TWiT 990 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

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Twit this Week in Tech. We've got a great panel for you. Jason Heiner's back. He's editor-in-chief of ZDNet, owen Thomas from the San Francisco Business Times and somebody brand new, but I know you know him from Gamer Tag Radio. Paris Lilly joins us. He's in security, so he'll talk a little bit about CrowdStrike. We now know what happened. It's pretty terrible. The AI-designed vegan cheese that you're probably not going to be able to buy in stores anytime soon. And OpenAI decides to compete directly with Google by announcing its Search GPT All that and more coming up next on TWIT Podcasts you love.

From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Twit this week in tech, episode 990, recorded Sunday, july 28th 2024. Dogecoin, fort Knox. It's time for Twit this Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news and, as always, we've assembled a very fun panel. Owen Thomas is back. He's a managing editor at the San Francisco Business Times. He is there in the asbestos-lined offices of the San Francisco Business Times. Hi Owen, hey Leo, thanks for having me back. You're not worried about that ceiling stuff, it's okay.

0:01:33 - Owen Stone
You know, exposed ceiling means that it's completely transparent. You can see what you're exposed to.

0:01:38 - Leo Laporte
You can see where your mesothelioma is coming from. I feel safer. Yeah, I love it.

0:01:41 - Owen Stone
You're where your mesothelioma is coming from. I feel safer.

0:01:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I love it. Great to have you back. Also, jason Heiner is here. Editor-in-chief of ZDNet. That's a wow. You've really risen to the top, the top. I love it I love it. We were talking off camera earlier with Alex Lindsay and I and he was saying the best studio background is a corner and you knew that You've got it. Look at that. It's beautiful with the old Mac and everything. Thank you.

0:02:12 - Jason Hiner
Yes, yes, thank you. Is there a door behind you, or a?

0:02:16 - Leo Laporte
window. What is?

0:02:17 - Jason Hiner
that's a door.

0:02:18 - Leo Laporte
That is a door back there and, instead of believe over the door you have, imagine. Which?

0:02:23 - Jason Hiner
is kind of the same thing Really, yeah, yeah. Perspective, just a perspective.

0:02:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, thanks, for having me. Always a pleasure, always nice to have you, jason, and somebody who's never been on this show before. I don't know why Paris Lilly from Gamer Tag Radio Paris, so nice to see you in your corner.

0:02:42 - Parris Lilly
Yes, First off, let me just say it is an absolute honor to be here. I have. You have been such an inspiration for me, not only in my career, but obviously things that I do people know me, things I've done in gaming, but I mean twit has just been a part of my life for and look, I'm not trying to date either one of us but twit has been a part of my life for a very long time and this, this is quite an honor. So thank you for having me I am honored to have you.

0:03:08 - Leo Laporte
Uh, his day job is info security, so he is actually. We should have had you on last week. Oh yeah, holy cow, uh, did you get bit by crowd strike?

0:03:20 - Parris Lilly
I did not, thankfully, and I actually had a meeting with CrowdStrike about eight months ago about switching to them and something told me no, let's just stay with what we have. And sure enough, here we are.

0:03:34 - Leo Laporte
Although you know, crowdstrike is very well known in the business. Steve Gibson was talking about all of the times. We've mentioned them as people have discovered new zero days, and that's because of that Falcon sensor network that is on so many machines monitoring any kind of activity out of the ordinary. Unfortunately, it was running in ring zero and now CrowdStrike has kind of I give them credit for being honest admitted what happened, and it doesn't reflect well on them at all. It does not. Uh, I'm sorry to say so. The, as you probably know, we talked about it last week. Microsoft says it was. Uh, only what was it? Eight million, eight and a half million computers were affected by this, running windows with with CrowdStrike on it.

Crowdstrike pushed out an update to its Falcon sensors that put the machines into a boot loop, a recovery blue screen, and the only fix, at least initially, was to go from machine to machine, boot it into safe mode and remove the sensor 291 files and then boot up and you're fine. We speculated a lot last week on Security Now and on this show about why it happened. Crowdstrike explained. So we had an employee who at this point is probably an ex-employee who put out an update using a template that was new and hadn't been the tests for it hadn't been fully developed. My instinct is that they had stubs, they had placeholders in the test that said passed, it's passed. Until we get to this, it's passed and unfortunately, after running it through the tests, it passed even though it was clearly not functioning and got pushed out to all of the computers running CrowdStrike strike and that brought so many down. Delta Airlines was down for, I mean, almost a week. Jason, did you cover that at all?

0:05:53 - Jason Hiner
Yeah, we did it's out your way.

0:05:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah.

0:05:57 - Jason Hiner
Yeah, you know, it's one of those unfortunate things that shows us how vulnerable we are.

I think it's a good reminder.

And it's a good reminder that the tech world, the tech revolution, the digital revolution, touches everything in so many places more and more, and when something goes wrong, it goes bad.

I mean we've seen this with AWS, with a number of their outages that have then cascaded and taken down multiple other services and system. You know systematic approval of all kinds of whether it's updates or changes or software development of other kinds. You know we just need to hold it to a higher bar, right, and all of the companies that are involved we need to hold to a higher bar, because I think you also look at the flip side of this, like, think about the dangers of what this presents, for you know companies with a nefarious purpose this is one where it was more like hubris and lack of good systems led to sort of a bad outcome but you think about, you know what does that mean for all of the things that are out there that are potentially vulnerable, that somebody could sneak in and put some bad code in there and take down the airlines or the power companies or the power grid or things like that. I think that's the larger worry when you start to think about, you know, things like this.

0:07:39 - Leo Laporte
There was blame to go around. I mean, certainly, when Delta went down for more than almost any other company, they clearly didn't have good processes for getting everything back up and running Perhaps not backups. I was told I don't know if this is accurate that one of the problems was that they lost all this prior scheduling data for pilots so they couldn't make new schedules because they didn't know what the previous schedules had been. That's on them, right. Windows gets some blame for allowing security content to run in ring zero, where it can crash the computer. Microsoft says hey, don't blame us, blame the EU. Because back in 2006, okay, the EU said hey, you've got to give parity to other security software. If your defender runs in ring zero, you've got to give parity to other security software. If your defender runs in ring zero, you've got to let them run in ring zero. I think most sensible commentators have pointed out that was a long time ago. Maybe you could have figured out something Paul Thurot on Windows Weekly said. There's also APIs that companies like CrowdStrike could use instead of software running in Ring Zero. There are APIs that are safer to use.

Crowdstrike gets probably the brunt of the blame. Their templates are kind of like virus definitions. They're not the sensors themselves, but they're rapid release because there's an emergency or it's really important to get out put out fast. That's one of the reasons it went out so quickly we got to get these out and it's also one of the reasons so many companies applied it immediately without their own testing. It's a rapid response right to something that's going on. Crowdstrike says two additional template instances were deployed due to a bug in the content validator, the testing harness. One of the two template instances passed validation despite containing, in their words, problematic content data, should that ever happen, paris.

0:09:41 - Parris Lilly
No, it should not happen, and you even pointed out, just from the standpoint of Delta as well. All this really comes down to CrowdStrike, windows, delta, other companies that had extended downtime. It's your policies and practices that are failing internally in your company. This is something that you have to constantly go through as far as QA goes, development cycles go, making sure that you're doing proof of concepts before you ever put anything into production because of exactly something like this. All it takes is one mistake and you can literally take down your entire environment. I actually have a story from maybe about 15 years ago where I took down an entire county network because of a mistake.

0:10:27 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but well, that's why you know it's important to ask a security professional, because there may be perhaps a little less likely to cast blame, because it happens right Mistakes happen.

0:10:37 - Parris Lilly
It does happen. Yeah, mistakes do happen, but something on this scale. You already said it yourself.

0:10:44 - Leo Laporte
um, that person who was probably ultimately responsible for this is probably not working at truck crowd striking, and maybe the people who wrote the test harnesses, who put in stubs or whatever they did so that it would pass, even though it didn't, they might deserve a little bit of blame too, right, I mean, you don't deploy tests that don't work and then people deploy something based on those tests. That's your heap of trouble.

0:11:09 - Parris Lilly
But this is also why you have compliance, you have to have testing levels, you have to have QA, you have to make sure that every check and balance and control is being tested at every level Because, again, all it takes is one link in the chain to break and, you know, you can have a disaster in your hand should we give craft strike the benefit of the doubt?

no, no, because, like I told you offline and we we said at the beginning of the show you know, I, my company, we almost went with crowd strike. So if that happened, we're we're losing production time, we're losing revenue because of this mistake, which would not have been our fault, because we were trusting CrowdStrike to provide us proper endpoint security on our servers and our workstations, and now you bricked some of our critical systems. We're losing money on that. So who's liable for that? So again, that comes down to lawyers and contracts and SLAs and where you have all that you know defined, but ultimately, crowdstrike does have to be responsible for this.

0:12:08 - Jason Hiner
Yeah, yeah, and ultimately this was probably on somebody's list at CrowdStrike oh yeah, that's that thing we need to clean up. Like, when we get to it, we've got to get that cleaned up. And then it hit the flan and they're like oh shoot. So I'm sure there's a bunch of IT people right now that had things on their list and they're like all right, we're working overtime this week, we've got things we've got to clean up. We know that we have a, we're vulnerable there.

Let's like prioritize those things because because there's always you can never, you know it's like in any business, you can never get everything done on your task list. You can never, you know, have everything perfect. But you know it's a game of priorities. You have to prioritize the things that put you at the most risk.

And for CrowdStrike, you know, as Paris said, they're in the business of trust.

You know they're helping protect you and if what's helping you protect you, you know, failed, it's just really tough to go back and have that same level of trust, and so I think for them that's going to be a challenge. To be fair, there's a lot of companies that swear by them, that feel like that they have been super helpful to them and that they are very much needed in many infrastructures around the world. And so you know, I think some people that will give them another chance, that they'll, whatever their policies is I'm sure their policies are and their processes, I'm sure they're going to all of their clients, you know, right now, and telling them look, we've got this under control and here's our processes in place to make sure this never happens again and we're going to learn from it and get better, and so, but whether you know, companies buy that or they have to, you know, as part of their own CYA and making their processes better. If that means they have to cut CrowdStrike and go in a different direction, you know, only future will tell.

0:13:55 - Leo Laporte
Chocolate milk, many SIPs says in our Discord. I find it frustrating. No one ever talks about the obviously bad code in the driver that crashed a PC because it didn't check its inputs. It shouldn't be crashing on bad inputs. It should be saying oh well, I don't know why you just sent me to an address that doesn't exist and it should halt itself. So let's spread a little more blame around to the person who wrote the bad code in the driver. Should government be involved in this? I'm reading from an article at Yahoo Finance by Daniel Howley, who's their technology editor. He says we don't have a body that can generate the best practices needed for private industry to protect against delivery of damaging updates and what a customer should do, how banks, hospitals and airlines should protect themselves. Hospitals and airlines should protect themselves. The CISA Department of Homeland Security, cybersecurity, infrastructure Security Agency doesn't in fact have an enforcement mechanism.

0:15:00 - Parris Lilly
Should there be one? I lean towards no, in the sense that you don't want government to get their hands too involved into private business when it comes to things like this. But I do think there needs to be some form of guidelines from a compliance standard, whether it's the government that's overseeing this or there's an agreed upon, you know, third party that's doing governance for this. We need that to be just industry-wide as a standard for things like for things just like this. Like something else that comes to mind for me from from from my company uh, kaseya.

Uh, a few years back, when there was a ransomware attack on them that affected us directly because Kaseya was a vendor that we trusted, was a tool that we use, and we had to shut down for like over a week of using that tool, which was critical to access to some of our systems. So again, this is where I'm saying you're losing revenue because you're trusting a third party vendor, because you're you're, you're using their tool, you know, for your day-to-day production. So I would like to see some type of overall compliance. I mean, sure, there's a SOC two, there's ISO, that's out there, we use that in my, our company, but you don't have to necessarily use it there's. If a company chooses to not go by that guideline of, yeah, you don't need to be SOC 2 certified, we'll still use you. Where's the check and balance other than some legal agreement that you have between the two companies to oversee that?

0:16:19 - Leo Laporte
It feels like the government does have a role here. I agree with you, because obviously the EU government demand that Microsoft give parity to other security companies at ring zero is a problematic decision. That, whether you agree with Microsoft or not, that this is the part of the underlying cause. Clearly no government should be weighing in at that level. But we're all interdependent on the on the Internet now and all these companies, and I don't know who is going to enforce it if it's not government. We're all interdependent on the internet now and all these companies, and I don't know who is going to enforce it if it's not government. I mean, is it an industry association? Is it a standards body like ISO? It seems like you need to have some teeth in this.

0:16:58 - Parris Lilly
Yeah, I do agree on that.

0:17:04 - Owen Stone
Leo. The other problem with government involvement is there's a large set of people online who already believe that CrowdStrike, in particular, is a tool of the deep state. And look, you can't beat you not.

0:17:13 - Leo Laporte
You can't beat those people, though, right, I mean that's going to happen.

0:17:16 - Owen Stone
Well, including one of the candidates for president. President Trump, on his infamous perfect call with Ukrainian President Zelenskyky, brought up crowd strike in connection with the dnc servers. It was a whole scandal, dnc. Uh, the crowd strike had to, you know, publish a blog post about, you know, setting the record straight about our work with the dnc. Um, you know, it was just part of that. I don't, I didn't remember that.

0:17:40 - Leo Laporte
Wow, deep, yeah, deep. Cut on that one. That's good yeah.

0:17:44 - Owen Stone
Yeah and uh, you know, I think. I think that kind of uh just bolsters Paris's point about like it's very dangerous to get government to involve, especially in this information environment where people are going to say, you know, oh well, well, was the government, you, you know, somehow tilting the scale and, you know, hacking this company or that company through its influence yeah, well, yeah it's, but we live in a crazy world yeah, but you can't defend against crazy.

0:18:17 - Leo Laporte
I mean, there's always gonna be somebody, even crazier how you defend against. You can't make government policy based on the fact that somebody might come up with a conspiracy theory, or can you? I don't know, well, maybe you have to Look at 2017 through 2021. Yeah, Well as. Long as we go ahead, Jason.

0:18:35 - Jason Hiner
Yeah, I was just going to say that there's sort of like the practical aspect and then there's like the ideal aspect. I think the ideal aspect is, if you think about, if you think about banks, if you think about healthcare highly regulated industries. They're highly regulated because there's a lot of public damage that could be done if they aren't right. And so should the internet be a highly regulated industry, Should the tech industry be a highly regulated industry?

Up until now it's been a very lightly regulated industry, partly because the lawmakers don't understand it very well, partly because there is some fear that if we get in there and put too many restrictions in place, it's going to slow it down and put us behind.

We are in a race globally with other nations, other areas, other regions, and so there's some fear about, you know, being too heavy handed. And so I think that the ideal is somewhere in the middle, and I think several people have already mentioned that there's the possibility that you could put some or roll out some standards, guidelines, best practices right, Like CISA does often, and that the government could do more of, and that could sort of set the expectations of what if you are running a business that a lot of other businesses that are critical, like airlines and banks and hospitals, then you know you need to have a level of fault tolerance, you need to have a level of systems verification, all of these things that will make sure that things like this don't happen. I think that's the most likely and maybe the most practical solution in the in the sort of short to medium term.

0:20:18 - Leo Laporte
All right, this is for our crazy listeners. I've got some evidence that there is some weird conspiracy going on. I've got some evidence that there is some weird conspiracy going on. Somebody emailed me that said you should examine what was going on with short selling on CrowdStrike in the days before this event. And actually, if you look at the CrowdStrike stock, it did plummet precipitously, but the plummet began on the 15th and the actual event was on the 19th. It had already lost half its value then. Um so so there's two thoughts here. Maybe there was some inkling that there was a problem with what this? They had, by the way, done something similar to lennox a couple of months earlier, so it might be people were starting to worry about their processes. I don't know. But I think also, if you're talking about punishment or regulation, is the free market sufficient regulation? I mean, crowdstrike is going to have a very difficult time going forward. I would imagine. Yeah, I don't know, as long as we're talking about Trump, we'll get this out of the way right now.

He headlined the biggest Bitcoin conference of the year yesterday in Nashville. Now, I got to point out, in 2021, he was not a big fan when he was president of Bitcoin. He said it just seems like a scam. I don't like it because it's another currency competing against the dollar. He said tokens aren't money. Their value is based on thin air and warned that unregulated crypto assets could facilitate the drug trade, among other illegal activity. I'll tell you one illegal activity. It absolutely facilitates his ransomware.

You got bit by the Reval ransomware within the Kaseya incident. What was the payment? It was in Bitcoin. Yeah, it was Bitcoin. Yeah. Casea incident what was the payment? It was in bitcoin. Yeah, it was bitcoin. Yeah, that's been pretty clear that the entire ransomware economy is based on cryptocurrency. Well, he's changed his tune when he now, as often happens with uh candidates for the president, and especially for this candidate, it's a transaction he wants the vote of and the money of, by the way, the bitcoin billionaires, including andreessen horowitz, uh. So he went to the bitcoin conference and said and I want you to tell me if this is true for too long our government has violated the cardinal rule that every bitcoiner knows by heart never sell your bitcoin. Is that true?

0:22:48 - Parris Lilly
never sell you I believe he did say that yes he said it?

0:22:52 - Leo Laporte
oh, I know he said it. The question is is it true? Now I have to say I can't sell my bitcoin because I forgot my password, but if I could, I probably would. At this point he also said he wants, so he says a, we're not going to let the government ever sell any bitcoin. It's going to keep all the bitcoin it has and they're going to create a strategic bitcoin reserve he has diamond hands now diamond hands so do you want to get super nerdy about why the government has bitcoin of?

0:23:23 - Owen Stone
Of course?

0:23:23 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, why does the first of all? Why?

0:23:26 - Owen Stone
Well, most mostly from seizing it from from criminals.

0:23:30 - Parris Lilly
Yeah.

0:23:31 - Owen Stone
And then, interestingly enough, there's a whole business of figuring out how to hold the government's Bitcoin. Uh it's a business called crypto custody. Uh, and that's complicated. Um, it is, I believe, the US Marshal Service that has most of the crypto that's been seized, and they work with various custody companies. One that comes to mind is, I believe, anchorage.

0:24:05 - Leo Laporte
They convert it to dollars as quickly as they can, don't?

0:24:08 - Owen Stone
they Well? No, the problem is and this is interesting too is often that's tied up in legal disputes.

0:24:15 - Leo Laporte
Oh, so they can't. They have to kind of sit on it.

0:24:20 - Owen Stone
Right and then if there is like a you know, eventually a legal settlement, you know, a disgorgement process or distribution process, that happens. I believe that they do sell at that point because they can only distribute cash normally in those scenarios I think you know some and there have also been disputes. These are more often in some of the bankruptcy cases that have come up over. You know, like, if you're owed Bitcoin, um, you know, or, or ether, or any other cryptocurrency, should you, as part of a settlement, get coin for coin what you held, or should you get the dollar value at the time of the failure?

but the value might the value might have changed a lot and if there's a difference, who's kind of on the hook for that difference?

0:25:13 - Leo Laporte
RFK spoke on Friday to the same conference and said we should have a Bitcoin Fort Knox and he says the government should have a reserve of 4 million Bitcoin and we should buy 550 a day until it reaches 4 million. Senator Cynthia Loomis of Wyoming has announced a bill to amass a federal reserve of 1 million Bitcoin, which she says will be held for a minimum of 20 years. It could be used for one purpose reduce our debt. It seems like all three of these people think that number always goes up, Right? I mean, it makes sense if you know the Bitcoin is going to be worth a million dollars a coin in 20 years. Well, yeah, we should buy more.

0:25:54 - Owen Stone
Well, because Bitcoin and this is not universally true for cryptocurrencies, but Bitcoin by design, is deflationary. There is a limited set that will be issued, so if you believe that demand for it will go up, then the supply is limited.

0:26:08 - Leo Laporte
Supply demand, ergo Okay but, owen, I'm glad you brought that up. I've been thinking about this. Yes, it's designed to make it harder and harder to mine Bitcoin, and there will be a total, a limit on the total number of coins, but you can also split bitcoin almost infinitely, right? So in a way, it is still inflationary.

0:26:29 - Owen Stone
I mean no, you can't, you can't split it. I mean yes, you can buy fractions which? Are fractional yeah yeah, but that's not splitting it.

0:26:37 - Leo Laporte
Well, but I understand. But it's if, if, if bitcoin becomes worth a million dollars a coin, then you've got got Satoshi's. It seems like it doesn't change anything.

0:26:47 - Owen Stone
That's not like, that's not at all like the you know.

0:26:52 - Leo Laporte
You can't print more bills like you can with the dollar, right yeah.

0:26:54 - Owen Stone
Yeah Right, the US Treasury, you know just printing dollars and that's. You know that is. That's part of the original attraction. You know, a lot of early Bitcoiners really believed in that deflationary model. You know, I mean, they're not that different from gold bugs in that regard, though you can mine gold from the ground. The, you know, an issue with a lot of the more fly-by-night cryptocurrencies that have emerged are the fact that there's like a mechanism for issuing more coins and hence inflating.

0:27:30 - Leo Laporte
So you're saying we shouldn't have a Dogecoin Fort Knox? That would be a mistake.

0:27:38 - Owen Stone
Probably a worse idea than a Bitcoin Fort Knox. But I'm not saying that.

0:27:41 - Leo Laporte
You know, I'm not saying that that's a good idea either. Yeah, yeah, ox. Um, but I'm not saying that. You know, I'm not saying that that's a good idea either. Yeah, yeah yeah all right, so maybe it makes sense then to have the government hold four million coins well, el salvador has tried it um oh yeah, how did that work out? That became their currency not great.

0:28:00 - Owen Stone
I mean, you know, the. The problem is that their economy is so weak and so small and the president was spending so much on Bitcoin purchases that he was running into possibly violating terms of their international loan agreements. So probably not, you know, not the strategy that we should pursue if we were to go down this road. That we should pursue if we were to go down this road. But generally the US government has not gone the sovereign wealth fund route. We've not historically held securities. There was, I think, the limited exception in the financial crisis where we held some warrants in, you know, in in the car companies, and you know, I think everyone believed that was really that was really awkward. I think that you know, I think the you know the government holding Bitcoin is kind of putting its thumb on the scale of you know.

0:29:02 - Leo Laporte
Well, yeah, because if there's a limited number of coins that can ever be minted and the government has four million they will always have a set fraction of the total Right.

0:29:12 - Owen Stone
Right, and there's not really a. There's not really a governance risk there, but it's, you know, because of the way Bitcoin works. But you know.

0:29:20 - Leo Laporte
I wonder if we should replace Bitcoin versus Ether. Should we replace the dollar with Bitcoin and then the Federal Reserve can't print more money?

0:29:28 - Owen Stone
Well, there has been talk about a digital dollar, which is different.

0:29:34 - Leo Laporte
There's stable coins which are fixed tied to the value of the dollar right.

0:29:38 - Owen Stone
Right, and this is a different thing altogether. It's a CBDC, a central bank digital currency, and the Federal Reserve is actually studying it. Now, this would be not replacing the dollar. It would be taking the dollar and essentially tokenizing it so that you could trade it much like a cryptocurrency. It would kind of eliminate the need for stable coins, really, but you know, it could potentially reduce some of the costs of of payments infrastructure. A lot of this is still theoretical. They've been studying it for years but, um, you know not, not wild uh, not completely wild and crazy idea and a lot of other governments around the world are looking at, um, you know, a digital currency.

0:30:22 - Jason Hiner
The China has explored a digital yuan and the EU, of course, has formed a committee to study it. I mean, keep in mind that there's a lot of scammy stuff in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, right? We all know that and we don't need to name any names, and we know the history, I think our audience, samuel Bankman Freed.

0:30:48 - Leo Laporte
Is that who you're talking about? The?

0:30:49 - Jason Hiner
audience here knows the history of the very scammy nature of a lot.

0:30:54 - Leo Laporte
A lot of stable coins have turned out not to be so stable.

0:30:58 - Jason Hiner
Not to be very stable. Exactly that said, like the underlying technology and idea of blockchain and potentially, you know, the potential for digital currencies is still quite solid. There are some really solid ideas there that have proven over time to be somewhat durable. The biggest one is Bitcoin itself. Right, be somewhat durable. The biggest one is Bitcoin itself. Right, bitcoin has these massive swings up and down based on enthusiasm, because it's not based on anything. It's not tied to anything. Yeah, it's not tied to anything except the value that people put in it. At the same time, that's also essentially what the dollar is now. The dollar is not tied to a gold standard any longer. It's really essentially tied into the confidence that people have in the United States government to be around and to be stable and so so it's.

0:31:59 - Leo Laporte
Both Bitcoin and dollars are fiat currency, but with the dollar, the fiat is the faith is in the us government. That's right there. What is what is the? What is the faith with bitcoin? Just that speculators will continue to well the algorithm, the algorithm.

0:32:15 - Jason Hiner
Okay the and the technology, technical underpinnings and, as as owen said, it has a limited number of coins, and so it is anti-inflationary in that sense that it will. You know, you can't just keep printing more indefinitely, and so the long-term path that has been set for it is that eventually it will be worth somewhere between like 1 million to 4 million a coin or something. If you believe that that could be 50 years or who knows, Well, and I should point out, that's what the Winklevoss twins thought.

0:32:48 - Leo Laporte
And then they have become crypto billionaires. They've done very well on Bitcoin.

0:32:55 - Jason Hiner
If you bought it in 2013,. You're doing amazing yeah.

0:32:58 - Leo Laporte
But does that mean, if you bought it in 2024, that in 10 years you would be doing as well?

0:33:05 - Jason Hiner
Probably not as good as the people bought it in 2013. The best time.

0:33:11 - Leo Laporte
It's the old Chinese proverb the best time to buy Bitcoin is 10 years ago. The next best time is today. No, that's not the Chinese proverb, that's about tree planting. I do have to say Bitcoin is now worth $68,000. It has been a very good year for bitcoin. It started one year ago.

0:33:29 - Jason Hiner
This time last year at thirty thousand dollars less than half it takes these swings right, it goes up, it goes down, but it it tends to always make higher lows, which is what you want, right? Like I kind of got it's a password.

0:33:44 - Leo Laporte
I got eight bitcoins in a wallet that I cannot touch.

0:33:47 - Jason Hiner
You have eight.

0:33:48 - Leo Laporte
Oh my gosh leo it could be my retirement fund, if I could just remember the password that's funny.

0:33:55 - Jason Hiner
Hold them for 10 years, as you just said, you know so, uh, it's.

0:33:59 - Leo Laporte
It's widely believed that the biden administration is kind of anti-Bitcoin, although they have started to make rules. We now have Bitcoin ETFs. Right, I can buy Bitcoin whatever that is an ETF at my stockbroker today. I'm not sure I would recommend it. Maybe I should. I feel like when you buy a stock, you kind of are investing in the company, just as, like, the dollar is an investment in america. But when you buy bitcoin, what are you? What is it tied to? Is it the?

0:34:36 - Owen Stone
well, I mean it. I mean a stock is a. You know, a stock is a bet on the future earnings of a company. Yes, right, it is a speculative vehicle, you know, from that perspective, but at least it's tied to something you can research.

Right, yeah, I mean essentially, but a lot of the value of a stock, at least in terms of, like the day-to-day swings, is the psychology of the market. Sure, not just what investors think about it, but what investors think about what other investors think Right, right, momentum and all these other phenomena of the stock market. So all of those things are present in Bitcoin. Like you know, a lot of the speculation is not based on, like, the inherent value of Bitcoin, but what people think other people are thinking about Bitcoin.

0:35:24 - Jason Hiner
Hmm, If you buy Bitcoin, you're really buying the belief in blockchain and the technology and that this sort of bet that a currency or a financial system that's based on rules and math, rather than you know people and their sort of ups and ups and downs, right, and so do you believe in that. It's tough, I'm I wouldn't necessarily encourage people to run out there and do that, but, but I do think it's um reading about blockchain and the theories behind what cryptocurrency is based on. Um, because there there's some interesting ideas there, right, because, remember, it came out of the um, the uh, the mortgage crisis in 08, 09, where people were like, well, what the heck? You know, the system that we thought we trusted was based on the whims of a few oligarchs, essentially financial oligarchs that were. This is almost like going back to our CrowdStrike example. We had some misplaced trust and so what can we trust? And so that's when they came out like, well, what if we had a system that was based on algorithm and math, rather than putting our trust in institutions that are run by flawed people?

I'm not necessarily endorsing it. I wouldn't encourage people to put their 401k in a Bitcoin ETF. Do not do that. I would not recommend that at all. Just do the S&P 500 index fund or something you know you're going to be much better off. But but I think that there are interesting ideas in there that are that have some implications for the future that are worth sort of learning.

0:37:24 - Leo Laporte
If you, if you care about tech and the future, I shouldn't do this. I should go to a break but I'm going to say but what does that mean about NFTs then? I for some reason they're inextricably linked in my head.

0:37:39 - Owen Stone
I I think, I think NFTs are like, they're a great idea for digital tickets, for, like you know, like Using blockchain to verify the provenance of something makes sense.

0:37:52 - Leo Laporte
Yes, especially if it's an ephemeral thing like a ticket. Maybe less sense if it's the Mona Lisa, but for a ticket it makes sense it.

0:38:08 - Owen Stone
It makes sense, yeah, as as like a vehicle for, like you know, like artistic, like a vehicle for speculation on, like digital art. I think that ship has a bad. I think people, I think people are just tired of that idea, right? Yeah?

0:38:16 - Leo Laporte
it's only related because it's blockchain under underneath the hood.

0:38:19 - Owen Stone
That's all yeah, I mean certainly, certainly crypto enthusiasm lifts NFT enthusiasm Right, and you know, nft skepticism feeds crypto skepticism.

0:38:31 - Leo Laporte
Okay, we really should take a break, but I'm glad we had this conversation. You know, jason, you're actually more bullish on it than most of the people I talk to, so you've convinced me no, you've convinced me Interesting.

0:38:42 - Jason Hiner
No, you've convinced me.

0:38:43 - Leo Laporte
I'd kind of written it off like NFTs, as kind of a fad of the early 2020s and not worth paying any attention to.

0:38:52 - Parris Lilly
Before you go on a break because I obviously stayed very silent during this entire conversation about Bitcoin, I will say that I'm still on the skeptic side of it, and I have been for a while and it just really comes down to everything to in this conversation. It's about having faith and taking basically taking a leap of faith as far as the investment goes in the future, of what Bitcoin is going to be and obviously you're bringing NFTs into this as well. I'm just too skeptical of a person that I don't trust it enough to want to invest, so I stay away.

0:39:22 - Leo Laporte
I almost asked you, paris, how much Bitcoin you have? Vest, so I stay away. I almost asked you, paris, how much bitcoin you have zero. I honestly, if I had not forgotten the password of the wallet, I would have zero as well, but because I can't access it, I've got diamond hands I just I can't, I can't sell you mind those too right, didn't you actually mind those?

0:39:40 - Jason Hiner
oh, this is the sad story.

0:39:42 - Leo Laporte
no, steve gibson mined in the very early days 50 bitcoin back in the days when you could set up a pc running a miner, and the next morning he woke up and there's 50 of them, but they weren't worth virtually nothing and he erased the drive that contained the wallet. It's gone now. Now, that poor guy, that's three million plus and, uh, and if you say it's going to go to a million dollars each, that's 50 million dollars. That's uh, oh boy. We try not to mention that to steve and steve.

If you're listening, I apologize, I uh, the 7.85 bitcoin I have were all donations because at one point, you know, we hada tip jar and I thought, yeah, I was real hip back in 2013. I thought, you know what, we'll take Bitcoin and we did, and people gave us one. I think the biggest donation was like one Bitcoin, which at the time was $20 or something Right, but I could see, you know, I mean it's all there in the ledger. I could see all the donations. Most of them were fractional and I'm very grateful to you all and you paid my. I have my retirement fund. If I could just crack it somehow, my son everybody, I, you know, my son says no, I found a guy, so I say, well, there's a there's a very high percentage I bet Owen probably knows the number maybe of of like something like 25 to 30% of all the coins are lost.

0:41:01 - Jason Hiner
Yeah, yeah, Including including the right.

0:41:04 - Leo Laporte
Including Satoshi Nakamoto's original Bitcoin, which have just sitting in that, whoever he is, whoever here they are.

0:41:16 - Jason Hiner
It's just sitting in that wallet, if it ever moves.

0:41:22 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it'll, it'll. It'll crush or make the market. Yeah, that's the other thing. You don't know, right, there's some whales out there who could really change things.

0:41:26 - Jason Hiner
So Bitcoin whales is a real thing, where there's a small number of people that own a lot of coins that move the market and potentially manipulate the market, and so at some point, if this becomes truly, becomes a thing that you know is a global financial, becomes a part of the global financial system, there will be closer regulation and scrutiny over all that.

0:41:52 - Leo Laporte
And we don't know who the whales are. We just don't know. That's right. And they may be malicious. They may want to crash the market, who knows? Yeah, all right, enough of that, let's move on. I love this panel. Jason Heiner is here. I first met you when you were founded the Tech Republic. You are now the boss of it all Editor in chief at ZDNet. Is that an onerous job? Is that a tough?

0:42:15 - Jason Hiner
job. There's no doubt about it. But I'll be honest, I love it. I love the work that I do. I love the team that I have. How big is the team? Back to ZDNet yeah, so we have not large, or I think of it as not large. We have 17 staff and about 35 freelancers.

0:42:37 - Owen Stone
Oh yeah, right, that's not huge, so about 50.

0:42:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

0:42:39 - Jason Hiner
Yeah, when I worked for ZDNet it was thousands right, yeah, for sure, but that was many magazines and a whole lot of stuff.

0:42:50 - Leo Laporte
That's right.

0:42:51 - Jason Hiner
That included all the magazines and labs and all kinds of things, right, but look, I love what I do. I have a great team. In 2022, we had this awesome opportunity to recreate ourselves, re-imagine ourselves for the future. What can ZNET do for technology enthusiasts for the next 10 years and business readers, because a lot of our readers are professionals and then so we recreated the mission, we relaunched the brand and the site and then, at the same time, we recreated the team. So you barely you rarely get the opportunity to do those three things at the same time and and we did, and so it's been. You know it's, it's been terrific. We still have a lot to learn, and but it's really focused on two things today, which is how is the technology, how is tech changing? You know your life, your work, and you know your friends, family and community, and then what are the products that can help you sort of get a taste of that right? What's, what's coming next and how can it? You know best impact your life.

0:43:58 - Leo Laporte
You still have some really great people like Adrian Kingsley Hughes there and Ed Bott and such great legendary names and I see Ant Pruitt is still a contributor there, dan Patterson, dan is Don Reisinger so many great people that we've known over the years. So I am rooting for ZDNet big time. We're going through a reinvention too. You know media. One of the weird things about new media is it's constantly changing and we're trying to figure out what podcasting is going to be in the next few years. We're reinventing ourselves as well.

0:44:31 - Jason Hiner
It's exciting, right, yeah, it is. It's an opportunity, it's fun. It's an opportunity to reimagine yourself and be useful to people, and obviously you do a lot of things that are very useful to a lot of people. Absolutely Yep, yep. And obviously you do a lot of things that are very useful to a lot of people, absolutely, yep, yep.

0:44:46 - Leo Laporte
And I think, as long as you keep your eyes on that, that what you're up to is to help people understand technology, and your tagline is great Tomorrow belongs to those who embrace it today. As long as you keep that in front of you, I don't think you can go wrong. I think that's the mission. You keep true to that mission. It's so great to have Paris Lilly here First time, not last time. You play games live on TV. That's exciting. Gamer Tag Radio.

0:45:17 - Parris Lilly
Yeah, I mean, gamer Tag Radio is an audio podcast, or it started as an audio podcast back in 2005. Ironically enough, leo if you're you may or may not remember this my cohost, danny Pena. You and him went into the podcast hall of fame together. Yes, I do remember that. Yeah, yeah, and he's. He's the one that got me into this. I started in 2006 and again just doing it as fun, you know I'm.

I like playing video games, I like talking about it, doing that for a while, with Danny going to the E3s, doing all those things and, ironically enough, it was 2020. Right when the pandemic happened. I was thinking, oh, I'm going to be done. I think I've had a good run with this. I'll, you know, just continue with my day job, right. But then, because of the pandemic and everybody was at home, it opened up so many more opportunities for me. So I, to this day now I part-time, do things what kind of funny games you're talking about, the live streaming and studio stuff. I've hosted things for Xbox. I've done things with Ubisoft, ea, playstation. I've done some work with IGN as well, because now I'm able to be home, because I live in Southern California, but I can still have that impact, I can still have a voice and I can still be out there, literally to the globe, you know talking about video games and participating.

0:46:38 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because Gamertag started pretty much the same time, twit did I mean. We both started in early 2005 and it's so good to see the continued success. What's what's your game these days? Is there any one that you play all the?

0:46:50 - Parris Lilly
time I this weekend, ironically enough, uh, speaking of Xbox, because Xbox just added Call of Duty, modern Warfare 3 to Game Pass. So I was like you know what? I don't really play Call of Duty a lot. Let me give it a shot. I've been addicted. That's like the past three days that's all I've been playing. But yeah but.

But beyond that I mean pretty versatile, because I'm fortunate enough, I get to preview games, review games. I have a big preview that's going to come out here in a couple of days that I can't say exactly just yet what it is, but it's, it's been awesome. I've even done stuff with Microsoft as far as their Flight Sim game goes. I've been able to host a few events for that as well. It's been a blast and I've been very lucky and fortunate that sure I'm in IT, which again I have to give you credit again. Taking all the way back to the screensaver days, watching you, listening to you and watching you talk about tech is what got me into it. And then I've just progressed over the years to where I am today. But you know, I've been lucky enough to have my day job, being able to maintain that and then being able to do this gaming stuff on the side it's. It's been a lot of fun.

0:47:57 - Leo Laporte
That sounds pretty good. That sounds pretty. That sounds like a good deal. I try modern warfare and I go in there as I could do a single player campaign. But when you go in the in there are they're so good it's like instant death. I mean you can't.

0:48:14 - Parris Lilly
Yeah, I'm not good by the way, I just but it's just fun to play and they teabag you and they're just mean as hell.

0:48:20 - Leo Laporte
And I just, yeah, it's too tough, it's uh, paul. Paul theriot said that. I said I'd like to play call of duty. He said, no, it's too hairy for you, you can't, you can't handle it, he was right, owen thomas you living. He lives in the, in the uh worst city, the worst run city in the world, and he's proud of it yeah yes, no, by gosh it.

0:48:45 - Owen Stone
You know, if anyone's going to criticize San Francisco, it should be San Franciscans. That's a deeply held belief.

0:48:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and I love San Francisco. It's one of my favorite cities. Lived there for years and I still love it. There's some, you know there's some problems, but every city goes through its ups and downs. Now you sent in a clip of you on the show not so long ago.

0:49:08 - Owen Stone
I have it queued up to a spot.

0:49:09 - Leo Laporte
This is four years ago. Watch this. This is Owen Thomas four years ago. Look at him.

0:49:22 - Owen Stone
You think you're very cute, Owen, but how much weight have you lost?

0:49:25 - Leo Laporte
About 64 pounds, holy moly, dude. Now show, show him. Now show him the real. Show him the real. Owen Thomas, let's see him. Look at him. You look great, owen Chiseled.

0:49:42 - Owen Stone
Oh my God, look at the guns. What's your secret? Uh, you know, actually I was just texting with a friend about this Um, and he was asking me how I stay consistent. My advice is uh, make, uh, make fitness the default, um, and you know so, you just don't think about it Like, just do it. Uh, you know, it's not like it's not just exercise, though. Right, you've got a diet too, right, yeah, I, you know, I, I, I have definitely kept my diet a lot tighter than um, you know, then, no more french fries.

0:50:11 - Leo Laporte
yeah, the pandemic years were not good, not kind to yeah, I don't blame, I don't blame you for gaining weight during the pandemic. I mean, uh, we all did.

0:50:21 - Owen Stone
But you know, I, I you know it was also kind of convenient, right yeah.

0:50:29 - Leo Laporte
Or the path of least resistance. Pizza tonight pizza, tomorrow night pizza the next night.

0:50:34 - Owen Stone
Yeah, but I've actually found that intense exercise and a lot of it is what works for me.

0:50:41 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I can do that, all right.

0:50:43 - Owen Stone
I like that. Not sure it's the prescription. You know the prescription for everyone, but I log things religiously and I found that you know, if I go to the gym a certain number of times a week, I'm I lose weight, and if I fall below that level of activity, my weight doesn't change or goes up.

0:51:04 - Leo Laporte
What's your fitness device? You wear an Apple Watch or Fitbit or nothing. He's not wearing a watch.

0:51:12 - Owen Stone
How do you track it?

0:51:14 - Leo Laporte
You write it down like a savage with a pencil.

0:51:18 - Owen Stone
Actually, I've got an app that I swear by. It's called Gym Goal Gym Goal and that's about it and MyFitnessPal for calorie logging, and I've used those tools for like 15 plus years. Nice and a lot of others have come and gone. At one point I had three fitness trackers strapped to my wrist to test them out at the same time. My conclusion was none of them.

0:51:45 - Leo Laporte
None of them, you know, gave useful data. There's no substitute for actually taking a heavy weight and moving it up and down. You got to do it. You got to do it.

0:51:55 - Jason Hiner
They are getting smarter, though, by the way, like the newer breed, especially led by, like the rings, where they give you more um use ai to give you actual insights, like it's not just data I like heart rate variability and things like that and readiness and so forth, as if you tried the samsung ring, yet the new one, as I guess no one has yet.

0:52:16 - Leo Laporte
You have it. There it is. It's on his finger, what do you think?

0:52:21 - Jason Hiner
um, it's to the point that you all have been talking about the. The actual usable data is better, and you mentioned it like readiness. What they call it is your energy score. Yeah, I'll give you an example. Like with that, it told me um, this relates to what owen was saying.

There was one day where, like it was kind of lower and I could, I I tapped it was like what's, what's going on? Why is it lower? And they gave me give me the things. Most of them are related to sleep. But there was one which is like your exercise the previous day and it's like my exercise the previous day. My normal is like 30 to 40. And it was like six minutes the previous day. And so I was like, oh, okay, I guess I need to do some cardio tomorrow today. And it was true, actually, it was pretty accurate. Like I was, like I was a little sluggish that day and so I thought, well, that's interesting that it says my energy level is low. So I tapped it. But you know, the interesting thing is like this never gives me anything. Apple watch never gives, has never given me anything close to that those kind of insights, yeah, so that's really interesting I had an aura ring.

0:53:24 - Leo Laporte
I wore for a long time, especially in covid, because I thought, well, it'll be able to monitor temperature change and that should give me early warning if I get sick, uh, but I stopped wearing it because it was uncomfortable in the long run. Um, interesting, the samsung ring is not cheap.

0:53:39 - Jason Hiner
It's 500 bucks, 400, 400, yeah, okay yeah, but the aura like the one that I, the one that looks like this, the the one, the black, sort of matte black one, is 450.

0:53:50 - Leo Laporte
You know it starts it, so you know and it doesn't have a subscription yeah, I like that in the range aura started making you pay monthly and that that bugs me. That's another reason I stopped wearing it.

0:54:02 - Jason Hiner
It only works on android and it especially the best stuff is if you have a samsung phone, yeah, yeah, if you want something similar that does something similar. I think the ultra human ring is um is the one that one's 350 and it works on ios and android and it's essentially the same across android. So that's's when I haven't tried it yet and we're sort of going to test that one after the Samsung. But Samsung, I will give some some credit that they do some good things. Uh, and I think this ultra human one is is interesting because it already does a lot of what the Samsung does. So we'll see when we test it. But um, it's a company out of India that um serious about some of this stuff and has been doing it for a couple of years and is a bit of a like undercurrent, one of the favorites of the people out there that are that are into rings.

0:54:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm going to have to check it out. I wasn't even aware of it and there's been rumors that Apple's working on something like that. Although Apple has and they seem to be doing some work on this, because they've got something in your ears Most people's ears most of the time with the AirPods. They have an opportunity there to do some stuff.

0:55:08 - Jason Hiner
That's kind of interesting, Sure, To do temperature and that the interesting thing with the ring is, you know, this thing has some gesture control, so it has. You put it on the index finger partly, partly because it can do better readings there, partly because it's more comfortable. If you have it between two fingers it's less comfortable, but if you have it where it's only one other finger is touching it, you know, then it's a little less noticeable, because these rings are bigger than most rings that people wear, right, yeah, but it does have some gesture support, which I think has to be related to the VR headset that's coming out. Samsung and Google and Qualcomm are working together on this VR headset. So right now it's like it'll let you take a picture from the phone or dismiss an alarm, right, with a sort of a pinch gesture, the same gesture you use on Apple Vision Pro, but with a ring.

By having a ring connected with it, you have more precision, and so we've seen this with the Sony XR headset, which is really enterprise only, but was it V? Was that CES? And I tested that out and it was interesting because it does give you a little bit more precision by having something there, versus using cameras to sort of watch you pinch. So anyway, that's a little is to sort of watch you pinch. So anyway, that's a little extra bonus if it comes to pass, and I do think that ultimately you'll see Google and Apple and probably Samsung and Meta eventually do a ring too, because it's really a pretty simple device. It has three sensors in it, and then to be able to connect it with other wearables is where some value is. Yeah.

0:56:38 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's great to have all three of you on this panel. We will get back to the bad news in just a bit. That was a little brief. Good news break Our show today, brought to you by Cisco Motific. You know Cisco? I didn't know this. They have an incubation engine called OutShift that merges innovation with the art of the possible. They call it their launchpad for transformative emerging tech. Outshift blends startup agility with corporate strength, of course, the strength of Cisco to develop next-gen technologies from the ground up. They're working in AI, in quantum technologies, cloud-native and more.

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Speaking of AI Bowen, I have to mention this An article about AI-designed cheese. Explain to me. He has stepped away for a second. Oh, darn it, I picked a bad time to talk to Owen. He's wandered off. Well, we'll talk about AI cheese in a moment. Ai cheese, yeah, stay tuned. I remember Stacy, not Stacy who sent me that. Oh, amy Webb was going to be on in a few weeks. Amy Webb sent me AI-designed whiskey. It was awful. It was awful. It tasted like burnt rubber. It was the worst. So don't let your AI design whiskey or cheese. What is it?

1:00:07 - Jason Hiner
AI vegan cheese is what it looks like.

1:00:10 - Leo Laporte
Now you're vegan, right, jason, so you might be interested in this. Owen, explain what is it.

1:00:17 - Owen Stone
So there's a company here in San Francisco called Climax Foods, and they purport to use AI to analyze ingredients Sorry, they're actually in Berkeley, just across the bay, but they purport to use AI to analyze ingredients to come up with new food products food products In this case.

They came up with a vegan blue cheese that is, you know, like good and funky, with those blue veins. It looks good. Yeah, it has gotten placement in about a dozen restaurants from San Francisco to LA to New York, and it's available in two markets, actually one, I think, not too far from you, in Marin County, and also online from an online browser called Good Eggs, not widely distributed. It is widely talked about, though, because they entered a food awards competition the Good Food Awards and were ultimately disqualified because of an ingredient they used, and there's a lot of controversy over this ingredient. It's basically a seed-derived butter, kind of like a nut butter, but the long and short of it is there was so much of a kerfuffle over their disqualification that they landed on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert and you know like two minutes on broadcast TV.

That's better than any advertising yeah, incredible publicity, but it doesn't seem to have really boosted their business.

1:01:56 - Leo Laporte
Let me read a little bit from your article. Sarah Bloomberg wrote this for the San Francisco Business Times. Stephen Colbert plucked up a toothpick that had been prepped with a triangular block of blue cheese and examined the moldy swirls before popping it into his mouth. Nine seconds later he said I like it, you can really taste the foot. Did that sell? By the way? This startup has 27 million dollars in funding, because I bet you, jason heiner, you're just dying for a good blue cheese.

1:02:29 - Jason Hiner
well, they lost me at blue cheese like if it was mozzarella. Okay, you know it's funny. I've only eaten blue cheese one time, when I first got married. Um, and my wife my wife bless her she made this dish. She was really excited about it. I'd never had blue cheese before. And, um, and we tried it and and it was so difficult to eat I didn't realize I didn't like it and so, but that was the first and last time I ever had blue cheese, cause I had such a bad reaction to it. Um, my, my gut had such a bad reaction to it. Yeah, um, but, but, yeah, but is there good vegan cheese?

1:03:03 - Leo Laporte
out there there is.

1:03:05 - Jason Hiner
There's actually one that's in northern california called miyoko's, which is now like national and and is really good. They do vegan um cheeses. It's handcrafted. They also do um like whipped butter and other things that are that are plant-based and um is is terrific. Uh, there's some others as well, I think, like the things that are that are plant-based and um is is terrific. Uh, there's some others as well, I think, like the ones that are made out of like cashew cheese and that kind of thing like makes a good sort of ricotta substitute. So, uh, so there are some. There are much better ones than there were, like 10 years ago. I've been a vegan for almost 15 years and it's gotten a lot. It's gotten a lot better the last five to seven years, especially with the dairy replacements.

1:03:45 - Leo Laporte
It feels like that you should just eat fruits, nuts and vegetables and not be eating simulated animal products, though.

1:03:54 - Jason Hiner
It's true, I don't eat a lot of the simulated stuff.

1:03:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I guess when you're first transitioning, maybe you have a craving for a hamburger, and then okay, but it seems like the whole point is to not eat animals, even fake ones.

1:04:11 - Owen Stone
So and this is not a criticism of Jason or anyone else who identifies as vegan but there has been a movement in the food world to, instead of emphasizing what you're not eating, emphasizing eating more of say plant-based.

1:04:28 - Jason Hiner
I like that I like that.

1:04:31 - Owen Stone
So one term that's very popular here in San Francisco these days is plant-forward. There is a plant-forward food hall actually on Market Street called Salyu Hall. It's inside an Ikea and I actually had a plant-based burger there. It was pretty good. I mean, you know, but you put enough cheese and grilled onions and sauce on anything.

1:04:54 - Jason Hiner
Anything's really good, all right, yeah, it was pretty good.

1:04:56 - Leo Laporte
Best food, best vegetarian food. It wasn't vegan, but it was vegetarian food I ever had. It was one of the best restaurants I've ever been to in San Francisco Greens. It's still there, it's vegetarian and it's amazing, so I'm not against it by any means.

1:05:12 - Owen Stone
Sure what rule, did they?

1:05:15 - Leo Laporte
break. They had seed butter?

1:05:17 - Owen Stone
Yes, and it's called kokum butter and you know, apparently this is not a material that's been deemed uh grass or generally recognized as safe. So if it's, if you have a grass oh, it's unsafe. Well, it's like putting turpentine in it or something it's not not unsafe, but it's it hasn't been proven safe.

1:05:43 - Leo Laporte
Who does the GRAS certification?

1:05:45 - Owen Stone
Well, that's a tricky thing. It's not the government. If you have an ingredient that's been in circulation for a long time but but has never been like formally blessed, you sort of self-certify and hope the FDA doesn't crack down on you. Um, but that is not good enough for a lot of people. They say, if you have something you know, that's if you have a non-grass ingredient. Um, you know if you're, if you're a grocery store and you know you're a food startup comes to you and says, hey, we've got this great vegan cheese, but it's got a non-grass ingredient. Uh, you know, a lot of people are going to say come back to us when you have a.

1:06:30 - Leo Laporte
You know a better formulation apparently the way the fda does it is you can, you can send them a notification that it's it's generally recognized as safe and they can say okay.

1:06:47 - Owen Stone
Yeah, and the question is not so much government regulation but kind of market regulation. Vegans, as you can imagine, are pretty particular about what they put in their bodies, so this is not the right market segment.

Do not put turpentine into my fake cheese like oh, trust this cheese because ai picked the ingredients for you, that's. I don't think that's a winning marketing, you know, slogan for for a lot of people. Um no, they, you know, they may, they may come up with some novel combinations, but I think, know that probably the safer route is, like you know, rather than say, oh, we're going to use AI to sort through, like thousands and thousands of just like completely wacky ingredients you've never heard of, maybe use AI to combine existing completely safe, trusted ingredients and, you know, start from there.

1:07:42 - Leo Laporte
I have learned so much in this episode.

1:07:46 - Owen Stone
Crypto custody vegan AI cheese Very valuable, really good stuff.

1:07:50 - Leo Laporte
We've got it all Amazing.

1:07:52 - Jason Hiner
Well, the article, me too, the US Marshals holding custody of Bitcoin. I'm still reeling from that one.

1:07:59 - Leo Laporte
Wow, you can read the article on the Berkeley alt cheese startup that went on Colbert but then lost it all because they weren't grass in the San Francisco business journal. This guy the business times. I'm sorry, this guy is the managing editor of the San Francisco business times but it is a biz journalcom, so it's very confusing Biz journals of the San Francisco Business Times, but it is at bizjournalcom so it's very confusing.

1:08:22 - Owen Stone
Bizjournalscom slash San Francisco.

1:08:25 - Leo Laporte
Yes, because San Francisco has to be just a little bit different. We get in Petaluma pretty much weekly a notification that AT&T's 9-11 service is not working. Please call the main line of the police department if you have an emergency. I guess it's not just Petaluma. In February, at&t is now admitting a wireless outage blocked more than 92 million calls 92 million calls. It was a 12-hour outage. Among those 92 million, 25,000 were attempts to reach 9-1-1. Now why are we finding out about this? Because the FCC has been investigating it for the five months in between. They have referred the matter to its Enforcement Bureau for potential violation of SEC rules. At&t just can't catch a break these days.

1:09:19 - Owen Stone
And, by the way, at&t also wants to shut down its copper line network in San Francisco. It's the landline network.

1:09:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the CPUC returned them down. The last I saw yes.

1:09:31 - Owen Stone
And San Mateo County.

1:09:33 - Leo Laporte
Other municipalities are fighting them on the issue they are At stake, uh, something called the carrier of last resort. Uh, you're not allowed to cup your copper if you are the last person who still offers copper for emergency reasons. That makes sense. At&t has asked, or asked, the state of california to be relieved of their colr obligations. Uh, so that they, in other words they, wouldn't be required to offer landline phone service. They say everybody uses cell phones. Now I have to. Let's be honest. Does anybody here have a landline?

1:10:12 - Owen Stone
No, no, does it count if I have a VoIP line?

1:10:17 - Leo Laporte
No, that's not a landline, because there's no copper, that's through the internet, right? I mean I suppose some older people do. We for years on the radio show I would tell people always have a landline because even if the power is out and the internet's out, it will continue to work, because back in the day AT&T and the other phone companies are required to keep that powered from their central office. I don't know if that's still true. The CPUC, the California Public Utilities Commission, turned them down.

1:10:47 - Jason Hiner
Is ISDN still out there? Remember that for pocket. Yeah, sorry.

1:10:53 - Leo Laporte
So I have some experience with that, because in 2004 when I started the radio show that's how we did it ISDN line First put it in my house, then we put it into the cottage, we put it into the brick house studio and I think we had ISDN here for a while. But eventually Clear Channel, which syndicated the show it's part of the iHeartMedia, said you know, we can't get the phone companies to give us ISDN, they don't want to run those switches anymore. It's a separate switch.

1:11:24 - Jason Hiner
For each line, right? You have this dedicated line.

1:11:27 - Leo Laporte
Like nobody else is on your line, so the price went up and up and up and they tried to force you out of it. But what's interesting is, technology has improved to the point where you can now use really the Internet for radio broadcasts, and almost all radio broadcasts no longer use ISDN, they just use the internet, the public internet, using a specially designed device for that purpose.

1:11:50 - Owen Stone
It works fine. Nice, so the US phased out ISDN in 2022, but you can still get it in the UK for one more year. Wow, wow.

1:12:00 - Leo Laporte
It's kind of the end of the line. That was my first high-speed internet. I went from a 50 56k dial up and I got an isdn line which was 264 kilobit lines, always on, always on the. The phone companies originally invented it because they wanted to compete with the cable companies and offered TV over the phone line. This did not take off, needless to say, but they had this digital technology. So then they said well, maybe you could use it for the Internet. I don't know. So for a while we were the fastest kids in town with our 128 kilobit bonded. I thought it was pretty nice. I mean, I felt pretty good about it yeah yeah, same wasn't it.

1:12:43 - Owen Stone
You know, leo, up in your neck of the woods there's an isp called sonic oh, we love son, we have sonic, right now oh yeah, and sonic is, uh, I believe, also concerned about at&t's plan to abandon the copper network because they actually offer DSL still. I was going to ask that, yeah, because you know they're in the process of rolling up fiber. But you know, as you can imagine, fiber is a slow process. It's block by block and they still have customers who depend on that DSL and they would essentially disconnect them.

1:13:23 - Leo Laporte
I believe AT&T's proposal would be well, just go on 5G for your oh wow, that is probably not a good solution for a lot of people. Yeah yeah, Sonic is a. We're a customer. I'm friends with Dane Jasper, the guy who founded it. They've been putting fiber in all over the area. They're a really good ISP but Dane, to his credit, really fights the fight for consumers and that's one of the fights. I guess we have a 10 gigabit symmetric Sonic fiber here. I'm going to miss that, Whoa, Wow. You know I'm going to miss you, John, but I think I'm more than that. Even I'm going to miss the 10 gigabit symmetric.

1:14:04 - Parris Lilly
There is no fiber in my house. Do you have Sonic in your?

1:14:06 - Leo Laporte
house too. No, there's no fiber in your house. I have to go. Comcast is the fastest thing in my house I'm stuck with. I'm so sorry. In this country it's basically a duopoly everywhere. Yeah, it's either your phone company or your cable company.

1:14:24 - Jason Hiner
In my neighborhood they built AT&T, built fiber for the first two-thirds of the neighborhood but I live in the back, third oh.

1:14:30 - Leo Laporte
I'm so sorry.

1:14:31 - Jason Hiner
Which is where they didn't want to. They have a certain deal. They had to connect a certain number of households and they're like, yeah, it gets harder when we get back there. There's more yards we have to dig up. Yeah, so they didn't, so they there's been. There's been symmetrical one gig fiber in my neighborhood since 2017 hasn't, but I've still been frustrating spectrum so close and yet so far I can smell it, can you?

1:14:57 - Leo Laporte
smell the fiber.

1:14:59 - Jason Hiner
I can smell the fiber from my yard but can't get it.

1:15:03 - Leo Laporte
That is so frustrating. Dane told me that their whole strategy is you have to have a certain population density If you, and you can assume that a certain percentage of the people who are capable of being on the fiber will buy it. And it's a fairly low number, something like one in five or two in five. If they subscribe, then it pays for laying the fiber Because they do this is. The other issue is that the phone companies will, in many areas, not let them use the poles. Yeah, and pole access is a big deal. And he says we often have to trench. We can't go up in the poles. We often have to trench Because the Because we often have to trench, we can't go up in the polls. We often have to trench because the phone company doesn't like us. I wonder why they offer gigabit fiber for $60 a month. Wow, that's awesome. Nobody can compete with them.

All right, here's one for you, paris Lilly. Secure boot is completely broken. Dan Gooden, writing in Ars Technica, this seemed like a good idea back in the day, and it started because people were putting root kits on Windows machines Windows machines using BIOS to boot. The threat of BIOS-dwelling malware, dan writes, was largely theoretical, but still concerning enough that people decided to modify UEFI, the extendable firmware interface, to use public key crypto so that it would essentially the machine on booting would say is this boot software signed and unmodified since the signing? Okay, then I'll boot. That's secure boot, except Did you read this story, paris?

1:16:42 - Parris Lilly
I did.

1:16:43 - Leo Laporte
It's going to put shivers down your back. On Thursday, researchers from a security firm named Binerly revealed that secure boot is completely compromised on more than 200 device models sold by some of the biggest PC manufacturers in the world Acer, dell, gigabyte, intel and Supermicro. How could this happen? In the stupidest way possible, the cryptographic key underpinning secure boot on those models was compromised in 2022.

Someone working for multiple US-based device manufacturers published in a public GitHub repository a platform key. That's the cryptographic key that forms the root of trust between the hardware device and the firmware. It was secured by a four-character password, so, of course, four characters. You can do the math. It's not going to take long for you to brute force that it was brute forced. The key was disclosed pretty quickly after that accidental publishing, but it went unnoticed until January of last year when Binary Researchers found it while investigating a supply chain incident. Basically, anybody who used that platform key is compromised. It's an unlimited secure boot bypass for all devices using the platform key. You do have to be. You have to have either privileged access or be on-prem, so it's not probably most people with these machines doesn't. You know? Don't have to worry. I just wouldn't let your evil maid go near your computer.

215 devices use the compromise key and you can find a table at the end of the article by Dan Gooden of all of the devices. Article by Dan Gooden of all of the devices and it's you know it's quite a few devices from Acer, aopen, dell. A lot of gigabyte motherboards are widely used. I think we probably have quite a few gigabyte devices. Look at all those gigabyte motherboards that use the platform key and then Intel server boards from Intel Supermicro. So when you read this Paris, did you have to go to each machine and see if you had a problem?

1:19:09 - Parris Lilly
No, I mean, it really comes back to and this goes to our previous conversation, where we have a saying that your weakest link in security is human laziness, because it just is. You want convenience. You don't want to use anything that's complicated, you want ease of use. So the fact that you brought up the four character password of course it was a four character password because that was easy to remember. No one will ever try and crack it, but of course they're going to try and crack it. Of course the key was out on GitHubub. Of course the key was exposed to everyone. So now you can't trust any device because they're all compromised, it's just. It does not surprise me at all that that this happened and it'll continue to happen, unfortunately well it did.

1:19:54 - Leo Laporte
Okay, because ami then put out a certificate that was clearly labeled. You can see it here and the issuer says do not trust. The subject says do not trust. Despite that, an additional 21 platform keys with this certificate, this untrustworthy certificate, were used by other companies, like a open uh for uh me life, fojitsu, hp, lenovo and super micro.

So, oh well, I turn off, because I install linux in almost every system. I turn off secure boot anyway. So what the hell? Uh, russia is now throttling youtube access because, I guess, too many people telling the truth on YouTube by 70% at the end of next week. It was one of the last social media sites still available in Russia. It's probably your fault, paris. I blame you. They're going to slow YouTube download speeds by 40% this week, by 70% by the end of next week.

It's interesting, they don't block it, they just make it un unbearably slow every turn. Yeah, it's a deterrent. Youtube blocks facebook x instagram. I don't know why they block x. I feel like, uh, russia, I didn't. I said youtube, I meant russia blocks x facebook and it feels feels like Russia has so many accounts on X that they probably wouldn't want to block it. Anyway, everything that's happening is a consequence of the anti-Russian policy of the host host being YouTube that consistently deletes channels of our public figures, bloggers, journalists, artists with positions that differ from the Western point of view. I guess you can't blame them, right? Youtube did not respond to comment on this story from bloomberg. You still can access uh youtube on mobile devices. Apparently that will not be affected oh interesting it's.

1:21:57 - Owen Stone
It's interesting, though, because um in the, you know, in the ukraine war, uh mill bloggers, military bloggers, are such a big factor, in kind, of the information war that's happening around, you know I I.

So I kind of wonder if russia is um shooting themselves in the foot by, you know, by not kind of allowing their friendly mill bloggers to you know to get their you know, their version of events out on YouTube. Youtube might not be a particularly friendly you know place for them, though. I mean, I imagine a lot of stuff gets flagged as you know misinformation or disinformationinformation so they'd like to keep using it.

1:22:42 - Leo Laporte
Well, there are. There's our youtube. There are russian native versions of us over a similar product, and telegram is actually huge, huge in fact this announcement was on telegram. Yeah, that that, that tracks, that tracks. All right, we're gonna take a little break. Great panel, owen thomas. The new, improved, 64 pound, lighter version. You look so good now that now I hadn't noticed it, but now that you mention it you look great, nice job oh, thank you.

1:23:11 - Owen Stone
Yeah, you know it's. It's probably been little by little between every it has.

1:23:14 - Leo Laporte
It's been gradual, but now that you put the two together, wow, uh, first time for paris Lilly, not the last Great to have you from Gamer Tag Radio and, of course, jason Heiner, eic of ZDNet, our show today brought to you by NetSuite. You know, it's a simple business fact the less you spend in your business on operations, on multiple systems, on delivering your product or service, well, the more margin you have, the more money you get to keep. So it makes sense that, in order to reduce costs and headaches, smart businesses are graduating to NetSuite by Oracle. Netsuite is now the number one cloud financial system bringing accounting, financial management, cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, hr, all into one platform. And you know what that means A single source of truth, one source of truth. With NetSuite, you reduce IT costs because NetSuite lives in the cloud, no hardware required, which also means it can be accessed anywhere. That's really convenient. You cut the cost of maintaining multiple systems because, well, it's all under one roof, one unified business management suite. You improve efficiency by bringing all your major business processes into a single platform, slashing manual tasks and the errors that they produce. Over 37,000 companies have already made the move to NetSuite. So do the math, see how you'll profit with NetSuite to NetSuite. So do the math, see how you'll profit with NetSuite. By popular demand, netsuite has extended its one-of-a-kind flexible financing program for just a few more weeks. So head to netsuitecom slash twit N-E-T-S-U-I-T-E. Netsuitecom slash twit. Netsuitecom slash twit. We thank them so much for their support.

This week in tech, this hits home Paris Lilly Video. Remember the SAG-AFTRA strike, the writers' strike? Well, now video game performers are striking over similar concerns. Artificial intelligence taking their jobs. It's another strike. How is this going to impact the video game community?

1:25:21 - Parris Lilly
It could be huge, because if the strike is it going to, how is this going to impact the video game community? Uh, could be huge because if this is, if the strike is extended and and these voice actors and performers are are basically out for for a while, then game development could be stalled. On some of these big games that you'll and probably not even recent you know recent games that will come out this year or in 2025, but even down the road games that you might not see until 2026 could be affected by this, because you want to get those performances in and they help dictate, obviously, where the game is headed in a development standpoint. So this is a big deal and I'm actually glad that it is happening because I think these voice actors do need to protect themselves against AI. I'll just add in that a few weeks back, xbox invited me to sit down and hear their approach on how they're using AI or how they're attempting to use AI in game development, and there's some things that I'm like yeah, I can see how this will be helpful, but I can also see the other side, where you potentially will be putting people out of jobs.

And specifically about this from a voice acting standpoint, I'll just use Troy Baker as an example. He's very, very well known voice actor in gaming. He's done things like the Last of Us, matter of fact, the Indiana Jones game that's about to come out. He's like a dead ringer for Harrison Ford in that game. Under this, he's not protected of if AI could literally replace him, and now one of the most talented voice actors that we have in this industry is no longer needed because they can just replicate his performance on any game. So I do think they need to strike. Do think, just like hollywood did, um, they need to get some, some policies and basically some regulation in place on how this is going to be used what?

1:27:08 - Leo Laporte
at what point in making a game do they bring in the performers to act it out? I know when you're doing um, like cartoons, you do. You do that almost at the beginning because the animation has to match the voice. I guess it would be the same for games. I don't know.

1:27:22 - Parris Lilly
Yeah, and again, I'm not an expert as far as that goes, Just the limited knowledge that I do have on that. I think it is happening at various stages throughout the process of game development, which these big AAA games now I mean. You're talking four or five years during that cycle. So that's why I was saying this strike right now could affect the game that you might not see two years from now.

1:27:49 - Leo Laporte
You may say. You may remember that this is the second time they've they've been on strike. They went out at the same time as the writers went out a couple of years ago, but they've been in negotiation now for another two years, specifically over artificial intelligence protections. Um, the SAG-AFTRA's negotiators say the gains they have made, gains over wages and job safety. So they've made progress. But they are split on how to regulate gen AI. Right, and it makes sense. Do they routinely get performers to record enough material for the ai or can they just use existing material and go from there and that?

1:28:29 - Parris Lilly
I would imagine that's part of why they're on strike right now and that's why I brought up brought up troy baker as an example because there's such an extensive library, right, you know of work throughout the years. Can they just go back into his back catalog, so to speak, and use AI and teach AI how to replicate all his performances? And I'm like okay, troy, we don't need you for the next game in the Last of Us 3, because we already have your performance as Joel as an example, right? So that would be the concern I think these actors would have that even previous work they've done could be replicated with AI. And are they being compensated for this? Or are they being, you know, replaced altogether?

1:29:06 - Owen Stone
It's. You know, I, I, I do think there's another way to to look at this, which is that, you know, acting in games has been kind of stuck in the choose your own adventure model. Remember those books where it's like, you know, okay, if you make this choice, turn to page 50,. If you make this choice, turn to page 51. And game actors can only record, kind of like what's in the script. If you go off script, that's where AI could actually do something creatively interesting.

If you could imagine, you know, essentially an AI, presumably based on a human actor, being able to kind of roll with any scenario that evolves organically within the game. But you know, how do you compensate the human actor for kind of the base of that in in a way, that's fair. But, you know, let, let's, let's take, let's, you know, let's take as, given that there are, there are games that you can't create right now, not because it's too expensive to pay the actor, but it's, you know, like you would have to have the actor sitting there for decades recording all the possible permutations of gameplay.

1:30:23 - Parris Lilly
So, speaking on what you're saying, that's actually a great example. That's what Xbox was showing me a few weeks back. A scenario, let's say it's an open world game with NPCs that are populating it Now. Their interactions with you are dynamic, so each player is having a unique experience compared to the other one, because it's not following a set script. That's great. I think of sports games like nba or madden, where you have the announcers. Now they can real-time react to what's going on and they're not just following a script yeah, because they always say the same stupid thing.

I want to hear, I want more yeah, and that's where, okay, I can see AI being beneficial in that aspect. Great, you know, as a gamer, I would love to see that. But you also want to protect the people that are making these games and that are providing these performances that, if they're not being used and AI is randomly generating their performance, they're at least being compensated in some way.

1:31:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there should be a framework for that, I agree. Yeah, if they're at least being compensated in some way. Yeah, there should be a framework for that, I agree. Yeah, if they're using your voice Now, did Harrison?

1:31:28 - Parris Lilly
Ford get money for being-. Well, they're using his likeness, so I would imagine-.

1:31:32 - Leo Laporte
I guess he's getting paid for that, right? Yeah, he's got to get something. But they.

1:31:35 - Parris Lilly
Obviously. Harrison Ford's not going to sit in a VO booth for a game, so you get a voice actor to replicate his performance.

1:31:42 - Leo Laporte
I love the idea of having you know. I mean, how many times have you heard of getting an arrow shot in the knee? Right, you don't want to get it. You give me another reason why you're no longer adventuring. I'd like to make up some new ideas. It isn't, by the way, just a voiceover. The agreement covers more than 2,500 voiceover performers, but also on-camera performers, motion capture and stunt performers there are quite a few of those the coordinators for those stunts, singers, dancers, puppeteers and background performers.

There are a lot of humans involved in video game rendering these days and they all want to make sure that they're protected against AI. Members voted overwhelmingly last year to give authority, the leadership authority to strike. Of course, the movie studios made a deal with during the film and television strikes a couple was it last year, I guess, and now they want to be protected as well. Couple was it last year, I guess, and now they want to be protected as well. Um, be in. Well, we'll see if it, if it holds up some big titles, does. It seems like it doesn't take much to hold up a big video game title these days.

Eu threatens to find meta because meta keeps saying Facebook's free what the EU says it's notified Meta that it's new pay or consent model for Facebook and Instagram. That was the deal where Meta said look, we make our money by tracking you and showing you ads for things you might be interested in. If you're not willing to be tracked, if the EU forbids that, then we're going to have to charge you, and I think they proposed $15 a month, which no one's going to pay 15 bucks a month for Instagram or Facebook. I don't think the EU says that Meta has until September 1st to propose changes to its model, which it calls misleading and confusing for users. 12.99 euros a month to use facebook and instagram without ads is that a fair amount of money, about 15 a month to not have ads? I I don't know. I like instagram, but I it's got so many ads. Maybe it would be worth it youtube.

1:33:58 - Parris Lilly
Is the youtube premium? I believe. Believe is what? $13.99?.

1:34:01 - Leo Laporte
That's expensive, but it's worth it, because if you don't pay it, you're going to hate yourself. Yeah, you're going to hate your life.

1:34:09 - Parris Lilly
From social media to Doom Scroll on Facebook. No, I'm not paying that much yeah.

1:34:17 - Owen Stone
For reference, Meta's ARPU, or average revenue per user, in the US and Canada is around $68. So that's how much money they make on ads A year, a year.

1:34:28 - Leo Laporte
So $5 a month a little more.

1:34:31 - Owen Stone
Yeah, a little over $5. It's lower in the EU. It's around $23.

1:34:35 - Leo Laporte
So they're asking for a real premium.

1:34:39 - Owen Stone
Yeah, and it's not quite clear why, and I'm sure that would come up in the investigation, like what's the justification? If you're only making $2 now, why do you think you should make $15 or $16 a month per user?

1:34:56 - Leo Laporte
The EU says that the company uses confusing language to explain how both the paid and and they put this in quotes free versions of Facebook and Instagram work, and that the rollout pressured people to make a choice without enough time to consider how it would affect them. They also say calling the ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram free is misleading, since you have to consent to the use of data for targeted ads.

1:35:24 - Parris Lilly
That's an interesting point.

1:35:25 - Leo Laporte
Is something free if you have to consent to being tracked.

1:35:32 - Owen Stone
If you're not paying, you are the product. Yeah.

1:35:36 - Leo Laporte
I mean honestly, that's how we've always said it. Right, it's free. Gmail is free. Instagram is free. Gmail is free. Instagram is free, twitter is free. But people understand that it's free, but there's ads and that's what supports it. I'm not sure Are Europeans more confused about that.

1:35:58 - Owen Stone
It's interesting too. In the, the streaming world free is kind of increasingly popular. There are services like pluto and to be right that are supported. Free tv yeah essentially like, yeah, like the classic broadcasting model amazon actually calls it free tv.

That's the name of it, and preview yeah preview google tv does too, yeah and, and you know I, maybe it's kind of easier with it. You know, when you're kind of like being hit with a video stream, you know for an ad to pop up there. You're you're used to it. But, um, there doesn't seem to be the same controversy over ads and in that, like, you're watching something and then an ad pops up versus you are consuming, really participating in a social media experience and ads are being, you know, kind of slid into your feed in a not very transparent way. I think there's, you know there definitely are questions about that model to this day.

1:37:03 - Leo Laporte
So maybe this is explains it a little bit. The commissioner for Dush just says people might be confused at the thinking if they're paying they won't see ads. They're still going to see ads, but they won't be tracking you. That makes it completely undesirable.

1:37:27 - Owen Stone
15 bucks just so they don't track me, but they're still going to show me ads. Also, who is going to deliver an ad in an untrackable environment?

1:37:34 - Leo Laporte
they're not, doesn't yeah, it doesn't make sense to me that like an advertiser would agree to that well, that's one of the reasons we're struggling, because we can't track you in podcasts and advertisers want to track you, so some fortunately some of our advertisers still don't do, don't you know can live without it. We had an advertiser this week cancel a pretty big contract because we couldn't track people and they said what? Oh well, we don't want those ads.

1:38:05 - Owen Stone
Then I mean, you know, nbc, abc, cbs. They're not tracking their broadcast. That's true, you know like if you're getting it over rabbit ears, they have no idea.

1:38:17 - Jason Hiner
They just give you audience data right, which you can do too. Leo, I'm sure you're giving them audience data. Here's what we know about our audience. Here's who you get.

1:38:25 - Leo Laporte
It's not as it's not as uh, as useful or good as as stuff from a nielsen survey or people meter, but it's what we can, the best we can do. All a podcast knows about you is your ip address, and that is not necessarily of any use, and we don't reveal that to advertisers anyway.

1:38:42 - Owen Stone
I mean, and the IP address could be a service that is downloading the file.

1:38:46 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, For you, it's probably the San Francisco Business Times. It's not. I mean, do you ever download podcasts at work? Every podcast.

1:38:58 - Owen Stone
Yeah, I'm sure my phone is doing it.

1:39:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, of course, all, all the time every podcast people at microsoft download comes from the same ip address. It's not much, doesn't tell us much, in fact we can't even count.

1:39:09 - Jason Hiner
Count them because, uh, you know that counts as one download yeah, and this whole environment sort of took a step backwards this week with Google admitting that they're just going to stop deprecating cookies. Oh yeah.

1:39:25 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a break and let's get to that story. I want to talk about that. I also want to talk about ChatGPT. They've announced they're going to do a search product which is going to be very interesting. This is what Google's been fearing for years. All that and more coming up with our great panel. Paris Lilly is here from Gamer Tag Radio, jason Einer from ZDNet and Owen Thomas from the San Francisco Business Times. Our show today, brought to you by ExpressVPN.

This is right down the privacy alley. Right A few decades ago, private citizens used to be largely that private. What changed? Oh, the internet. Think about everything you've browsed, searched for, watched, tweeted, x'd. Now imagine all that data being crawled, collected and aggregated by data brokers into a permanent public record your record. There's a few members of Congress who wish that there were no such thing right about now. Having your private life exposed for others to see was once something only members of Congress and celebrities had to worry about, but in an era where everyone is online, everyone is a public figure. So maybe you ought to do what I do Keep your data private when you go online.

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We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. We also thank our great Club Twit members who make this show and all the shows we do possible. Now I have mentioned before we're going to have one more episode of Twit in the studio. We are closing the East Side Studio for good in a couple of weeks. That's to save money. But thanks to Club Twit, we are going to continue on. We'll soldier on All our shows ad-free. You get access to the Discord. We will be streaming into every streaming service known to man. We will give you additional content. It is all possible thanks to our wonderful Club Twit members Seven bucks a month. You can pay more if you want, but I do ask, if you like the shows and you want to keep the shows going, that you join the Club Twittv slash Club Twit. Thank you, thank you, thank you to all our Club Twit members.

I said earlier, and I think it's really true, I don't know if we'd be turning out the lights for good in two weeks if it weren't for the club. The club's making it possible for us to continue operations and not lose anybody. The only person we're losing is John Slanina, who will be retiring after many years of service. Thank you, john. We're going to miss. That's going to be hard. Who's going to be there to yell at me when I swear? I don't know how I'm going to do it. I want a little button, a little jammer B button that goes hey, knock it off it goes hey.

1:44:22 - Jason Hiner
Knock it off. You can make an AI out of John and his voice and then just have it detect when you've said a bad word.

1:44:28 - Leo Laporte
It's on a USB key. Thank you, John.

1:44:31 - Jason Hiner
Nice.

1:44:32 - Leo Laporte
All right, I got John in a box right here. It's in my pocket, that's good. I will assign a Stream Deck button just for you, john, and anytime, I swear, I promise I'll hit it. Hey, all right, let's talk about this. Jason Open AI announces Search GPT. It's an AI-powered search engine. Not available yet, it's a prototype and limited release. Only a few, maybe a thousand. I tried, of course, because I pay for Chat, chat gpt, but uh premium yeah, premium, but I know it's only.

I think a thousand people will get initially, but this is the thing that had google shaking hands boots a couple of years ago, right?

1:45:12 - Jason Hiner
yeah, for sure, and xenon reported on this, you know.

This week too, of course, ai's become our most popular topic cyber security is the most popular topic on zdnet for for over 10 years and and january 2023, ai was. Ai was the number 22 most popular topic in 2022. In january 2023, it leapt to number one and we thought, well, this is sort of a fluke, because you know it's going to be just this month or whatever, and it's been number one ever, ever since um, so, so so we cover it. This one was really interesting because, um, it was anticipated earlier in the spring in the event that that um, that they did uh, that uh, that open ai did uh, where they released um gpt 440 and they didn't announce the search engine then, but they have announced it now. You know it's rolling out to about 10,000 users and publishers for OpenAI to collect feedback. But really, it's taken this idea and I think, the biggest thing to think about with this, at least the people that I know that have used ChatGPT. When they went to use it and to try it, if they didn't go oh, I'm not sure what this is and then leave if they kept using it.

What most of the people say is there's a lot of things I used to go to Google and now I just go to to chat GPT. Right, they'll go there as sort of first line of defense, because there is some more naturalness to it and it's why, of course, google is cramming a bunch of its what, the SGE, sort of its version of these results at the top. These AI produced results at the top of their results search results on googlecom but they've gotten a lot of pushback from users that don't love it. I think the opposite is going on here. So the great thing about ChatGPT is you can follow up, right.

If you ask it what's the most popular language spoken in Ghana, then you can do a follow-up question and say what's the second and third most popular languages spoken in Ghana, right? Or even you can just say what are the second and most third popular languages, and it knows via context that this is a follow-up search to your first one, and that level of conversationality is just a lot more natural and, I think, ultimately a lot better. And it's why the rise of conversational AI has been what it is and it's why Google is really worried about it. For the first time really, in 20 years, since Google has become the dominant search engine, the landscape is changing. That's my perspective from a user perspective. I'll give you also a perspective from a publisher which is a little bit more cynical about this, which is that, you know, chat uh open. Ai is signing deals with a lot of publishers because some publishers, including us, are blocking them from using.

1:48:16 - Leo Laporte
they just call it the open internet using they just call it the open internet we do.

1:48:21 - Jason Hiner
We block all of the AI engines that try to scrape our content.

1:48:26 - Leo Laporte
You use robotstxt to do that, we do, yeah, so to keep them from training our models. Not all scrapers honor that, of course.

1:48:37 - Jason Hiner
That's right. We've seen that lately and so there's a little bit of a push and pull there. So I think, from a publisher's perspective, I wonder if part of this is their way of one saying you know that there's going to have this opportunity to use this data on the open web as a way to and let people sort of click through, although you know the rate at which people are going to click through from that versus the way they do on Google, still up for debate. You know the world is changing on that and it's going to mean a lot of difference. It's going to mean a lot of change for publishers like us, where you know Google is a is a huge source of of traffic for for what we do.

So I I am skeptical about this from that standpoint of like their motivations here. I think some of it may be antitrust related. Some of it may be also related to um because of um, you know, know if open, if AI and chatbots become sort of the force that it looks like they will be, you know they want to be seen as somebody who is playing fair, not, you know, taking people's intellectual property and using it without permission, all of these things. So challenging stuff, but I think ultimately, from a user standpoint, it's a good thing because it takes and it puts more pressure on Google in ways that nobody has really in the last couple decades.

1:50:14 - Leo Laporte
What about errors? What about? I don't like to use the word hallucinations because it implies it's a human but what about misattribution? Incorrect facts, I mean? Are we? I mean, right now, when you search Google, you can kind of trust those results? Are you worried about fabricated results?

1:50:39 - Owen Stone
Well, I mean you can kind of trust them right, but Google is, you know, google. Even you know Google has had problems with its, you know, with its Gen AI experience in search, with bogus results popping into that top result.

And they had problems before with their summaries.

You know, another way to look at this is that search engines have been training users to search the web for more than three decades and you know that interface, that way of thinking about you know asking a question, might ultimately be better than you know, than the chat interface for a lot of users.

You know the fact that there's a field called prompt engineering where, like you know, people are specializing in like how to talk to chatbots to get the right results. That suggests that there is a user interface problem with chatbots and maybe search is just a more familiar, more comfortable interface for a lot of people. It also you know to the. You know to that point about hallucinations, errors, just bad information popping up in results. Maybe it's better to get you know like three, five, 10 answers and you can quickly sift through them and say you know what, I can see what source this answer is from, and this answer is from ZDNet, so I'm going to trust it on cybersecurity. I think people naturally do that in search engines and maybe OpenAI is realizing hey, this is not a bad way to hedge our bets in terms of what user interface is going to win out isn't it, though?

1:52:25 - Leo Laporte
I mean, this is part of what jason's worried about is that you might go do a chat, gpt search, and it says you know, uh, zdnet says, uh, it's safe to use this technology, and you never even go to the zdnet article, you go oh yeah, well, some zdnet it's okay and you get. You get, no, no benefit from that. They get all the benefit from that. That's got to be one of the things that's concerning you.

1:52:53 - Jason Hiner
For sure. Yeah, for sure, although Google's been doing that Google started doing that.

1:52:59 - Leo Laporte
with the knowledge graph, google realized that what people really want is answers, not links, and so they've increasingly moved towards answers, not links.

1:53:11 - Jason Hiner
So there has been this move right. The sort of straight set of results that you got for a search has really not been a thing for a while. It's become more and more. A winner takes all game If you got into a code snippet, right, or, um, an answer box. The answer box are like where it will break down questions, right, and you can go into those questions, um. Or if you got into one of those code snippets, which is like if you, um, or or sorry, featured snippets where you know, say, you have an answer to, uh, a question about how to do something right, how to use a piece of software, how to fix something.

If you ended up in one of those, though, you got a lot of traffic out of it, so it's funny, because it looks like something that's like oh, if you end up in there, well, google just gave you the information from our article, but if you ended up in there, you ended up doing really well and that. The fact is, it used to be that, but it's a winner. Take all game right, cause there's only one site that gets in there. Or if you end up in the answers right, there's maybe a handful, whereas it used to be, though, if you were on the first page of Google, if you were one of those 10 on the first page, you got a lot of traffic, because people would often click multiple ones and see which one. So google is one in one sense more effective for users, because that's what google cares about, right, that's its job, but less friendly for publishers, because it's just more and more a winner takes all kind of game.

1:54:51 - Leo Laporte
Result you would like is a is a summary of facts, answers, not links.

1:54:58 - Parris Lilly
I maybe I'm just old school in this way. Give me the link, let me go to the actual source, versus you telling me a summary. Like I'll rephrase it. I like the fact that we're getting a summary of it, but I also want to be able to go directly to that source to basically vet what you're telling me. I would hate that we get to a point where we're no longer actually getting the actual source URL or link to where I can vet the information that's being shown to me, because, let's just be honest, we're in an age now where disinformation is rampant and we aren't a hundred percent trusting everything that we're getting you know from these AI bots currently or at least I'm not anyway so I want to make sure I at least have a way to make sure I'm vetting the information that's being given to me.

1:55:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean that that is a big point of it is that it's hard to judge the quality of the information, even with footnotes, unless you, unless you go to the site. Not that sites don't make mistakes too. Uh, I think you know I've been using for a long time I've been using on the iPhone something called Arc, and Arc is a new browser based on Chromium that I've been using on the Mac, but on the iPhone it's a little different. On the iPhone it's a search tool. You type in a search, let's say let's look for Reval ransomware, and then it gives you really two things you can do. You can. You can say go and it'll go to the page. But you see, it also has a button called browse.

For me, and this is, I think, what chat gpt is working on. You saw briefly to pages. This is this is it made a page for me of the answer and I get it's actually very useful. You get kind of an overview and then below that you might get some more. No, let's see, there we go. No, we still haven't got the links no link.

1:57:07 - Jason Hiner
No link to be seen.

1:57:08 - Leo Laporte
You have to go quite a way to get to links, so you're really getting a. It's as if you had a smart friend and you said, hey, tell me about the reval ransomware. And he went on for four or five pages and and it's been fairly accurate. I I have to admit, and I know perfectly well this is a terrible thing for your webpages, but I use it all the time because often that's all I want. I just want the summary of the information. I don't really need to see this.

1:57:39 - Jason Hiner
It's better for the user right, it's better for the user.

1:57:41 - Owen Stone
The trust is the issue right. The trust is the key component and we'll still we'll see where it all shakes out on that but it seems like a lot of users, um and I hate to make this a generational thing, but I'm sure they're mostly younger uh, they seem to believe any video where someone is like pointing up at words like this you know yes yeah, you know, whereas they'll be skeptical of you know anything, anything textual, like just just default skeptical.

Um, and I I wonder if we as a society don't just need to do a better job of, like you know, encouraging media literacy, internet literacy. Um, you know, in schools, in, you know, in the broader culture, teaching people how to vet information. You know, you know, as Paris said, like you know, it's just second nature to him to you know, to kind of like vet you know, vet a link and see where it's coming from and investigate, but that's not, I don't think that is a widespread behavior, unfortunately.

1:58:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, paris, you do a lot of YouTube stuff, right? Yes, that's good for you. There's, it seems to me. And no, nobody under 25 watches TV, they watch YouTube or they watch TikTok, or that. You know somebody pointing that text. I, I just think that's the future, isn't it?

1:59:21 - Parris Lilly
It is the future. It's so funny. Just to give insight into my home, I have three kids, but my wife it was like I had to pry direct TV from her cold dead hands. I'm like nobody is watching this except you. Oh wow, just get, get YouTube TV and be done with it, because no one's was why. So we actually finally made the switch earlier this year and it was so funny. She was so against it and now she can't live without it, isn't that? You know, she, she's just used to. How old are the kids? Oh well, I have older kids, so my, my daughter's, 22, my son is 18 and then my youngest daughter's, 14.

1:59:59 - Leo Laporte
Now I bet the 14 year old, never turns the tv on at all, never, never.

2:00:05 - Parris Lilly
My son only does it because he watches sports with me. Sports, yeah, but other than that, like you said, they're on normal regular youtube or they're on tiktok or snapchat or whatever they're doing these days. Yeah, it's hard to keep up.

2:00:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, uh, yeah. That's actually one of the reasons apple and amazon, uh, and all the other streamers are looking so hard at live sports. It's the only thing that gets people young people to turn on a television set. Yeah, yeah.

2:00:33 - Jason Hiner
Yeah, I watch mostly YouTube. I would say 80% of what I watch is YouTube.

2:00:37 - Leo Laporte
Well, you're a young person in an old person's body, that's all there is to it. You always had to have had a young young person persona. You don't watch TV. That's kind of young person persona. Um, you don't watch for the olympics? Uh, you know, it's so funny. Uh, I, I heard my wife cheering this morning. I came downstairs and I thought she must be watching the olympics. There's nothing else to cheer right now. Uh, she was, but she was watching it on her phone. We have a tv feet just a few feet away. She was looking at clips on her phone and that's all she cared about. She didn't want to watch the whole race, just who won.

2:01:16 - Parris Lilly
Go ahead. I'm sorry.

2:01:18 - Owen Stone
And it's a huge thing for NBC Universal, too to get people to watch the Olympics on Peacock right now. They think this is kind of make or break to get that streaming service to critical mass All right.

2:01:31 - Leo Laporte
Well, I want to talk some more about this. I want to talk more about AI, but we are running out of time. I am so glad to have it is 420, so don't go anywhere. I am so glad to have Jason Heiner, paris Lilly and oh, he already left. No, no, he's back. Owen Thomas he's pointing up at the words at the top of the screen A great panel today, perfect for the subject matter, and it provides end-to-end lifecycle protection for cloud-native application environments.

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You want this thing. Visit panopticaapp to learn more. P-a-n-o-p-t-i-c-a panopticaapp. You're going to love it. You're going to love it. Thank you, cisco. They've been a big supporter of late. You saw that speaking of AI. Jason. Reddit is now. They made a deal with Google I think $60 million to access all their Reddit stuff which, by the way, of late, when I talk to people you do site redditcom before any Google search. You're going to get real results from real people, but they are not letting anybody else scrape them. Now Reddit says this has nothing to do with the $60 million that Google paid us.

2:04:26 - Jason Hiner
Yeah, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, google has put its thumb on the 60 million dollars that google paid us. Uh, yeah, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, google has put his thumb on the scale for reddit. Certainly, users are doing it, for sure. But you know, one of the things we've seen in product searches is, just in 2024, all of a sudden, reddit things that you're searching for, um, if you're looking for a review of something, or you know the best phone under $500, or things like that Reddit has ended up filling up a ton of those results, much more than ever before, which has almost gotten, has sort of over-indexed a lot of these things to sort of the confusion and and almost the inconvenience of users, to the point that Google appears to be dialing that back a bit.

But there's no doubt. But there is no doubt that users want to see not just what publishers like us have to say about something. They want to see what people in the real world have to say about it too. Right, they want both those perspectives, and so and people don't fully trust Amazon reviews. They know there's a lot of spam and a lot of fake reviews in there, and so Reddit is a good alternative, and then I think, you see, you know, I think Reddit.

I really do give Reddit some reason to be salty about the way things have gone the last couple of years, because some of the rumors are that OpenAI built a ton of their algorithm right on Reddit data and now it's gotten this huge evaluation. At the same time, reddit is also trying to go public and they have a much, much, much smaller valuation, even though they think that their data is worth so much more than what it's being valued for. They're like look, our data is what powered you know what, the hottest thing out there right now, and they've gotten no credit and no you know also financial benefit from it. So they certainly deserve to be a little bit salty about the way things have gone, and I know they're trying to I'm sure they're trying to navigate what that looks like for them for the future.

2:06:44 - Leo Laporte
I remember I wish I could give them credit. Somebody said I'm at the store, I'm looking at the maple syrup aisle and there's all these maple syrups and I'm trying to figure out which one's the best maple syrup for my pancakes. If I do a Google search, it's just going to give me a list. If I do a Reddit search, I find r slash maple syrup and I find people who are serious maple syrup aficionados listing the best maple syrups and why, and I go right to the one I want. And that's why Reddit is better, for because of humans, for some searches Reddit really is better. That makes sense to me.

2:07:26 - Jason Hiner
This is the thing that people thought. Remember um, uh, when, sir, when, when social was really getting big and people would, when, when twitter was still like a fun place, you know, and you, you would go and doing just this instead of saying, um, going to google oh, you'd ask reddit, twitter, lazy reddit you would ask lazy, you would ask twitter, rather lazy twitter.

2:07:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you would just say on twitter hey, lazy Twitter.

2:07:48 - Jason Hiner
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You would just say on Twitter hey, what's the best maple syrup to buy if I make it pancakes, and you would get like 10 2030 answers. You know from your, your friend network.

2:07:58 - Leo Laporte
Do people still do that or is that is that I don't ability lost?

2:08:02 - Jason Hiner
I don't think so. There's just there's just too much noise on there. Also, remember there wasn't a whole lot of activity on on the social networks, to be fair, back then, right like now, I mean, and algorithms dominate it. If you put that on some of these ones that are dominated by algorithms, you know that's just never going to end up in many people's feeds and so it's sort of worthless and so people don't do it. But um but boy, there was a lot of that, and Google was really freaked out.

2:08:30 - Leo Laporte
That was the whole reason social search, google Plus, that's right.

2:08:35 - Jason Hiner
That's right, because they were afraid that they were going to miss out on this and they had this whole narrative. And there was the whole, you know, narrative about them talking about this painting in the Googleplex with the boat and the ship and the sea, and there's like this is us and and we have to go into social or the ship is gonna sink this is how you know your company is not doing well, when every time somebody comes up with something, you have a panic and you all start running around like crazy they did it, uh then, and that's they like they.

2:09:10 - Leo Laporte
I remember everybody it said yeah, your bonus depends on how well we do in social. Now, now they're doing it with open ai and ai search. That's a bad sign for a company. You're always reacting instead of it's not great, yeah, doing it's not great they did it badly with social and it didn't go well.

2:09:29 - Jason Hiner
I think I it's they. They're also doing it pretty badly in in ai. It's not going great either. I think they will eventually do better. You know, in in ai they did originally invent the transformer model. Right, that was technology that came out of google oh, that's oh good point. Yeah, yeah, a lot of the best.

2:09:48 - Leo Laporte
AI stuff came out of Google.

2:09:51 - Jason Hiner
Yeah.

So I think that they have what they call in the industry like a right to win.

They have a right to win a little bit more in AI than they ever did in search, for sure, because they have people that have been thinking about these problems for a long time that have been thinking about these problems for a long time. I think that they held back on some of the language model stuff, even though I think they knew that there was a lot of potential and that it was going to happen quickly, because I think that one they worried about some of the what this technology could do in the wrong hands, and I think they also worried about it siphoning money off of their main business, which is search ads right, people putting ads around search. They're a public company that has to make more money every quarter to satisfy their shareholders and they worried they didn't see a real endgame for them there. So I think they will eventually do well. They're still stumbling and they are behind, but I do think that in generative search they will do much better than they ever did in social.

2:10:59 - Leo Laporte
We shall watch with interest.

2:11:02 - Owen Stone
I would love an AI bot that takes a YouTube video and converts it basically into the format of a Reddit post. Like I, you know, and, and clearly a lot of people are getting answers to their questions, um, on YouTube. But like, oh yeah, I don't want to watch a video.

2:11:21 - Leo Laporte
I want to, you know, want to learn something, and YouTubers have a little bit of a habit of drawing out the beginning. Want to learn something? And youtubers have a little bit of a habit of drawing out the beginning, mentioning the subscribe and the bell and the thing in 15 minutes, and then there's finally the thing that you, you, watch paris knows this pain the little person's laughing.

2:11:37 - Parris Lilly
Yeah he knows the game.

2:11:39 - Owen Stone
Yeah, gotta get those 10 minutes it's like when you search for a recipe, there's, like you know, a 2000 word. Yes, you know 2000 word, word, narrative, uh, intro, which is you know, which is largely because you know the the copyright rules around recipes are you can't copyright the recipe itself, like the raw list of ingredients, um, or even the the steps, but you can copyright, like the creative expression around the recipe.

2:12:05 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, so I've seen this a lot. It's been more and more the case. Why is it that they're doing this? It's literally four pages down before you get the recipe. The reason you went to that site they do it so they can own it.

2:12:20 - Owen Stone
Yeah, I mean they can't own the recipe proper, the treatment they can own, yeah, the treatment they can own. And also, you know those 2,000 words, if it's interrupted every 500 words With a mad.

2:12:33 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I always forget that thing, yeah, yeah.

2:12:36 - Jason Hiner
Actually Cashing five checks all the way down, you know on that.

2:12:40 - Leo Laporte
That's a good point. It happens to me every time I fall for it. Speaking of X, elon Musk is in a little bit of trouble because X has apparently changed their rules to say that you are automatically opted in to your tweets, your data being used to train Grok. It's LLM, according to a spot by Easy Baked Oven Twitter Twitter. Just this is Kimmy, bestie of Bunzee, ceo of Execube Tech. I don't know, she's easy bake oven on Twitter. Twitter just activated a setting by default for everyone that gives them the right Twitter's right the right to use your data to train Grok. They didn't announce it. You can disable it, not in the mobile app, but only in the web app, but you've got to find it and there's the setting. This is just the trend, isn't it? Is there anything wrong with doing that Personally?

2:13:39 - Parris Lilly
yes, I don't like it. I would prefer that you give me a, you officially communicate that you're doing this, so that I have the option. Even if you're going to force me to opt in by default, at least let me know so I can then decide hey, all right, I want to keep it in, or I can go in and disable it, because I saw that same tweet and I immediately went and disabled it. Did you want to participate? Yeah, I don't want to participate in that. I think anything and again, obviously ai has been a hot topic for this entire episode. I think everything ai related. The consumer should be aware of what they're contributing to it and, if they want to be a part of it, make it an option. Allow us to have a choice versus doing it this way. We know that wild guess. 75% of the people on Twitter aren't going to bother to opt out of this and they're basically allowing their information being used to train this AI bot.

2:14:39 - Jason Hiner
Defaults matter right, like when you, when you default stuff. Still so many people never change the defaults. I think it's generally 80% or higher On most things. People never change the defaults. You know most users will never change the defaults.

2:14:53 - Leo Laporte
Well, and that's why X did it that way, right, yep, for sure they know that, and this is a company you know.

2:15:00 - Owen Stone
I think Elon Musk is in denial about it, but it's still under FTC scrutiny over its data practices and, yeah, it doesn't seem like a good move, but you know, elon don't care.

2:15:14 - Leo Laporte
Elon is the honey badger of social media owners or whatever. I don't know.

2:15:25 - Jason Hiner
If we are talking about this data collection piece and AI, and since we are, and since it's now rumored that, uh, ios 18.1, the beta is coming out with Apple intelligence and it is imminent for the next you know, oh really, I thought they weren't going to have it in time for the fall release, oh that was.

So that was, that was a, that was a German, that was a new German drop. So, since we're talking about that, there is one thing that this also relates to, because even Apple, who has made its whole reputation over the past five to 10 years, they're essentially like we're not very good at data, so instead we're going to look at privacy, we're going to lean into privacy, right, and they have done, and it's been very effective and it's been very good for users and it's good for the industry. Honestly right To have one, at least one player that is defaulting on the side of privacy. And then you have what Apple's done in Apple intelligence and especially image playgrounds, which is to me a bit shocking and has been undercovered and I'm sure you've probably covered it, Leo, on MacBreak Weekly.

But I think that what they've done with ImageClave playgrounds, where they went and they trained their model on the open web, right, and this is sort of as soon as people say we've trained it on the open web, then you know they've gone and they've taken stuff that they do not have permission to use and they've used it in their model and it's potentially taking money out of the pockets of creators and artists and all that and it shocked me that Apple did it.

But it is one of the things that I really do not feel good about and I'm surprised and disappointed and it deserves a lot more scrutiny, because you know that the Apple ecosystem very largely has been built and during their worst times on, creators right have been steadfast in supporting their platform and using their platform, and for them to do this in a way that really undermines so many creators is unfortunate and disappointing and is another sort of version of this right where it's like let's just go out and scrape everybody's stuff and now they say, oh, you can opt out of it, but they've already grabbed your data and trained it with it right, and so there's some real yeah, there's some real answering that I think Apple and the industry is ultimately going to have to do. You know on on this.

2:17:53 - Owen Stone
Someone is someone's not minding the brand store over over at Apple park, because you know they also put out that horrible ad for I think it was for the iPad called crush.

2:18:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they actually showed it at the release.

2:18:08 - Owen Stone
yeah, yeah every form of human creativity into a little thin ipad right, you know. But it's like why didn't they show all of this creativity blossoming out of the ipad, the ipad supporting it, instead of?

2:18:21 - Leo Laporte
we are squeezing creativity out of the universe and turning it into silicon uh, I think maybe they are up against the same wall that everybody else is, which is that ai, if it's not trained on the broadest possible variety of content, isn't very good. And isn't that what they got with siri?

2:18:44 - Jason Hiner
maybe. But there's also, if you look at like what ai, what sorry adobe has done with firefly, for example, they've only trained things on licensed sources right, apple could have done something similar to that. Why wouldn't they do? Why wouldn't they do that that would have? Then then even publications like us, right, can trust something like that. We could use stuff on that.

We can't go and use apple intelligence to create anything that we're going to use, you know, in a story or anything, because we don't know the, the legal viability of those, um, things that they've scraped off the open web and who they're going to get sued by that eventually could sue us, right, if we used their image creation tool to create an image that then we used in a story. So it's, you know, it's radioactive, like. We could never use that and from an ethical standpoint wouldn't want to use that because it could be trained on something by someone who didn't give permission, you know, to use their stuff as a source. So you can do this stuff on licensed sources and Apple did mention in the keynote at WWDC that they mentioned licensed sources and that kind of thing.

I think to your point, leo. I'm ultimately saying I think you're right, leo, I think they decided we have to use the open web if our model is going to ultimately be as good and as flexible and as usable as everybody else's. But I still think it's a swing and a miss for going out and using the open web to train all of this stuff and it puts them and the rest of all of you know image stuff in some really murky legal territory and it's going to make it even more challenging, I think, over the next couple of years to sort out.

2:20:37 - Leo Laporte
Well, and if you're right, if it's possible to do it without, you know, infringing copyright, uh, then they ought to. Um, but there's so much pressure on all these companies to keep up at this point they're all running around like chickens with their heads cut off. They just, and that's why so much stuff is breaking. And you know, uh, move fast and break things is the motto.

2:21:00 - Jason Hiner
They're afraid to miss the wave.

2:21:02 - Leo Laporte
They don't want to miss the wave.

2:21:03 - Jason Hiner
There's a lot of buzz about the wave and the reality is that you know we are probably getting a little over our skis, like we do in the tech industry. Every time something new comes out, there's a lot of enthusiasm. We'll get to the trough of disillusionment, you know, before too long, and then it'll sort itself out and, like, over time, a lot of real stuff and interesting stuff will get really good over a longer period, you know.

2:21:30 - Leo Laporte
I hope you're right and I think that's exactly, actually a very accurate analysis. Let's take a little break, one last break before we wrap things up. What a fabulous panel. To have all three of you on the show today has been a blessing for me, and I thank you, paris Lilly and Owen Thomas and the wonderful Jason Heiner, our show today brought to you by 1Password. Now we've talked before about 1Password's latest acquisition, the folks from Collide, and now they've merged the two to make a tool that everybody, every enterprise, needs. Because I'll ask you a question Do your end users always use only company-owned devices and it approved apps?

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Check it out at 1passwordcom slash twit. That's the number one. P-a-s-s-w-o-r-d dot com slash twit. Make sure you get that slash twit in there so they know you heard about it on this Week in Tech. 1passwordcom slash twit. Tech onepasswordcom slash twit. Actually, this whole thing makes me think of Amazon and their Echo. We knew that they were losing money on the Echo. Now we know they're losing a lot of money on the Echo. According to the Wall Street Journal, between 2017 and 2021, in a four-year period, amazon lost more than $25 billion. In a four-year period, amazon lost more than $25 billion. We don't know what they lost since then. That's meta.

2:24:53 - Owen Stone
VR money.

2:24:54 - Jason Hiner
That's like meta level VR sort of money there. That's.

2:24:58 - Leo Laporte
Echoes, kindles, fire TV sticks, video doorbells. They bought Ring in that time period. They're trying to reverse the loss and one of the ways they're trying to do that is we think we've heard that they're going to have a paid version of amazon echo that has ai in it five dollars a month. You're ready to pay five dollars a month for your amazon echo paris?

2:25:25 - Parris Lilly
oh, you're muted is it us or him? That was my dog barking. I muted earlier. No, I was saying, echo isn't allowed in my house. Now, oh interesting, I'm definitely not spending $5. Why not Paris?

2:25:42 - Leo Laporte
well, ask my wife that question.

2:25:45 - Parris Lilly
She wants the dish and she wants no echoes and and honestly I I understand and respect her reasonings for it, because here's a device that potentially could be listening to all our conversations and she just doesn't feel comfortable having it. And I'm not necessarily pushing hard against that either. I'm like, okay, fine, we won't have echo in the house, so that's that's the main reason. But to your point about the question of spending five dollars a month, even if we did have that either, I'm like, okay, fine, we won't have Echo in the house, so that's the main reason. But to your point about the question of spending $5 a month even if we did have Echo, no, I don't think I would want to pay anything If it's not worth it for free.

2:26:18 - Leo Laporte
It's certainly not worth it for $5 a month. According to the Wall Street Journal, amazon's device operation was a pet project of Jeff Bezos, former CEO and founder, of course, and the Echo assistant was inspired by his interest in Star Trek. He wanted the computer in Star Trek. One former they quote one former longtime devices executive. When launching products back then, we didn't have to have a profit timeline for them, we had to get the system in people's homes and we'd win. We'd innovate and figure out how to make money later. Former amazon devices senior vice president, dave limp, told the journal in 2019 we don't have to make money when we sell you a device. We make money when people actually use the device. Problem is, people use the device to for cooking timers and to find out what the weather was, and they never use the device to for cooking timers and to find out what the weather was, and they never used the device to buy stuff on amazon. Uh, and that turned out to be a 25 billion dollar loss.

2:27:19 - Parris Lilly
Um, well, we'll see, and I think that's and then I think that's the big thing, leo, what you're saying, um, even though we don't use echo, obviously I have siri, you know, on my apple.

2:27:28 - Leo Laporte
Well, you, have something listening then yeah, yeah, but my wife does it.

2:27:32 - Parris Lilly
She turns it off on her phone.

Oh really boy she is adamant yeah, yeah, she is very adamant about her privacy and look good for her husband is I'm in. I'm in cyber security, so it makes sense. But to that point, even with siri, the only things I'm using for hey siri, what time is? Hey Siri, what's the score of the Lakers game? Hey Siri, is it going to be hot tomorrow? That's really all I'm ever using it for, so I don't see any time soon. A reason why I would want a paid tier of that, because I'm not using it at an advanced level anyways. Right.

2:28:07 - Leo Laporte
You don't need to pay $5 for the time or the score. How about you, Owen? Are you an Echo user or you don't have them in your house either?

2:28:17 - Owen Stone
I actually do have an Echo in my garage gym. This is going with my earlier theme. So when I'm swinging a kettlebell, I can blast RuPaul music at the highest possible volume. I love it. But you know, I can blast RuPaul music at the highest possible volume, I love it. But then, you know, I I don't know that that was really a considered decision, other than you know, I had, uh, I had an echo lying around, um, I think I, I think Amazon was even offering them free with purchase.

2:28:44 - Leo Laporte
Uh, at one point just. Oh yeah, they really wanted to get them in the house.

2:28:48 - Owen Stone
Yeah, how they were losing money on these things. You know my brother uses an Android, so Alexa calling is sometimes something we use as kind of like an iOS. What do you do when you're on an iPhone and your brother's on an Android Like, how do you call each other? It's a very first-world problem. I don't know, I guess I don't feel very strongly about is Amazon violating my privacy worse than any other company out there? But I also don't love the product enough to put it in my home proper. It stays in the garage.

2:29:35 - Leo Laporte
Um, yeah, and, and, and you like, though. You like it because, while you're working out, you can listen to music. That makes sense.

2:29:40 - Owen Stone
Yeah, it just. It just seemed like the easiest way to accomplish that, um rather than just doing it, doing it through my phone.

2:29:50 - Leo Laporte
I think we can wrap things up. I know Jason wants to go out and get his vegan cheese, so we'll let you have your vegan cheese. Jason Heiner is editor in chief of ZDNet. Our good friend, how many. When was your first time on Twitter? It's been a long time 2008, maybe wow that's very early on, yeah yeah, really great really great to have you on old friend always a pleasure and we will have you on the next time you'll be on, you'll be, I'll be in my attic, but uh, it will.

It will love it it will still be.

2:30:23 - Jason Hiner
I'm in my basement, yeah, why not?

2:30:25 - Leo Laporte
right, not Right. Let me see I can go to your appearances and find your first appearance.

2:30:31 - Jason Hiner
Oh nice.

2:30:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we have it on the website oh that's an old picture.

2:30:36 - Jason Hiner
Many many, many appearances.

2:30:37 - Leo Laporte
That's so cool that you have it Four pages of appearances, let's see your first one was going, going, going.

2:30:45 - Jason Hiner
Come on the funny thing I remember my first one because you all had invited me and I was visiting my grandmother in Fort Wayne, indiana. Oh wow. So I took my laptop and got in one spot and had my microphone, so yeah, it was this Week in Tech number 205 in 2009.

2:31:06 - Leo Laporte
You were on with John C Dvorak and Pete Cashmore, who was the founder of Mashable.

2:31:11 - Jason Hiner
Oh, from Mashable, yeah, yeah.

2:31:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, oh, that's funny. That is when we were only audio, so we can't go back and look at how fat you were back then.

2:31:21 - Parris Lilly
No, you weren't?

2:31:21 - Leo Laporte
You've always looked the same. You've never changed. It's amazing. Thank you, Jason.

2:31:26 - Owen Stone
It's really a pleasure, what a pleasure. Thank you for no always a joy.

2:31:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, thanks for having thank you to owen thomas, who's also a long time, uh, regular on our show. We just love having you on, and I and your new good looking slim show us the guns again one more time. Let's go to the gun show. Good lord, are you just lifting all the time? What are you doing?

2:31:48 - Owen Stone
You know I'm not going to lie, I am. I love it.

2:31:52 - Leo Laporte
You're ripped, my friend. You look great.

2:31:55 - Owen Stone
It's what works. Also like apparently this week in tech is the weight loss secret? Like, go on Twit and lose weight, there you go. It's like there's a causal connection. Yeah, I wish it would work for me, because correlation is causal.

2:32:10 - Leo Laporte
Owen is, of course, the managing editor at the San Francisco Business Times. If you are in San Francisco, you should subscribe, right? Is there a subscription? You just go to the website.

2:32:25 - Owen Stone
Go to bizjournalscom, slash San Francisco and smash that subscribe button.

2:32:31 - Leo Laporte
It's just that easy, and is there a cost to doing that?

2:32:36 - Owen Stone
Yes, there are various offers. I should know the latest rate. That's okay, people will find that out, but yes, sorry.

2:32:48 - Leo Laporte
I should have that at the tip of my tongue and we showed. That was your first appearance on the show, as far as I know back in 2012.

2:32:54 - Owen Stone
Yes, at least in modern times, yeah, in modern times.

2:32:57 - Leo Laporte
I think you'd been on before then, but that was the last time in modern times with video that we had you on. Thank you all, yes, great to have you and Paris. Thank you, yes, great to have you and Paris your first time. Was it OK to live up to your expectations?

2:33:12 - Parris Lilly
It absolutely lived up to my expectations and thank you so much for having me on. I mean, like I said, I'm just a big giant nerd, so you've been a part of my life for a long time. You make me cry and how I.

2:33:26 - Leo Laporte
What part of the country do you live in?

2:33:29 - Parris Lilly
Southern California. I live in Temecula.

2:33:31 - Leo Laporte
California.

2:33:33 - Parris Lilly
Yeah, just north of San Diego.

2:33:34 - Leo Laporte
So next time you're up in the Bay Area, come visit me in the attic. How about that?

2:33:39 - Parris Lilly
Oh, I would love that and I'm up that way a lot when I go to the studio for Kind of Funny. So yeah, I would love to do that.

2:33:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we still. I mean, I have two seats. I can't have a whole lot of people up there, but I have room for one more person. Thank you, paris. It's been great having you and we'll have you back very soon. Paris Lilley, thank you. Thanks to all of you for joining us.

Now a reminder next week, if you have a Vision Pro, we are going to do a Vision Pro version of this, thanks to Alex Lindsay and Stream Voodoo. So I don't know what that means. Will it be live? It has to be after. It'll be live. You can watch us live, okay, and it will be an all live in studio audience. It is, in fact, as I think you know, the schedule is a little fluid, but I think it will be the last show we do from the Eastside Studio, the last Twitch show we do. After that, it'll be up in my attic and it kind of, I think, a new model for what we want to do, something a little bit more fluid, incorporating more content from you, the community. Stay tuned, because, thanks to the club, we are able to do this little bit of a pivot here Should be a lot of fun. We thank you all for being here.

We do twit Sunday afternoons Actually, that's another thing I want to talk about Maybe moving the time a little bit earlier in the day. Benito, we should talk about that. Okay, yeah, right now we do it from two to five Sunday afternoon, pacific five to eight Eastern, 2100 UTC. But I'm thinking maybe move it to noon Pacific, 3 pm Eastern. That way I think we can get more people who are on the East Coast in the show and they won't miss dinner, which has been a problem. So just, we'll negotiate that and let you know If you have a strong opinion about that. Let us know, um what time you'd like to it to be.

I think most people listen after the fact and that's really the beauty of it you can uh, we record it so that you can watch or listen at your leisure, either from the website twittv or on YouTube there's a YouTube channel dedicated to this week in tech or subscribe in your favorite podcast player, audio or video. You can get the show after we finish it on Sunday, just in time for your Monday morning commute. Thank you everybody for being here. We really appreciate your support. Join us next week for the last twit from the Eastside studio and, as I have said now for 19 years, thanks to our wonderful panel and thanks to all of you. Another twit is in the can.

2:36:14 - Owen Stone
This is amazing. Doing the twit. Doing the twit All right, doing the twit, baby. Doing the twit All right, doing the twit.