal crossings um?

02:42:44 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I want to play the atari 800 I have sitting in a closet you have one, I'll buy it from you oh, I grew up with one, but I can't find the floppy. Uh, drive, but otherwise, um, oh, yeah, I got one don't you have cartridges? I have a few cartridges, but most of the games we played were on floppies and I think I may have the floppies themselves, but I we couldn't find the bed in the attic that had the. How do you actually get the program off the floppy and get to play it?

02:43:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so I may be missing parts well, I'm going to uh go ahead.

02:43:18 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I'm sorry, I was going to say there's a ton of like. I remember years ago I was going to buy a ColecoVision and it was people will buy them, ColecoVision wow. Yeah, and they completely restored them. They take them apart, clean them, replace the wires.

02:43:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wasn't that the one that had the stringy floppy? Wasn't that the storage? It was like a cassette. No, it was a cartridge. Oh, they have a cartridge, all right.

02:43:51 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
We had a cassette too, and then I think I do have, but it was too slow. We didn't play the games off the set.

02:43:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We played the games off the floppy drive but yeah, actually, um, the option key or the select key got sticky at some point, so it will need a little bit of tlc. So tuesday, civilization seven comes out and I'm gonna take the rest of the week off. No, I'm actually I'm going to be gone Wednesday through Saturday because I'm taking Lisa to the Tucson International Gem and Mineral Show a rock show, so it's not a rock concert, it's a rock show. So I will not be here for Wednesday's shows, but Micah will be filling in for me on windows weekly and twig, uh and uh. Maybe I will play a little civ 7 while I'm gone. I don't know. We gave it a very good review, did you people are getting really excited about? I am not. I've never been a civ player because turn-based games never. I always liked real-time strategy, like I was a huge age of empires fan, but uh, benito's convinced me I have to I do not like that.

02:44:46 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I cannot play my age of empires, which I lawfully purchased, and will not run on my machine. I think well, you need an ipad, because they just released it for ios, for I have to buy it again to play the software I lawfully purchased from microsoft I bought age of empires.

02:45:02 - Benito (Announcement)
She purchased a license to play that game, which they revoked Many, many times.

02:45:06 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Did they even revoke? Where's my notice of that revocation?

02:45:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Always the lawyer Kathy Gellis, I want to play that game.

02:45:13 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I missed it.

02:45:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I can't because I don't run on this computer. Wasn't it a great game they did remaster it.

02:45:19 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It was remastered, so it's even better now so that's better.

02:45:28 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Now, aoe2 is, uh, incredible. Yeah, I don't always like the new fangled uh animations that some of the remastered games are. I kind of like the stuff that's not fully pixelated but like closer to that style, the ones that are like so detailed. I bought an age of empires four and I because I wanted oh what, if I like three, I better like four, and I returned it in the return window. I just found it so garish that I didn't want to play it anymore.

02:45:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It gets me because I'm watching the trailer for Civ 7, and it's all cut scenes. This is not what the game looks like. Give me a break, yeah.

02:46:00 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
This is really it's kind of deceptive.

02:46:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Really, you want to know what the game looks like. Let me see if this will show like click it's.

02:46:08 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
You're just a top down.

02:46:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're looking at the, you know. Anyway, I still look forward to it. Fans, that's not it either. What the hell there it is. This is a little closer to the real thing. Uh, anyway, thank you, kathy, for being here. Thank you for the work you do at tech dirt. Try not to bust an aneurysm or something. Just breathe deep and go look at the San Francisco Bay. It's gorgeous today. I really appreciate everything you do. Cgcouncilcom. She's on Blue Sky, kathy, with a C Gellis.

02:46:40 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yes, well, that's why I write what I write. I think that a lot of people are really upset and don't really know how things work, and if I can explain how things work, I think that will help focus people, help them take a breath and then organize their strength to use it in usable ways what to do and I don't feel like there's much we can do, but I will keep reading you.

02:47:08 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I will read keep calling your congress people let them.

02:47:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We live in california, our congress people are not, you know, they're not the bad guys no, but they need to know they need to know.

02:47:17 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It's data that they can use and say, hey call.

02:47:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Volume has surged over a hundred calls a day, right, or they?

02:47:25 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
keep a record of what matters to you as well, and the hold the line and the senators in particular, and yeah, it's even.

02:47:34 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Adam Schiff especially needs to hear from you.

02:47:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Okay, well, he's my senator. Yeah, thank you for being here, Kathy. Thank you, lisa Schmeiser. No jittercom. You're the editor in chiefmeiser. Nojittercom, you're the editor-in-chief. Tell me about no Jitter.

02:47:48 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
The quick elevator pitch is we cover the technologies that help move information from point A to point B and allow everybody to act on that information. So it's communication and collaboration technologies from personal workspaces all the way up to enterprise networking and contact centers.

02:48:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's pretty important stuff. It sounds like it's great to have you on the show and I appreciate it, and everybody should immediately hi the to nojittercom. You can sign up for the newsletters and stay on top of communication in the workplace. Daniel Rubino, editor-in-chief of Windows Central, also a part of my regular daily news check. Every uh. Every day, something good at windowscentralcom. Thank you for being here, daniel, I really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks to all of you for being here. You can go watch the super bowl now. We I think we got it done just in time.

02:48:42
The uh this. This is normally 2 pm pacific, 5 pm eastern excuse me, 2200 utc to watch the show on those eight live streams. But of course it's uh. It's a podcast, which means you can get a copy of it at our website, twittv or youtube, where you'll see the video. That's a great way to share clips from the show. And finally, of, of course, best thing to do, subscribe in your favorite podcast player. Just because you have it doesn't mean you have to listen to it, but it would be nice if you downloaded it and it'd be even nicer if you listened to it. We appreciate it.

02:49:16
Thanks again to all of our club members who make the show possible. Thanks to Benito Gonzalez, who is our technical director producer. Great job, benito. Kevin King will be editing the show later today. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We're celebrating our 20th year as a podcast. In fact, april will be the 20th anniversary of the first Twit and, as I've said for the last 20 years, it's hard to believe. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next week. Another Twit is in the can. Hard to believe, thanks for being here.