This Week in Google 665, 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.
Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for TWIG This Week in Google, Stacey and Ant have the week off. But Jeff Jarvis is here along with our favorites, Kathy Gellis and Kevin Marks. We'll talk, there's lots to talk about. We'll talk about VCON the big NFT conference this past weekendend, in Minnesota. Wow. <laugh> we'll also talk about a digital driver's license. That's tough, tough to forge, but easy to crack and a gel film that may solve the world's drinking water problem, all that. And Seth Green's Bored Ape, I guess it's gone missing coming up next on TWIG!
Cathy Gellis (00:00:40):
Podcasts You Love From people you trust. This is TWiT.
Leo Laporte (00:00:49):
This is TWIG, This Week in Google episode, 665 recorded Wednesday, May 25th, 2022. The Apes of Wrath. This episode of This Week in Google is brought to you by Codecademy. Join over 50 million people learning to code with Codecademy and see where coding can take. You get 15% off your codecademy pro membership. When you go to codecademy.com and use the promo code twig. And by eightsleep, go to eightsleep.com/twig for exclusive Memorial day savings through June 6th. Cool down this summer with eightsleep now, shipping within the US Canada and the UK. And if you're listening after June 6th, well use the same URL to check out the pod pro-cover and save $150 at checkout. And by policygenius, if someone relies on your financial support, whether it's a child aging parent, even a business partner, you need life insurance, head to policygenius.com/twig to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. It's time for TWIG, This Week in Google, the show, we cover everything in the Google verse and beyond. Jeff Jarvis is our chief in charge of Googling and beyond. No, I, I do the beyond. You're the king of beyond TikTok. I that's what I do media. He is after all the Leonard Tow professor for journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark graduate school of journalism at the city university of New York Stacy has the day off Cathy Gellis is here back in with us from TechDirt fame. She is also a a professional attorney at cgcouncil.com. Hello, Cathy. Good to see you.
Cathy Gellis (00:02:44):
Thanks for having me.
Leo Laporte (00:02:45):
Welcome. We love having you on yes. Yeah, there's always stuff right up Cathy Cathy's alley. We need the attorney. We also need the king of the open web. Our good friend, Kevin Marks is joining us from indieweb.org from his home in the, on the Moores <laugh>
Kevin Marks (00:03:05):
Well, I did climb up a hill this week, so I I'm going off by particular photograph on the top of the hill.
Leo Laporte (00:03:10):
<Laugh> it's great to have you all of you on a sad day in America sad to say they never seemed to stop. Unfortunately it, you know, last week, 10 days ago, 11 days ago when the Buffalo massacre happened, we, we heard people blaming Twitch and 4Chan and discord for both radicalization and communication and so forth. I think again, they're saying there is some involvement with, but you gotta stop blaming the internet for this stuff. They seem, that seems to be the, the least culpable yeah. Agency here.
Jeff Jarvis (00:03:52):
And I think, I think Leo that the conversation has shifted. I think,
Leo Laporte (00:03:58):
I think it might have
Jeff Jarvis (00:03:58):
A lot more about Tucker Carlson about Murdoch. Yeah. About media as, as a whole and less about, about the internet per se.
Leo Laporte (00:04:07):
I mean, I I'll be honest. I will defend Tucker Carlson's right. To say whatever he wants. Oh,
Jeff Jarvis (00:04:12):
He can say whatever he wants, but doesn't mean Ruper Murdoch should be paying him to say
Leo Laporte (00:04:16):
It well, or you or Ruper. I mean, I guess, you know, he owns the presses, so I guess he can say what he wants, but you know, that's protected speech, but that doesn't protect him from blame and ignominy IGA, you know what I'm saying? <Laugh> none of that.
Cathy Gellis (00:04:32):
So the, the, the problems, the outrage conflates the issues. So I get very nervous about, okay, great. They're not, you know, people aren't kicking the internet and my job is to protect the internet. So, okay. That's relief, except they're still taking issue with some things that are first amendment protected because I don't think people see the difference of the toggle between there ought to be a law that ought to be illegal versus that kind of crap up with which we should not put. And I think that's a very different question about what we should tolerate as polite society, as acceptable messages within our midst versus what we should have a law to make sure it can never be spoken. And because there's not a good understanding of that difference, you end up seeing things that are, we should ban Fox news. And I think we should not watch Fox news, but that's a very fundamental different question of saying that the government should step in and make it impossible to watch Fox.
Leo Laporte (00:05:27):
I absolutely agree. Absolutely agree. In fact, in some ways you can, I mean, honestly I'd like to blame the judiciary that released Kyle Rittenhouse after he used an assault weapon on people on the streets and found him not guilty. That was a message to 18 year olds all over the country. It's okay. So, I mean, there's lots of blame to go around. I,
Jeff Jarvis (00:05:52):
I wanna blame my cable company for making me pay for Fox news. Good point O
Leo Laporte (00:05:56):
Good point. That's an interesting distinction. You could, we could push cable companies as, as its customers to stop carrying crap like that.
Jeff Jarvis (00:06:06):
Well, or even not that even, you know, we, they're not carrying RT anymore so fine. They have a right, just like Twitter does to decide what they carry and what they don't carry. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:06:15):
You can't leak leak. You can't stop them legally, but we could, as customers
Jeff Jarvis (00:06:19):
Say something, we could have a, an all cart, which has come up again and again and again, but, but the, the, the, if you wanna, an ad boycot of Fox is meaningless because the pillow guy's gonna be there no matter what. Right. And, and Murdoch doesn't really make his money. Now, that way he makes it from subscriptions either directly wall street journal, or indirectly through carriage fees and cable. Right. And if we didn't all pay for Fox and chose, not to, that would have an economic impact on him.
Leo Laporte (00:06:47):
Kevin, you know, you're in the UK sitting on the outside looking in, you lived in the us for a long time. Do people think we're nuts?
Kevin Marks (00:06:57):
Yeah. I mean, broad. I mean, <laugh>, we had a school shooting in the UK 27 years ago. It's a similar one where somebody went into a, a, a primary school and shot a lot of children. And we passed a gun ban within a year and it was a, a handgun ban as well. So yeah, there, there was, there was a response to that response that here and similarly in Australia, they they've passed right. Weapon bans as well. Yes. Yes. It will be hard in America because there are many more people with weapons and many more weapons, but it's not impossible.
Leo Laporte (00:07:27):
We have 5% of the global population, 42% of the global guns.
Jeff Jarvis (00:07:32):
But as I, I think a third of America owns those guns. So it's once again, as we constantly see these days, it's the tyranny of the third. Yeah. and, and I, I, you know, I, I, today somebody on, on, on Twitter said you know, I'm a proud non people talk about, they're proud gun owners, what, I'm a proud non-gun owner, and I'm a proud non-gun owner. I have never fired one. I never intend to.
Leo Laporte (00:07:55):
Yeah. Maybe it's time. I mean, for a long time, we've kind of a little bit kowtowed and said, well, you know, we have the right the second amendment, blah, blah, blah. Maybe it's time to stay. No, no, you know, it's, it's, it's time to stop. Let's, let's,
Cathy Gellis (00:08:09):
You's low hanging fruit. We could go for first. The problem is, is the conversation is so polarized where, okay, let's accept that. There's a, an appropriately libertarian argument for why certain weapons should be ownable by the population. But it doesn't necessarily mean that it extends quite as far as it's getting extended. I think there's a lot we could do before we actually start bumping up against what should our, inalienable rights actually be. There's a lot of sense you could bring to the policy discussion to where you haven't really interfered with the liberties, but you have sort of maybe bottled up some of the more risky consequences that we keep tempting, but we're not having a reasonable conversation. Everything is very polarized all or nothing. And you're, I just don't think we're gonna get to something sensible. If those are the two polar positions and nothing can exist in the middle.
Leo Laporte (00:09:03):
I do. I little bit of, a little bit of a bright light, I guess the news media, at least as far as I can tell is not naming the shooter in the last two events, which I think is, is exactly right. Yes. I don't think there should be any glory associated with this. No one should some of the news media mistake. Well, that's the thing. Yeah. Some, yeah, but, but, but the main, all the mainstream coverage I saw barely mentioned, that's the shooter, as it, as it as is right
Kevin Marks (00:09:32):
As it should, but the, but the fringe media and the, you know, the New York post and
Leo Laporte (00:09:37):
Maybe the places that those people go
Kevin Marks (00:09:39):
Rights are,
Leo Laporte (00:09:40):
Are glorifying them. Yeah.
Cathy Gellis (00:09:42):
Both. Yeah. No, but they did worse than that.
Kevin Marks (00:09:43):
Spreading the shooter. No. Yeah. They, they, they lied about the shooter and they said they made up a bunch of stuff about it. That wasn't true.
Cathy Gellis (00:09:49):
Yeah. They named innocent people as the shooter. Yes. So in a sense, we all in the accurate information, people have been making stuff up and in a way that's actually causing harm. So maybe it isn't really the way to, it's hard to know what the right, most ethical and responsible way to report on this actually is because you're sort of damned if you do, and damned if you don't, if you don't give credible information, people gap fill and they gap fill badly. So that's a problem. But on the other hand, if you give the credible information, then there's consequences of what does it mean for that information to be known?
Leo Laporte (00:10:21):
All right. Well, I was just trying to give somebody some credit for doing one thing, right? <Laugh>,
Jeff Jarvis (00:10:25):
There's
Cathy Gellis (00:10:26):
No room for that and this in 2022
Leo Laporte (00:10:30):
Oh man. I, and I didn't really, I, I think we have to acknowledge it. I didn't really plan to spend a lot of time talking about it, but I think we do have to have to acknowledge it such a great tragedy that happened 10 years ago at Sandy hook and should never have happened again, never ever happened again. And it's time maybe to stop soft pedaling this and start taking a hard line on it.
Jeff Jarvis (00:10:54):
And last night, this, this is gonna sound ridiculously trivial in this context, but, but I was last night, Fred Guttenberg, who's just heart rending. When he speaks about this was all when Nicole Wallace, one
Leo Laporte (00:11:05):
Of the, one of the parents of the Sandy hook
Jeff Jarvis (00:11:07):
Child, right? No, of of of Parkland
Leo Laporte (00:11:09):
Parkland. Okay.
Jeff Jarvis (00:11:12):
Whose daughter would
Leo Laporte (00:11:13):
Isn't it said that we had that we have so many that we,
Jeff Jarvis (00:11:16):
We confus him. His daughter would now be a freshman in college, and he's watching his friend's children in college where his daughter is not last night, he, he, I won't do it for this. I don't wanna get John mad, but he used the F word and, and I thought, oh, I'm gonna, you know, watch, MSNBC's gonna apologize for this. And I'm gonna get really angry. And they didn't, and they put up video, even though they in the text, they didn't use it, but they put up the video and, and, you know, I dare the FCC to come and complain about a passing obscenity
Leo Laporte (00:11:46):
If ever there were an appropriate use of strong language that would be.
Jeff Jarvis (00:11:49):
And so the other thing that's interesting, I dunno if you saw it, cuz you were, you were on your air quotes air. But Beto
Leo Laporte (00:11:56):
It's the air I'm floating through the air. <Laugh> some
Jeff Jarvis (00:11:59):
Beto O'Rourke
Leo Laporte (00:12:00):
Yeah, Beto interrupted governor Abbot's UN
Jeff Jarvis (00:12:04):
Tunnelly, which was
Leo Laporte (00:12:06):
Unseemly fundraising event the very next day.
Jeff Jarvis (00:12:11):
Right. Right. Which I think was, was great. And I think that we're, we're at a take no prisoner's moment on this. Well,
Leo Laporte (00:12:17):
That's kind of how I feel. I, I feel like yeah, I see a lot of rhetoric, especially from senators who have to deal with the other 50 senators saying, well, maybe we can do some minor compromise. We gotta do something better than nothing. You know, what vote the sons of bitches out in November period. It is time to say for the majority to stand up and say no more period.
Jeff Jarvis (00:12:39):
And it is the majority.
Leo Laporte (00:12:40):
It is the majority and you know what, they're gonna keep taking money from the NRA. The NRAS gonna have its I thought
Jeff Jarvis (00:12:46):
The NRA was bankrupt. By the way. I, I really don't understand that they gave $13 million to, to MIT Romney. I literally thought they were bankrupt. Where's this money coming
Leo Laporte (00:12:54):
From? Let's talk about <laugh> the Florida social media law because Kathy, you've got an article in this week's tech dirt about <laugh>, you know, and the way that tech dirt capitalizes titles is really, this is good. The problem with the otherwise very good and very important 11th circuit decision on the Florida social media law. So first of all is SB 70, 72, like the Texas social media law
Cathy Gellis (00:13:29):
<Laugh> okay. So we can't escape this conversation, not talking about Texas, Texas is also going to be relevant to what we're talking about. And Texas just filed something at the fifth circuit saying our bill is totally different than the Florida one. So this 11th circuit decision that largely flew throughout the Florida social media bill the council for the plaintiff appellant the, the plaintiffs who are challenging, it submitted as you know, supplemental authority like dear fifth circuit, while you consider authoring an actual decision about how you wanna adjudicate this appeal you might wanna know that your fellow circuit over here took the bulk of it. The bulk of a law that was trying to regulate content moderation in general and said the 11th circuit found that it implicated the first amendment rights of platforms. So they just went back to the fifth circuit and said by the way, you might wanna know that that's how a fellow court decided things. How
Leo Laporte (00:14:25):
Bound
Cathy Gellis (00:14:26):
Is the response
Leo Laporte (00:14:26):
To that? These are both federal courts of appeal, but is the fifth in any way bound by what the 11th does? Do they, are they a completely standalone independent?
Cathy Gellis (00:14:36):
So they're standalone independent. The 11th circuit would be regarded as persuasive authority, but the circuits are free to do what they want, except they're all supposed to follow circuit precedent and national precedent. So if the Supreme court has actually articulated something, then the circuits are all bound to they can't, they're not supposed that P to come up with a yeah, they, they, they have to be consistent with what the Supreme court said. Okay. Now that gives you a lot of wiggle room as a court, cuz then you basically try to argue that what the Supreme court said is in applicable to the case before you, right. But they're supposed to follow that. So when the 11th circuit looks at Supreme court precedent and says, based on the things that the Supreme court has said before, when we apply it to this type of law, we think that there's a problem it's bumping up against the first amendment interest of the platforms that we've decided that's unconstitutional. But the problem is, is the reason we have to go back to Texas is so both states had their own laws. The, the, that they came out, Florida had their, their law, which involved the weird theme park exception where it applied to all platforms, unless they happen to also own a theme park as part of their corporate assets. And Texas, yes,
Leo Laporte (00:15:45):
By the way, given how governor DeSantis feels about Disney these days, they probably wouldn't have left that in.
Cathy Gellis (00:15:52):
Oh, they had took it out. They actually, literally, they took it out. They amended the law while it was getting in the appeal promises. They actually,
Leo Laporte (00:16:00):
We don't like anymore. You're too woke, we're taken out. So
Cathy Gellis (00:16:04):
And so they took it out and then they had, and then they wrote to the court while it was busy, you know, chewing on this decision to update the court to say, by the way, the par exemption is no longer in the, in the, oh that's
Leo Laporte (00:16:14):
Law
Cathy Gellis (00:16:14):
Hysterical, but it's kind of like, you know, from the other side, the people challenging and it's kind of like, yes, they're right. You know, this just shows how arbitrary and capricious and how offensive it is to first amendment editorial judgment that like you would toggle it about like who your political enemies are. And this is who you're gonna target with your law.
Jeff Jarvis (00:16:31):
What was the one was the show title last week, Leo?
Leo Laporte (00:16:34):
I don't remember. What was it
Jeff Jarvis (00:16:35):
About laws that are made just for one party?
Leo Laporte (00:16:39):
Is this a I don't, I was only, I was only half here last week. I don't, I don't remember
Jeff Jarvis (00:16:45):
That. Oh, no, it wasn't last week. Oh, hell. This locked over. It was the week before that.
Leo Laporte (00:16:49):
Nevermind.
Cathy Gellis (00:16:50):
I gotcha. Moment failed.
Leo Laporte (00:16:51):
<Laugh> it did it.
Jeff Jarvis (00:16:52):
Did I just got myself. Yeah.
Cathy Gellis (00:16:55):
Well, so
Leo Laporte (00:16:56):
Bill of a TA was bill of a Tainer. Oh yes. Good old bill of a Tainer who could forget him. William of <laugh>. Yes.
Cathy Gellis (00:17:04):
So both states had these laws that kind of did slightly different things. Like they had a slightly different focus. Florida's is more about journalism and political campaigns and Texas, maybe that was the political campaign. They had a little bit difference in their orientation, but basically they were fundamentally that the state wanted to tell big tech platforms, how they got to do their moderation and put a lot of interest requirements, lets that would take away their ability to
Leo Laporte (00:17:29):
Do it freely. Let's let's be in the new spirit of calling things. What they really are. This was don't ban Donald Trump from Twitter law.
Cathy Gellis (00:17:40):
Yeah. That it boils down to dare you and
Leo Laporte (00:17:43):
Others at all. But yeah. But yes, you're not allowed to ban Donald Trump from Twitter law. Okay.
Cathy Gellis (00:17:48):
Right. So both
Leo Laporte (00:17:50):
I've got a question for, oh you keep going, but then I'm gonna have a question for you. Keep going.
Cathy Gellis (00:17:52):
Okay. So both states had laws like these and both states laws got challenged. And in both instances, district courts looked at them and said, we're gonna enjoy this or at least most of it. Because we see that this is conflicting with the first amendment rights of platforms. So the laws were enjoined. Nothing could happen with those laws. Then each state appeals, cuz they're unhappy with that. They want their law. So Florida appeals to the 11th circuit and that appeal was heard first. But then we were waiting for a decision for a while, which is not abnormal. It usually takes a long time to get a decision and then Texas had appealed and that was heard by the fifth circuit, in an oral argument. That didn't really go very well. It was very strange, sort of some of the questions being put back at the planet, but then it quieted down.
Cathy Gellis (00:18:40):
But then all of a sudden Alva blue two or three weeks ago, both laws were currently enjoined. And then the fifth circuit with no explanation whatsoever came out of the woodwork and said with a two to one decision, we're gonna stay the injunction, which basically in this one line order said, guess what? The Texas law gets to go into effect right now, whatever constitutional effect it has be damned it wasn't going to talk about it. It didn't explain why it thought it wasn't defending the first amendment. It put it in. And the Texas law is active law right now
Leo Laporte (00:19:15):
Pending of course is still on trial and pending a judgment down the road. But it's
Cathy Gellis (00:19:20):
Pending that they actually issue a ruling right on its constitutionality, which we're still waiting for. Right. So then this led to an emergency application to the us Supreme court, by the plaintiff challengers to say, hang a second, we need some relief because this is a really bad law. We definitely think it's implicating our first amendment rights and how can this be live? We can't even appeal it because there's nothing to appeal cuz there's no decision. So we shadow docketed. There's an emergency application to the us Supreme court to ask it, to give the some relief. And I wrote an Amicus brief in support of this. So I have shadow docketed too. Oh good. And so now we're waiting, but unfortunately it's quite of a big deal.
Leo Laporte (00:20:01):
The justice in charge of the fifth circuit is Samuel Justice
Cathy Gellis (00:20:05):
Alito. Now he did issue an order to make the state respond. So the state had to put in a filing. So there's some tea reading that suggests that this is being taken seriously, but we waiting
Leo Laporte (00:20:17):
Seriously. He, he could do two things. He could send it back, say Nope, not gonna get involved or he could then refer it to the other justices.
Cathy Gellis (00:20:26):
I'm not entirely sure what all the options are because this is
Leo Laporte (00:20:30):
Our docket is
Cathy Gellis (00:20:30):
So yeah, it's under articulated. The us Supreme court is normally very regimented with a ton and ton of rules, including if you're filing like as an Amicus, there's a ton of rules ordinarily. But in this case there's no rules. They have some proposed ones, but basically this is sort of like they're making it up as they go along, which is really not something you wanna see in your judicial system. But nonetheless it's sort of as a litigator, it gave you a little freedom of like, I didn't have to like spend money on expensive printing because that wasn't a rule here. We just kind of shoved it in with like, this looks reasonable. I think they'll take it. But this is really not how you wanna do your
Leo Laporte (00:21:07):
Litigation. We're seeing more and more of these shadow docket orders, unfortunately.
Cathy Gellis (00:21:11):
Right. So where we are now is nothing's come out of the Supreme court yet. Nothing's come out of the fifth circuit to explain its order. But early this week, the 11th circuit, I think rushed out their decision and their decision took aim at most of the Florida law to say, this is really colliding with first amendment rights of platforms and gave a very fullthroated analysis to talk about how a lot of the arguments like common carriage and this, that, and the other thing were like, Nope, there's this is, this is wrong. You've really done something that's unconstitutional. So it mostly continued the injunction on most of the Florida law. My teched post is raising concern that they didn't fully enjoy it. They let a few provisions go through and I think it's problematic that they did, but it's not the end of the litigation train for that. But that only shuts down the Florida law, the Texas law is still live and we need somebody to give us some relief or at least some explanation on why did the Texas law get to go into effect? Given that the 11th circuit has just articulated a very sensible basis of why these types of laws are hugely prob Matic and interfere with first amendment rights
Leo Laporte (00:22:21):
Platform, did Florida or will Florida then send that to the Supreme court or do you know? Or
Cathy Gellis (00:22:27):
I would not put a, I would not be surprised if they did. Yeah, but to do it.
Leo Laporte (00:22:30):
Who is, who is, who is the justice in charge of the 11th circuit?
Cathy Gellis (00:22:35):
You know, all the judges on the 11th circuit who rendered this unanimous opinion were all appointed by Republican presidents. At some point in time, one was a Trump judge. One is a, is a Bush judge of some sort. And I think one was a, a Fort or somebody. So yeah. So this was something where even conservative judge. So
Leo Laporte (00:22:55):
Clarence Thomas,
Cathy Gellis (00:22:57):
That there's a problem.
Leo Laporte (00:22:57):
Clarence Thomas is the justice who would hear a shadow docket appeal. Oh geez. Oh no. <Laugh> <laugh> so anyway.
Cathy Gellis (00:23:06):
Oh, I see what your point
Leo Laporte (00:23:07):
Is. Yeah. You get what I'm saying? Who's the Alito for the 11th circuit. It's Clarence Thomas. Oh
Cathy Gellis (00:23:11):
God. Well, so the other thing though is, so I told you there were Amicus briefs that went in, in support of this emergency application. Most of them went in, in support of the Amicus application, but there's a cup two went in, in support of Texas cuz Texas had to say, no, no, no, our law is totally fine. Leave us alone. Nothing is the year go away. And they had two Amicus briefs. One of which was by Florida. And I think a bunch of other very red states that showed up to say, this is totally fine. We should totally be able to regulate the internet the way these laws are articulated. So they've kind of already presented themselves to the, to the Supreme court a little bit. And I don't think it's a mystery to the court, what Florida thinks about it. But the procedural posture of this is a, is very strange. It's always strange a little bit, cuz there's always options and sort of like chess strategy that you get to play out in terms of how do you litigate something from beginning to end. But it's definitely extremely strange because we're in shadow docket land and normal rules are not applying and what the Fitz circuit did to when that one line order unleash a law that there had already been a very articulate decision saying was unconstitutional and they just let it go out into the world anyway, ask you, that's very strange from an injunctive standpoint,
Leo Laporte (00:24:23):
Let me ask you, I, if these laws were about a newspaper instead of social media, w would this there still be this same back and forth over this? Or would it just be no, obviously you can't do that.
Cathy Gellis (00:24:39):
There are some open questions about what is the right analog to apply to the internet. So to some extent, this is not completely ridiculous, but on the other hand,
Leo Laporte (00:24:50):
So I'm
Cathy Gellis (00:24:51):
My, there's some really an weird analysis of precedent going on with this. So I wouldn't even trust that newspapers are necessarily, so if we're kind of making it up as we go
Jeff Jarvis (00:24:59):
On, that's where we
Leo Laporte (00:25:00):
Are now. Oh, okay.
Jeff Jarvis (00:25:01):
Can I, can I ask another question, Kathy, that, that puts it. Yeah. I make the first amendment argument obviously constantly. And the compelled speech is not free. Speech is a tattoo. I'm gonna get put on my chest. But I, I have a different basis for this question. If a bar can say, I don't wanna serve Leo. I don't serve people in white shirts. I don't like 'em I, you just, you can't come in here. Right? They have that right.
Leo Laporte (00:25:28):
I should explain. I am wearing a white shirt today. <Laugh> oh,
Jeff Jarvis (00:25:31):
Sorry. Yeah. For those who can't see
Cathy Gellis (00:25:34):
Narrator very
Jeff Jarvis (00:25:35):
Old it's
Leo Laporte (00:25:36):
White shirt, it's not some sort of, you know, euphemism for the, for anything. I just happened to be wearing
Jeff Jarvis (00:25:41):
White shirt, the secret McKinzie consultant <laugh> so it's a white, white polo shirt. Yes. Give right. So, but, but a bar as an establishment, as a private establishment could say, we choose whom to serve as long as you don't do it on the basis of race and other, other protected classes. Right. Why is that not also the same for a Twitter that we choose not
Leo Laporte (00:26:07):
To serve? That's what I was gonna getting at with my question too. Was, are we tweeting social tweeting? Are we tweeting social media as different somehow from what, you know, standards would be for other, you know, businesses or journalism or, but apparently not?
Cathy Gellis (00:26:27):
Well, I, I lost the thrust of that. Well it
Leo Laporte (00:26:29):
Just, he's saying basically a business can say no to Leo. I would say you can't tell a newspaper what it can or cannot do. And that seems like established law, but why is it that
Jeff Jarvis (00:26:41):
We, how can you suddenly tell Twitter yeah. Who they must serve?
Cathy Gellis (00:26:45):
So the, the reason the argument that Texas and Florida would make is that they start to throw out two ideas both of which were re fully rebuffed by the 11th circuit and correctly. So, but one of them is this idea that social media is quote unquote. And I use it in quotes, derisively, cuz I don't buy this at all, but it's the new public square. Yeah. And that, if you are the new public square, you have a different sort of duty to all comers. And this is the second idea that they throw around, which is, oh, and you are a common carrier. So therefore you must take all com. So they're, so they basically try to look at these businesses and say, oh no, no, you're not the bar anymore. You are something special cuz you're different. And you're so integral to the functioning of modern society that you are now subject to additional regulatory burdens that strip you of editorial discretion. And now you have to serve all comers, which leads you
Jeff Jarvis (00:27:37):
Farther down the path that you, you, you would have to accept everything. Everything legal, yes.
Cathy Gellis (00:27:42):
Would have to be accepted. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that's been argued in these appeals is, and it came up like Wallace was getting litigated. The emergency application to the Supreme court was pending when we had Buffalo. And there was the issue of the, the culprit had live streamed it and Twitch took it down. And there's a very arguable case that under the Texas social media law, it was not legal for Twitch to take it down. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> that's a really terrible situation. We're in, if, if platforms really have their hands tied where some really awful content cannot be removed because there's liability associated with removing content. Like this is not the world we wanna
Leo Laporte (00:28:19):
Live in. Yeah. But again, it's very clear that neither legislature was thinking about things like that. They were thinking about Donald Trump and these are, these are very purpose built, Jerry rigged with the most ridiculous arguments laws that baffles me that they are getting any protection at all from the courts.
Cathy Gellis (00:28:39):
Well, I mean the only protection they
Leo Laporte (00:28:41):
Apple says, Leo can't come to an apple event. <Laugh> there's no one to say that's I mean, no one would reasonably say that's illegal. You Leo, it's your wardrobe. Well, whatever. I mean, and it seems to me that's well established precedent. Yes. And the fact that, so the, they were coming up with these F Kaka ideas, that's a public square or it's a common carrier. It's BS. And I'm amazed that the fifth circuit could even, you know, accountants that
Cathy Gellis (00:29:10):
Well. Yeah. I mean, and it's not entirely clear to what extent the fifth circuit, how badly it got it wrong because it hasn't shown its work. So we don't know it quite how badly it got it wrong. What a timeline.
Leo Laporte (00:29:21):
Why is that? Is that a new thing too? I mean, I guess if you do a, if you have a full ruling, you have a, you write an opinion, that's the problem with the shadow docket too, isn't it? That there's no opinion.
Cathy Gellis (00:29:31):
Yeah. There's a very judicial processes we've known. It has. I mean it evolves over time, but it's definitely been taking some very sharp left turns. I don't mean left right. In a political sense, but just sort of like all of a sudden shifting from stayed boring, evolving slowly until all of a sudden, some pretty
Leo Laporte (00:29:50):
Ramy
Cathy Gellis (00:29:51):
Ironic changes, how things happen because
Leo Laporte (00:29:53):
These are all originalists and constructionists doing it. <Laugh> that's, what's hysterical.
Cathy Gellis (00:29:59):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and original
Leo Laporte (00:30:01):
Originalists. Yeah.
Cathy Gellis (00:30:03):
I mean, and the originalism runs into a problem cause they're all like, well this is what was true in 1780. It's like, yeah. But we also had the 14th amendment, like we had to, they're not originalists amendments cuz we had to tune things up.
Leo Laporte (00:30:12):
Not originalists. It's obvious. They're not constructionists it's obvious. They just use that as cover. No, the
Cathy Gellis (00:30:18):
Judicial process itself can change without really offending the constitution. The problem is, of course it depends what it's changing into. And right now it's changing rather radically where they're changing the rules on the fly in a way that sort goes as the end, they wanna actually achieve like process tends to beget substance. And so very sort of, oh this is just a change in how we judicially process this case, all of a sudden is having huge substantive effects. And the fifth circuit in particular has been very troubling in sort of how it's been handling itself. And it's then feeding into the Supreme court, which then also has been changing the rules about how it processes cases and all of this has been having tremendous substantive effect and all the lawyers who like litigating these courts are kind of like throwing up their hands of like, I don't know what the rules are anymore.
Cathy Gellis (00:31:03):
This is, and I will get back to it cuz I think it's a fair accusation. It's turning the courts into Calvin ball and this is not a great way to have rule of law. The fact that like, you know, I can train as a litigator and I'm still in the dark about what it would actually take to press a client's case. That's not an okay position to be in like all the skills I have are kind of like, yeah, maybe they're useful, but it's a whole new ball game now and it's not supposed to be a whole new ball game right now,
Leo Laporte (00:31:32):
Kevin to the Brits. Think we're crazy. <Laugh> <laugh>
Cathy Gellis (00:31:37):
Every 15 minutes. We'll just ask Kevin's question.
Kevin Marks (00:31:42):
Well, yeah, I mean we have, we have
Leo Laporte (00:31:45):
Sort, you have your own, you have the snoops charter. You
Jeff Jarvis (00:31:48):
Have no worst thing going on. Right. We have other things you a party at number 10 that's that's what's turning the country apart now.
Leo Laporte (00:31:54):
<Laugh> yes.
Kevin Marks (00:31:55):
Well I have this, a party that happened yeah. A year ago.
Leo Laporte (00:32:00):
There is no first amendment in, in the UK. Oh no. Right. Or in common law is there or I mean it's not a it's a us concept. Yeah.
Kevin Marks (00:32:10):
There, there isn't a first there isn't the equivalent of a first amendment in the same way. There is, there are, there's a reason people Sue for li in, in London because the libel laws have, have got a different basis here. And if you are being sued, you've gotta prove you didn't say something defamatory, which is tricky.
Leo Laporte (00:32:26):
Right.
Kevin Marks (00:32:28):
And, and the defenses are different. So you, you can, you, you can make a defensive truth, but you can't make a defense of public interest in the same way. I think,
Leo Laporte (00:32:36):
Which is why you have such fabulous tablets.
Cathy Gellis (00:32:40):
Although in England's credit, England like had Blackstone that came up with some common law rules that actually were protective of free speech. So for instance, in America, under the first amendment, prior restraint is not supposed to happen. And we got that actually from England that predates the United States that judge Blackstone had articulated that restraints on speech prior to adjudication is not something that the concept of free expression could tolerate. And we took that and we've, we've had other decisions that are consistent with it, which in my Supreme court brief is a point that we made that this order, that all of a sudden lets a law challenge, the free rights of free expression is all of a sudden being, let loose with no real adjudication about whether it's okay or not starts to have qualities of prior restraint to it, which really shouldn't be allowed. This is first amendment free speech. You gotta like take care of that.
Leo Laporte (00:33:33):
Judge black, you
Cathy Gellis (00:33:34):
Can'ting the bell. Once you've chilled speech
Leo Laporte (00:33:36):
Blood judge Blackstone's commentaries were published in the 18th century, in the UK on, on British law and presumably were read and understood by the founders. So that's why
Jeff Jarvis (00:33:46):
Fair. The other person read and understood by the founders was, was my hero. John Wilkes, the great troll. And if you really want, have fun study his history and, and some argue that the bill of rights was a great measure, inspired by Wilkes and the, the rights he fought for being frankly, quite a jerk in print, but it was his right to be so
Leo Laporte (00:34:07):
<Laugh> okay. Let's take a little break. Disagree with that. I hope you've enjoyed our little law class here. This is fun. Actually. I love having Cathy on. And and later
Jeff Jarvis (00:34:19):
On, you'll watch me bag Leo to show you a charming moment from TikTok, but that's
Leo Laporte (00:34:22):
After if you <laugh> still to come, there's
Cathy Gellis (00:34:25):
A charming moments from TikTok. That is a
Leo Laporte (00:34:27):
Thing. Oh, that's Jeff's favorite. Yes. Favorite thing. He's a troll in his own, right? Hey, Hey. <Laugh> Hey, Hey, let me talk. And
Jeff Jarvis (00:34:36):
I've got, I've got a topic for I'm sorry. I've got a topic for Kevin too.
Leo Laporte (00:34:39):
Good. That's great.
Kevin Marks (00:34:40):
That's great.
Leo Laporte (00:34:41):
Kevin, you started as a coder, right? You were at the BBC writing code for them. Went to apple worked on QuickTime there. Do you, do you get to code at all anymore?
Kevin Marks (00:34:51):
Yeah, no. I was doing some coding. I'm I'm, I'm actually writing some code for the BBC at the moment again, which is fun. Nice. I'm doing a bunch of freelance things at the moment. So
Leo Laporte (00:34:58):
What do you, what do you what do you write it? What code? What language do you like to write?
Kevin Marks (00:35:03):
Whatever I need to write it in. I mean it's of different things. I've currently I'm running stuff in node. PHP. Python.
Leo Laporte (00:35:09):
Javascript.
Kevin Marks (00:35:11):
Yeah. Yeah. Geo JavaScript is, is node. But also I've done C and
Leo Laporte (00:35:15):
Java. When you first, do you remember the first language you learned? What was it? Was it basic, basic on the time X or the BBC Sinclair or
Kevin Marks (00:35:23):
I still got the book.
Leo Laporte (00:35:24):
Yeah. Look at that. He's right. To his, not only he,
Jeff Jarvis (00:35:27):
I thought you were,
Leo Laporte (00:35:29):
He's got, oh, look at that for the
Kevin Marks (00:35:31):
Sinclair
Leo Laporte (00:35:32):
Ky, is that the Sinclair's man? This
Kevin Marks (00:35:33):
Is, this is, this is illustrating basic, which was a handwritten book about how to write programs that was published in 19.
Leo Laporte (00:35:42):
He went all the way back to the main free Gruenberg manuscript area. 77. Yeah. 1977. You know, what's funny. I have my Carnahan and Richie, the C programming language from the pretty much the same year. I think annotated in ink by me from way back way. There it is. There you go. You got that too.
Cathy Gellis (00:36:00):
Wait, do I have to go get mine? Get your law books. I got one too.
Leo Laporte (00:36:03):
Oh you do? When are
Cathy Gellis (00:36:04):
You? I do I have a currenting I in Richie? You do.
Leo Laporte (00:36:07):
Do you write code?
Cathy Gellis (00:36:08):
Well I was a web developer, so I wrote a lot of friend. Oh yeah. This is what I did before I went to law school. This didn't I mean, I didn't do much.
Leo Laporte (00:36:18):
You, you reasonably figured out that the internet and, and the web wasn't going anywhere. So you were gonna take a go to law school.
Cathy Gellis (00:36:24):
I was alarmed by people who didn't understand the internet or how people used it, nonetheless regulating it. So I went to law school so I could perfect. Help them not regulate it badly.
Leo Laporte (00:36:35):
We need you. That's great. I'm so glad you great. I'm so glad you're doing that. The reason I ask is our sponsor today. A lot of us learned basic or C in the early days. Our sponsor today code academy, if it had been around back then might have been the way to learn. If you've wanted to learn how to program, if you've wanted to change your career with code academy, you can learn to code on your own terms and I've taken their Python courses. They're great. Over 50 million people. I'm not alone already know that code academy is the best way to learn to code cuz code academy not only teaches you job ready, coding skills. It also helps you build unique projects for your portfolio. That's very important to get that first job you get a certificate you could put on your LinkedIn and or in your resume.
Leo Laporte (00:37:22):
You can even prep for technical interviews with code academy. When I wanted to brush up my Python, I went to code academy for a couple of reasons. One you're coding from day one right away. The very first thing you do is write and submit some code. They have Python, they have JavaScript, the HTML CSS, they have SQL you, and if you go there and you say, well, I don't know. Do I wanna be a full stack engineer? Do I wanna do front end backend? Am I interest in computer science? Am I all about statistics? I've got a great suggestion for you. They have a programming personality quiz you can take, and it'll give you tailored career advice. Not on, based on what you know, or your mathematical ability or anything like that, but on your strengths and interests on your personality. I took it.
Leo Laporte (00:38:07):
They said, computer science is the way to go for you. Lisa took it. It said, statistics, you should learn R you're you're a number. And it was absolutely right. It was absolutely right. So Coke academy can point you in the right direction, get your coding fast. You choose what you wanna learn from basic websites to artificial intelligence, everything in between. And no matter what your experience level, you'll be writing real working code in minutes. In fact, if you've never written any code, I kind of envy you. This is the, you know, really the best I cannot really recommend learning. Basic first, this is the best way to get started. Not typing in code from a magazine. We were talking about that earlier today. You'll learn how to code right with an interactive platform that helps you'll learn by doing you'll get a certificate of completion, which is a really handy thing to have to get that first job web development, programming, computer science, data science.
Leo Laporte (00:39:00):
If you wanna learn a new skill, if you wanna just have some fun, if you wanna troubleshoot tech issues, if you wanna transition into a new career code academy is a great place to do it. Join over 50 million people learning to code. That's kind of amazing what a number at code academy. See where coding can take. You get 15% off your code academy pro membership. When you go to code academy.com, use a promo code twig T w I G code academy.com 15% off code academy broke the best way to learn to code. Of course you could start it for free as well. C O D E C a D E M y.com promo code T w I G. Thank you. Code academy, actually. I'm going backwards in time. Kevin I' <laugh> I wish I wish 40 years. What is the there's the old Japanese proverb that the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The next best time is today. And I feel like the best time for me to have learned EAX and lisp was 40 years ago. <Laugh> but I love it now. And that's what I put and I figured this is a lifelong for the rest of my life. I'll be learning Emax cuz it's you never stop. But I really, I love it. I almost just wanna not use a gooey at all anymore. Just do it. I know it's crazy. It's nuts. But so be it I'm a geek. What
Kevin Marks (00:40:23):
Can I say? I never quite got into the, the whole EAX thing. I,
Leo Laporte (00:40:27):
No, I know you're smart. Not to cuz it's a, it's kind of a, it's
Kevin Marks (00:40:31):
A it's
Leo Laporte (00:40:32):
Kind purpose. It's a way of like it's a steep learning curve.
Kevin Marks (00:40:35):
Well,
Cathy Gellis (00:40:35):
So Kevin VI or Emax, which would you pick?
Kevin Marks (00:40:39):
I'd pick VI. Cause I, I can actually use that one. But I wouldn't pick it on purpose. I'd use B, B BBB edit or
Leo Laporte (00:40:45):
Or vs. Code's
Kevin Marks (00:40:47):
Very good. Vs. Code vs.
Leo Laporte (00:40:48):
Code code.
Kevin Marks (00:40:48):
I, I use vs code all the time, but I use, I still use BB edit as well because it does, it does a bunch of things. Well,
Leo Laporte (00:40:55):
I love BB edit, actually. The it's
Kevin Marks (00:40:57):
Really good at like deep dipping. You
Leo Laporte (00:40:59):
Know what I, yeah. Dipping is very good and grip. I use their grip all the time. If I have a large text file that I need a massage. It's really great, but I, but I bet I could do it in EAX if I only knew the cords <laugh>
Kevin Marks (00:41:13):
Well EEX could just actually actually use grip, right?
Leo Laporte (00:41:16):
Yeah. Or you could use grip. Yeah. You could use crap. There was a a nasty advent of code problem last year where it was just a massive, I solved it with a massive grip problem. Smarter people did it a little bit better, but man, it was, it was kind of fun to get deep back into grip. Grip is such a inscrutable language that you, you probably shouldn't ever use it, but if you can, it's fun. I I
Cathy Gellis (00:41:44):
Actually, I feel like the next question is and what is your favorite shell?
Leo Laporte (00:41:48):
I use fish. What do you use?
Cathy Gellis (00:41:54):
Oh, me. I don't know. I think I was, yeah, I think I was tshirt sea, but it's been
Leo Laporte (00:41:59):
Even, even apples, a oyster oysters, apples. A fashion uses a Z shell. Now as the default. Yeah.
Kevin Marks (00:42:05):
I'm I'm using Z shell. Cause apples switched it on me, but I
Leo Laporte (00:42:07):
Don't. I like Z shell use sea shell for a long time, but fish is a little, I don't know. I don't, it's a little more modern. I like the way Phish works. Nothing's modern. <Laugh> Phish. I think Phish is motto is something like shell programming the way it's supposed to be like the eight in the eighties or something. I can't remember there. It's ridiculous. All right. Enough geeking out back to the news V con, we were talking about this before the show began, Gary V Gary Vayner. Chuck, who has been on this show is a friend of the show. He he started as an early podcaster with wine club TV, where he would make wine recommendations, cuz his family owned a wine store.
Jeff Jarvis (00:42:46):
I go to that store to this day. That's where I get my my sins
Leo Laporte (00:42:50):
Met what's it called? Wine library. What's wine, wine library library. That's it. So wine library TV was his show. And then he he somehow turned himself into some sort of marketing guru. Everybody
Jeff Jarvis (00:43:04):
Loved him cuz of the show. And he did a daily show, 40 minutes a day doing wines, which of course everybody loved. And then they kind of came to him and, and he ended up showing up at all these conferences like, look who this guy you're doing this neat thing who understands the internet.
Leo Laporte (00:43:17):
Yeah. That was kind of what it was. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis (00:43:19):
It passed into, if I know that I must know everything on earth.
Leo Laporte (00:43:22):
Yeah. And
Jeff Jarvis (00:43:23):
People,
Kevin Marks (00:43:24):
How many popular? Cause you bring wine to the conference. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:43:26):
Yeah. <Laugh> that's
Kevin Marks (00:43:27):
True. He pretended the conference with like several cases of wine and, and organized tastings for you. So that,
Leo Laporte (00:43:32):
That made him, but to his credit, he took his notoriety as a podcaster and became, he created an agency that does big stuff. Now, big advertising agency. He created a, a rest of our reservation app called REI, sold that to American express. So he's done. He's done quite well. And of late he has become, I'm sad to say like so many of my friends he's fallen down the NFT rabbit hole.
Cathy Gellis (00:44:00):
Oh
Leo Laporte (00:44:00):
No<Laugh> I know.
Jeff Jarvis (00:44:02):
Oh, big time. He is. He is Alison Wonderland of, of, of NF keys.
Leo Laporte (00:44:07):
Yeah. He his conference four days in Minneapolis was called vCAN V econ. I mean he's become, I mean he's now V he's V he's vCAN at the us bank stadium. Our friend, she Lazar was one of the moderators there. Kevin Rose, who has done very well Senate selling NFTs. So it's really interesting. Kevin bought in early into the zombie series. These are just little cartoons you buy. And you know, you kind of have some sort of weird digital ownership of this, of this zombie and you know, he bought it early when it fir it was one of the very first I think was the first NFT collection. He bought it early for, you know, 500 bucks at last count was worth like $400,000. Jesus. So then there was the board apes yacht club, similar idea. They hire, I feel bad for the artist cuz they hire some artist for hire, pay him a flat fee to draw, you know, a thousand board apes. And then they're worth millions. Kevin got together with people. Who's a well known NFT artist and a few other. And I think Gary was involved in this, created a group. They created owls, right? Cartoon owls. Kevin had to post a video on YouTube a couple of weeks ago saying, yeah, I know we made 50 million notice. He mentions it in dollars. Not Ethereum, not Bitcoin. <Laugh> 50 million, but we're gonna do good things with it. I promise you I, at this point I'm feeling,
Jeff Jarvis (00:45:44):
The other thing gets me. Leo is they also say like, like Gary says, we're gonna have cartoons with this character. Like, like just thinking of the, you know, the funny snail character is sufficient.
Leo Laporte (00:45:54):
When you hear the set screen story, wait, this is gonna end with a great story. This. So at this conference V con Minneapolis last weekend to educate I'm I'm using from the racket Minnesota dot com, educate, evangelize, chill, and convert people into true believers of NFTs, spike Lee, Pharrell Williams, Kevin Smith, milah Kunis, Eva Longoria, Seth green, Deepak Chopra, Steven Iki lo DJ Logan Paul video V YouTube star Liam Payne, dunno who he is. And Snoop dog, 6,000 token holders from around the world came to the 73,000 seat us bank stadium tickets to the event you had to buy a V friends token, crypto token, which gets you into three years of Vons. The average token price are
Jeff Jarvis (00:46:59):
Still around
Leo Laporte (00:47:00):
Average token price, 7.76 E, which is one, 1,496, $1,490.
Jeff Jarvis (00:47:08):
Is that, is that now about $40 or?
Leo Laporte (00:47:11):
Well, you never know that's the, that's the problem? Here's so let's talk about Seth green as a poster child. <Laugh>
Cathy Gellis (00:47:23):
I realize I'm gonna need to say something cuz the camera can't pick up me. Rolling my eyes.
Leo Laporte (00:47:28):
Okay. Yeah. Just say rolling eyes. Rolling eyes. Rolling eyes. So Seth green bought a board ape and now that he is the owner of the board ape decided that he would like to make a board ape cartoon show developed the show. You know, it was, you know, it was gonna, I think, premier on where was it? Some big network in a few months until his board ape got stolen his forthcoming series, white horse Tavern incorporates actors characters from the actor's extensive NFT collection, but a fishing scam got him and the scammer stole his board ape, which means he lost his license to commercially adapt. The monkey though.
Jeff Jarvis (00:48:22):
One actually could debate that as to whether or not owning the F Ft was in
Leo Laporte (00:48:26):
Fact, well here's the fear because it was then sold on to somebody else. Board ape, 83 98 purchased from the anonymous scanner by scammer, by somebody called dark wing 84 for $200,000, then transferred it to a collection called GBE vault, which happened like that. Green has located dark wing, 84 on Twitter, but has failed to make contact according to Buzzfeed. <Laugh> here's the problem. If the cartoon goes ahead, board dark wing, 84 could Sue Seth green because technically he owns the copyright <laugh>
Jeff Jarvis (00:49:07):
Well, but wait counselor, is that the case or not?
Cathy Gellis (00:49:10):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:49:11):
Eye rolls. Eye rolls.
Cathy Gellis (00:49:13):
Well, eye rolls, eye rolls, eye rolls. Like there's so much going wrong here. Cause this is not how it works. And I know that like, okay, obviously NFT is a technology that didn't really exist and there's questions of how does existing law apply to it. But a lot of people who have no particular expertise in how law normally worked are throwing it around and applying it in ways that I don't think it works at
Leo Laporte (00:49:36):
You don't believe Australian surgeon who goes by the name, Mr. Cheese. You don't believe him. <Laugh>
Cathy Gellis (00:49:45):
Okay. I also didn't believe so. Seth green had a tweet that like for 18 years I've been studying copyright law in the business of law entertainment. I'm like, oh boy. I mean, you know, I can't throw stones at all. You know, non-law some people actually do develop very sophisticated understanding. I look to Mike Masick as somebody who's not a lawyer, but understands it really, really well. But one of the things you understand is like, it depends is fundamentally very often the correct answer. And if you think it actually comes out to very strongly one way or the other, that is kind of a sign that you might be wrong because there's gonna be a countervailing argument for any argument you wanna make. I mean, but then again, some of them are just so that yeah, they are garbage, but
Leo Laporte (00:50:28):
There's well, there is. Okay. So I'm looking at the board API club terms and conditions. <Laugh> I mean, they, I don't know how, I mean it's legal is this legally binding, this is a contract under which you own your board ape.
Cathy Gellis (00:50:40):
Does it give you a venue? Does it,
Leo Laporte (00:50:43):
Is there venue
Cathy Gellis (00:50:44):
Law clause in that?
Leo Laporte (00:50:49):
No. As far as I can tell,
Cathy Gellis (00:50:51):
I mean, you have a mess anyway, like this is a law school exam because you've got some contract which may or may not be binding. You've got copyright, you've got state law, which tends to apply to contracts. You have federal law that preemt stuff which tends to apply to copyright. And these threats don't even under the best days, interact with each other very well. And now all of a sudden you have an awful lot of people with some nefarious activity, possible theft, but theft in a way that we might not actually be able to describe as theft legally because it's ephemeral and not necessarily physical and which jurisdictions laws are gonna be doing the describing. And like the issue spotting is amusing. Like, you know, me and my law friends could geek out on this and, and, you know, have some, you know, lengthy conversations that are very interesting, but to pretend that there's any sort of clear path of how this would all get resolved, this is a, that's not clear. And that seems like a bad idea.
Leo Laporte (00:51:41):
So Mr. Cheese, here's
Cathy Gellis (00:51:43):
The will be
Leo Laporte (00:51:43):
Shit. The Mr. Cheese, the autonomous anonymous something Australian surgeon who owns the board ape now he, which one? That, that particular board ape or yeah, ape board ape or all the board a ape, the board he,
Kevin Marks (00:52:01):
Well, when it looks exact like about four others.
Leo Laporte (00:52:03):
Yeah. Well,
Kevin Marks (00:52:04):
She's the only challenge of making a
Leo Laporte (00:52:05):
Cartoon out of it. He says I have no plans for the ape. I have no plans for the ape Mr. Cheese added <laugh>, as you can see, I've been collecting for a while. I bought it because all I liked it, it wasn't a cheap buy either and it was not marked as suspicious. So I bought it in good faith. I'm happy to be in contact with Seth to chat about this. <Laugh> <laugh> he spent $200,000. I think it'd be fair to give him a reasonable profit on his purchase. Although he has been ignoring Seth's Twitter appeals on treaties on treaties.
Cathy Gellis (00:52:42):
I mean the concept of ownership is something that everyone's just sort of relying on when it's not even clear what source of law would even define ownership whose source of law would define ownership and what is the effect? If somebody has purchased it, who wasn't good. Faith was good faith. You know, even the United States, if you, you know, you didn't know the thing was stolen, but you bought it anyway. You may not be criminally liable, but you might still have to give up the thing, but that's less true in some other countries. Like it's not even clear who law applies here, what law would apply here. I think this is basically just so lawless. This is just a very strange way to have some sort of really significant economic activity riding on because most of the time economic activity is protected by just having some sort of rules of the road. And it is not entirely clear what rules of the road are guiding.
Jeff Jarvis (00:53:33):
Yeah. Every contract says, where, where were you? If, if we come to Sue each other, where in what jurisdiction will that be? And, and, and, and so on, the other thing that gets me about this is that, and I, I see that, I forget some time ago, somebody wrote a post about how this is the ownership economy as if this is the, the, the, where it all goes. I think it's the opposite. I think it's the last gasp of stupid copyright of the metaphor of property for creativity. I think that's, that's, that's from statute of Ann until today. And then I think it starts to die off into something else I've written about credit, right? About, about chains of creativity. There's a lot of ways we could talk about this, but this whole idea that everything gets owned. And, and what you own is this creativity as a thing, rather than an act and a product. I think it's outmoded. I don't think this is gonna last
Leo Laporte (00:54:24):
Here is the board ape in question <laugh>
Jeff Jarvis (00:54:28):
Well, I can see why
Leo Laporte (00:54:29):
You want fight over this described as an ape in a skeleton. T-Shirt smoking a cigarette with a halo and
Jeff Jarvis (00:54:37):
Well, that's not a cigarette Leo. That's
Leo Laporte (00:54:39):
Funny. Yeah. It's a funny cigarette. Don't know, background purple clothes, bone tea, eyes, sad, fur brown hat, halo, board unshaven. Here's the whole, because it's the blockchain. We know the entire, you know, history of the purchases and so forth. We know who owns it currently GBE vault, which
Cathy Gellis (00:55:00):
Is reported for suspicious activity.
Leo Laporte (00:55:02):
Yeah. Well, so open sea then, if, if there is something like this and this was not on it when he bought it, but open sea, once they heard about all this has, has then disabled purchase and selling of it and and has this thing on it, which as you know, now makes it all on the up and up. So anyway you know, honestly,
Jeff Jarvis (00:55:23):
It's hilarious.
Leo Laporte (00:55:24):
It's hilarious. I feel bad this
Cathy Gellis (00:55:26):
For no way, this is a dumb way of doing creativity. It's a dumb way to do economics. And it's a dumb way of doing creativity. This doesn't vindicate like this actually makes copyright look good. And I resent that.
Jeff Jarvis (00:55:37):
Yeah. Yeah. You got a copy. You're right. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:55:40):
This makes copyright look good here though. Again, thanks to the blockchain. We know exactly who owns it. We know exactly who transferred it. We know what they paid. All of this is a, is public. We know what name they use. You see Steve Iki had it. He, he sold it to Seth green. Seth green then was, it was stolen from Seth. This is the notices. The red exclamation mark. This account may be compromised to C a a oh nine oh, who then sold it to dark wing immediately, by the way. And dark wing immediately transferred it into the GBE vault. That's where it,
Jeff Jarvis (00:56:22):
That's Dr. Cheese.
Leo Laporte (00:56:23):
That's Dr. Cheese. By the way, that's Dr. Cheese. Cheese is not like some new age. C I energy coming up your spine. He's cheese. It's fromage. It's <laugh>, it's, it's a nice piece of, of monster. So
Cathy Gellis (00:56:37):
I think disappointed if somebody doesn't write a book about this and call it the apes of ref
Leo Laporte (00:56:42):
Apes of ref. Oh, oh. So what is, how much is 106? E I guess you, I guess it's $200,000 at some point, I guess, at the point of sale, and then don't forget the gas fees, which also have to be added on. And, but look here 41. Maybe you should have bought 41 75. I could buy it now for 150 E you know what sad is somebody, somebody drew this, they're getting no money for it. They got paid, you know, 50 bucks an a or whatever. And that's that it's just so stupid that we are hit. We have hit the,
Cathy Gellis (00:57:23):
I mean, there's Brian Zo has sort of looked into some of the artistic merits of this NFT thing. And he's written some very interesting defenses of how this might actually further artistic creativity and funding, and sort of actually put copyright law to shame as it deserves regularly. But, and I can accept a lot of the arguments that he has, but that's not what's happening. That's not, what's getting vindicated. This is a weird gold rush mentality, rent seeking pyramid schemes, Grif. This is, this isn't vindicating, anything of value. And it's just neither an economic nor legal construct that solves an existing problem. It just seems to create a whole bunch of new ones. So I'm never a fan
Leo Laporte (00:58:06):
Of that. Yeah, my attitude is if you wanna support artists, give them some money. You don't have to, you don't have to do this whole BS thing. Oh, Hey, by the way, this is gonna be interesting. This is just in, from the San Francisco Chronicle, right after the horrific events and involved the Texas yesterday, the California Senate passed a gun control bill modeled on the Texas abortion law. So now which
Jeff Jarvis (00:58:36):
Mike Masick already said, not a good
Leo Laporte (00:58:38):
Idea, private citizens can file suit. <Laugh>
Jeff Jarvis (00:58:41):
That's not a way to do policy, as Mike said,
Leo Laporte (00:58:43):
No, it's terrible. It's bad in Texas. It's bad in California, but you know, it's kind of hard to resist, right?
Cathy Gellis (00:58:52):
Well, the only thing, so since I have no control over this and it's on its own trajectory this point, this helps illustrate the tremendous damage that the shadow docket on SBA eight had, because it, it puts states in a position where they can do this sort of thing, which isn't the way our federal union was supposed to work. And that one thing of like, yeah, go ahead, let SBA go ahead. No problems here. This is exactly the sort of problem attempted. And in a way, as a single example, I don't necessarily mind it as something hopefully salient enough that can nip this trend in a bud, because otherwise I think we have fundamental problems about how we're gonna stay together as a country, because it's really is so corrosive on the bond. Yes. That hold the states together.
Leo Laporte (00:59:38):
Yes. I presume this will immediately be, I mean, it's, you know, it's obviously unconstitutional just as the Texas law. Oh. But wait, <laugh>
Cathy Gellis (00:59:49):
There, there you go.
Leo Laporte (00:59:50):
<Laugh> nevermind. Let's
Cathy Gellis (00:59:54):
Let's however, if I can jump in with other stupid that's come from the California legislature, or that's working its way through the California legislature, like we've already spur the red states and their stupid ideas of how they wanna regulate the internet, but California's got some too they're floating a bill about creating a private rate of action against platforms for something alleged to be called like that. Kids get addicted to social media, which is a highly, highly species thing, not supported by social science. So it's questionable that there's actually a legitimate problem to solve and the way that there is a pending bill to solve it is rather game over for a lot of platforms, because it would really just sort of just open them up to unending litigation from everybody who, who has really just no particular claim at all, but can float a lawsuit to go try to extract settlement money from it. This has gotten through the legislature, but it's now at the Senate. And I wanna highlight that because the Senate really needs to put the breaks on this. This is not something that's good. And it's just because we've got, but think of the children attached to it. Nobody's putting the appropriate thought into what the full implications of this policy proposal are.
Leo Laporte (01:01:08):
This is AB 20
Cathy Gellis (01:01:10):
California care,
Leo Laporte (01:01:11):
The social media platform. I think that might right. 2 8, 2 children act introduced by Democrat Buffy wicks of Oakland with Republican Jordan Cunningham of PA Robles and support. Believe it or not from the UC San Diego school of law children's advocacy Institute. And it allows, and
Cathy Gellis (01:01:30):
It's a tricky one to fight this. Isn't something that children have a, the social science does not support the claim that there's a problem or that this would be the solution to any problem that there might actually be. This is kind of the, the moral panics that come up every so often that the rock lyrics are too violent. The video games are too violent. It's as untethered to social science as any of those things.
Leo Laporte (01:01:59):
Snap. Oh, snap. Oh, more good news. Oh, snap snap sends shiver through ads, stocks. We're talking about you, a singular shiver, a single shiver has been sent. This is Martin be's reading in the it's like a single E it's one shiver. It's a new filter, one single shiver snap stock down. It says 30%. I think it was even more than that. Initially it was 40. Yeah, it was, it was almost half of its value gone because it said, oh yeah ads, ads are second quarter. Revenue and profits will be below what we projected a few weeks ago, thanks to a faster than expected deterioration in macroeconomic conditions. Nobody is buying ads.
Cathy Gellis (01:02:51):
They allude to supply chain problems. And a friend of mine tweeted like what's, what's the breakdown in a supply chain. No more eyeballs. What,
Leo Laporte (01:03:02):
What is the thing? No, I can, I can, I can address that stupid glasses. We see the same thing, which is companies are reluctant to buy ads if they can't sell products that are being advertised. And so if there's a supply chain problem, those, it's a, it's, it's a, a follow on effect from supply chain.
Cathy Gellis (01:03:18):
Oh, okay. Well, their, their message was not clear that they were, they were having ancillary effects to other people's supply chain problem problems, the way they articulated. It sounded like they had a supply chain. There
Leo Laporte (01:03:29):
Is no lack of ads on snap. If you need one <laugh> we've got a glut apparently. Okay. Okay. So yeah, I don't, you know, I, I pay attention to this stuff. When I see something like that, it sends a shiver down my spine because of course we also sell ads, but we haven't seen the same drop off by knock wood, Leo by wood knock, knock on wood. But that's why we have club TWI, you know, to kinda smooth out the, the shiver. In fact, why don't I do an ad right now? We got a great panel. Kathy Gilles is with us. She writes@tecdirtalsohasalawpracticeatcgcouncil.com, C O U N C E S E L like, you know, like a counselor and is at Kathy Gilles on Twitter, Kathy with a C. It's great to have you, Kathy. Thank you for you've even got a new microphone just for the show. So thank
Cathy Gellis (01:04:23):
You just for the show.
Leo Laporte (01:04:24):
I appreciate it. Also great to have Kevin Marks. Nope. There, Kevin <laugh> thought I was gonna get an accent there for a minute. I threw John. I knew I would great to have Kevin Marks indie web.org is the site he likes to promote, cuz we all want an independent web and we all all want a support web standards. You know, it's really been interesting Kevin to watch MAs on, take off after all of this Twitter upset our TWI social has gone, you know, through the roof as, as MAs on social and the other Masta on instances. Yeah.
Cathy Gellis (01:04:57):
We've seen quite
Leo Laporte (01:04:57):
A flow again. Yeah. Really glad to see that. I'm a big fan as I am of independent web standards in ind web.org. So great to have you. And of course, last and least Jeff <laugh>. Oh, it just, I like to tease you. I love you, Jeff. Of course. Couldn't do the show without you. He's the guy who shows up. So I gotta give you credit. Exactly. Yep. T's got the day off. Stacy's got the day off, but Jeff. Nope. Can't get rid of me. Can't get rid of him. I'm petty here. I am. No, we love having on.
Cathy Gellis (01:05:28):
You're stuck with him. Insulting your shirt. No matter what,
Leo Laporte (01:05:31):
It's a white shirt I'm wearing actually it's a bit of history. This is a ZD television shirt, which goes back to the early nineties when Ziff Davis, who is no longer, but was at one time, a well known publisher of magazines, especially computer magazines, PC magazine, computer shopper, and the like said we should be in television. And and they, they, they gave me a polo shirt and said, <laugh> you're in it. You're in, you're on right now. Go polo shirt. That, by the way, you cannot wear on TV oddly enough. But they were new to it. They didn't know <laugh> they didn't know it's too bright. Our show today. Hey, let me tell you I'm feeling good today. I am feeling really good today and I can credit it to my eight sleep faith. Even this morning, Lisa said, wow, you were out last night, went to bed early, stayed in bed till eight 30.
Leo Laporte (01:06:22):
I said, yep. It was just too comfortable to leave eight sleep, make something we wear. We have on our mattress called the pod pro cover that has really transformed the quality of my sleep. You know, 30% Americans struggle with sleep. And one of the main reasons is temperature too hot, too cold. Good sleep is so important for health. So important for state of mind, your heart, your blood pressure, even good sleep can even reduce the risk of Alzheimer's. Why are we having such trouble sleeping? Well, I think especially, you know, in the summertime, it's too hot wintertime it's too cold. Eight sleep is an amazing cover that checks your biometrics while you're sleeping and the temperature of the room and then adjust the temperature of the bed. And man, when did I say adjust? It can adjust it as low as 55 degrees or as hot as 110 that's that's pretty warm and that's pretty cold.
Leo Laporte (01:07:24):
What's nice. And it doesn't actually, it doesn't swing that much. Most of the time, what I do is I set it to be a little toasty when I get in bed, it cools off at night, which helps me get to that deep sleep cycle. Your body really wants it to be cool for that. And then I to wake me up instead of an alarm clock, I just have it go up a little bit and I'm toasty. And I wake up and I go ready for the day eight sleep users fall asleep, 32% faster and reduce sleep interruptions by 40% and overall get a more restful sleep. And they know that because they've got the biometrics to prove it. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. Nature's gentle nurse and I love Mike pod cover. You gotta get at the pod pro cover from eight sleep.
Leo Laporte (01:08:12):
Here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna go to eight sleep.com/twig right now, E I G HT eight, sleep.com/twig. And because it's Memorial day, wow. It looks like the I'm not, I don't think I can say the amount, but just go. There's exclusive savings through June 6th through Memorial day shipping in the us, Canada and the UK. Now, if you're hearing this after June 6th, the reason I don't wanna say the numbers is cuz I don't want you to be jealous, but you can still get $150 out of checkout by going to eight sleep.com/twig, but go to eight sleep.com/twig now or later and get a great amount of savings. You will want this. I'm telling you yes, it has two sides of the bed. So Lisa <laugh> I think Lisa Lisa see there is an auto, you know, there's an automatic kind of sleep doctor thing and she turned it off and she said, no, I'm gonna do it.
Leo Laporte (01:09:05):
And she said it too cool last night. And she was, she woke up. She says I was freezing <laugh> so she did not have a good night's sleep. Let the eight sleep choose don't don't override it, but you do have different sides that didn't bother me at all. You have two, two different people each side of the bed basing on, based on your sleep stages, your biometrics and the bedroom, temperature eight sleep.com/twig to check out the pilot pro cover and save $150 a checkout eight sleep.com/twig. Thank you so much for supporting this weekend. Google the holes. Yeah. People are saying you have holes probably its but it's pretty old. Yeah, no, I don't think it's moths. I think it's the mic eclipse kind of poked it in there. I don't know. Somebody says the mic clips you're right. It does have holes, but I still wanted to wear it just as you know, a bit of memora. Yeah. And then I'm gonna send it to Christina. Christina Warren collects failed companies. T-Shirts <laugh> yes.
Leo Laporte (01:10:10):
Alright. Let's let's move along. Big tech is getting clobbered on wall street and the New York times is on it. The New York times says it's good for them. I'm sorry. It's a good time for them. What flush with cash. Facebook, Facebook, apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are positioned to emerge from a downturn stronger and more powerful trip. Kel writing this for the New York times. He's of course the guy wrote after Steve, I interviewed him a couple of weeks ago about that book. He said they've lost $2.7 trillion in value. Myfu money is saying AFU journal. Yeah, me too. Now I didn't invest directly in these companies. I invest in the SAP 500, which I have since learned is heavily invested in capital, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google. So they lost what would be the equivalent of the annual gross domestic product of Britain this year since January. But,
Kevin Marks (01:11:18):
But has lost about 10% of that
Leo Laporte (01:11:20):
As well. But yeah, that's right problem. Yeah. so, but trip says it's a good thing he says. And he's quoting actually analysts who say large companies drops and prices 50 8% for Peloton, Uber down 45% job cuts layoffs. But a little belt tightening is good during great recession. Facebook, Amazon, Google, apple, and Microsoft acquired more than a hundred companies because they were cheap.
Jeff Jarvis (01:11:58):
But now they're not gonna be allowed to buy companies because of antitrust.
Leo Laporte (01:12:01):
Oh
Jeff Jarvis (01:12:02):
Aha.
Leo Laporte (01:12:03):
Mm. I guess that's the, the total upshot of it, right? They can buy stuff now. I guess it's cheap anyway. Let's see what else Jack Dorsey has now officially left the building. You knew that what he's he's not alone. Oh, others who stepped down. Look at the next line.
Jeff Jarvis (01:12:31):
It's very interesting.
Leo Laporte (01:12:32):
Twitter shareholders vote to kick silver lake off the board. And what's interesting. Ison Durban who is now resigning from the board is a long time Musk backer, a business associate who supported Musk's acquisition of Twitter. So the shareholders, that's an interesting signal from the shareholders. They have to approve any deal from Musk. Why are they kicking silver lake off
Jeff Jarvis (01:13:03):
The shareholders? Don't like Musk,
Leo Laporte (01:13:06):
You think it really is a, a vote against Musk.
Jeff Jarvis (01:13:09):
That's what my thought is. Mm. I don't know.
Leo Laporte (01:13:11):
Mm Hmm. Is
Kevin Marks (01:13:16):
It shareholders mean say, is that why all this has
Leo Laporte (01:13:18):
Happened? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So Durban through silver lake poured a hundred million dollars into solar city before it was acquired by Tesla. When Musk remember famously said that Tesla is gonna go private, he was working with silver lake as a financial advisor, both men serve on a entertainment, a board of an entertainment company called endeavor Manuel's company. So yeah, maybe this is a little
Jeff Jarvis (01:13:50):
Little subtweet
Leo Laporte (01:13:51):
There signal. Yeah. A little subtweet from the shareholders. We don't like this deal. Although what is Twitter's stock at? I mean, at this point you're getting a hell of a deal. Elon offered 52 40, I'm sorry. 54 20. The stock is at 37, 16. Some things
Jeff Jarvis (01:14:08):
Are more important than stock like the democracy, but it's back up because Musk is, is getting more money.
Leo Laporte (01:14:15):
Oh yeah. I think some of this, some of this was a vote that Musk would not get his bid would not be supported. And so they weren't gonna get the 54 20. In other words, stock market didn't believe it. But now, and there has been a little bump today. Musk says he's gotta get 44 million total. He's got 33 and a half million. He should put, you know, what you should do is put a little thermometer on the lawn at Tesla that just shows how close he is to raising.
Jeff Jarvis (01:14:48):
And next to it is the stock price.
Leo Laporte (01:14:50):
<Laugh>
Cathy Gellis (01:14:52):
This seems odd because he's very extended in terms of his Tesla stock and the Tesla stock is dropping. So his ability to convert what he owns in Tesla seems, I don't know this, it, it doesn't seem like it makes sense to follow each little, like jump because I don't think we know enough to know how this is happening, but I I've. I feel like I've seen more stuff saying to suggest that this is gonna fall apart than I've seen stuff to say that everything is fine and it's gonna, the deal is gonna be consummated the way it was articulated originally.
Leo Laporte (01:15:28):
Are you sad, Jeff? Cuz I know you really think Twitter is all that and obviously this is not good for Twitter, whatever happens. And if Musk gets ahold of it, it'd probably be, even be worse. Are you sad? Is that a loss?
Jeff Jarvis (01:15:41):
Yeah, it, it really is. But I think it, you know, I go back to Jack's tweet a few weeks ago where he said that that centralizing discovery and identity in corporations was wrong. And I, I think that's what we're seeing here. And in fact, and so I'm gonna, I, I, I'm trying to reach out to to blue sky cuz I'm I remain fascinated in that. And there's two other interesting things. This is where, this is my stories for Kevin discussion too. Adam sari from the head of Instagram did a Ted talk and normally I don't quote Ted talks, but which he was arguing and it's a fairly obviously, but he was arguing that that blockchain will enable creators on any platform to have a direct relationship. This is what he is advocating direct relationship with their fans, their subscribers, their purchasers, their call them what you will, their people.
Jeff Jarvis (01:16:37):
And so what he is talking about there is a shift protocol. What blue sky is, is a shift from company to protocol, even open sea which was criticized for still being a centralized point in the supposedly distributed world of NFTs is distributing now talking about a protocol. And so I wonder whether we are potentially entering a new phase of the net where Twitter may be a sacrificial lamb to the ills of centralized ownership and showing us why we really don't want that. And we really wanna return to a world of H C, D PS and email protocols and so on and so forth where we have a more open world. Now I'm sure Kevin can poke holes in that little bit of optimism of mine, but I'm hoping that this is, this is what we see coming. So yes, I'm very sad about Twitter. I think it, it, it's part of the public conversation. It's a place where I have tons of friends get tons of information. I spend a lot of time and I enjoy it and I fear maybe it's not gonna go down. And, and Andre Brock, the, the great author of distributed blackness has said, we're gonna stay and we're gonna fight. And other people are too. And maybe we can still do that, but it just feels like we got cooties even being around Musk.
Kevin Marks (01:17:55):
Okay. There's a couple of things there. So yes, protocols, a great thing. I'm a big fan of protocols. I, you know, I'm, I advocate for those, but there's the pernicious thing now, which is been pushed by a Z and a bunch of other people where they're saying we're gonna make new protocols and there's gonna be money in them and that's gonna be better. And actually that's gonna make them worse. We spent a long time getting money outta protocols, the patents that were blocking us actually doing IOP in audio and video for 20 years. But we basically had to wait for 'em to expire before we could do IOP again, because the, the thicks were so thick in that rules. And we spent a long time actually reconstructing the sort of social order of technology so that we, we work on, on an open source basis on different protocol basis. Now most of the time, and they're trying to turn the clock back to the kind of patent pool nonsense the dog does in the, in the nineties. So that's, that's, I think that's the antithesis of, of, of what you want when you're trying to,
Jeff Jarvis (01:18:54):
How, how does tell, explain to me a little more Kevin, if you would, the money in protocol, money, outer protocol, what does that?
Kevin Marks (01:18:59):
So this is, so this is the Chris Dixon web three thesis. So Chris Dixon is, is going around saying web three, which is not the web and the web doesn't version numbers, but he's saying we're gonna have this great idea where you have a protocol and you, and it's lucrative to create protocols because you will get paid every time and someone uses your protocol. Ah, we should mention there, be a huge, there be a huge market for your protocols
Leo Laporte (01:19:21):
Is, is a venture capitalist at Andreen Horowitz. And, and they are in fact, the owners in effect of web three. Go ahead.
Kevin Marks (01:19:30):
<Laugh> yes. Yeah, yeah, no, it was web well, web three was made up by Gavin what's his face, but in 2014, but yeah, Chris Dixon has been, has been hyping in strongly and, but his, his, his supposed investment thesis is we can create protocols that, that flow value by attaching tokens to protocols, which means they don't end up IPOing at all. You end up having a bunch of protocols that are each got separate tokens, and then he can, he can sort of pump and dump those and push them out to Coinbase and then make another one. So it's, you know, it's a, non-starter, it's not a good way to do protocols. The way you do protocols is very hard and complicated where you actually sit down and have to agree with people how to do things. This is the opposite. I'll
Leo Laporte (01:20:09):
This is the opposite. I don't have to agree with you. I'll just make a token and do what I want.
Kevin Marks (01:20:13):
Yeah. So it's, you know, having spent a large chunk of my time doing protocol stuff, it's, it's not about, we've had a brilliant idea and we've written it down. Everyone adopted that. People seem to think that it's like, basically I've I've said this to protocols are not legislation, protocols are documentation. They, they say yes. Here's how to do things. If you wanna work on the same, if you want to move data between these two things, here's how you do it. And here's, here's the rules. The trouble is we write it like legislation. So if you actually read them, they say, you must do this and you shall do that. And you may do the other and you know, cause it's written in that form. And so after people have done that a bit, they think, oh, so if I can change the protocol, then everyone will, will then change the world. And that will, that will do things. And that's when your standard's body gets Bo down in politics and you have to throw it away and start a new standard's body. What do you, so that's
Jeff Jarvis (01:21:01):
About blue sky in that, in that context.
Kevin Marks (01:21:06):
Blue sky, I mean blue sky. I like some of the people involved, I talked to them but they seem to, they, they they've been valuing originality over utility. They said we wanna do something new and different. And we said, well, here's how you do it with existing protocols. Look, we've been doing for 10 years and they go, oh, oh, but that's not new enough. It's like, yes, that's the point. The point is that we know how to do IOP Twitter, like IOP with existing protocols. That's example, what indie web is about. We've, we've, we've built six or seven different protocols. We've simplifying some existing ones. We've got them through w three C, we've done a whole bunch of work on this. You're getting people to adopt them and so on. But they're saying, well, we, we really don't wanna use DNS.
Kevin Marks (01:21:50):
We wanna, we don't wanna use DNS and URL. So we're gonna make up some new signature thing. That's, that's based on cryptography, which, you know, you can sort of argue for that, but actually it's really annoying. You, you end up with things that aren't names you end up with things that are like long strings of hex digits, which is one of the sort of nightmares of all the NFTs and Bitcoin area. You you've got two magic long het strings and you you're supposed to give someone one or not the other. And if you give them the other one, then they take your, your apes. You know, there's, there's a, there's a, we have a way to do distributed name spaces across the internet. It's called DNS it's works very well. There was a time where we had to put some political structure in place to deal with it, which is I, can we have that now? And making new ones is not actually enormously helpful. Twitter, Twitter gone away with very, a new name space, but basically their name space is put twitter.com before this, and then you've got the name and they've hit the problem that they're running out of them now. So all the new names have got six digits, half of them as well. So we, you know, but
Jeff Jarvis (01:22:56):
They address very nicely. All of those people. Yes.
Kevin Marks (01:22:58):
Yeah. But, but you know, you, you are, you remember Jeff, we, we, we, we link to each other on blogs. It, isn't actually hard to link to someone's blog. No. Or even their post, but you can link their name, the blog, and that works. And we've got protocols now that when I link to your blog, it can, I can, it, my blog can tell you I've linked to it and you can take what I've done. Add onto the end. You know, how to do that. We're working with different groups to adopt more of it, but it's, you know, the challenge is not the protocols. The challenge is people trying not to interate, you know, I had, this is, this is exactly the problem I had with open social 14 years ago, where it was where we, we, we did the work to get things wouldn't interoperate. And then everyone said, actually, we'd rather not interoperate. We wanna own everything. You know, Facebook did it first. And then Google said, yeah, no, we wanna do that too. Which is, you know, why I didn't work there afterwards. And you know, now nobody owns anything.
Leo Laporte (01:23:51):
Well, so you agree with Chris's second point, which is that the current web is, is basically run by corporations and the value of Chris. No,
Kevin Marks (01:23:59):
I don't, I don't agree with that all. No, I think the web is fine. I think the, the structure of corporations is a problem, but the way you, you don't fix that by more financialization and nonsense,
Leo Laporte (01:24:08):
Right? Yeah. Right. We already have systems that are Democrat democratized that work perfectly well.
Kevin Marks (01:24:16):
You, you fix it by finding groups of people who, who actually want to interoperate again and, and working with them and, and talk to them and it's, and it's, you know,
Leo Laporte (01:24:23):
Trying to in web.org. So the system you talked about is web mention, right?
Kevin Marks (01:24:28):
Yes. So that's one of the, the pieces of it. Yeah. But web, but the, the specific one of to build a sort of distributed tool like app reply thing is web mention. So if I, if I Jeff writes a post and I, I reply to it, I can web mention him and it can appear under his, his post, if he has web mention supporting software invite and, and, and vice versa, he can reply to me. And we've got, we, we've got the infrastructure for doing that,
Leo Laporte (01:24:53):
How we get people to use this.
Kevin Marks (01:24:57):
You get them to, well, you something, the supports it, micro blog supports it. We're working on getting other people supported. We, we talk having an interesting conversation with Tumblr this week where we're trying to get Tumblr to support indie web stuff. And we're getting strong support from Matt mulling, we, and the COO of Tumblr to do some work to.
Leo Laporte (01:25:16):
Matt's fantastic. I have to say there's a, there's a guy who's a champion of open.
Kevin Marks (01:25:21):
No. Yeah, Matt, Matt's great. And if, if we can get on Tumblr great. And then we can maybe get on WordPress two and then, then we've got like half the web. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:25:28):
Literally Matt Mullenweg is the found creator of so WordPress. So I think that the
Kevin Marks (01:25:33):
Problem with Twitter
Leo Laporte (01:25:35):
Tumblr yeah. As well as, okay.
Kevin Marks (01:25:37):
You've definitely set me off it. Good.
Leo Laporte (01:25:39):
Keep going.
Kevin Marks (01:25:41):
Your problem with Twitter is, is exactly the problem. You said. It's like, it's the place where your, your news buddies are which is why it's great. And it's one why I like it. There's a, there's, there's a bunch of other parallel Twitters that go on. But the, the global journalist Twitter is an important part of Twitter. And the challenge is, is the same challenge that we had what we had with Google reader. And with Facebook's news products is the problem is news is news and ad businesses are don't really go very well together, especially automated ad businesses because running ads against news is, is a tricky business at the best of times, but also people don't want, they do the classic thing of you don't want plane, plane ticket adverts next to plane crashes, but the machine will provide that for you if you're not very careful.
Kevin Marks (01:26:29):
So the it sort of gets naturally rejected by these ads of body businesses. So, you know, the reason reader didn't last was they're like, well, there's, there's, there's Google was like the right enough people using it. It's like the people who are using it are using it like 1600 times a day. And they're the people who actually won't use it because they're the ones who are writing about your, about your products, but didn't quite get that. And it's not quite a little conversation it's fairly close to conversation. And Twitter has the same problem. It's like the journalists love it. And they like the attraction of that part of it. But in terms of ads, that isn't, that isn't the, where they they're making the money, the ads anyway, and techn variety was that too. We had that same problem. We built that tool for, for that was primarily for journalists in news. And we had the continuous problem of like, how do we make money from this? Because that doesn't correlate well with advertising.
Leo Laporte (01:27:17):
There was a wonderful tool. Oh, it was great. I missed techno. I really do. Yeah.
Kevin Marks (01:27:22):
But, you know, but, but yeah, we can build to distribute techno with this stuff if we want to. Yeah. Or build centralized. Well, if we really want to, again, but I'm not sure I wanna take that on again, but the other half is you spend a lot of time dealing with spam. But anyway, so, so
Leo Laporte (01:27:35):
That's a problem everywhere, isn't it? Yeah.
Kevin Marks (01:27:37):
Yeah. So, so the, so, so the, there's the sort of the problem of, do we have interrupting protocols? Yes, we do. We've got plenty of interrupting protocols and we've got layers of them and we've got choices and lots of the different layers. We can, we can do this stuff, but it takes some will to actually want to inter operate. And then the other problem is there is a tension between ad supported and news, and it's not something that's, that's, that's trivially solvable, and you it's a problem for new sites as well. The, the other thing Corolla of that is that the, the, the news that's good and has had time spent on is now behind pay walls and the, the propaganda isn't. And that's, that's the other thing that eats weared it as well.
Leo Laporte (01:28:22):
Exactly.
Kevin Marks (01:28:24):
So, yeah, there's a, there's, there's a sort
Cathy Gellis (01:28:26):
Of, so one thing that gets back
Kevin Marks (01:28:29):
So sorry, Kathy.
Cathy Gellis (01:28:30):
Oh, well, so one thing that gets back to the 11th circuit and the first amendment in the Florida social media law is stuff having to do with, we talked a little bit about like, well, if, why is the rule different that the bar could kick out the person that they didn't wanna serve, but not the platform. And the argument being thrown into that is that these platforms are so integral to how society, you know, you need to be there cuz everybody else is there. So if you wanna have your life function, you better be on Facebook, which I think is a speech notion, but they're obviously big and have very heavy presences. And so that's been the argument for their ability to parse out who they let on their platforms or not. But the thing is you could, in theory, get another, you could get another Facebook, you could get a www dot, not facebook.com.
Cathy Gellis (01:29:19):
You can get a www dot not twitter.com that in theory, you can get an infinite number of other platforms to either facilitate messages, or if you want roll your own. So you can have your own website and you can point out your own message. And the more that we rely on protocols instead of the companies, then when you put your message up. So it's on the web in a certain way, other people will be able to interact with it. And we don't need the proprietary methods to be able to do that. But then to back up, the concern that I have a little bit is what are the obstacles to being able to roll your own, have your own web server, have your own mail server, have your own you know, and email server what are the regulatory obstacles? So for instance, we better keep section two 30 because that keeps the regulatory obstacles at a minimum.
Cathy Gellis (01:30:09):
But then we have privacy regulations sprouting up all over the place. So, you know, if you wanna start your own fan forum, for instance, it's a much harder decision to make a more expensive decision to make than it used to be, but it's still makeable. And then what are the practical considerations? It's gonna need some technical support. It's gonna be some maintenance. Now, cyber security is a big thing. So how do we support it so that people can functionally provide their own independent outlets? And then the protocols can make sure that we get the functionality and interconnectivity between the internet outlets. So, you know, as a lawyer I wanna care about, do we have the regulatory space that is making it so we can get another, we can get another Facebook, or we can even just get your own platform where you're put out your own message that other people can interact with and you don't even need another platform necessarily.
Cathy Gellis (01:30:58):
And certainly not run one run by a corporation. So from my perspective, I on the ball of what does it take to diminish the barriers so that we don't need to use these companies because we can get what we need. There's something we get from them, but we could probably get all those benefits in another way that does not require giving, you know, up our privacy and this, then the other thing in order to have accounts on Facebook, there's other ways that we can speak to each other online. We were doing that before Facebook let's figure out if we can do that after Facebook as well.
Kevin Marks (01:31:30):
Yeah. And, and they do still regulation. Yeah. But
Cathy Gellis (01:31:34):
Regulation is a factor, but yeah. Yeah.
Kevin Marks (01:31:37):
But yeah, WordPress does take WordPress is still a very large portion of the web. You know, blogger still exists. You, you can go and use that and, and, you know, Tumblr too. There's, there's a, there's a whole bunch of places you can go and publish your stuff online and, and talk about things and the many master instances and so on as well. It's more that the, the challenge is, is the group of people I want to talk to there. And then you have to do the work to, to cross post things, to, to publish on one place and then say, and then share it somewhere else to feed stuff back. And again, we've got tools to help do that and things to make that a little easier, but it still work and still takes some setting up. And, and then the other half of that is you don't necessarily want to make them all together.
Kevin Marks (01:32:13):
You know, you don't necessarily want every Twitter reply to show up on your blog post. That that could be annoying too. Cuz the way Twitter replies have with, you know, both thundering, her problems and piles and things, you don't necessarily want them all turning up on your own site. You wanna keep that cleaner. So there's, there's some, there's, there's some tensions there's always in tensions between my post is taken off. Oh great. Oh my post is taken off. Now I've gotta go and move house. You know this which, which is a, which is a real problem.
Leo Laporte (01:32:45):
Let's see.
Jeff Jarvis (01:32:47):
You want, you want a happy TikTok moment?
Leo Laporte (01:32:50):
No, but okay. I'll do it. <Laugh> yes. A happy TikTok moment. You definitely
Jeff Jarvis (01:32:55):
BEAC moment. You deflate cry. Boy deflate me
Leo Laporte (01:32:56):
So much. Yeah. Which one of the of the list?
Jeff Jarvis (01:33:00):
Well, the one there's just two moments. Okay. So Anna Lapwood who I've talked about before is a young woman who is at Cambridge. She heads the organ at one of the colleges there. She, she directs a a chorus and she goes and she's staff kind of a staff organist at Royal hall. So she goes in and she has to go in the middle of a night to practice. And she's there and you play this one.
Leo Laporte (01:33:24):
I don't know why it's there every now and then you, oh shit. How come I can't play it. There we go.
Jeff Jarvis (01:33:31):
Now you play a concert chicken. I really don't you playing concert. Phil chicken really liked. Oh, I'm sorry. There was a wrong with her. All right. So, so keep going. This was a concert for bonobo. Did I say that right?
Leo Laporte (01:33:40):
Yes.
Jeff Jarvis (01:33:41):
They saw, they heard her. She was playing a couple hours. Notice they heard her. They said, Ooh, we have to have you. They wrote a park for her. And he, she did a five day engagement with them. Wowing the audience when this organ just
Leo Laporte (01:33:55):
People didn't know there was an organ in Royal Albert Hall. Well,
Jeff Jarvis (01:33:58):
It's there, but they know
Leo Laporte (01:33:59):
Everybody's gonna play. It's pretty it, you can't miss it. It's right there. Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis (01:34:04):
But it was kind of a wonderful woman. And I think she's the greatest she's she's young woman. Who's who's in the all best senses. Our sense of the word, a nerd. She's a pipe organ nerd, but she just has this enthusiasm about it. That's infectious. So I thought it was a nice, happy moment. That's one. The other one is Ukrainian soldiers singing a tribute to their drones.
Leo Laporte (01:34:25):
They love their drones. And here they are singing a tribute <laugh> with full orchestra. Apparently the invaders have come to mother Ukraine with new ammunition. And, but all the nice gears now burning like tar BI rack tar, which is the Turkish drone that they love. Russians have parked their in the bushes to munch on K BAA. They stole from baka before they could say ska. They're hit hard by biretta <laugh> I don't know if I should really, we should be really celebrating this, but I kind of understand their they're joy. They're dragging us back to their evil empire, bad move on their part. We won't let them bring back the us Sr buy. Why is Victor Orban selling? Vira char to the Ukrainians is mine question
Jeff Jarvis (01:35:31):
NATO.
Leo Laporte (01:35:32):
Yeah. Is it?
Kevin Marks (01:35:33):
I thought it was,
Leo Laporte (01:35:35):
I feel like Turkey is kind of, I don't know, on the fence.
Jeff Jarvis (01:35:39):
No. Are they?
Leo Laporte (01:35:40):
Yeah.
Cathy Gellis (01:35:40):
No wait Orban or
Leo Laporte (01:35:42):
Gan? Erdogan. Yeah.
Kevin Marks (01:35:44):
Gan. No, no bad. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:35:45):
Erdogan. That's what
Jeff Jarvis (01:35:45):
Means to me. Okay. Right. Well, good
Leo Laporte (01:35:49):
Market. I confuse hungry in Turkey. Sorry. <laugh> yeah. Yeah, this is hysterical. Okay. Thank you, TikTok. I guess I could play that. There's not the Ukrainian army is not gonna come after me with a strike on YouTube. They
Jeff Jarvis (01:36:11):
Might come out after you with a drone. Not with a take down order.
Cathy Gellis (01:36:14):
Yeah. They do strikes in a different way.
Leo Laporte (01:36:16):
Different kind of. It's not a, it's a different kind of copyright strike.
Kevin Marks (01:36:21):
I think the Ukrainian government is very happy to have their, their content shared at the moment. They they've kind of blinder with this stuff.
Leo Laporte (01:36:27):
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis (01:36:28):
They're you know, they're, they're wonderful young guy, who's their, their head of digital transition left Keve and went to Davos and scolded companies like SAS to get the heck outta Russia. So you, you companies are not doing enough, which I like seeing when they go to, to Davos. Especially since I'm not invited here,
Leo Laporte (01:36:46):
You didn't get to go. I'm sorry. No. Oh, when Thomas protocol will join us on Sunday to give us the Davos report, which we used to have from Jeff. Yeah. Sorry. <Laugh> I, this was actually, I thought kind of an upbeat story. Let me see if I can find it. They they have created students at the researchers at the university of Texas at Austin have created a gel film that can pull gallons of drinking water per day from the air. Even the very dry desert air it's cheap to make. It's it's basically cellulose with a common food additive, couple of bucks to make per kilogram. And the at, at 30% humility humidity, it could produce 3.4 gallons of water per day, per kilogram of gel. Even at the very low desert humidity of 15%, it could produce 1.6 gallons of fresh water a day per kilogram. So the gel absorbs the, the moisture from the air. And then if it's heated, Miley releases, it
Jeff Jarvis (01:38:07):
It's really, I thought
Leo Laporte (01:38:08):
It was a great story. Isn't that amazing? It's cellulose and Conack gum, which is widely used in food additives. So it is yeah, I don't know. I just thought I saw that. I thought nice, nice story. Please don't use the duck duck go browser because they made a deal with they made a deal with Microsoft to
Jeff Jarvis (01:38:32):
Nobody's perfect.
Leo Laporte (01:38:33):
Nobody's perfect. To allow Microsoft trackers on third party sites duck do go, I guess, uses Bing duck dot go does not store any personal identifiers with your search queries, but Microsoft advertising may track your IP address in information for accounting purposes. <Laugh> like we're gonna make money accounting purposes. Anyway, the duck do go. Guy said, it's not, it's not the search. It's just the browser he posted on on Reddit doing little reclamation.
Cathy Gellis (01:39:08):
Let me point put a sh well I realized we were trying to go upbeat. And now I'm about to talk about the dystopia, but the the degree to which tracking intimate medical details.
Leo Laporte (01:39:20):
Oh, big
Cathy Gellis (01:39:20):
Problem is so easy. Yeah. It was kind of something. I was like, I'm aware of this and I kind of thought, okay, but that's not a problem that would affect me. And then a phone call I made, seemed to have been reflected in an ad. I saw on my Twitter app. And that just no, that
Jeff Jarvis (01:39:38):
Tether. Did you see the FTC? Cathy?
Cathy Gellis (01:39:42):
I see a variety of things. What, what in oh, that they, well, I think Tector said they're just politely asking not to track kids, but
Jeff Jarvis (01:39:52):
No they're using F two, a phone data to sell the advertisers.
Leo Laporte (01:39:57):
Oh, Twitter. Yeah. Hundred 50 million Twitter got a big fine. So, but this was probably not related to a phone call. You made Kathy Twitter's gonna pay 150 million because just like Facebook a couple of years ago, remember they, they get your, your number so they can send you a two factor code, but they've been using it to target ads. Now
Jeff Jarvis (01:40:17):
That's the phone
Leo Laporte (01:40:18):
Number. Yeah. But I don't, I don't think Cathy's phone call. Well, maybe.
Cathy Gellis (01:40:23):
So I was trying to figure out what the vector was. And I'm actually less upset by Twitter at this because Twitter is sort of like, what's some data that's be usable for us to give us ads. And if that was the extent of my relationship where I wouldn't have been as bothered, but Twitter didn't know about the phone call that I made. And yet, somehow it had information about me that suggested I had made this phone call. So I'm more worried about who scooped up information about my phone call to then pass it on to somebody for whom that information would be useful. I'm more worried about the initial scooping up and trying to figure out what the vector was. And the only thing I can think about is it was the phone call. But this is why people think like Facebook is listening to you because there's certain things where it's like the topic you were interacting with was so esoteric. And yet some somehow there's a very direct correlation.
Leo Laporte (01:41:13):
Couldn't have been, could not have been a coincidence
Cathy Gellis (01:41:15):
Later, like in an ad,
Leo Laporte (01:41:16):
You're sure it's not a coincidence.
Cathy Gellis (01:41:18):
It doesn't feel like it was a coincidence. Yeah. It,
Leo Laporte (01:41:20):
Cause I hear, you know,
Cathy Gellis (01:41:21):
I almost tune it out and then I realized, no, this is not normal.
Leo Laporte (01:41:24):
Yeah. I hear this all the time. My Alexa or my Google assistant was listening in or Instagram was listening and it's giving me ads based on something I said. And, and I can't say for sure, it's not, but there, I mean, these, you know, there's a lot of anecdotal,
Cathy Gellis (01:41:41):
Let me take back that it was Twitter. Yeah. Cuz it wasn't just Twitter. It was I was watching Tobi on Roku and I got an ad and a part of me is like, oh, this is the normal ad I would've seen at this. And then I'm like, hang on a second. These are not ads that everybody else sees. These are ads that are somehow being tailored to me and it thought I would want to see this ad. And the only reason I could think of why it thought I might wanna see that ad was because of this phone call I had made. So I'm trying to figure out what the vector was of why did it think that was appropriate and something that I would want because it was the type of thing that in this day and age would be very, very, very concerning for people to be able to have that insight into what I might, what might be going on in my life. Right?
Leo Laporte (01:42:24):
DOJ says, it's not going to prosecute white hat security researchers, which will relieve, I think quite a few security researchers who have been very nervous about the computer fraud and abuse act, which has been used to harass many people, including of course the late Aaron Schwartz. We'll see. <Laugh>, I'd still be nervous. We'll see the department's goals for C FAA enforcement are to promote privacy and cybersecurity by upholding the legal right of individuals, network owners and operators to ensure their confidentiality. The EF F has of course, you know, lobbied to let white hat hackers you know, do their job. We need that. And, but it's always been risky. And we, there are many stories of white hats being at least investigated under the CFAA. So let's see. Let's hope. Here's another happy story. Electrify America, which is the big charging network that VW is installing across the United States.
Leo Laporte (01:43:30):
After their diesel gate. This is part of their reparations will be a hundred percent solar powered by 2023. That's good. Yeah. Already. It's a hundred percent renewable electricity as of April. So when you get your electric car and you drive by the gas station, charging seven bucks a gallon and you go down to electrify America, know that the sun is powering, where do you charge yours at home? And, and this is when you're out. A lot of electric car people are prospective buyers of electric vehicles worry about this, cuz they with a gas vehicle, you can't fill it up at home. So they're always worried, well, where am I gonna charge it? The truth is most of us never drive more than, you know, 50 or 60 miles a day. And most cars have a hundred or 200 or three. Mine has 250 miles per charge.
Leo Laporte (01:44:21):
I charge it every night at home using solar power from our solar panels. And where you to drive longer, if then you would use electrify America or something similar I've used electrify America. Can you use Teslas? No. Well, not as of now, someday Tesla says maybe and in the UK, I think there's one Tesla supercharge. You can use <laugh> in the old country. <Laugh> but but, but there electrify America, which is, this is the good news about diesel gate. They're gonna be all over the country. They're putting in thousands of them. So and they're fast chargers. They're good. Fast chargers. But again it's,
Kevin Marks (01:44:56):
If you got a go ahead, a big power wall thing as well,
Leo Laporte (01:44:58):
Then I do, I have two power walls. Yeah. Okay. 60 pounds.
Kevin Marks (01:45:01):
You said you were charging for solar power at nine. I was like, that's a good trick.
Leo Laporte (01:45:04):
It's a good trick. And a tech. I mean, honestly it's technically probably not, you know, cuz it's we sell it back to the utility company, et cetera, et cetera. But yeah, it's, we're generating more electricity than we use,
Kevin Marks (01:45:16):
Which is good. Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:45:19):
So yeah, if you're worried about it, if you wanna buy an electric vehicle, buy one what's what's the price of petrol per liter in the UK these days?
Kevin Marks (01:45:28):
I dunno. I haven't
Leo Laporte (01:45:30):
<Laugh> you have an electric vehicle also? Obviously
Kevin Marks (01:45:32):
I have an electric bicycle.
Leo Laporte (01:45:34):
Yeah. I love my electric bicycles. If we could just get rid of all the cars, I'd be happy to ride my electric bicycle everywhere, but I don't, I'm terrified of getting creamed.
Cathy Gellis (01:45:43):
So I'm outta step. I'm out step with everyone because I have a petroleum powered car and a non electrified bicycle.
Leo Laporte (01:45:52):
Well that's okay. It's better to pedal muscle. Yeah. Muscle powers. Always better. Yeah. Are,
Kevin Marks (01:45:58):
Are you south bay? I mean it's not far down there.
Cathy Gellis (01:46:01):
He likes no I'm a north bay. The biking is good here or relatively speaking.
Kevin Marks (01:46:06):
Yeah, no, I mean I
Cathy Gellis (01:46:07):
Actually, the south bay is also very good.
Leo Laporte (01:46:08):
Where are you located? Kathy
Cathy Gellis (01:46:11):
North bay.
Leo Laporte (01:46:12):
We're in penal close. Where are you?
Cathy Gellis (01:46:15):
Northern Marin. Oh,
Leo Laporte (01:46:16):
You're like five miles away. We should just get together and do this and you wouldn't to worry about your mic bike up here. She'd be better off in the parking lot with wifi than where she is now.
Cathy Gellis (01:46:27):
<Laugh> no run out ethernet cord. I could plug directly. Oh, I need an ether. I need a dongle, but yeah,
Leo Laporte (01:46:32):
No I understand. Oh, okay. No, I mean
Kevin Marks (01:46:35):
I used to, I used to like it if we in the bay area too. But I didn't have an electric bike there cuz they were, they, well, they weren't really straightforward then. Cause
Leo Laporte (01:46:42):
Yeah, they are now man. I mean they're and they're wonderful Kathy ever. Is it an assistant? Yeah. Or it's pet all pet by law, they are pedal assist. Although if you get one with a throttle <laugh>
Kevin Marks (01:46:55):
Yeah, you can, well,
Leo Laporte (01:46:56):
You need, you need and spend a lot of time pedaling. <Laugh>
Kevin Marks (01:47:01):
Well, the, I mean the, well there's different. Great. I mean, there's, there's ones that are basically motorbikes that are electric. But the, the, the primary thing is pedal assist. And it just means that when you hit a hill, you're not gonna be sweating and getting bumpy because you actually get up the hill more.
Leo Laporte (01:47:16):
It's lovely, which is what I need. I have, we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 electric bicycles. One of them is a trike which I keep driving into a ditch because unlike a bicycle where you lean to steer a trike, you turn the handles to steer. And I keep forgetting that and I'm leaning and the bike
Kevin Marks (01:47:35):
Continues. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:47:37):
In the direction of the ditch. It's okay. It's okay. Why, why, why do you have a trike to pull the groceries back home or what? Well, I could do that with my other bike too, cuz I have lots of pans and baskets and things, but well, it was my theory cuz I, again, I don't want to get creamed that if I, an old man was driving a tricycle, people would go around me, you know? But now I'm still not convinced of that. We have a ghost bike on the way to work. There's a bridge I'd have to go over. That is very, has a bike lane this wide. Yeah, it's tiny. And, and, and there's a ghost bike there where a guy last year got killed by a an elderly motorist who had taken too much of his meds and just kinda, and and I realized, you know, in a battle against a vehicle, I don't care how many helmets I'm wearing. I'm not gonna win. So
Cathy Gellis (01:48:30):
Yeah, I have been, I have had a close encounter with a car that's terrifying. And I was, I was a kid, but sort of been there, done that don't need to.
Leo Laporte (01:48:38):
Yeah. So, so unfortunately the, there are lots of streets here with no sidewalk, no bike lanes and very fast vehicles. We just, this like everywhere else in the country. We are not, I I'm thinking of moving to Amsterdam. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> mm-hmm <affirmative>
Cathy Gellis (01:48:56):
I did semester of law school in Germany. It was good.
Leo Laporte (01:48:58):
Yeah. Yeah. There were more bikes per capita in Amster in hall Netherland. I think they would, they would look down upon you for an electric assisted bike wouldn't they it's just kind care. No, no, I'm not against it. I'm no.
Cathy Gellis (01:49:12):
Well I do cuz I do it myself. That's what granny years are for. I do it both ways uphill in the snow, whatever. Like it's fine. And I do it a lot. Snow it's
Leo Laporte (01:49:22):
It's good for you
Cathy Gellis (01:49:24):
Now. Well, when I grew up in New Jersey, I did in, in the snow, but but less of an issue out here. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:49:29):
It's good for you. I don't, I I, but I, no, I mean I'm old San
Kevin Marks (01:49:33):
Jose. It's got very good bike lanes.
Leo Laporte (01:49:34):
You does it. Yeah. Bike line's honestly really ought to have concrete partitions between
Kevin Marks (01:49:40):
The yes. You should have separate barriers. That's absolutely true.
Leo Laporte (01:49:42):
Yeah. Cause it's just too easy to veer into or turn into. Well, I,
Kevin Marks (01:49:45):
Well, I had a annoying one today where I was cycling along and somebody, some guy pulled into the bike parks. He was waiting for his kids
Leo Laporte (01:49:53):
To happens all the time. And I worried about being door.
Kevin Marks (01:49:57):
This was actually, this was a separated bike lane. There was a grass verge and a red bike lane and he still parked
Leo Laporte (01:50:02):
Into
Kevin Marks (01:50:02):
It.
Leo Laporte (01:50:03):
He, well, I guess I'm not moving to the Moores <laugh> you
Kevin Marks (01:50:10):
Can, you can, you can ride out like nice rows. Like the one behind
Leo Laporte (01:50:13):
Me here. Look. No, I know isn't that I would, I would bicycle there like crazy.
Kevin Marks (01:50:17):
Well there's that you can see, you can see my bike behind me leaning against the fence there. Cause then I just climb at the stone road. Oh, on the bike to the bottom of that hill. Oh, a little black little bike dot.
Leo Laporte (01:50:26):
So this is your own your own image, your own picture.
Kevin Marks (01:50:29):
Yeah. I took this few days ago, three days ago.
Leo Laporte (01:50:32):
Beautiful. So this is just, just a miles from your home.
Kevin Marks (01:50:37):
Yeah. This a there's a hill called Roseberry topping, which <laugh> looks like, looks like a volcano course
Leo Laporte (01:50:44):
Throws. Great topping. Of course it is. Yes.
Kevin Marks (01:50:46):
It's got, it's got, it's certainly weird shape. Cause a chunk fell off it in the 19th century. Cause they were mining stone. It fell off. So it looks, looks maybe volcano shaped, but then you can, you can bike all the way around to the bottom of it. And then the last bit is this weird, not quite a path, not quite a staircase thing that you walk up to, it
Leo Laporte (01:51:01):
Looks, yeah, it looks a little difficult, but it'd be worth the challenge. And then are there DED graves or something? Is it a, is it a Dred? No,
Kevin Marks (01:51:10):
No, no, not this one. No, there's there's there's a bunch of stone and a and a a thing you put a field light on so you can a trick point. But yeah, there's, there's the whole, there's the whole Cleveland way and there's lot. There's lots of like nice walking paths and cycling parts around here.
Leo Laporte (01:51:26):
I can recommend it. We played a little bit or talked way about Dolly and Dolly two, which is from open AI, the kind of fun little image generation program where you write a text and then here's a bowl of soup that looks like a monster spray painted on a wall and you see it's it's, you know, generating that I have yet to get permission to, to go into it. Well, Google says, hold my beer. And they've created something called imagine at Ima I M a G E N research dot research image, iGen image. But it's like imagining, right? Yeah. Same idea. And
Kevin Marks (01:52:09):
Who's that generating images too. It's a poem.
Leo Laporte (01:52:12):
Yeah. Image gen. Imagine three spheres made of glass falling into the ocean. So these are not, these have never existed before. Here's a bald Eagle made of chocolate powder, mango and whipped cream. These are, this is not just looking up stuff on the internet. This is, these are generating and
Jeff Jarvis (01:52:30):
Bascot made from bamboo a really angry. The one amazing to me is a corgi on a bike.
Leo Laporte (01:52:37):
I can't get back to it. It's like corgi on a bike. Yeah. I had it and I can't get back to it. <Laugh> anyway, that's kind of cool. It's pretty amazing. I, I wish you could play with it. Can you, oh, here's the corgi bike.
Kevin Marks (01:52:50):
No. Well you have to get access to it.
Leo Laporte (01:52:52):
Yeah.
Kevin Marks (01:52:53):
And
Leo Laporte (01:52:55):
Have you access to it? No, no. I'll ask for access. There was,
Kevin Marks (01:53:01):
Did you see the, the viral one, a cent except the man part a jumbo shrimp. Do you see that one this week?
Leo Laporte (01:53:06):
<Laugh> no,
Kevin Marks (01:53:08):
I let me find that again.
Leo Laporte (01:53:11):
Centar shrimp and vital parts. Jube shrimp, jumbo shrimp, vital parts should be enough to narrow it down. Nope. Images for centar shrimp. Vital parts gives me
Kevin Marks (01:53:24):
Cent cent, ju cent jumbo shrimp
Leo Laporte (01:53:26):
Center. Jumbo. Maybe the word jumbo shrimp will narrow.
Cathy Gellis (01:53:32):
I thought you meant that just the man part was a shrimp. Not the,
Kevin Marks (01:53:37):
Yes. That's that's what supposed to, ah,
Leo Laporte (01:53:38):
This is disgusting. This is, this is really loathsome.
Kevin Marks (01:53:44):
He said, oh, that's quite a thing. Oh yeah. That's the one.
Leo Laporte (01:53:46):
Yeah. Here's this tweet, this isn't,
Kevin Marks (01:53:49):
This isn't either of, of these two. This is another image generation thing that that is in, in prototype.
Leo Laporte (01:53:55):
It says, so Jenny
Cathy Gellis (01:53:57):
Endless screaming,
Leo Laporte (01:53:58):
Jenny badge limp, shrimp bull on Twitter. Also known as horse wizard says, okay, the AI refuses to gimme a normal cat. But when I ask for a Centor except the man part is a jumbo shrimp, it nails it <laugh>.
Kevin Marks (01:54:16):
So I asked someone who had access to Dali to try the same thing and it wasn't as good.
Leo Laporte (01:54:21):
Wow. Wow.
Kevin Marks (01:54:24):
So I now wanna see the, the image I put the link in the chat.
Leo Laporte (01:54:32):
Okay. Let's look at the chat. Which chat did you put that link into the TWI live IRC. Okay. We have so many.
Kevin Marks (01:54:43):
That's true. Yes. It's not these
Leo Laporte (01:54:44):
Here. It is from think, think vert think wort not as good as the viral tweet as sent to except the man part is a jumbo <laugh> jumbo shrimp.
Kevin Marks (01:54:54):
That's just that she's, she's not as nice as the other one. Well, not as is this,
Leo Laporte (01:54:58):
This is from Imagen.
Kevin Marks (01:55:00):
This is, this is from Dali
Leo Laporte (01:55:02):
Dali. Okay.
Kevin Marks (01:55:03):
The thing where said I've got
Cathy Gellis (01:55:04):
Said remembers what it produced and it won't produce it again, cuz it's learned, it's sort of like I got that out my system and now I've sort of been crafted in some way.
Kevin Marks (01:55:12):
Well, they do tend to give you, it does tend to give you model versions. You're supposed to pick the good one. Yeah. so I want I'm I want to see what Imagen does with this prompt.
Leo Laporte (01:55:20):
Do you think
Kevin Marks (01:55:23):
I'll let you do it,
Leo Laporte (01:55:24):
Do you think right now these are just silly toys, but yes we are close. Do you think to being able to actually say, you know president Biden, falling down the stairs and getting an image that is indistinguishable from real?
Kevin Marks (01:55:44):
I think the ch the challenge is that's actually harder than anything you would think. I think these, these things they show them with these sort of slightly dangerous things because that, that works works better. But and they're also trying very hard to, to not generate images of people at the moment. They they're all like writing, oh, we shouldn't do that type stuff, but they, they will, you know, it it's STC parents problem. Again, they're gonna generate images of people, then, then they've gotta deal it with it. And then you'll find that using people's faces, they shouldn't be using and in trouble. How
Leo Laporte (01:56:12):
Effective though, in the long run, are they gonna be doing stuff like that? I mean, you know, you can't only keep, have you ever seen a poll? I'm sorry. Pandora's box closed so long.
Kevin Marks (01:56:21):
Well, I mean, that's, you know, we've, we've had this with the face generators, you know, those, those have been around for the while and those are
Leo Laporte (01:56:27):
Right.
Kevin Marks (01:56:27):
You know, plausible faces and you, you, if you look very closely, you can, well, if you cherry pick them a bit, cause they will, it also generates like weird extra heads next to you sometimes.
Leo Laporte (01:56:37):
Yeah. Well, that's also what you have to do with a text. You know, you you'll have G G P T generate five different versions of text and pick the one that says,
Kevin Marks (01:56:46):
And then you, then you should, then you should cherry pick the good ones, cherry
Leo Laporte (01:56:48):
Pick.
Kevin Marks (01:56:49):
And, and this, you know, this was the pretty critique we had of Google's new model when they were showing that off. And they were doing again last week, whenever when they did was it IO last week?
Leo Laporte (01:57:00):
Yeah. IO was last week.
Kevin Marks (01:57:01):
Yeah. And they were doing the same thing of like, well, it makes stuff up sometimes. And that's, but it's still cool. It's like no making stuff up. It's not cool. Responsible research query is not cool.
Leo Laporte (01:57:08):
Not cool. <Laugh>
Kevin Marks (01:57:10):
You? Your, your entire job was organizable as information making the university accessible and useful that
Leo Laporte (01:57:15):
Making do
Kevin Marks (01:57:16):
Stuff. If make it up instead, that's not actually very helpful. That's the opposite of what you want us want to be doing. And if you're cutting out the middle of man of the spamers who have been doing that to figure into your search engine, but I'm not sure that's actually a helpful sort of disintermediation. Thank you.
Leo Laporte (01:57:29):
It's kind of this, the way computer science is the first 80% is easy, but the last 1% is intractable. Yeah. Whether it's self-driving vehicles or face recognition or handwriting recognition or generating images or text, it's always that
Kevin Marks (01:57:45):
Little thing. I mean, some of them converge a bit better than others. I mean, the, the stuff they've been doing with audio processing is actually very impressive, but, but yeah, you've got the translator things that sort of mostly work, but they work with the language that they've got. They they're trying to scale them to other languages. And that's not as
Leo Laporte (01:58:01):
Somebody has an amazing simulation of an actual phone ringing. Oh, okay. That's Jeff <laugh> I know it's a simulation because no one actually has a phone that rings anymore. So tough to forge digital driver's license is actually pretty easy to forge a litany of security flaws. This is the government of new south Wales in Australia, rolling out digital drivers's licenses, they said would provide additional levels of security and protection against identity fraud compared to plastic driver's licenses. Well, no, not, not in fact, do
Cathy Gellis (01:58:41):
You know this? You know, this is doomed from the whole way that they decided that what they were trying to do was even better. Yeah. Because they were, they were ignoring all the security problems. Yeah. You don't put your digital ID on your phone. You don't put it on something that you might hand to a cop. It, and no, no, this wasn't something that was broken, like the whole bit with like R F I D chips in, in your passports, like, oh, this will make us safer in some way. No, it just provided another vector for attackers to suck up identities from. Yeah. Like it was just this idea that like, oh, we're just gonna add this, this latest buzzword and everything will be miraculously wonderful. And this magical thinking is just absolutely terrible when it comes to particularly changing any system that worked in an offline analog into something digital, like it's so under theorized, it's so undercooked and making something digital does not make it better. It tends to introduce a thousand more problems that you never bothered to anticipate,
Leo Laporte (01:59:42):
Which is why I thank God. We're not voting on the internet yet.
Cathy Gellis (01:59:46):
Exactly. Like that is a system where no, this is not a thing that will
Leo Laporte (01:59:53):
Help the pixel watch is gonna have a,
Cathy Gellis (01:59:57):
But then like, you know, Bitcoin, like, oh, we're just gonna add the blockchain.
Leo Laporte (02:00:01):
That'll make blockchain makes everything better. Like bacon pixel watch will have a, a two year old exo 91, 10 processor, but we'll also have a physical USBC port. What <laugh>
Kevin Marks (02:00:19):
Charge it some haven't you?
Leo Laporte (02:00:20):
Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, but usually they charge it with some sort of, that's a, you know, wireless charging thing. I, I don't really credit this. It'll have 32 gigs of storages, or this is rumors, even if you've announced something, apparently it's possible to have rumors. 32 gigs of storage is a lot, it'll have a lot of Ram as well. More Ram than any existing smart watch today, according to nine to five Google. And apparently it will have a USBC port. I maybe that's just a diagnostic port, early apple watches, I think, had something like that. So maybe that's
Kevin Marks (02:00:59):
So how, how is it? They still haven't managed to integrate a Fitbit, Google.
Leo Laporte (02:01:04):
I mean, yeah.
Kevin Marks (02:01:04):
How many sort of for engineers they employ in, why is it still a third party app that called fit to fit that moves between the two?
Leo Laporte (02:01:10):
You, you own it, I guess it may, it's a hard computer science problem. Kevin.
Cathy Gellis (02:01:15):
I could, I could see it, it being a regulatory compliance problem that you've gotta integrate these things and they may not be easily integrable, like even just from the privacy policy standpoint that that's gonna take like a lot of foyer hours to do.
Kevin Marks (02:01:27):
Has that deal actually closed? I think that was we
Leo Laporte (02:01:29):
Way before. Oh yeah. They own Fitbit. Yeah. Yeah. They are. Yeah.
Kevin Marks (02:01:32):
They Fitbit. So it's like,
Leo Laporte (02:01:33):
Yeah.
Kevin Marks (02:01:33):
It's like, what,
Leo Laporte (02:01:35):
What, but they bet the, I suppose they, they wanna make something new instead. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's see. You get P goof making things compatible. That's the problem. Facebook is paying. If you are a resident of Illinois, Facebook is paying each and every one of you, $397 because Illinois is one of the few states in the union that has a good biometric anti biometric law. It was a class action suit started in 2015, a lawsuit of face against Facebook because of a facial recognition feature. The social me media network used it would recognize your face and tag you in photos. You may remember that. However, it is a violation of the Illinois state privacy law, which forbids any company from collecting biometric data from its users without consent big victory, $397. I'll take it. I wonder
Jeff Jarvis (02:02:34):
Who gets it and who doesn't.
Leo Laporte (02:02:35):
I think everybody, I don't know. Well, not everybody. You probably have to be an Illinois resident. You're in the class. You have to be an Illinois resident. You have to use Facebook, I guess. If you, oh, you have to sign up and, you know, file your claim and all that. But you'll be getting a check in the next few days. Look for an email Illinois resident Kelly, Ann Conway, my husband, George abandoned me for Twitter. That's all <laugh>
Jeff Jarvis (02:03:06):
Corresponded in the divorce.
Leo Laporte (02:03:09):
That's are they getting divorced? No. Well, that's the, that was a joke. It's the strangest thing. I mean, she's been, her book is apparently fairly vicious about George, but they're still married. So I don't know, you know, no one knows what really goes on their marriage to each their own. I am not gonna do a change lock, sorry. Nope. Not gonna do it.
Jeff Jarvis (02:03:30):
It's bad today. It's nothing good.
Leo Laporte (02:03:36):
<Laugh> I'm just scanning through, looking for fun in what is the GrubHub fiasco?
Jeff Jarvis (02:03:42):
That was the, we talked about last week where they did a $15 thing.
Leo Laporte (02:03:45):
Oh.
Jeff Jarvis (02:03:46):
Thousands of waters came in. Oh yeah. This has more reporting about that.
Leo Laporte (02:03:49):
Oh God, what I'm missing?
Jeff Jarvis (02:03:50):
What, what an incredible screw up. It was,
Leo Laporte (02:03:54):
You know, specialist, is it cost GrubHub, nothing. And the cost, the restaurants,
Jeff Jarvis (02:04:00):
You know, well now they're gonna offer further coupons to people who didn't get their food and all that poor restaurants just suffered terribly. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:04:05):
Terribly. Yeah. I'm taking it that you pasted these in like the introduction. I know I didn't paste in the introduction of Microsoft Excel in 1992.
Jeff Jarvis (02:04:16):
Have you seen this one?
Leo Laporte (02:04:18):
No, but obvious. Shall I play it for sure?
Jeff Jarvis (02:04:22):
Little
Leo Laporte (02:04:23):
1, 19 92. It's on YouTube. This is apparently when Excel came out, it was on the Mac first. Wasn't it? I feel like it was
Jeff Jarvis (02:04:35):
Soft. Woman goes by clearly the boss, very nervous employee. Can't wait for somebody else to come in. The guy finally comes in. Look at all too casual.
Speaker 6 (02:04:42):
Just saw Wilson. You're showing her the projections for the new vacation packages this morning. I am.
Leo Laporte (02:04:48):
Thank God. I have Microsoft Excel.
Jeff Jarvis (02:04:51):
Well just wait,
Leo Laporte (02:04:53):
Is this the GED is good era. Come
Speaker 6 (02:04:55):
On. Don't do this to me. Yeah. It's just one little spreadsheet this could make or break the deal. Her exact words were 9:00 AM or never calm
Leo Laporte (02:05:06):
Down. Don't you feel bad for these guys who were apparently real actors? Oh
Jeff Jarvis (02:05:10):
Yeah. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (02:05:13):
I got a gig. I got a gig. I'm gonna be in an ad for Microsoft Excel. Not even an a it's a four minute. I, I don't wanna watch the it's special infomercial. All right.
Jeff Jarvis (02:05:24):
All right. Recording obsolete sounds. Now I found this one. Interesting.
Leo Laporte (02:05:28):
I like this. We're going by the way. This is effort in case you didn't notice we're going through Jeff's submissions.
Kevin Marks (02:05:35):
Jeff's weirdness,
Leo Laporte (02:05:35):
Jeff's weirdness, but I do like this one, because this is good. There are, what are obsolete sounds? What, what would you, what would
Jeff Jarvis (02:05:42):
You example? The sound of a VCR? Yeah. Rewinding the sound like ABO a 300 Bo modem. Yeah. they want people to record these sounds so we have them. So we hold onto them. It'll soon be the, the sound of a dial tone, no doubt or rotary phone or all these things. So they just want people to record they don't have them yet, but it's a pro you know, one of those open projects where they want everybody to record. Sounds so, so go find all of your right there at twit. You could do a hundred of
Leo Laporte (02:06:13):
These. We have a lot of obsolete sounds here. Oh,
Jeff Jarvis (02:06:16):
Do you ever
Leo Laporte (02:06:17):
Citi cities and memory.com cities and memory.com, which is it loves sounds. I guess it's the world's biggest sound project. Global collaborative sound art and field recording program with the aim of remixing the world. One sound at a time. This is my, you wanna hear today's featured sound sure it is an early morning bird song. It's St. Leonard's gardens St. Leonards on sea, England. This sounds like Kevin Mark's house.
Kevin Marks (02:06:49):
<Laugh> my California house.
Leo Laporte (02:06:52):
Yeah. We used to get birds. You'd be out by your orange tree. We'd get all sorts of birds.
Kevin Marks (02:06:58):
Yeah. Well, the birds were asleep now. Cause it's its night. This is boring. Why is this? Why is this bird sound obsolete? That makes me, yeah. Doesn't
Leo Laporte (02:07:05):
No, no, no. They that's something new.
Jeff Jarvis (02:07:07):
The cities
Leo Laporte (02:07:08):
They do. They, you know, the
Jeff Jarvis (02:07:09):
Obsolete sounds is a new project, right.
Kevin Marks (02:07:11):
Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. I mean, BBC sound archive, the sound effects
Leo Laporte (02:07:17):
Archive. That's an amazing, amazing. And
Kevin Marks (02:07:19):
They have, they wanna have lots of obsolete, weird stuff in there. Yeah. That's that's, that's, that's very good. It's very useful.
Leo Laporte (02:07:27):
I have actually browsed the BBC sounds archive. That's AMA that was created for their radio division, I guess, to, for radio plays and things like that.
Kevin Marks (02:07:36):
Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. And was, and they just gathered it over time and they used to, they used to distribute it on record in CD. I, I, I remember getting what sound effects went out the library when I was about 14 and playing it at home and scamming the crap out my mother. Cause it was a huge explosion.
Leo Laporte (02:07:51):
<Laugh> <laugh> so now you've come up with a good use for these though. That's good. Yeah. Let's take a little break. We are gonna get some picks and ideas and stuff like that. I love you guys, Kathy Gilles. It's always great to have you see G council.com and you'll read your stuff on Tector on a regular basis. Jeff Jarvis you, you know, Frank Sinatra called him a bum. He is a nickel millionaire, according to Ray crock and and a beloved member of our team. The only one who showed up today. Yeah. Kevin. Yeah. Kevin Marks also always a glad to have Kevin on indie web.org. I show they brought to you by policy genius, policy genius. I you know, when you have kids, first thing that goes through your mind is I got some responsibilities now. And that first, very first thing I did is went out and got life insurance life insurance is I think one of those things it's like being a grownup gives you peace of mind.
Leo Laporte (02:09:00):
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Leo Laporte (02:10:37):
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Leo Laporte (02:11:33):
And I have to say my daughter's 30, my son's 27 <laugh> and they still, I feel like I still have to have a little responsibility to them. Policy genius.com/twig to get someday though, they all have a job to get free life insurance quotes and see how much you can save policygenius.com/twig. Does TikTok count as a job? I guess it does. He makes money in policygenius.com/twig. We thank you PolicyGenius for supporting this week in Google. Now Kathy, Kevin, I'm not gonna put you on the spot unless you wanna participate, but here's your opportunity. I know you're a Huey Lewis fan, Kathy galls. <Laugh> so go ahead. Give us your Huey Lewis pick of the week.
Cathy Gellis (02:12:19):
Well, you should there's two tweets there. You should click on them, cuz this is about the picture. So click on the Huey one
Leo Laporte (02:12:25):
First. I got it here. He is at the Andy now. Huey, can he speak? I know he can't sing. Can he speak? Yeah,
Cathy Gellis (02:12:31):
He can speak. He
Leo Laporte (02:12:32):
Just can't sing. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Cathy Gellis (02:12:33):
Right. So he was out in Pittsburgh because he participated in some way with a film about endangered birds and bird conservation and that film debut at the Carnegie center in Pittsburgh. So he was out there and while he was in Pittsburgh, he apparently toured the Andy Warhol museum. And this, I decided meant that he was trolling me because if you click on the other tweet, the one that from me. Yes. Okay. Click on that and look at the picture.
Leo Laporte (02:13:02):
Okay. Yes. Oh you didn't. So that was my
Cathy Gellis (02:13:06):
Birthday
Leo Laporte (02:13:06):
Cake. Campbell's soup can on your birthday cake,
Cathy Gellis (02:13:10):
Right? Because my birthday happens to be world intellectual property day, according to WPO, and I've decided, well, they could see me coming. So they made my birthday the day that we are going to celebrate intellectual property. And so every year for the last couple years, I've tried to come up with a thematically appropriate cake. And in this particular instance, because of the terrible decision from the second circuit involving Andy Warhol which kind of ruined fair use, which is now going to be heard by the Supreme court. I decided that to celebrate world intellectual property, I had an Andy Warhol themed cake and I had to figure out how to do it. And I got, you know, Mike Campbell suit camp. So I did that. That was like a month ago. And then Huey shows up, you know, at the Andy Warhol museum while Andy Warhol is so relevant to my life. So, you know, this is just the synergy I have with Huey Lewis that like he plugs into the legal issues I'm thinking about and just, you know, makes his own derivative works co consistently,
Leo Laporte (02:14:06):
You're gonna better watch out. You're gonna start getting ads for Huey Lewis merchandise in your Twitter feed.
Cathy Gellis (02:14:10):
This would be bad. I really don't understand. That would be fine. That would be fine for everyone. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (02:14:16):
What is the terrible decision? I didn't hear this about Warhol and, and his is it about his Campbell soup? Can
Cathy Gellis (02:14:24):
Not, the Campbell soup can, it was about his prince pictures where he had the prince prince yeah, P R I N C P R I N T S. And he, they were famous pictures where he had taken a photo and then he had kind of stylized them. And in the way that he stylized them, they became quite famous because they captured a certain essence of the artist prince in a way that the original picture hadn't. And so these were, you know, prototypical Warhol works that existed for a long, long time. And then the original photographer eventually discovered this, that it was her picture that had been used. And so she sued and somehow the second circuit decided that she had a leg to stand on and that it wasn't fair use and she had a claim against his estate now there's some irony because the Warhol estate, I believe has also sort of gone after other people for their potentially fair uses of Warhol works.
Cathy Gellis (02:15:19):
But in this case it really broke a lot. And it also ended up a decision that was inconsistent with Google versus with Oracle V Google, which also addressed fair use. So there was a cert petition, the Supreme court, and they agreed to hear this case. So hopefully it will straighten this case out. And the one that actually concerned me more was one from the ninth circuit, which I think was even worse, which had to do with the mashup of the, oh, the places you'll go, which was the star Trek and Dr. Sue mashup. And there was a, and the, it was defended successfully at the district court. And then the ninth circuit court of appeals just sort of tore up so much fair use wasn't fair use, you'd be liable. And that case ended up settling. But after this terrible decision that would've kept it going.
Cathy Gellis (02:16:08):
And I think that one was even worse because at least in the second circuit case you had a living copyright, the, the original artist was at least still alive. And then going after art produced by somebody who no longer was, whereas in the ninth circuit, you had the estate of a dead person shutting down future creative expression of a live person. And this is an awful lot of power that the dead would have over our lives. If this is the way that fair use works. So I'm really hoping that we'll get some clarity from the Supreme court to sort of make fair use, be usable, because if it's chilling other works that bring new ideas and new thoughts together, but are built on the shoulders. You stand on the shoulders of giants, you use the works that came before to inform your creativity now because that's how art works. This has to be something that you have a safe space to do. And if you don't have a reliable, fair use defense, then you're not gonna be able to do it. And that's an awful lot of new expression. We're not gonna get to experience.
Leo Laporte (02:17:09):
It's kind of a weird case because the photographer did li it was licensed to an, to vanity fair. He used it, then he continued to use it. She was unaware of it until she saw of vanity fair article in 2016 after Prince's death. They, the Warhol state preemptively sued her. So she didn't even bring suit. They sued her preemptively and and won. And then now she says, well, I don't think that's fair either. The judge said the, the transformation was sufficient that the print series work can reasonably perceived to have transport prints. So you know, none of the pieces, none of the parts of the original photo are, are still there, even though it is recognizable as a, as a altered work of the original she's, where is a, she is now counter suing, not counter suing. She's now appealing to the Supreme court.
Cathy Gellis (02:18:05):
She appealed and she won. And now that boy get reviewed.
Leo Laporte (02:18:08):
Oh, so they're as an intern. Okay. Okay.
Cathy Gellis (02:18:10):
Yeah. So so yeah, I think the Warhol state probably did a declaratory judgment. They won for finding a fair use. She appealed that the second circuit undid it, and now that's being reviewed by the Supreme court. Oh, that's interesting. But the, the, one of the biggest issue
Leo Laporte (02:18:23):
It's transformative, right? That's your, your position is this is a trans sufficiently transformative that it is, it doesn't have to, they didn't have to license
Cathy Gellis (02:18:32):
The problem. The problem with the second circuit decision is it really conflated two things where if this conflation could happen, then there all, a lot of transformative works are in trouble, which is you, you do have the exclusive, right as the copyright owner to control derivative works. And, but at the same time, fair use is it is found to be fair use when it's sufficiently transformative. So what does it mean if you've transformed something into something new, have you now changed it and that's fair use, or have you essentially made a derivative work? And the way the second circuit decision reads is you made a derivative work of the original, but that would just obviate all sorts of transformative uses because in theory, they're inherently derivative. So there's gotta be some other delineator to make that the, the new things that people are building, not something that the original the original create copyright owner, would've been able to control, cuz if they can control everything, then there's an awful lot of new stuff that can't be developed. And this is particularly onerous as copyright terms are just enormous and you know, generations
Jeff Jarvis (02:19:36):
And we have an internet that's built on collaborative building upon all creation has been built on prior creation. Exactly. Especially on the net.
Cathy Gellis (02:19:44):
Yeah. Ex especially. Yeah. So both cases from the ninth and the second circuit are really troubling because you can't do anything new. The original person who may be dead gets veto power. And that's, that's no way to run a railroad like you, the whole point of copyright laws. Cause we wanna keep getting new stuff. And so these, these, these decisions are standing in the way of getting new stuff, cuz they're making it legally unsafe to make the new stuff.
Leo Laporte (02:20:11):
Interesting. very interesting
Cathy Gellis (02:20:15):
Little did Huey know that that's the issue he wandered into? Maybe he, maybe he did know. I should give him credit cuz he's Huey Lewis. He's wonderful.
Leo Laporte (02:20:23):
Kevin Marks, you got a couple of things this week. Oops. He's muted. Is that us or you
Kevin Marks (02:20:32):
Sorry? Yep. One of them is I'm talking about obste things. Mac O eight.app.
Leo Laporte (02:20:39):
You can boot wait a minute. Let's boot up a Mac running Mac OS eight. So in other words, JavaScript is fast enough to do system eight <laugh>
Kevin Marks (02:20:49):
System eight in the browser,
Leo Laporte (02:20:50):
In the browser.
Kevin Marks (02:20:51):
Amazing. And it's got a bunch of software in there, but also the thing that you can do with it is you can drag in, I ISO images for CDs so I can actually play the old CD ROMs that I made.
Leo Laporte (02:21:02):
Oh wow. And does it work? Yeah. Have you taken your old CD ROMs and put 'em in there?
Kevin Marks (02:21:09):
Let me give you a go. Hang on. I'll give you piece
Leo Laporte (02:21:11):
On screen. That's hysterical. I've gotta play dark castle though, while you're doing that. Oh
Kevin Marks (02:21:15):
<Laugh> I'm I can't screen share.
Leo Laporte (02:21:17):
Ah that's okay. So you're what are you, are, these are the old CDs you did for the be or, or what?
Kevin Marks (02:21:24):
Yeah, well multimedia corporation ah,
Leo Laporte (02:21:28):
This was your first like your, your first job practically. Yeah,
Kevin Marks (02:21:31):
But you can, you could download C Rams off internet archive. And if you, and you can drag, you can drag basically. But yeah, this is, this is like retro max.
Leo Laporte (02:21:41):
It's hysterical. Look at that. Am Mike, is there sound John is, I should be yeah, there should be sound on. This is, is okay. Turn it up. There we go. Oh, this was such a fun game. <Laugh>
Jeff Jarvis (02:22:01):
Wow.
Leo Laporte (02:22:02):
All right. What
Jeff Jarvis (02:22:03):
Year was this likely?
Leo Laporte (02:22:05):
Oh, I don't know. Nineties.
Kevin Marks (02:22:08):
This is rich night. Wasn't it?
Leo Laporte (02:22:11):
It been late eighties, early nineties, I think. Yeah. That's one now. Another you don't care about crypto boy.
Kevin Marks (02:22:21):
Okay. Yeah. I don't. This is, this is a to one for Jeff. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7 (02:22:27):
Nfts one more time.
Leo Laporte (02:22:49):
Now wait a minute. She's lip syncing. This is this somebody else's original.
Kevin Marks (02:22:54):
It's this? Her original. But she did a rerecording and then she's she left it out. People to sing on
Leo Laporte (02:22:58):
Salem. IISE on the, to S a L E M I L E S E. She's also on on the YouTube. Yeah. So,
Kevin Marks (02:23:07):
So this broke out enough that she actually performed it live at Gary V's.
Leo Laporte (02:23:11):
No did really? And how did they they laughed, right?
Kevin Marks (02:23:18):
I think so.
Leo Laporte (02:23:20):
He's defending, he's a, he's got an open sea thing behind him. He's defending it right? Three. Okay. So that's a great song. That could be a hit that
Kevin Marks (02:23:31):
His history it's actually very catchy.
Leo Laporte (02:23:32):
It's a great song. Well done. Bravo Salem. IISE S a L E M I L E S E. I'm just saying it over and over. So she won't Sue me. And now <laugh>, Jeff's Jeff's stuff of the week. Jeff
Jeff Jarvis (02:23:47):
Know how I love technology, how it's ability to solve problems. I was in do Toros, which is a knockoff of, of Chipotle in New York where I get to look my lunches when I'm in the city. And I watched the, on the take on, on, on the delivery line, woman doing a phone order, an online order, putting on absolutely everything on this burrito. Right. And I think there's no way she's gonna get that folded into her burrito. And she there mushes it over and mushes it on and mushes it over and rolls it up tight as can be. And then it gets the foil around and quickly tightens it up before it explodes. Right. So there's a problem here that needs technologies.
Leo Laporte (02:24:26):
Yeah. Because as soon as you unwrap that foil, it is gonna explode. It's
Jeff Jarvis (02:24:29):
Gonna explode. It's gonna explode. So students at oh God, where is it?
Leo Laporte (02:24:36):
The John John's Hopkins, J Hopkins, Q undergrads have
Jeff Jarvis (02:24:40):
Created an edible burrito tape
Speaker 8 (02:24:43):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (02:24:44):
To hold your burrito together. It's actually clear, they put some blue dye in the one on the right, but it's actually clear and it's edible. I don't even know
Jeff Jarvis (02:24:53):
You're eating that's no,
Leo Laporte (02:24:54):
It's edible. Yeah. So Aaron Walsh told NBC Washington, I'm a student athlete, so I'm not looking to make a skimpy burrito <laugh> they are applying for a patent. So they have not disclosed their formula. And you know what? I hope that Aaron Walsh, Marie, Eric, and Rachel, and I become crypto billionaires by inventing burrito tape, all they can say is the ingredients are safe to consume our food grade and our common food and dietary additives. You know, you could actually probably use seaweed strips to do this, but they would add a little, is
Jeff Jarvis (02:25:37):
It, is it adhesive?
Leo Laporte (02:25:38):
Yeah. If you, yeah, it's gluey. It's what they hold sushi together. Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis (02:25:43):
Well, but that's the, the, the rice, right?
Leo Laporte (02:25:47):
I dunno. You're asking the one. I dunno,
Jeff Jarvis (02:25:50):
You started it.
Leo Laporte (02:25:51):
<Laugh>
Jeff Jarvis (02:25:52):
I just gave you a nice burrito tape and you gotta say no, no, no
Leo Laporte (02:25:56):
Sea way to do it. Geez. Do, do you wanna do any of these other wonderful ones, but no, that's good off. That's
Jeff Jarvis (02:26:03):
Not only is crypto going down, but Rolexes are going down. People are panicked about that. I found that I found a little bit of shot and Friday for that.
Leo Laporte (02:26:10):
Yeah. when you're
Cathy Gellis (02:26:12):
Gonna wear your Rolex, if you're busy wearing your Google watch, apple watch fits that's that's that'probably common. Like how many hands do you
Leo Laporte (02:26:20):
Have? Probably why the Rolex, apparently there is an index, the Rolex mark watch market price index and over, oh, I have to buy it to get five years of historical data. <Laugh> I know, but it's been down, down, down last month. Whew. Plummeting plummeting. Since it's peak back in April.
Jeff Jarvis (02:26:43):
This was the NFT before there. NFT.
Leo Laporte (02:26:45):
Yeah. That's really true.
Jeff Jarvis (02:26:46):
Overpriced watches.
Leo Laporte (02:26:47):
Yeah. The average market index of the 30 most popular Rolex models over time. Wow. well that concludes this edition of <laugh> the, this weekend, whatever the hell we wanna talk about. <Laugh> Kathy, Kathy. Great to have you as always Kathy Gillis. Next time I'm gonna make you come into the studio. That's what I'm gonna make you do. You're gonna sit right next to me and the hell with you bike. Yeah, yeah. Bicycle on up. She you'll see her on tech, dirt, CG council.com. Kathy Gilles on the Twitter. Thank you so much, Kathy. Always great to have you on really, really appreciate it. Kevin Marks always a pleasure to see you indie web.org indie web camp regular meetings, I guess they're all virtual these days. So you can go there's
Kevin Marks (02:27:34):
There's one in about an hour and a half. Nice. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:27:38):
And it doesn't matter where it is. How well attended are those
Kevin Marks (02:27:44):
You, we get like a half dozen to a, to a dozen people.
Leo Laporte (02:27:48):
I really want, you know, I have
Kevin Marks (02:27:51):
The weekly things.
Leo Laporte (02:27:52):
I static have Hugo blog. I recently added the ability to comment on it, but you have to comment on Mastadon, which is nice, but I want to add web mentions to it. So that's gonna be my project for the weekend. Okay.
Kevin Marks (02:28:03):
Yeah. Come well. Come to chat.web.org. People have already done it. So you'll find people to talk to about it. Yeah. The channel you can. So there's two ways to do it with a start one. You can have a JavaScript thing that will load the comments, like, like which I do on mine. Right. or you can, or you can bake them into it at, at rebuild time, but then you've gotta rebuild it each comment or something. Yeah. Yeah. Which makes it a little trickier.
Leo Laporte (02:28:25):
You know, the nice thing about Hugo takes nothing, no time to rebuild it. I might just make a CR job.
Kevin Marks (02:28:31):
I just do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But people have done that, but I, but I, I, on my side I do it. I have the comments coming dynamically from an external server.
Leo Laporte (02:28:40):
Nice. The only bad thing is I know no one's commenting about my blog, so <laugh> it won't, it'll just be depressing, but I still wanna do it in spirit.
Kevin Marks (02:28:51):
If you were to bridge, you get tweets as well. So
Leo Laporte (02:28:54):
Yeah. That's nice. Yeah. I, yeah. I'll use bridge. Yeah. There's some really cool technologies and I wish more people would, do you feel like there is more awareness or is it just kind of, it's a group of people
Kevin Marks (02:29:06):
It's it's happening. Yeah. I mean, that's what I'm saying. We were having a conversation with Tumblr about integrating with them, which would be great if we that's
Leo Laporte (02:29:11):
Huge much. Yeah. Tumblr tum. That's really huge.
Kevin Marks (02:29:15):
So that, that that's
Leo Laporte (02:29:15):
Good. It all starts@indieweb.org.
Kevin Marks (02:29:19):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:29:21):
Anything else you'd like to say? You can? No, I think
Kevin Marks (02:29:23):
Use this. I
Leo Laporte (02:29:24):
Think that's it. This moment in front of the microphone. And then of course, there's Jeff Jarvis, the director of the town night center for entrepreneurial journalism at the great Craig Newmark graduate school of journalism at the city, university of New York, our good friend. What do you having tonight for dinner?
Jeff Jarvis (02:29:44):
My wife made something good. Last time we had leftover a ham. Oh. And was just a thing with that.
Leo Laporte (02:29:50):
You know what Dorothy Parker said, eternity is a ham and two people. And on that note, <laugh>
Jeff Jarvis (02:29:58):
I thought it was a food cake
Leo Laporte (02:30:00):
Fruitcake. That works well. Thank you, Kathy. Thank you, Kevin. Thank you, Jeff. We do this weekend, Google every Wednesday, 2:00 PM. Pacific 5:00 PM. Eastern 2100 UTC. You can watch us do at live, live.twi.tv. Then you'll hear all the FBOs bombs. Unex. if you're chatting, chat with us at IRC TV, there were a few this week. There were a few you can also, there was one in the song. Yeah. Yeah. There was one in the song. Yeah, but we'll bleep 'em before they go out. You can also chat with us in our discord. If you're a member of a club twit, which I highly recommend, not only do you get access to a really great conversation about our shows, you also get to participate in conversations about pretty much everything under the sun, from anime to hacking, to photography, to sports, to travel and you get ad free versions of all of our shows and you get the twit plus feed, which features shows we don't even put out as podcast like the untitled Linux show. And Stacy's book club is coming up. Termination shock will be the book from Neil Stevenson. Is that
Jeff Jarvis (02:31:08):
The title? The untitled Linux
Leo Laporte (02:31:09):
Show. Yeah. They wanted to have a title. I said, no, no, keep it. <Laugh>
Jeff Jarvis (02:31:14):
Good. I like that. Yeah. I did
Leo Laporte (02:31:14):
Like that. There were a lot of like, you know, corny things with talks and stuff and I no, no, no UN title Linux show. It's perfect. So that's the name of it. We also have the GI FIS, Dick T Barolos weekly venture into weirdness and a lot of other things going on. And all of that is available on the trip plus feed or as a member of club trip, you know, it's easy seven bucks a month go to TWI, do TV slash club TWI. And it really helps us out. So thank you in advance. After the fact on demand version of the show are available with ads intact at twit.tv/twig on the YouTube channel it's dedicated to this week in Google. Every show actually has its own YouTube channel. And of course like all our shows, you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client. And if you subscribe, you'll get it the minute it's available. So you don't have to even think about it. Just listen at your leisure. Thanks for joining us. Everybody. We'll see you next time. This weekend, Google byebye, there is my pal, Jeff, my Powell,
Speaker 9 (02:32:17):
Hey, I'm rod Powell, editor of ad Astra magazine. And each week I'm joined by Tark. Mallek the editor in chief over@space.com in our new this week in space podcast, every Friday Tark. And I take a deep dive into the stories that define the new space age what's NA up to when will Americans, once again, set foot on the moon. And how about those samples from the perseverance Rover? When do those coming home? What the heck is Elon must done now, in addition to all the latest and greatest and space exploration will take an occasional look at bits of space flight history that you probably never heard of and all with an eye towards having a good time along the way. Check us out on your favorite podcaster.
