This Week in Google Episode 646 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 has the day off. Mike Elgan joins Jeff Jarvis, Ant Pruitt. Lots to talk about. Moxy Marlon spikes, leaving signal. What he thinks of Web3. What Mr. Elgan thinks of Web3 and why you don't need to think about Web3. Samsung, a no-show on their press conference. Those cats who love hot satellite dishes and the worst of CES, it's all coming up next on TWiG.
New Speaker (00:00:30):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.
Leo Laporte (00:00:41):
This is TWiG, This Week in Google episode, 646 recorded Wednesday, January 12th, 2022. The opposite of long COVID. This Week in Google is brought to you by Streak. Whether you are tracking sales, fundraising, hiring or support streak is a CRM that will help you stay on top of all your processes directly inside Gmail. Get 20% off your first year of their pro plan. Their most popular option by going to streak.com/twig and by new Relic, that 9:00 PM call is just waiting to happen. Get new Relic before it does, and you can get access to the whole new Relic platform and 100 gigabytes of data free forever. No credit card required when you sign up at new relic.com/twig and by code academy, join over 50 million people learning to code with code academy and see where coding can take. You get 15% off your code academy pro membership. When you go to code academy.com and use the promo code twig. It's time for TWiG, This Week in Google, the show we cover the Google-verse, the Twitter-verse, the metaverse and the metaverse.
Leo Laporte (00:01:58):
<Laugh> Used to be the Facebook verse and now Meta owns it. Although they may not own WhatsApp for much longer, but then we'll talk about that in a second. Ant Pruitt's here from hands on photography. Hello.
Ant Pruitt (00:02:11):
Hello, Mr. Laporte. How you be, sir?
Leo Laporte (00:02:13):
I am great. I just drank a bunch of nootropic energy stuff. So if I start to get strange, you'll.
Jeff Jarvis (00:02:21):
Start to? Start to?
Ant Pruitt (00:02:23):
It'll just be another Wednesday. Is that what you're saying?
Leo Laporte (00:02:25):
It'll be just another Wednesday. Woo. Also with us, the Leonard Tow Professor for Journalistic Innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Hello Jeff!
Jeff Jarvis (00:02:44):
Hello.
Leo Laporte (00:02:45):
Good to see you. And Stacey it was a little under the weather. We're giving her the day off, but good news. We got Mike Elgan in her place. Yay. He's back in the US. Mikeelgan.Substack.Com Home of his newsletter. Hey Mike.
Mike Elgan (00:03:01):
Hey, how you doing?
Leo Laporte (00:03:02):
Are you gonna do this standing up?
Mike Elgan (00:03:04):
Yes.
Leo Laporte (00:03:04):
Wow.
Jeff Jarvis (00:03:05):
That is, that is a physical, humble brag.
Ant Pruitt (00:03:08):
<Laugh> yeah. I, I thought about doing that before. Nah bruh,
Jeff Jarvis (00:03:11):
No, no, no, no. Get a seat.
Mike Elgan (00:03:13):
I spend, I, the truth is I spend so much time sitting. It's really almost dangerous. So any chance I get to stand up is great. That's I don't like to
Jeff Jarvis (00:03:21):
That's why you have a rear end is to use it. <Laugh>
Mike Elgan (00:03:25):
I like your attitude. We got these these you know, elevating tables, I guess the theory was that I could stand up and do this, but then we realize
Mike Elgan (00:03:34):
Up, is your chair going down?
Leo Laporte (00:03:37):
The funny thing, I also, as I get older, I I'm gonna blame the cushions in the chair becoming less resilient, but I think it's actually me shrinking. I'm starting to starting to get dwarfed by this chair. I'm just getting tinier and tinier in the chair pretty soon. It's just gonna be me. And now it's time for TWIG.
Jeff Jarvis (00:04:00):
Ah, Leo, Leo, if I may, I may. Yes. Yes. I mean the old days we remember, we used to have unboxing. Yeah. You got
Leo Laporte (00:04:06):
Something. I have
Jeff Jarvis (00:04:07):
An unbagging unbagging
Leo Laporte (00:04:09):
Important. What we got in the bag Cocho Pape puffs from trader Joes. Did they send them to you or
Jeff Jarvis (00:04:18):
No? No, no, no. I've held onto them.
Leo Laporte (00:04:20):
Hashtag sponsored. No, you bought these with your real money,
Jeff Jarvis (00:04:23):
Right? So this, this is my first try. I, I could have opened 'em two days ago, but I said, no, I'm gonna try 'em on the
Leo Laporte (00:04:27):
Show because of course, just for background, Jeff loves the KA Peppe real for real at trader Joe's. Is this, is this anything like surveys? The Cacho Peppe in that's is in the bag at church
Mike Elgan (00:04:42):
Judging from Jeff's moment. <Laugh>
Jeff Jarvis (00:04:46):
It's a little odd a hold up, but the after taste is
Leo Laporte (00:04:48):
Wonderful. After taste is wonderful. That's good. So put that on the bag. <Laugh> <laugh> the after taste, my wife
Jeff Jarvis (00:04:57):
Is wonderful. Went to buy them and the nice lady she deals with all the time, prayer Joes saw her reaching for him and said, oh no wife, there's something wrong with them where they're gonna go. She said, lady said, those are so addictive.
Leo Laporte (00:05:09):
Uhoh oh God, he's gonna crunch the whole show. Isn't he? <Laugh> oh, this will be great. Somebody's saying the taco bell now has subscriptions. That might something you'd be interested. Yes they do.
Jeff Jarvis (00:05:23):
For tacos, not burritos. They a burritos version. I'm in,
Mike Elgan (00:05:27):
It's like a, it's like a taco a day or something. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:05:30):
30 days of tacos for 10 bucks. It's the taco lovers pass. Choose from one of seven select tacos, but a taco at taco. Bell's like a 30 cent. I mean, yeah,
Mike Elgan (00:05:43):
It's a taco lovers pass. As in pass,
Leo Laporte (00:05:45):
As in, I'm gonna pass. If I love tacos, they're so tiny. You only get like two ounces of meat on 'em and I wouldn't even use the word meat for whatever that is. I said, air quotes. Twig, This w<laugh> air quote. Well, you could tell how much it's worth 30 days for $10. <Laugh> a mess. Okay. Taco bell is the master though of marketing aren't they? They really yeah. Oh, they are. They're kind of amazing. But
Jeff Jarvis (00:06:15):
They used to be, you know, I'm loved him for years and years and years and years people made fun of me. And now it's hip. Yeah,
Leo Laporte (00:06:21):
It is. Well, thanks to marketing it's hip. Like Mintos got hip thanks to marketing. Yeah. In the early days of MTV, I know this because the guy who was our program director at TechTV used to was a programmer at MTV and his, he said ETOs before MTV was grandma's thing. It was the thing you'd get in the cut glass. Crystal. When you went to grandma's house, the candy, no one wanted, he said, but then they started advertising on MTV, the fresh maker. That's right. I remember that. And it became suddenly hip. So it's really, it's just marketing, you know? And, and now, by the way, it's back to grandmas, except grandma watched MTV <laugh> 30 years ago.
Jeff Jarvis (00:07:06):
What
Leo Laporte (00:07:06):
Goes around, gets old, grandma grandmas, never end. I am happy to tell you proud to report. According to Mike ELGAN in the computer world.com safely. Ignore web three.
Jeff Jarvis (00:07:22):
Oh, appreciate it. You gotta tell the rest of the web back. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:07:24):
Yeah, we it's funny. We had on Sunday we had, we, we would've been our futurist panel. We had a science fiction author. We had Kevin Rose, everybody got sick. So we ended up just being a priest, Amy Webb, who's an actual futurist. So I kind of thought it was like, well, we got the medieval point of view and we got the future <laugh>. But one, one of the very first things we talked extensively about is this notion of web three. Maybe Mike, because you wrote this article, you can explain what web three is.
Mike Elgan (00:07:54):
Well, okay. So web three is the, I idea that the next version of the web is going to be based on the blockchain tokenization and distributed decentralized. Yeah, decentralized, radically decentralized. Interestingly, you'll notice that the mission of the web three decentralization power to the people instead of the corporations and the governments, this was the, this was the mission of the, what, what formally called the internet. This is the, the techno utopian hippies that created T C P I P. And all the protocols that, that our current internet and later web would be built out of that was their it to, you know, and, and remember John Perry Barlow's manifesto where he said, you know, we won't be subject to governments. We won't be controlled by anyone. Well, that turned out to not work out so well because as the web three enthusiasts will tell you web two, the current web where content creators ha have to deal with these gigantic corporations that really have all the keys and, and, and control everything. Well, the problem with this whole thing, the, the idea of rebuilding the based on NFTs, blockchains, cryptocurrency, et cetera, et cetera, is that it's fundamentally incompatible with human nature. So this was, and
Leo Laporte (00:09:24):
By the way, the nature of technology, but I'll, but
Mike Elgan (00:09:26):
Go on and the nature of business we'll get there. Yeah, exactly. Jeff, and this was, this was where Jack Dorsey chimed in and basically said that look because Jack Dorsey is in fact committed to decentralized communication, which is why they're working on, what is it called Jeff? They they're working on the Lu guy Lu sky, right? Which is actually a dis decentralized project. His point is that the problem with with the vision of the utopian web three crowd is that everybody wants to invest in it because they wanna make money, which means they, you have these corporations that want to grow and profit heavily involved, heavily in control because that's where the money's coming from. And so, as he said, they'll, the web three will never escape their incentives. Their incentives are to use their power that they have for, from their investment to direct the nature of these products to profit themselves.
Mike Elgan (00:10:25):
Right? This is in direct contradiction to the notion of this democratic, the people in charge, the crowd is in charge kind of et ethos. So it doesn't really work. And, and I think Jack Dorsey had a eight point in that regard, the other two ways that it doesn't work is that the giant tech corporations that in fact do control many of the services that we use, aren't gonna go along and the public is not gonna go along, cuz it's all too complicated. People people don't want. And this is sort of touches on what Jeff wrote about brilliantly I might add and this in, in his buzz machine piece which is that human nature, doesn't really, you know, content creators want to create content. They don't want to be mucking around with running their own servers with doing all this stuff. They're not gonna go along with this. And so it's kind of an non-starter, but the, the problem, the beef I have with the journalism or around this and the same something similar is happening with the metaverse idea is that every cryptocurrency thing, every blockchain thing, every tokenized thing is called web three. Well, it doesn't really mean anything if we're just talking about individual applications running on the web two
Leo Laporte (00:11:36):
Web three is how taco bell got cool marketing. It's the 5g of the internet. It's just <laugh>
Mike Elgan (00:11:42):
But, but 5g is you,
Leo Laporte (00:11:45):
You could argue 5g is actually something we, we
Mike Elgan (00:11:48):
Will actually, you can actually connect over 5g. Yeah. Whereas where's the idea that, you know, it's, it is a very different proposition to have what we have now, which is some cryptocurrency stuff, some blockchain chain stuff. We have NFTs services around those things. We have Bitcoin wallets, we have all that stuff. There's a big difference between that, which is inevitable and that all that stuff will grow as well. And having the internet be based on that sort of thing. Okay. That that's the part that's not gonna happen ever. Right. And, and if that isn't the web three and some people, you know, nobody really fully agrees on what this is, but if that isn't the web three, then it's just, it's just a word that means all that stuff that the Bitcoin bros love
Leo Laporte (00:12:32):
Jacks a tweet is the short version, which is you don't own web three, the VCs and their limited partners do it will never escape their incentives. It's ultimately a centralized entity with a different label, know what you're getting into. And of course he was immediately blocked by mark Andre, mark Andreson because mark Andreen Andre har are basically the chief proponents of web three. It's kind of a portfolio deal for them. I think maybe the long version of this, which is kind of technical. But I think worth reading is mark Moy, Marlin spikes blog post at Moxi do, or it's brilliant. The guy dead is signed. Yeah. He's a former CEO of signal. He invented signal and is two days ago. Yeah. Has passed it on, which is completely appropriate. We'll talk about that in a bit, but he makes, I think, I'll see if I can summarize this.
Leo Laporte (00:13:26):
He makes the point that one, and this is really important. People do not wanna run their own servers. Right. And, and they never will. I happen to run my own server, but I understand why nobody with any idea of, you know, public scaling or anything is gonna run their own. Even big companies run their servers on Amazon. That's why Amazon's so successful. So that's problem. Number one is you can't decentralize something. That's by its very nature centralized. You're not gonna get people to run their own servers. He also points out and this is, this is a deeper insight, but actually really good that a pro and then this is gonna be a little hard to understand a protocol moves more slowly than a platform. And to give an example, that really is a Germa to our audience. IRC is a platform it's been around for 30 P plus years. And he says, people are still trying to standardize sharing a video reliably over IRC. Meanwhile, slack lets you create lets you not only do that, but create a custom reaction emoji based on your face, cuz it's a it's it's a, it's a platform, not a company. It's a company control. Yes. Centralized it's it's and that's control enables that, that speed. So he says, if something's truly decentralized, it becomes very difficult to change and often remains stuck in time. This is a, it's a brilliant way to put it. I thought
Mike Elgan (00:14:46):
That was the best of the post on
Leo Laporte (00:14:47):
The yeah. And I think a really great insight. And once you understand that, that makes makes you, you realize why it's hard to hold on just a sec. I'll I'll get to you in a, in a second, it's hard to, to propose a decentralized web cuz you nobody's gonna run their own surfers and it's not gonna move along very quickly because the platforms are just gonna leapfrog it. He also talks about and can kind of peripherally making an NFT. He makes an NFT. I'll tell you what, how this ties in, in a second, but he makes an NFT that looks different depending on where you look at it. Oh right. So the first one is on open sea. The second view, same NFT is on wearable. And if you do it in your wallet, you get a poop emoji <laugh> well, the,
Mike Elgan (00:15:30):
The the punchline, the punchline of all this is that when you buy an NFT, what you actually buy what's registered on the blockchain is a
Leo Laporte (00:15:38):
URL is a link. So if and furthermore, so he's able to change this because you know, he can change it depending on where you come to it. But then the punchline on this one is open C blocked it cuz they didn't. They said, well you violated terms of service in some vague way. And as soon as it was blocked on open sea, which is one platform that is very popular for NFTs, none of those versions of it got seen because it turns out crypto wallets don't do the rendering, nothing does the rendering, they all use open C's API to file. I know what's in the NFT. Oh, centralization strikes again, completely centralized. And if open sea blocks, it it's gone. Which really is I think problematic for this whole notion. So I'm sorry. So then we, we gotta pop the stack in order. So this is a, this is a lipo stack. I think I owe you a comment first aunt Pruit. Go ahead.
Ant Pruitt (00:16:40):
Well, there's two things. Has anyone even considered where the people running the infrastructure stands on all of this. We move to say this whole web three, decentralized, that stuff still has to run on top of infrastructure. That's gonna be controlled by big companies guess are their thoughts.
Leo Laporte (00:16:59):
Those people are the ones promoting this <laugh> I like Andrew and Horowitz. Okay. And you know why, cuz they're gonna make money. Who makes money in NFTs? People like ope, the ones who min it, not the people so much selling it. Okay. Now also, yeah, go ahead. You're not fully popped. Go ahead
Ant Pruitt (00:17:17):
With the thing with open sea blocking it. That sort of reminded me of apple podcasts and how apple podcast seems to be the end all be off of the podcast industries. When you go and look up a certain podcast application or whatever there you usually pulling from apples Apple's database instead of going to look at the actual creators source. Of course. And, and that, that still sort of centralized unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:17:47):
Okay. I popped the stack and now it's Mike ELGAN next <laugh>
Mike Elgan (00:17:54):
So it feels to me like, and you, and you've mentioned the idea that cryptocurrency is a, a kind of a Ponzi scheme, pyramids, Ponzi scheme, or pyramid scheme or whatever. And it seems to me that the people who are investing in this sort of, of thing want massive universal buy-in because that's right. Very profitable in general across the board. <Laugh> so, so this, so they've got this sort of double think sort of self-fulfilling kind of language thing going where they say where they make the claim that web three is all this stuff that I'm invested in and that's the future of the web. And so ordinary consumers of technology news will get the sense from the incredible hype around this concept. That web three is the future. So I better start investing in all these startups. And it just seems like a kind of a, it seems like a, a grand marketing scheme, similar to the metaverse thing. I don't know if we wanna talk about that later, but, but it seems like a grand marketing scheme to legitimize something that is really that, that a certain minority of people are super passionate about. And the vast majority couldn't care less. They don't understand it. They don't care, et cetera. And they're trying to get the masses sort of the, the, the majority of people to just go along with it, to invest in it, to make the world safe for this sort of thing, for their own profit. I think it's
Leo Laporte (00:19:18):
Always easier to market something that doesn't exist. Yes. You know, it's the, it's the van, it's the van of white principle when somebody asked Peter Jenning, why everybody liked him? He says the van white principle, Vanna never says anything. So you project upon her. Yeah. You, you are at the attributes. You like, you assume that she's like you. And I think that that's the same thing with this marketing. You assume it's what you want. Yeah. Because it isn't anything you, the best paragraph in your column. My is the two biggest buzzwords in tech right now, the metaverse and web three describe platforms that don't exist. Aren't expected to exist even by boosters for a decade, at least, and probably will never exist of the top 100 concerns for tech pros. Web three is 101 <laugh> all right. Popping the stack. Jeff Joe.
Jeff Jarvis (00:20:12):
So then I read it took, took me. I got Moxie's piece is really smart. Yeah. But, but it's difficult to get through. And I was wondering whether to assign it to students, it's it, it, it's very dense with ideas and technology. So I, I read it a couple times hoping I would get it. And then, then Matt Mullenweg, who I admired greatly founder of, of WordPress tweeted this
Leo Laporte (00:20:35):
Also very smart, very, very smart, good guy. Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis (00:20:38):
And we didn't, you know? Yeah. And we didn't talk about it last week, but there was a really good profile of him in protocol. Yes. which I highly recommend. Yeah. So Matt said, people seem to be redefining web 2.0 as Facebook, et cetera, that owned data. But web 2.0 at the time was platforms like WordPress OD six apart flicker, Tera, and delicious that had opened data and interoperate. So I, I was thinking about this and then I started riffing on it on Twitter. That became a post that said that I, I think that we make a mistake here in thinking that web one, two, well, anyway, 1, 2, 3 is, is a progression mm-hmm <affirmative> second we make a mistake in thinking that we're at web two or three, anyway, we're at web.zero 0 0 0 1 or 0 0 0 0 1 2. And, and, and you know, my shtick Gutenberg, it's early days, 1475.
Jeff Jarvis (00:21:32):
You've heard that spiel before, but same true with the web. Right. It's very, very early. We don't know what it is yet. It's not as like we've, we've graduated from something, the problem with periodization, the problem with thinking that, that there, the dark ages were there and they were worthless. And the Renaissance was the good thing. It's the same problem with saying, well, web 2.0, should be discarded and web 1.0, should be discarded. Cuz now our web 3.0 no, we're not. And what Matt said here, what struck me is there's things to learn. And in a way, what Moxy asks for at the end of his wonderful piece, in a way Matt and open source answer the questions. Cause I remember when, when the polar Polaris, VC VCs who called me when, when they were thinking about investing in WordPress and they did, and they said, is it nuts? He's gonna be open source by how does that, how does that work? And I said, he's already beat movable type because he's put something out there that because it's open source spreads widely, how much of the web does he now serve and gets updated? And so in a sense, we've seen web 3.0 it was web 1.0 it was called source,
Mike Elgan (00:22:39):
Right. With, with a similar mission of, you know, power to the people and, and you know, the crowd and, you know also to Wikipedia for that matter in interested, passionate people will have a bigger influence than the casual user, et cetera, et cetera, to build this thing without top down, you know, policy making. Yes.
Jeff Jarvis (00:22:59):
Yes. It's a creator's tool. Right, exactly right. Yes. But,
Mike Elgan (00:23:02):
But what what's what, one of the differences though, is that the whole web, the whole open source phenomenon was so much less naive than the web three phenomenon. For example, one of the big benefits of blockchains is you can, is that, is that the ledger is permanent and public, right? The greatest boxing tool ever created, you can, you can make a purchase, somebody NFT. And as part of your notes, you can doc somebody to smithereens and nobody could ever remove that information. Oh, that's interesting ever. Yeah, yeah. Stuff. The blockchain is permanent. Yeah. Right. Another one is like, oh, we'll use the blockchain to cure fake news. What we'll do is we'll make sure that every source of content is registered on the blockchain and then we'll know exactly where it comes from. Well, that doesn't address fake news at all. Because the problem with fake news is that is not that people are misled about where it comes from is that, that they think the New York times and the Atlantic are fake news and they think everything on four Chan is real, right.
Mike Elgan (00:24:04):
That's the problem, blockchain. Isn't gonna solve that at all. So true. There are no solutions to the problems of, of moderation, like FA face. Everybody likes to dump all over Facebook for moderation, but either they do something about hate speech or when they don't, we get to yell at Facebook either way, that's better than just hate speech running rampant and sort of come somehow. We're kind of in charge of it, you know as a group, like I don't there there's, nobody has articulated how that's supposed to, how that's supposed to work other other than, other than we're all blockchain enthusiasts. And so we're all people of good will, which is essentially how the original internet was supposed to, you know, you know, they didn't foresee spam. They didn't foresee any of this stuff. Yeah. Because they thought, wow, once information is free, then everybody will be on their best behavior.
Ant Pruitt (00:24:56):
You talked about marketing previously. And I think it makes perfect sense that they, they would be able to capitalize on it because of this being a pandemic and where people are emotionally and socially, these days with the whole resignation and wanting to just, you know, take more control of things for themselves instead of depending on their, you know, their jobs and whatnot. And then there's also the group that say, man, I, I remember Bitcoin team years ago, man. If I had just put $10 in it back then I would be rich and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think they're going to just sort of continue to market to that group and say, Hey, you don't wanna miss out cuz you missed out on Bitcoin back in the days. Don't miss out on web three and just, just stick with us, even though it doesn't exist just yet stick with us. You know,
Leo Laporte (00:25:48):
I remember talking to the secret service once about scams, like the, you know, the Nigerian prince scam. Oh yeah. There are really no new con games. The internet has just taken them off the street and put them on the internet. And this does strike me a little bit as, you know watch your wallet <laugh> because, oh, this is the hot, new, exciting thing.
Mike Elgan (00:26:12):
Now it's just watch, watch your Bitcoin wall.
Leo Laporte (00:26:14):
Watch your yeah. Well I wish I could, but <laugh> best place it could be is locked up right now. I'm telling you. Yeah. Best, best thing you mentioned Moxy Marlon spike who has the greatest name in te probably not his real name stepping down at signal. I don't know if that's anything we should draw any conclusion from that in his post. He said, you know signal which he invented is, is, is growing, is doing well. And every day he says, I'm struck by how boundless signals potential looks. And I wanna bring in someone with fresh energy and commitment to make the most of that. That's a normal transition. I don't think there's any reason to think that that means anything for signal. So yeah,
Mike Elgan (00:27:02):
He was unsustainable.
Leo Laporte (00:27:03):
Yeah. He's great. And I I hope he, I hope he works on something else, new and exciting and different.
Jeff Jarvis (00:27:10):
What did you think about Casey Newton's point about signal and, and untraceable financial contributions, a what do you think about that and security and the world and B, whether did that have anything to do with Moxie's departure? You know, I
Leo Laporte (00:27:22):
That's of some people and even in my mind, I kind of thought, well, cuz signal's been getting into crypto and they want to have transactions over signal, but most messengers, Facebook messenger, apples, messenger, Android messages, all, most messengers have financial transactions. The difference is signal is considering adding its own O coin, which is, you know, kind of anonymous, you know, and it's built on the stellar blockchain. It's, it's completely fair for Casey to say, you know, look, we wouldn't ransomware has taken off because of Bitcoin. When ransomware first started you had to go to, they would say go down to the seven 11 and buy some money cards and mail them to this post office box. It wasn't a very good system and they didn't do very well until Bitcoin became well enough. And in fact, even then when the first Bitcoin ransomware came along, they had a whole pages of description of how to set up a wallet, put money in the wallet, send us the Bitcoin. Now though, it's very, everybody kind of knows Bitcoin. And so it's really been good for ransomware. So that's, I mean, Casey's point is well taken, but you know, they've been saying that since PGP came out, I remember Phil Zimerman invented, PGP said, I interviewed him on triangulation. I said, well, what do you say to people that say, you know, terrorists can use encryption? He said, well, yes, that's right. But like you use telephones. Yeah. That's that's life you. And doesn't mean you shouldn't have something just because it could be misused.
Mike Elgan (00:28:57):
It can also have a whispering conversation in the parking lot. Right. And that, you know, it's like people are going to have private conversations and, and they, the risk to people who are trying to protect themselves and who aren't doing anything, terroristic is much higher than, you know, than the, than the damage done by, you know, terrorists who, who will anyone who's a criminal or, you know, a serious terrorist or whatever they're gonna figure. They're gonna know when there be upon for the most part. And they're gonna find ways to communicate without anybody knowing.
Leo Laporte (00:29:30):
And we do have a very private form of financial transaction. It's known as cash and <laugh> and it's completely private. If I, you know, give you a million dollars in unmarked bills, the problem is because of bank reporting laws, it's getting harder and harder to. So government is kind of closing in on that. I think the primary reason for the crypto existence of cryptos, cuz people want that privacy, the cash gives them, but it's getting harder and harder financial markets moving towards credit cards and other easily traceable products bank reporting requirements, et cetera, make cash less anonymous, but we didn't not use cash because it could potentially allowed for unmarked bills and banks.
Mike Elgan (00:30:14):
Yeah. And, and, and we have to acknowledge what a great thing credit cards are because if somebody somehow gets ahold of your credentials and they ring up the, you know, they go buy a Ferrari you don't have to pay for that Ferrari. Right. Right. Cuz you you're protected through the credit card system and through laws that are associated. But
Leo Laporte (00:30:34):
A lot of people would say, but I want the privacy. I wanna be able to buy stuff without being tracked by Google, you know? And I understand that, but, but, but,
Jeff Jarvis (00:30:42):
But get ready, get ready and get ready here. It is. There is a touch to push the ball, panic
Leo Laporte (00:30:47):
To that. <Laugh>
Jeff Jarvis (00:30:49):
We hear rather than saying, where is the harm and what could go wrong and why don't I want this? It's just privacy.
Leo Laporte (00:30:56):
Google bath Memorial panic button is broke. <Laugh> oh, there you go. Was there all we saw was a black screen. Mr. Jamer B was just really quick. <Laugh> you need a longer loop if, if we're gonna keep this up, you <laugh>. Well, I, I can think really my point is there's downsides to everything and there's upsides to everything. And so I don't think you could say, well signal doing crypto. Oh bad because bad guys could use it. You know, I don't yeah. I mean cash, bad guys can use cash bad. Let's get rid of cash. He does point out that DM, which is the Facebook created cryptocurrency has committed to following any money laundering laws. How well this is the problem I have means you report everything. Yeah. Right. You report all transactions and you set up a system where there are no anonymous transactions. Well, I don't know if that's
Jeff Jarvis (00:31:57):
Facebook is so eager to do whatever government would tell them to do to take them off the hook for what they Don
Leo Laporte (00:32:06):
Yeah. Yeah. FA yeah. Facebook is the last person that's gonna take a stand on the, you know, die on that hill. No, no, no, no, no. And by the way, this is, this is the, this is the commitment they made. In the early development of the Libra network it's members are committed to working with authorities to shape a regulatory environment that encourages technological innovation while maintaining the highest standards of consumer protection. I mean, it's not, it's not like, okay, here's what we're gonna do. And, and they, by the way, they say as with any currency or financial infrastructure, bad actors will try to exploit the network. When the network is open and accessible to everyone, with internet access, the network's main endpoints will need to follow applicable laws and regulations and collaborate with law enforcement. And in, in addition transactions on the blockchain will be in clear text, like many other blockchains. So it's possible for third parties to do analysis, to detect and penalize fraud again, they're saying, yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, law enforcement comes to us, we'll work with them. And it, you know, people, Bitcoin isn't anonymous. You can see every transaction what's anonymous is your wallet number.
Mike Elgan (00:33:15):
You know, Facebook says that the work with law enforcement, but whose law enforcement, you know, north Koreas China's, Russias,
Leo Laporte (00:33:22):
It's the typical bull pucky, you know, boiler plate that
Mike Elgan (00:33:27):
It's not easy being Facebook.
Leo Laporte (00:33:29):
Yeah. I feel bad for them. Yeah. Poor Facebook now the FTC which has been trying to get Facebook to divest WhatsApp and Instagram can go ahead. Us district judge Jane Boberg wrote in an amended complaint, the agency filed in August, offered more robust and detailed evidence to suggest Facebook has an alleged monopoly. He actually started his his completing with second time. Lucky <laugh>
Mike Elgan (00:34:11):
No, no lucky. Lucky is associated with the, with the VR product he had,
Leo Laporte (00:34:15):
Yes. Palmer, Palmer, lucky he had thrown out the original antitrust complaint saying, you, it, even, you didn't say they're a monopoly. So apparently he, this time is better and word yeah. Use. They can use the M word. So there's some thinking that maybe the judge is giving them the green light to try to break up or at least force Facebook to dives Instagram and WhatsApp. Hm. While the judge's decision, this is from the Washington post acknowledges the agency has overcome some of the shortcomings of the initial suit. Judge Boberg signaled. It may be challenging for the FTC to ultimately prove Facebook is a monopoly quote it's anyone's guess whether the agency will prevail. Who knows, who knows son? Oh, the though the agency, this is a quote may well face a tall task down the road, improving its allegations. The court believes it. At least now has cleared the pleading bar and may proceed to discovery. So I'm sure Facebook is not thrilled about this. You know,
Mike Elgan (00:35:19):
Ironically, I, it feels to me in Europe that Facebook is an absolute and total monopoly, less so in the us, everyone I know in Europe, all my European friends literally use Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp and nothing else unless they own a business. In which case they might have a website. But beyond that, a huge number of people in, in Europe and probably elsewhere in the world use only Facebook products to use the internet. It's astonishing how
Leo Laporte (00:35:49):
I had all, when we got to Oaxaca, I had to install WhatsApp. So I could text you in Amira. <Laugh> yes. That's right.
Mike Elgan (00:35:56):
Well, so you can text Amira, Amira.
Leo Laporte (00:35:59):
Yeah. Yeah. I don't use WhatsApp. So yeah. She's the only person in my WhatsApp phone book. <Laugh> but no, clearly the certainly WhatsApp has a monopoly in many nations worldwide. Yes. Not so much in the us Insta and you know, I think in, I don't know if Facebook has a, a monopoly or in the us, I don't know what the competition is for Facebook. That's part of the problem is Twitter competition. I don't know. I mean, what's the competition for Facebook, but I think I talk to people all the time and they even say it in an apologetic tone to say, well, I, I do have a Facebook account. Yeah. And I say, don't a, that's how you keep up with your, that's how you keep up with your family. And
Jeff Jarvis (00:36:37):
That alone is not a monopoly. It's it's, it's one of many, many things we use it. It it's it's.
Leo Laporte (00:36:43):
And it, well, that's the question. What's the competition for Facebook? Is it a, a postal letter? Is it, I mean, that's the question? What a monopoly. In what phone? Call realm. Yeah. As a phone call competition. What, in what realm? There isn't anything else? Like Facebook? Yeah. Not yet LinkedIn. No. Nope. Fensters gone friend. Feed's gone. My space is around, but it's not a competition,
Mike Elgan (00:37:10):
But, but you mentioned Fenster wasn't Friendster purchased by Facebook and then killed. Yeah. Okay.
Leo Laporte (00:37:15):
Well that's why its gone <laugh> but yeah,
Jeff Jarvis (00:37:17):
No, it was already right.
Leo Laporte (00:37:19):
It wasn't doing that. It was, it was a little peeked already. Yeah. My
Jeff Jarvis (00:37:23):
Biggest space, Neil dash that imagine though, if, if, if Friendster had won friend
Leo Laporte (00:37:28):
Feed had won friend feed was great. I really liked friend. Yeah. Friend feed was great. Yeah. Yeah. That was the Google plus before Google plus. But I don't, don't make, don't make Mike sad. I know I brought it up. It is, you know what? God Google, I'm sorry. I apologize to all the Christians out there, but I do want God to actually Google.
Mike Elgan (00:37:50):
Apparently they already have, you know,
Leo Laporte (00:37:54):
But honestly, what haven't they destroyed, look what the messaging mess. And then they, and now Hiroshi Lockheimer has a Tamer. We, we still have Gmail. We still have Gmail. We still have Gmail. We still have Gmail. Yeah. Yeah. Search and search still works. But then
Mike Elgan (00:38:14):
There have been reports too searches and all that good anymore. Either. I
Leo Laporte (00:38:17):
Saw that. Yeah. I haven't, I don't know if I agree with that, but that
Mike Elgan (00:38:20):
To the messaging thing. Yeah, that was a, so Ron,
Leo Laporte (00:38:25):
Ron Amadio in the ours Technica. Yeah. Wrote
Mike Elgan (00:38:28):
A it's one of those things where it's like, why didn't I write that? It was a, yeah. Oh, so good. But he basically points out first. He lays out the case about how Google is complaining. That iMessage is too powerful that they use bullying. They actually Google accused apple of bullying by, by making people who use Android devices, green instead of blue. How, how
Leo Laporte (00:38:48):
Terribly? Well, this is taking off on the wall street journal article, which, because there was nothing else to write about the journal. All suddenly discovered that people who are using Android messenger feel left out of apple messages, conversations <laugh>. But,
Mike Elgan (00:39:02):
But after, but after laying out the case that Google is making against apple, Ron just eviscerates them by pointing out that since apple launched iMessage in 2011, same year, they on Google. Plus by the way, Google launched Google plus Google has launched 13 <laugh> messaging product. I think we've used them all.
Leo Laporte (00:39:24):
The only person I ever talked on Allo with was you Jeff Jarvis? <Laugh>
Jeff Jarvis (00:39:28):
I know. And that's, you're the only person I ever talked to remember all somewhere around the cloud is our conversation says, well, this is Bob you. I think it's
Leo Laporte (00:39:36):
Pretty done. Ron's headline. After ruining Android messaging, Google says iMessage is too powerful. Please stop kicking our butts so badly. Google failed to compete with iMessage for years, and now wants apple to play. Nice. How many 13 Mike?
Mike Elgan (00:39:52):
Wow. 13, that, that they've launched in total. They've killed a bunch. Of'em obviously cuz it's Google. But now even today they have eight and they're even incompatible with each other. Geez. But today they have eight messaging solutions. But imagine theater of the mind, imagine if you will, ladies and gentlemen, if after seeing apple launch iMessage in 2011, Google launched you know, Google messages in 2000, let's call it 2012 and said, this is the only messaging platform we will ever support. It's on cross platform on everything. It supports all the bells and whistles. You can make phone calls, you can do this, you can do that. You can have it on an iPhone. You can have it on an Android phone. They would completely dominate this space if they had done that. Because, because iMessage has always been primarily for apple users. Yes.
Leo Laporte (00:40:41):
Right. They could have made a cross platform.
Mike Elgan (00:40:44):
They could, they could have the WhatsApp. It would've been like WhatsApp. Yeah. And but no, they, they are so disorganized and visionless that they just couldn't do that. So Ron
Leo Laporte (00:40:56):
Also points out, cause what we've talked about, this that Google's saying, well, everybody should just use RCS. If apple would only add RCS to I, I messages we'd be happy. Right? He says, even if Google could magically roll out RCS, rich community, rich communication, messaging standard, rich communication standard. It's a poor standard to build a messaging platform on because it's dependent on a key carrier phone carriers, right? It's anti internet. It can't natively work on webpages, PCs, smart watches and tablets because those things don't have SIM cards. They don't have phone numbers. The carriers designed RCS. So RCS puts your carrier bill at the center of your online identity. Even when free identification methods like email existing work on more devices, Google is just promoting carrier, lock in as a solution to apple lock in. And unfortunately I have to agree with them on that. Mm
Mike Elgan (00:41:47):
Yeah. But the, the solution as I intubated a minute ago is for them to have of the, have an alternative that isn't locked in. Right. You know, to have something like WhatsApp, but from Google, they could
Leo Laporte (00:41:59):
Have put it everywhere. This is what they did with Chrome. Chrome has been hugely successful. Yes, yes, yes. Just make it free, make it available. Google benefits. Cuz people use it
Mike Elgan (00:42:10):
And just have one, see your
Leo Laporte (00:42:11):
Discussion of WordPress. Just have one. Yeah. yeah. Google is only to only Google Hangouts would've worked. They were
Mike Elgan (00:42:19):
Right. Ron Amad points out that Hangouts was the best thing. That best messaging solution that the Google ever came out with and, and they killed it. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:42:28):
Yeah. It was solid. Wasn't perfect. But it, it was definitely, well, the messages works. One of the reasons messages works besides the fact that's the default messaging app on every iPhone sold and you can't turn it off. The other reason is it, it degrades properly. So it uses the internet for data like WhatsApp, but it will also use SMS. And so you can, you can have some assurance that you can iMessage everybody. Yeah. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and then it has desktop. It works. It's, it's a very aply thing. Cause you can't use it anywhere else. And,
Mike Elgan (00:43:00):
And it's, it's actually very secure and
Leo Laporte (00:43:03):
It's secure. Apple knows what you're doing, but other than that, it's secure.
Mike Elgan (00:43:08):
Well, I don't, I don't think even apple, well, I mean, theoretically, they could find out what you're doing, but it's like, it's, it's heavily encrypted. So no third party is gonna, it's a,
Leo Laporte (00:43:16):
It's a hell of a lot better than most stuff. Yeah. If, if, and I used Hangouts for a long time, cuz it worked on my iPhone, it worked on my Android phone. It worked on my desktop. Android messages will kind of do all of that. I have it on all those places, but it's not as good as Hangouts. Yeah. Hangout. So it's definitely the solutions for our family. Yeah. Cuz we could use it everywhere. So no, no you can't. Google. What was their
Jeff Jarvis (00:43:41):
Rationale for screwing it up? What can you imagine? What went through their heads?
Leo Laporte (00:43:45):
Ron wrote a long or somebody did ours had a long, a 25,000 word history yet was Ron history of Google's messaging.
Mike Elgan (00:43:54):
And, and I, I did that. I wrote, I wrote something like that for computer world. And by the time it was published, it already was outta date. Cause they changed the other, another thing <laugh> so I'm not gonna even touch it anymore.
Leo Laporte (00:44:05):
So it's fun if you go through all the different apps, Google talk, Google voice, Google wave, Google buzz slides, dis the Google plus I don't know what that is. I don't know. It's in the article. The Google plus era, Google plus Hangouts video chat. The first Hangouts, Google plus huddle messenger huddle. Oh God. Do we remember that? Yeah. Now it's a Microsoft. I remember I remember huddle Google docs, editor chat, Google Hangouts, Google spaces, Google Allo 2016. Google's dead on arrival. Whatsapp, clone, Google duo, which I still use with my daughter for video calls, Google Hangouts meet. They renamed it. Meet YouTube messages, Google Hangouts, check chat. They renamed it. Chat. Google map messages, YouTube messages. Oh wow. Yeah. In, in 2017 he actually says, yes, this really is the thing. Yeah. Google and RCS, Google photos, messages, Google stadium messages, Google pay messages, Google assistant messages, Google phone messaging, Google chat part two. And then the last bit is anyone in charge at Google <laugh> and
Mike Elgan (00:45:15):
The answer is no. And to answer your question the, the elevator pitch for, or the, the short version of the answer is that just like Microsoft used to do under bomber. Each division has its own messaging app and they don't talk to each other and they're competing with each other and, and Andre is nobody in charge. There's no Steve jobs. There's no Satya Nadella even to say, no, this is the one we're doing. That's it. Period. Everybody. We're putting all the wood behind this particular arrow. Nobody ever did that. I've been maintaining for several years. That Sundar Pacha is a horrible CEO. No, but ever says that. But look at the result of what's happened since he took over, it's been a it's all this stuff, the closures, the failures, the, this kind of thing. It's this is all getting worse and worse Anderson our
Leo Laporte (00:46:05):
Leadership. Remember that? Great cartoon. I agree with you. It was making fun of Microsoft where all the divisions are shooting in each other. Yeah. I have the original on my wall at home. Actually the artist sent it to me. Apparently Google decided that was a good way to do business and they adopted the Microsoft method. Meanwhile, Microsoft had the good sets to stop doing that and to kind of at least try to unify themselves. It's I mean, it's
Mike Elgan (00:46:32):
Sad for a long time, this, this, this spaghetti throw against the wall and see what sticks approach was great for Google. They, they got some major hits. Gmail was a 20% project by one engineer. Initially the idea of having advertising was just, some engineer had to talk Larry and Sergei into doing ads and they were like, they were, and they're like, no, no, we should do ads. And so for a long time, most of the things that were best about Google were the result of this kind of like every engineer kind of like spinning up their own thing and then we'll try it and see what happens. But Google grew so big. And so, and they became so successful that they could no longer be that kind of a startup like company. And so now you have people betting their businesses on their infrastructure. You have all kinds of you know, billions of people using their products. And so you can't have that sort of scrappy startup. Let's try it and see if it works kind of mentality. You have to have a vision about what you're going to do. And then you have to execute on that vision and they just
Leo Laporte (00:47:34):
Can't seem to do it. This is a Manu cots D treatment. This is Manu cots, organizational trees for all the different companies. Here's Microsoft where they're all shooting at each other. Actually Google's is still, I think, fairly, although this is, you know what that looks like. They're new building. Yeah. <Laugh> everybody reports to everybody else. Amazon's very hierarchical. I think it still is.
Mike Elgan (00:47:59):
That looks like the Amazon's atrium. It
Leo Laporte (00:48:02):
Is it's the downtown Seattle atrium. Facebook looks like a giant bean bag. Everybody's neck did apple. All this is from the era, Steve jobs era centralized point. Although I think it's probably still the same. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and then Oracle is like a giant legal division. <Laugh> a little engineering division. Man, you got it. You still, and I'm very proud to have this on my, well, by the way, Satya Adela, I didn't realize this in his book hit refresh. And the first page mentions this cartoon and says, this was the thing I was trying to solve. So Google apparently did not get that message. Where did that cartoon originally run? Just on a site or yeah, man who published it on. It's gone now unfortunately on bonkers world, but it's it's no longer there, but I am very proud to have a, originally a version of it from a man who sent us.
Leo Laporte (00:48:55):
Cuz we talked about it all the time. You're gonna make it in NFT. Ooh. <Laugh> now you're talking. All right, let me take a little break. We hope Stacy's feeling a little bit better. She's under the weather. Yeah, but we're thrilled. We got Mike ELGAN in. It's great to, to have you. I'm glad to be here. From Mike ELGAN dot SubT stack.com and of course don't forget gastro, no me.net. The Morocco tour is sold out, but there are more to come if you go to gastro nomad.net and click the experiences tab.
Mike Elgan (00:49:28):
Yeah. Our, our, our next one after that is Secco, which gonna be
Leo Laporte (00:49:33):
Really great. Nice. And of course I was on the Oaxaca trip and high, they recommended Morocco's a longer one. Isn't it?
Mike Elgan (00:49:41):
Two weeks, two full weeks. And we go to, I think something like eight or nine, 10 cities.
Leo Laporte (00:49:47):
Is there still room in this spring trip?
Mike Elgan (00:49:51):
Spring trip? No, that's, that's sold out.
Leo Laporte (00:49:54):
There is in October
Mike Elgan (00:49:56):
20, 22 is all sold out, but 20, 23 is already getting
Leo Laporte (00:49:58):
People. Nice. So very nice lot of lot of TWI listeners <laugh> on those trips. So you'll be amongst good people. I must say so much fun. We're gonna get you you on, I think next month you and Amira on to the club February 11th to talk about it. So that will be our Valentine. I forward to that episode. Yeah. Also Jeff Jarvis from the city university of March. My, my astronom spirits right here. I'll wait for you to take breaks. Like you gotta stop <laugh> and Mr. Aunt Pruitt, hands on photography who did not go to CES and that's my fault. I hope. And I'm still healthy. Are you okay that you didn't get to go?
Ant Pruitt (00:50:42):
I'm totally fine,
Leo Laporte (00:50:42):
Sir. Yeah, I totally fine. It would've been fun. What father Robert, was there a quarter of the normal attendances, about 40,000 people? So it sounds like it was pretty empty. There was some cool things, but I feel like it's a very gimmicky show and I don't know how much stuff really
Jeff Jarvis (00:50:59):
Well, everything I love is one, one vendor put up just plywood or, or, or two by fours and plywood and QR codes and
Ant Pruitt (00:51:07):
Hard. You know, the only advantage I would've seen at CES this year is it have been a little bit more intimate for us when you would've
Leo Laporte (00:51:15):
The boost. Yeah.
Ant Pruitt (00:51:16):
Cause very intimates, not as many people there as a lot of times, they are. They're literally trying to flush you through so they can get the next press person there. But this would've been nicer to sit down and, and spend a little more time, but it's all good. We, we still got the gist of it
Leo Laporte (00:51:30):
There. A lot of these companies just did you know, zoom conferences and virtual conferences, Mari Barra from GM didn't go, but she gave her keynote via zoom, things like that. Samsung had scheduled an event yesterday, the X and OS 2200 was supposed to be launched yet yesterday. They didn't tell anybody they didn't show up. They didn't do anything. It was like dial tone. It was
Mike Elgan (00:51:56):
Like the golden Globes. Oh
Leo Laporte (00:51:58):
Yeah, that was weird. I told my wife, we're watching the football game. I said, oh shoot. It's the golden Globes are tonight. No, but you can't watch it. They just,
Mike Elgan (00:52:06):
All it was was a, a few members of the Hollywood foreign press association tweeting <laugh>. So they tweet here. Here's the winner.
Leo Laporte (00:52:14):
They held it on Twitter.
Jeff Jarvis (00:52:16):
That's
Leo Laporte (00:52:17):
All it was ever worth. They held on Twitter. So Samsung finally did tell business Korea that they are planning to unveil the new processor when they launched the new phone own. There are no problems. <Laugh> that is all <laugh>
Ant Pruitt (00:52:36):
Dance. No, that's how you do a press release myself. This is
Leo Laporte (00:52:39):
All, yeah. Nothing more. There's nothing to see here. Move along. Yeah, I was so I'm looking at Twitter watch and then golden Globes thinking, oh, I wonder if Tina Fay and Amy poll will host it again this year. Maybe they got Ricky Jase. No, it's just 87 old white men tweeting <laugh> yeah.
Mike Elgan (00:52:58):
Yeah. Well that was part of the problem, you know?
Leo Laporte (00:53:03):
Oh Lord.
Mike Elgan (00:53:04):
Completely out of touch with the Ze and really should never have had the prestige that they had. I mean, it was just as you know, as it was a hundred, the, the journal, the foreign journalists that made up the foreign press association were barely even bloggers. These are people from third rate, two bit little regional newspapers. Oh,
Jeff Jarvis (00:53:22):
Freelanced a little bit here and there. They invented the daily disgrace of,
Leo Laporte (00:53:26):
And so I just want, I just wish though it was a great car wreck of a, of a TV show cuz everybody because of the alcohol launched and they, and they would hire people like Ricky JVE who would just insult them right. And left. Right? Yeah. It was fun. So just do that. Admit we're out of touch. We don't know what the hell talking about. We're just gonna give some awards, come watch our party. It was a, it was a good party. I feel bad. I think, I guess it's over, right? I mean, how do you come back from? Yeah,
Mike Elgan (00:53:54):
I think, I think it's definitely over. And what's funny about Ricky DVAs is that he did some bits, some of his best bits. In hindsight, when you, when you, when you look through, when find out what actually happened to them are just accurate depictions.
Leo Laporte (00:54:08):
Yes. He was. Please tell 'em the truth.
Mike Elgan (00:54:11):
He had this one joke. He said, oh, there, there aren't any nominee, any black nominees because the Hollywood foreign press are very, very racist. <Laugh> well, that was hilarious until it turns out that's just a plain
Leo Laporte (00:54:25):
True <laugh> he didn't care <laugh> oh God, that facts another casually of COVID I guess, you know. Well, see you think CES will be back next year. Oh no. Which the, the, the foreign breast association though was casually of scandal scandal. Was there actual scandal, scandal, or just people realized they were actual scandal. There was actual scandal. Oh,
Mike Elgan (00:54:50):
There multiple cases where Brooke
Leo Laporte (00:54:52):
Bribery, perhaps people
Mike Elgan (00:54:53):
Bri them, it started with Piora remember that in the,
Leo Laporte (00:54:56):
The eighties that's right. She
Mike Elgan (00:54:56):
Was best. No, her husband, her husband like took the entire foreign press to Vegas and wh them and dye them and she won best actress or something. <Laugh> for a horrible performance. And, and that was the first one, but there's been several since then that were
Leo Laporte (00:55:09):
Coming. But we knew about that. That was decades ago. Right. We didn't care cuz it was just a, a status quo. It was a that wasn't exactly the word I was gonna use. It did begin with S <laugh>.
Mike Elgan (00:55:22):
Well, the, the, the racism bit is the thing them in and I don't know, didn't get a lot of press, but Tom cruise actually returned his three golden gloves. Oh really? To the organization said, I don't want him anymore.
Leo Laporte (00:55:33):
It was cruise. Why was I thinking it was Tom Hanks. It was cruise that
Mike Elgan (00:55:39):
Don't quote me. I think it was Cruz. Maybe it was Hanks, but
Leo Laporte (00:55:42):
I think it was kind of thing. Hanks would've done. I can't see Tom cruise really caring, but okay. I thought it was Tom Hanks that okay. I thought that was interesting.
Mike Elgan (00:55:50):
Somebody named Tom
Leo Laporte (00:55:52):
Let's let's be Frank. I don't think the academy awards are much are much better. Are they? I mean, there's no evidence of bribery, but on cruise.
Mike Elgan (00:56:00):
Yeah. Well, there there's less evidence. They're all these awards
Leo Laporte (00:56:03):
Shows. They're all BS. They're meaningless, but it's a party I like watching. I like watching celebrities get drunk. Well, but, but actually it's entertaining.
Mike Elgan (00:56:12):
Yeah. I, I I'm shocked that I'm gonna be defending the Oscars, but, but they, they actually have thousands of members. They tend to
Leo Laporte (00:56:19):
Be many of them in the trade. Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Elgan (00:56:21):
Super luminaries. If you want an Oscar before you probably a member. Yeah. Steven Spielberg all these people, but when they, they had their own race scandal two or three years ago, if you recall, and they responded by increasing the membership by like, yeah. 25%, plus it's almost entirely people of color. So they, they good actually put their money with their
Leo Laporte (00:56:42):
Mouth and the are in the field that they're voting for, except for the big awards. So social
Mike Elgan (00:56:47):
Media made a huge difference. Hashtag Oscars. So white.
Leo Laporte (00:56:51):
Yeah. So white. So white. Yes. So white. It was by the way, Tom cruise credit to Tom cruise. This was, he returned his awards and NBC dropped the ceremony. I should have, I missed this article last year. That's why I wasn't on, on TV. NBC said it wants meaningful reform. <Laugh> good for them. <Laugh> this is a defining moment for Hollywood says time's up.
Mike Elgan (00:57:14):
I just think they should all be just deported and that'd be the end,
Leo Laporte (00:57:19):
You know? <Laugh> as long as every understands, what a, what a crappy thing it is. Yeah. We can still enjoy it.
Mike Elgan (00:57:31):
Yeah. They should rename it to be the trash Oscars or something
Leo Laporte (00:57:35):
Like, yeah. The trash Oscars. Exactly. Don't you know, I'm not, I don't know. Maybe not. I don't know. Maybe, maybe it does carry it, unfortunately carried a lot. Wait, it was kind of the precursor of the Oscars and right. Yeah. So that that's, that is unfortunate, I guess. But I did like watching it fall apart in, on live TV, Ricky,
Mike Elgan (00:57:53):
Ricky, Ricky
Leo Laporte (00:57:54):
DVE was cold. Tina, Tina Fey and Amy poll. God, it was funny. What is, what is streaks, sir? Oh, thank you for bringing that up because it is time to, and our sponsor. Thank you. <Laugh>
Mike Elgan (00:58:06):
Very, very well done. You protect the boss from himself and <laugh>,
Leo Laporte (00:58:11):
What is, that is the streak I keep hearing about. He says, what is streak? If you use Gmail, you know, it's a gold mine. It's a database of so much valuable information. Streak is our sponsor and runs. I guess you, we would call it a CRM, a customer relationship management engine. That's rides, right on top of Gmail. In fact, it's directly inside Gmail you're in. I mean, the thing that Gmail did so well, so right, is that don't delete your mail because everything in there is a value it's kind of a database, a history. It, it tracks what you've been up to sales and fundraising and hiring or support streak optimizes this in an incredible way. It kind of turns it almost into a spreadsheet of information you can use. Streak's free email tools to check. If your emails have been opened to send bulk emails with automated follow up emails to improve your response rates it's part of your everyday workflow.
Leo Laporte (00:59:07):
You're already using Gmail, right? But you can then inside Gmail, see details about your leads, your customers, your investors, no more switching between Gmail and other tools. If you're prospecting for new customers or raising a fundraising router, growing your team or managing support tickets, streaks pipelines, which are very cool, by the way, you, you can use them to track all your processes directly from Gmail. You can set up a pipeline in a couple of minutes. It's very easy to get started. Customize the pipeline it's based on your needs. This is I think a very cool way of thinking about mail. The process of mail streak makes it easy to collaborate by automatically sharing emails and notes with everyone and anyone on your team, Google technology partner of the year. So Google loves 'em too. It's used by thousands of founders, entrepreneurs and small business owners, 750,000 to be exact.
Leo Laporte (01:00:00):
In fact, all you have to do is ask around and it won't take long before the conversation goes to streak. People who use streak, just they have to tell the world I, you, oh, you have you have you seen this? Have you tried it? It's amazing. You could try it today. Right now. It's free to use on your own. That's to get you in the door. If you want to use it with your your business with your team, there's a pro play. In in fact, you'll get 20% off your first year of their ProPlan their most popular option, 20% off their first year, by going to streak.com/twig, S T R E a K streak.com/twig. So, and I want you to use that. So they know you saw it here, cuz I want them to stick around streak.com/twig, and you get a big 20% off for your whole first year. But as I said, the free plan you can use on your own. If you want to dip your toe in streaks, pretty, pretty, pretty cool streak.com/twig. We think of so much for their support of this week in Google. Ooh, Google.
Leo Laporte (01:01:09):
<Laugh> did you put this in here? The cats that are sleeping on the yeah. Starlink dishes. <Laugh> I love that. So a good headline too. Yeah. Cat and a hot satellite dish. The they're they're heated so that they don't get iced up. And apparently the cats figured that out <laugh> and the other problem is it's kind of hard for Starling to work through a cat one customer. Well, I'll give you they're revenge. Yeah, they here's a, here's a five cats. There's a tweet from Aaron Taylor, five cats who have discovered the warmth and they're in the snow. They're all bun. I wouldn't have thought you could get five cats on that dish, but apparently can't and the great thing is cats always have that. You gotta a problem with this look. Yeah, of course we're here. Yeah. They're cats are funny aren't they, they, they know they're doing something wrong, but unlike a dog which will run off a cat, just looks at you going, what <laugh> you? Right. I dare you to challenge them. What, what's your problem? That's hysterical. Why did, why is Ziga worth $12.7 billion
Jeff Jarvis (01:02:26):
Fake, fake!
Leo Laporte (01:02:30):
Do they still do Farmville? It's the NFT of the day I did Farmville three years. Try to get that fake hay farm. Farmville three for mobile is coming. I hear, oh, that's why. All right. The original farm bill, which died in 2020 has been replaced by games. They've acquired quite a few Graham games, small giant games, peak games, ROIC, extra. They're really the masters of the free to play the freemium games where that's good. You get people hooked. And then and then they they give you lots of money for fake donuts or, or things. So take two, which publishes grand theft auto and red, dead redemption and Bioshock and borderland, civilization. Really big Keal space program. All the two K games. They're a big gaming company. Just bought Z a name. It feels like a blast from the past. Yeah. Yeah. 12.7 billion, which means probably you'll see grand theft auto mobile. Right?
Ant Pruitt (01:03:39):
Why not, yeah. There's the horsepower for it. Yeah. These devices now. And that's all, you'll be able to mow down farm animals or something. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:03:51):
Wow. It's funny. I thought Z, I honestly Ziga was in the old tech TV building and I thought they gotta be gone by now. What, what are they doing? Yeah. So last week we mentioned that Norton 360 mm-hmm <affirmative> the, an, the antivirus program was in installing a crypto minor. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> you? I think, I don't think by default, I think you a, you had to have the right hardware and B, I think you had to opt in on people's
Ant Pruitt (01:04:20):
Computers. I thought it installed it, but you did have to opt in to run it
Leo Laporte (01:04:25):
That maybe that's it. And they take 15% of it as Cory Dr. Rope pointed out. Yes. Now it turns out they're not alone. A Vera, which was purchased by Norton is now doing it to a Vera has a big half billion users. It was a free end of virus. Very popular for a long time. They have, they have now introduced something called a Vera crypto to this almost would feel like the opposite of an antivirus. <Laugh>. Wow. but I, I guess, I mean, it's it's, to me, it's already a, a problem with Norton slowing your system down, right. To like molasses, but to add a crypto minor, not to mention the energy waste. And
Ant Pruitt (01:05:12):
Again, I question, why are we still pushing anti viruses? When windows already has something pretty good built in, why are we
Leo Laporte (01:05:21):
Still pushing these things? Because they're money, there's money in them, their Hills,
Ant Pruitt (01:05:27):
I guess you are Mr. Leo. Leport can you tell people to
Leo Laporte (01:05:30):
Just use windows? I do all the time on the radio show up, people ask me, should I get an antivirus? And I say, no, Steve Gibson says the same to thing. Yeah. there are reasons you might want an antivirus in business. A lot of we have, we run antivirus here, Russell. Okay. Right. Russell has us run into an antivirus because well we're a business. And the last thing we want do is get shut down by ransomware. Right? If you've got a teenager, you might want to consider it. If the hard HEADSS use the family can computer. Cuz they're no, I mean, when Michael, cause you know, I have the solution to it all. What's that Chromebook. Oh that's did you keep your Acer? What is that? What one is that? No, this is, this is the Google one. You went back to the Google one. Yeah. Yeah. That's the, which is that the go the one with the w bot go. But yeah, it is. Yeah. <Laugh> the w butt butt one. <Laugh> I,
Mike Elgan (01:06:21):
I still use the pixel, the pixel book, the, the, the Prego one. And I, I share your smugness. Jeff. It's I just feel
Jeff Jarvis (01:06:31):
That not in his fog. I'm right. I'm like, come
Mike Elgan (01:06:33):
At me, man. Like, what
Leo Laporte (01:06:35):
Are you gonna do? Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis (01:06:36):
It's true. It's like, it's the same reason I hate Wordle.
Ant Pruitt (01:06:40):
Yeah. It
Leo Laporte (01:06:40):
Makes sense. That Wordle works on Chromebooks.
Jeff Jarvis (01:06:43):
Well, I will never know that. Why do
Leo Laporte (01:06:46):
You hate word?
Jeff Jarvis (01:06:47):
I hate being spamed by all these people telling me,
Leo Laporte (01:06:49):
Look, I can spell, oh, you don't hate Wordle. You hate Twitter. See, this is the problem. <Laugh> this is the problem. He will defend the death Twitter. But this is really a Twitter problem. Not a Wordal problem. No, it's
Jeff Jarvis (01:07:02):
The problem. Wordle sets up this function so that everybody shares it. Like I should give a good rats, Ru everything you
Leo Laporte (01:07:10):
Cover. How many look I do word every day. I don't share it on my Twitter must be the people you're following
Jeff Jarvis (01:07:17):
People. I do. Yeah. I have jerks
Ant Pruitt (01:07:18):
Friends. Everything on the web is shareable, sir. Everybody on their webpage has that little icon that says click here to share to Facebook or to Twitter or what have you. So yeah, but it's
Jeff Jarvis (01:07:28):
A news story. Fine. But it's your, it's your sticky little word game.
Leo Laporte (01:07:32):
Well, look, this is another way to share it. Here's somebody who's cross stitching her Wordle scores. Yeah. Wow. Look, she got that word in two notes. That's hard to, I think that's luck if you get it in two words. I really do.
Ant Pruitt (01:07:46):
I think that's not Mr. Jarvis, do you think I play Wordle? No. Well actually I have, but no, because I didn't share
Leo Laporte (01:07:55):
<Laugh> yeah, I don't share it. I I'm pretty proud of it. Word score. You share. I don't share it. <Laugh> I don't, whereas I don't play
Ant Pruitt (01:08:02):
It. Donly played it maybe four times. Oh bad. I never remember to play it. I, I got other stuff going on in my brain. Yeah. That's
Jeff Jarvis (01:08:11):
The thing. I've got a more life, you know, just fine. You wanna do you wanna have orange juice breakfast? You don't have to tell me every day. It's like the old days when people, people tell me, oh, bloggers just say what they had for breakfast. Well, now everybody on Twitter just says, oh, I just played Wordle. <Laugh>
Ant Pruitt (01:08:24):
<Laugh>
Jeff Jarvis (01:08:27):
It's all gonna be replaced by an algorithm. Artificial intelligence is smarter than all of you. It can be is on GitHub. Now get the words faster. Everybody's gonna cheat. It's over. Wordle is already over.
Mike Elgan (01:08:39):
Yeah. Yeah. Think my word for it. What
Ant Pruitt (01:08:41):
Will be talking about my word Wordle next month?
Jeff Jarvis (01:08:46):
Like as in everybody remember Wordle,
Ant Pruitt (01:08:49):
Right?
Leo Laporte (01:08:50):
Worlds actually been how
Ant Pruitt (01:08:51):
Last cause these fads, they, they it's a FA come and go so quickly. They do. They do.
Mike Elgan (01:08:56):
Yeah. I'm angry bird. I get up at four o'clock in the morning and I start reading and writing basically and thinking and thinking a lot about words.
Leo Laporte (01:09:08):
And so I, those cows, cows too, cows gotta be milked,
Mike Elgan (01:09:14):
But I, well, actually, actually, as you know, Leo, I lived on a farm for the second year I worked at, at TWI and sometimes he had a farm. The farmers went on vacation and I literally got up at four o'clock in the morning to milk the cow, to feed the pigs before coming in and doing T and T. So that, that actually happened. But <laugh> don't recommend it. But no, I, I, I checked that word today. I figured, wow. It must be fun. Everybody's talking about it. I went there and I'm like, I don't want to have to struggle with more words. I do this from first thing in the morning to dinner time. Yeah. What's the right word. <Laugh> that's what I do all day. Every day. It's like enough already. So
Ant Pruitt (01:09:54):
That's a good question. How many writers actually use
Leo Laporte (01:09:58):
Actually plug? I use Wordle because I do a lot of coding exercises. So I don't want my brain developed too big on one side. <Laugh> I want it to the other. I'm trying to keep my lobes EEP. Even you do it for vanity.
Mike Elgan (01:10:13):
Yes.
Leo Laporte (01:10:14):
I don't wanna have a big bulge on one side on the right side, but I should have something on the left side. So that's why I do Wordle. I crossword puzzles too. I try to balance language and math.
Ant Pruitt (01:10:27):
Apparently I started playing at some point earlier today. Oh, there you told me,
Leo Laporte (01:10:31):
Forgot about it. There you go. You didn't even finish. You just got two words, right? That
Ant Pruitt (01:10:34):
Just shows you how much I really care. <Laugh> yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:10:37):
So will the Sonos be, will the Google devices be banned because of Sonos victory in the international trade? Well, not Bann they're
Jeff Jarvis (01:10:50):
Just taking away things,
Leo Laporte (01:10:51):
Right? Yeah. Well Google's solution to this is to take away features. So the final us ITC ruling last week, Google infringe on the Sonos patents, but the band will not, they probably will not ban them. Because Google has gone into crisis mode and strip, stripping away features from their their devices. You can't set the volume now for instance, remotely through a device on, on multiple ones, right on multiple devices. Yeah. Which makes me mad, cuz I don't want to use a Sonos. And the whole reason I was excited is I had the same, I guess that's the point of the patent? <Laugh> the same capability a patent, sir.
Leo Laporte (01:11:34):
I guess that's our expert witness. Mr. Lapore oops. I just little, little fuel on the fire there. Why can't they just pay Sonos for the well that's my question. Cuz apple has many of the same features. Apple must be licensing it some type of license fee. Yeah. I guess Google doesn't want to do that. I don't know it a set a precedent. I don't know an open letter from the CEO of YouTube to the world's fact checkers. I'm guessing you put this in Jeff judge. No two. I didn't. And it said open letter two YouTubes from the world's fact. Now you see why I didn't put it up? Oh no. We're gonna moral panic. That's fine. Dear. Miss Susan Ji. So what are they? They're worried that YouTube is promoting misinformation. Doesn't yeah, yeah. Yes. Is there an organization of the fact checkers of America?
Leo Laporte (01:12:30):
Oh, it's a fun. You can imagine what a fun convention that is. Yes, there is. I don't think you had a ham sandwich for lunch. Is that a ham sandwich? I don't think there's any ham in that ham sandwich. You probably have lunch. Look at all these organizations, Africa check animal political. Otos this is very good. Bolivia. Boom. Check your fact USA. But there's all of these checking organizations. Yeah. They're they're big ones. The Polish demagogue association. <Laugh> fact check Ghana. We have quite a few in the us cuz we got a lot of fake facts in the us. Yeah we do. My Gopen Taiwan. All right. PRODA <laugh> in Poland. <Laugh> I don't think it's the same PRODA I doubt it. The healthy Indian project FIP there's Pravda so,
Mike Elgan (01:13:28):
So Trump's new social workers. A social network is called truth. Social. Would that be translated as
Leo Laporte (01:13:33):
PRODA guess? It would. That's the word Prota in Russian is truth. Have I shown you the picture of five cats on a, on a dish? <Laugh> have I shown you? I'll be here all week. Dishy MC dish face. That's the name? The official name. Perfect, perfect antenna. <Laugh> perfect. Did we do the worst of CES last week? I think we did. I don't think no, we did another show. Oh, okay. I can. I do so many shows. This is actually good. Last week we were talking with miss, miss Giller, right? Yeah. Kathy was great. Yeah. By the
Jeff Jarvis (01:14:16):
Way was yeah. You're welcome. What a great thank you. Great
Leo Laporte (01:14:20):
Addition. Yeah. And, and now I feel like ancillary copyright has become part of the English language, which is <laugh>
Jeff Jarvis (01:14:26):
Repeat after me. Nice to <laugh>.
Leo Laporte (01:14:30):
Oh, in cow, I'm not doing that. I'm not repeating that we spent half an hour on ancillary copyright. Mike
Jeff Jarvis (01:14:37):
Leo's sitting there thinking, how do I break into this? How, how
Leo Laporte (01:14:39):
No, I, I literally sitting here thinking I don't wanna break into it's a very good conversation. It was a good, but I also can feel people turning the, I, this is from my radio days, turning off the radio, like
Mike Elgan (01:14:51):
It was only 15 minutes for me, Leo cuz I was listening at double
Leo Laporte (01:14:55):
Speed. So there you go. Then it was faster that way. Of course. So that's a good way to do it. The worst of CES, this is a six right to repair advocates who assembled last Friday to present repair dot org's second annual worst in show awards, a selection of the least private, secure, least repairable and least sustainable gadgets at CS. Cory doctor row was the host perfectly appropriate. Yep. <Laugh> he says, it's our job here today to talk about the hidden or maybe not so hidden and completely foreseeable failure modes of these gadgets award from the founder of I fix it. Kyle W's good friend of the network. He gave the Mercedes EQs electric vehicle, the award for worst product. This is amazing because you're not supposed to open the hood. When you, when you actually turn on the car, here's the note, this shows up Kyle posted this on Twitter notes on the hood only is this specialist personnel of a qualified specialist workshop should open the hood access by the customer is not permitted, not permit, not permitted to open the hood, consult a qualified specialist workshop.
Leo Laporte (01:16:12):
The reason they give. And I think this is not unfair. It's an electric vehicle. And there maybe you may could get a shock. You could shock outside. Yeah. That's a reason to buy the car. Yeah, but I have to say the only real car MIS up I ever had was when my car had overheated in the desert when I was a kid driving across country to go to college. And I, I, I don't know why I decided to open the radiator cap. Oh, oh that was a mistake. Ooh. Oh, what came out? Steaming hot water in a gusher. Ooh. I managed to Dodge it. I didn't get burned, but wow. That's an example of why you don't wanna open the hood. <Laugh> that's yeah, but, but you did have the right to, I had the right to do it. I had the right to hurt myself. Didn't
Mike Elgan (01:16:59):
Rolls Royce used to lock the hood and only to be open by a qualified
Leo Laporte (01:17:05):
Roy maybe. But if you're roll, if you're buying a rolls Royce, do you think you're really gonna go check the oil yourself? <Laugh> probably not. You got, you got Deon mustard on your hands. It's not gonna, pardon me? Do you have a dip stick? I could borrow. So it turns out DIPT sticks. I didn't know. Was, was it Mercedes in that piece? Yeah. That they got rid the dips stick. That's another thing. This is not the first time Mercedes has gone in this road. Wes noted. A few years ago, the company removed the dipstick from its C-Class vehicles. Arguing that only an authorized technician should change the oil. It's the automotive equivalent of an audio Jack. Yes. Audio port, maybe no dip stick for you. Apparently I've seen on a number of blogs and probably on Twitter. It is possible to open the hood.
Leo Laporte (01:17:58):
There's a, the secret handle that's covered. You can remove the plastic and find the secret handle. So Cindy Cohen, the director executive director of electric, chronic fun tear nation gave the award for the worst privacy. And I wish Stacy were here for this to the singled smart health monitoring light bulb. <Laugh> this is a light bulb says cone. That's supposed to be monitoring your health, but really it's monitoring the humans in the room. The, the light bulb could track your heart rate, body temperature. And if you put a light bulb in every room, all over the house, this is one of the things she said where some people are like, we can do this thing. Now let's find a need for it. <Laugh> and then I, I guess the need for it was in case grandma falls down. She said, of course, grandma has all sorts of other ways to tell you that she's fallen down.
Leo Laporte (01:18:51):
And that are really only about surveilling her and that she can control as opposed to this one, which is outside of grandma's control. Cohen said the idea that you need a light bulb to monitor your heart rate is just creepy, weird, necessary. Yeah. And of course they don't say what happens to the data. They collect it right? Nathan Proctor national campaign director for the public interest, nonprofit us per talked about the new Samsung TV that has its own NFT aggregation platform built in. <Laugh> we did talk about that briefly. Did we? Okay. Yeah, we did talk about that briefly. That's such a CRO and it is a ginormous OED, Sam UNG TV. What does it even mean? It, you can use it to buy, sell and display your NFT artwork. Geez. I, I know we'll we'll we, I we're gonna have the word old TV next, last about as long that's right.
Leo Laporte (01:19:45):
Nathan says, I, if you don't know what an NFT is, I'm honestly jealous of your life. <Laugh> Paul Roberts, founder of secure repairs.org chose John Deere's fully autonomous AR tractor. This is actually was big news at CES, a tractor that you, you don't need to get into. You could just get set it and go back to the house and or milk your cows as Mike. Does. yes. And of course he's, he's criticizing it, not because of known vulnerabilities, but because of the way John Deere engages with the sec security community and the,
Mike Elgan (01:20:24):
Yeah, it's a problem for any years because tractors are so automated and they, you know, this's another case where you're not allowed to look under hood, so to speak of the electronics right. In their tractors. But this tractor is if John Deere is, you know, if their claims are correct is really astonishing. Yeah. It's, it's a fully self, literally drive itself out of the barn, down public highway to the field and then it will do all the work in the field perfectly. And then it, it can work 24 hours a day. So it's, it's really an astonishing piece of equipment. The problem is of course that it costs $900,000 and farmers will have to go in debt more debt and and then won't be able to fix it or do their own repairs, et cetera. Well, or it'll replace workers in, in corporate farms. Right.
Leo Laporte (01:21:14):
Well, yes. Yeah. You know, the, the, some of these combines are so big. It's like a living room on wheels. Yeah. They're, they're pretty fascinating when you see 'em in person.
Mike Elgan (01:21:26):
Yeah. What's, what's also a, a nice tidbit about the John Deere tractor. Is that the control for the remote control for it is actually an, a phone app. Wow. Yeah. They actually control it with a phone, like remember the, the James Bond from like 15 years ago where he was controlling a car with a, with his phone. It's just like that. So you can, you can take remote control of the tractor phone. And again, this thing is the size of a, you know, of a building. And and then you can, you can monitor what it's doing, check its fuel, find out, you know, all the activities that it's doing. So it's pretty, pretty amazing. It's a, it's a fundamental advancement in automated farming.
Leo Laporte (01:22:10):
Speaking of automated farming, here's a teenager David Colombo, who has took full remote control of over 20 Teslas in 10 countries. And there seems to be no way to find the owners and reported to them. This is his, oh boy tweet. He says, it's not a vulnerability in te Tesla's infrastructure. It's the owners faults. He can remotely run commands on 25 plus Teslas in 13 countries without the owner's knowledge, including disabling century mode, opening the doors or windows starting keyless driving. I can query the exact location, see if a driver's presence and so on. He could also play Rick as on their Teslas and Rick Roland, he can't, he says stop the cars or mess with the throttle or anything like this, I guess it has to do with the app Tesla security team is investigating. In fact there is a CVE assigned, so, and it's good that it was this kid who discovered it, not, not a, not, not a malicious hacker. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>
Mike Elgan (01:23:20):
It, it's a great plot for like a, like a cheesy low budget B movie where somebody gains access to 20 Teslas all in the same place and can drive them and has a swarm of Teslas that terrorize little towns all over across the country. Auto
Leo Laporte (01:23:35):
Mates. Yeah, he has, he's not Bloomberg interviewed him verified it by seeing screenshots and documentation, but he would, he didn't want them to reveal the specifics because the, there isn't a fix out there yet, but it's basically involves an insecure way. The software stores information that's needed to link the cars to the programs, authentication tokens, I guess. You know, but why does this young man know this? I he's, what was he doing? Good little hacker boy, 19 year old. I wonder if I can get into these Tesla, he's an information technology security specialist. Look, we shouldn't knock people who do this as long as they do what he did, which is disclosed responsibly. Yeah. because the O other option is somebody finds it. Who decides to play with these people. Yeah. Instead going to Tesla saying here, here, you know he's a self-described Tesla fan.
Leo Laporte (01:24:33):
He lives in Germany. He started coding when he was 10 years old, frustrated with high school coursework. His father helped him petition German authorities to let him go to school two days a week and spend the rest of his time. Okay. Expanding his cyber security skills. <Laugh> all right. Well, that makes more sense. Now. Thank you. Tesla does have a bug bounty program. So it may also, and, you know, honestly, I know it's a little scary, but we should not condemn people who do this. Thank God they do this. And as long as they responsibly disclose and reveal it responsibly. Yeah. They're, they're making things better. Agree. Although it's embarrassing. I'm sure Tesla would prefer, he did not tweet that. <Laugh>, <laugh>, it's a little embarrassing. Anyway, that's the, the right to repair worst of CES for 2022. Oh, I, I didn't give you the worst in show overall, which Corey he says was Lenovo's new, smart clock essential with Alexa. This is device that you put next to your bed. He says that if you make an unintelligible random sound, turns on and starts listening to everything you say, I think we have one of these actually in our bedroom. <Laugh> Dr. O said pointing to the work of security researchers. Who've looked into the data captured by Amazon smart speaker system. That just feels to me like one of those things that right outta the gate, we should be able to spot is not something we want in our homes,
Mike Elgan (01:26:00):
In
Leo Laporte (01:26:00):
Our bedrooms, especially. Yeah. Yeah. I got, I got it. I got it all in my bed. I don't, you know, what, who the hell cares? All the sleep trackers have to have some sort of microphone. No, I have a sleep. No, that's the way that's the way Google's works. I have the sleep, the sleep Beautyrest sleep tracker, which is just a paddle underneath the mattress and I a mattress it's it's using radio waves to see movement and so forth and AI to say, oh, that's breathing. Oh, that's heartbeats. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> oh, that's rolling over. Okay. Oh, that's a small animal. Oh, that's four people in this bed. That kind of thing. <Laugh> gotcha. <Laugh>
Mike Elgan (01:26:39):
You know, you, Leo, you say who the hell cares you, you have it in your bedroom. So like that. But the difference is that you spend all day every day thinking about technology, learning, you know, learning what's happening in technology. You, you, you write code, you understand fully, you are a full participant in this thing and you know what it's doing, and you're okay with it. The vast majority of the consumers of these devices have no idea. And if they do did really understand what was happening, they wouldn't like it. Maybe they, maybe that dislike is irrational, but they still wouldn't like it. So they that's part it. I know
Leo Laporte (01:27:11):
People find it creepy. I don't know. Is that a, is that a, is that a reasonable criterion though for prohibiting a technology it's
Mike Elgan (01:27:24):
Creepy? Well, I think, I think that Google actually does it a lot better than Amazon does. Google is very upfront about reminding users. We're gathering this data. We have your location history. We, here's a, here's a link to the page with all the stuff we're capturing. Click here. If you wanna stop this click here, if you wanna delete that very good at that. I, I'm not aware of much of that at all. For Amazon where people are buying all these products, you have a lot of third party products that use and people are installing 'em in their cars, their bedrooms, et cetera. And they don't. Amazon seems like they don't really want people to know exactly what they're doing. They probably don't want people to know, know what their robot is gonna be doing in terms of mapping the house. They don't want people to know what their flying security cameras doing in terms of tracking things, recording video, uploading video, and all that stuff.
Mike Elgan (01:28:15):
They see, it seems like they they're just hoping nobody will notice and nobody will care. And I, that really bothers me. I would like a giant company like Amazon to be more responsible about it, do what you're gonna do, but get, give everybody full disclosure and give them an easy option to opt out for whatever their reasons are. It's really none of Amazon's business. What people's reasons are, whether it's rational or not, people should know what the product does. And, and especially in terms of recording conversations, remember the fire phone, the disastrous smartphone that Amazon came out with had a single button. If you wanted to recognize a car of milk and what the company was or whatever you'd pointed out, and you pushed the button. And when you did that, it recorded audio 15 seconds of audio and uploaded that audio. So people are thinking I'm, I'm taking a picture, but it was capturing everything you were saying
Leo Laporte (01:29:06):
Unnecessarily. And was that, that was probably a bug not, well,
Mike Elgan (01:29:10):
It was a, it was a bug in Amazon's culture. That's my point. They just don't care about that stuff as much as they should.
Leo Laporte (01:29:17):
I, yeah, I, I guess, I mean, I feel like I'm being made to feel guilty for not really caring if somebody hears me, me snoring, or, you know, I mean like, but, but you, you know
Mike Elgan (01:29:28):
What it's doing and you agree to it and, and that's fine. I'm, I'm in the same way. I,
Leo Laporte (01:29:33):
I agree with you, Amazon should have more clear. I have literally in my bedroom, an Amazon device, a Google device than an apple sir, in home pot, <laugh> I all board to
Speaker 5 (01:29:43):
Tears somewhere. Those somebody saying, would Leo fire do something interesting?
Leo Laporte (01:29:48):
Even if, even if Lisa and I had a fight or I, I said, I, I, I just wanna let you know, Lisa, just between you and me, I'm gonna murder Jeff Jarvis tomorrow. Even if, even if that I don't, it's like, it was plenty of cause I know, no. I mean, it's like, who cares? And if in fact I did murder you and the police got ahold of that, they would rightly put me in jail. And that would be good because I should go to jail for murdering you.
Mike Elgan (01:30:12):
But there are people who know as much as you do, who oppose it. And they
Leo Laporte (01:30:16):
Understand that here's my problem is their opposition is limiting what I can do. So it's, it's fine for everybody to make that judgment and not, and I know lots of people, including people on the show refuse to have these devices in their house. That's fine. But, but I don't want some moral pan. Oh, I'm sorry. I
Mike Elgan (01:30:36):
Know you were ahead of there.
Leo Laporte (01:30:37):
Yay. You got me, you got me
Mike Elgan (01:30:42):
Free Amazon echo. There's a game
Leo Laporte (01:30:44):
We're playing to see if they can get me to say it. And I lost, no, I don't. I don't want somebody else's you know, kind of nebulous, creepy fear to, to, to stop the technologies that I think might be useful.
Mike Elgan (01:30:57):
I agree. And I, that's why I say that is, should just about disclosure. They should do all the things that's doing. But have you be able to go? Nope, I don't want, I mean like what apple did recently with the, the tracking thing for third party apps, they have a, a new feature where it says, when you install a new app, it says this app would like to track you across the internet. You want to reject that and you just click one button and you're out, that's recent and it's, that's the way to do it. Yeah, I
Leo Laporte (01:31:20):
Think you know, I gotta point out that that apple button is meaningless. That apple is simply turning off the apple ID for advertisers. And there's plenty of other ways to track you across the internet. So in a way that's a kind of a misleading switch to apple. There's ways for
Mike Elgan (01:31:35):
Apple to track you, but not the little app
Leo Laporte (01:31:37):
Google could track you. I mean, there's, there's lots of ways to track you that don't require IDFA and I think apple knows that. And I think Apple's a little cynical saying, look, see, we care about your privacy. Yes. Double dealing there. Yeah.
Mike Elgan (01:31:53):
But I mean, there there's so many stories about flashlights that were uploading data to China and stuff like that. That's like, well, that's not right. I wish I would've had the option to, to say no to that kind of thing.
Leo Laporte (01:32:04):
Yeah. But I don't. Yeah. I guess. And I, and everybody always says, oh, you're you're in the privileged position, blah, blah, blah. That's fine. Yes. All right.
Mike Elgan (01:32:13):
I don't, well, I mean, the thing as a journalist working with, you know confronting all the different tech companies about privacy issues, Amazon is the worst. I mean, they, they, they just Stonewall you. If they don't wanna talk about it, they they're very cagey. They're very secretive. They're very problematic in terms of their relationship with the press. Google is one of the best companies in that.
Leo Laporte (01:32:32):
I wish Amazon be better. I think Amazon sidewalk for instance, is a really cool technology, which is a non-starter because people, because people don't oh, more and it's payable.
Jeff Jarvis (01:32:41):
It's PR it could be, it could be so easily, which is Mike's point. It could be so easily fixed, but
Leo Laporte (01:32:45):
They could fix it. It's just PR yeah. So easily. Yeah. But they, yeah, they don't. And Mike's
Jeff Jarvis (01:32:49):
Point too is right. It's
Mike Elgan (01:32:52):
Culture. Yeah,
Leo Laporte (01:32:53):
Yeah, yeah. Yep. Move fast break things. All right. Let's take a quick break. Our this week brought to you by this is a new sponsor. Wanna welcome new Relic, not a new name. I think probably to most people listening. If you're a software engineer, you know, you've heard and I hope you've tried. If you haven't. I want you to know, you can try it for free forever. You don't even have to give 'em a credit card, new Relic. What is it? Oh, I'm glad you asked new Relic instruments, your entire stack so that when you get that 3:00 AM phone call, something's gone wrong. And the app isn't working, you don't have to scramble around calling people, dreading the call from the CEO what's going on. You can immediately fix it. You've we've all been there. If you're a software engineer and network engineer assist admin, you, you know, you're, you're fast asleep phone rings three in the morning.
Leo Laporte (01:33:50):
Something's broken. Something's wrong. The, the server's not working. The app's not working. And you're going, what is it? Is it the back end? Is it the front end? Is it global? Is it the server? Is it the network? Is it the cloud provider do slow running queries? Oh God. Did I push a bug in my last deploy? Oh my God. The whole team's scrambling. They've got all these different tools. They're trying the they're messaging each other, like crazy to find and fix the issue. Now, if you had new Relic, like all these companies do, you wouldn't have that problem. You'd go, go to the source. You'd fix it. You'd go back to bed. Sad thing is, and this is a, a new, we, we had a great conversation with new Relic. They told me half of organizations, only half have, are implementing observability for the networks and systems.
Leo Laporte (01:34:36):
Only half. That means the other half are getting up at three in the morning and scrambling like crazy people. The report shows that maintaining network observability continues to be an issue for companies around the world. It shouldn't be, it will not happen. Just get new Relic, new Relic combines 16 different monitoring products. Things you might put together yourself separately, but as a whole, they give you complete observability across your entire software stack. In one place O of the 16 tools, there's application monitoring. There's an APM which you could put in your apps or your microservices. It, even it even, you can give you the line of code. It could say, you knows the symbol tables say this function's breaking. This database query is frozen. That kind of thing. Use Kubernetes. You'll love. Pixie gives you instant Kubernetes, observability, and then availability, distributed tracing. See all your traces without management headaches so that you can find and fix issues fast there's network performance monitoring.
Leo Laporte (01:35:37):
So you don't have to guess where the issues are. Ditch those data silos for a system wide correlated view, and so much more pinpoint issues down on the line of code. So you know exactly why the problem happened. You could fix it and fix it, right? That's why all these companies, the devs and ops teams at DoorDash GitHub and epic games, 14,000 other companies use new Relic to debug and improve their software. It's not just for Ruby anymore. New Relic is amazing. It does everything. Whether you were in a cloud native startup or a fortune 500 company takes five minutes to set up new Relic in your environment. That 9:00 PM call is just waiting to happen. That could happen tonight. So don't wait. Get new Relic. Now you'll be able to set it up fast. You can get access to the entire platform and a hundred gigabytes a month of data free forever, no credit card.
Leo Laporte (01:36:31):
You don't even have to give 'em a credit card. You'll have it set up at five minutes. You can go to bed tonight and sleep through the night. <Laugh> you'll love it. Sign up right now. New relic.com/twig. There is zero reason why you should be in mystery. The next time you get that, the servers are down. N E w R E L I C. New relic.com/twig. I know a lot of people rely on new Relic and if you're not, why not new relic.com/twig E three, by the way, is announced that they're not going to have a, a, a in person event this year. Cuz OFN E three is in the spring. It's
Mike Elgan (01:37:15):
It's Los
Leo Laporte (01:37:15):
Angeles, right? Yeah. yeah, LA's locked down, California. Got, we got heavy, locked down all of a sudden. There is I did see a group of people come back from CES with the vid, with the Ronna, Ms. Ronna paying him in a visit
Mike Elgan (01:37:37):
For all the number of people who got sick with something his way down this year. I mean every year in the past it was, it was a super spreader event of every
Leo Laporte (01:37:47):
Flu and virus. Oh God, everybody goes home sick, right? Yeah. I actually beat it the last time we were there two years ago and I, I almost washed my hands raw. This was before COVID, but I washed my hands at every opportunity and that actually helped a lot. Yeah. If I'd known about it, I would've worn a mask.
Mike Elgan (01:38:05):
70,000 mask is yeah. You're gonna see mask at CES. Oh, from now on guarantee
Leo Laporte (01:38:09):
Mask everywhere. Mask everywhere. Why not? I like you. We've learned mask. We now know, you know that the, you need a, a good N 95. You need a good seal. We kind of know how to wear 'em. Why not? Like wash your hands? 70 south Korean attendees at CES have tested positive now for COVID 19. I think this is just the beginning. Oh yeah. Just the beginning 70 cases. That's they test in South Korea. <Laugh> Samsung, SK Hyundai, heavy employees are testing positive. South Korea health officials are turning or urging. Anyone who went to CES to get a PCR test. Nevada says no evidence linking that surge with C yes. <Laugh> tip. They all went to Z. Yes. Okay. Fine. <Laugh> fine. South Korea had really had, was doing a good job and had really cut down. That's why they're very aware of all of this. Right? Many Korean business people attended CES are now confirmed. Be it with COVID 19 said a senior south Korean health ministry official.
Mike Elgan (01:39:21):
I really feel liken is, you know, it's, it's, it's really, it's really slipping past a lot of the mitigations and your best bet is just to be vaccinated so that if you get it, you, it doesn't,
Leo Laporte (01:39:31):
I think we're all gonna get it. And yeah. And if you're vaccinated and boosted, but I think the is pretty important. My kids both got it. They're both vaccinated and they were fine. I mean, you know, they got it. They were unhappy. Right. But they didn't, they didn't have to go to the hospital. I think, I think Jennifer got to their mom. Got it too. But again, boosted didn't have to go to the hospital. Well,
Jeff Jarvis (01:39:52):
I'm, I'm debating my, my 95 year old father has an appointment tomorrow. He gets an, the macular generation shots in his eye twice a month and the place is always crowded and you know, I don't know. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:40:07):
It's, that's the other, I mean, I'm, I'm really trying hard not to have a heart attack because this would be a bad time. Wouldn't it?
Mike Elgan (01:40:14):
Right. You schedule that
Leo Laporte (01:40:15):
For later. I'll schedule that for later. Exactly, exactly. But
Mike Elgan (01:40:19):
It's, you know, but it's amazing. I mean, I've been this last year. Well, last year we went to Europe three times, went to Mexico, like six or seven times and I've never gotten COVID it's is astonishing me neither, but
Leo Laporte (01:40:34):
I think that this is a different beast
Mike Elgan (01:40:35):
Now, right? Yeah. Yep. I, I think so. And, and, and really that's, that's the future because it's gonna become endemic. It's gonna be floating around. People are gonna die from, from COVID every year from now on tens of thousands of people will die from COVID just as they do with the
Leo Laporte (01:40:51):
Flu 60,000 people a year die of the flu. And
Mike Elgan (01:40:54):
There's gonna be new shots every year, every two years, whatever it is. And that's just life now.
Jeff Jarvis (01:41:01):
So, but let's not get too cavalier about, I mean, I are the people I know who have long haul, there's not long haul flu, but there is long haul COVID people I know, two years in. Right. We just don't know. And <inaudible> we have it's too. It's too new to know what the impact's gonna be. So it's still freaky.
Leo Laporte (01:41:18):
Was it you who put this story in about the guy's genital shrinking? No. Did I put that in there? No, I'm sorry.
Jeff Jarvis (01:41:26):
I put it in my Twitter feed.
Leo Laporte (01:41:27):
No, that's where I saw it. <Laugh>
Jeff Jarvis (01:41:30):
So here's the funny thing. So I checking Austral funny news sites constantly because I, I wanna see what's going on with Nova Jovi,
Leo Laporte (01:41:39):
Right? Oh yeah. And so boy, what a horrible story that is. Geez. So
Jeff Jarvis (01:41:43):
I put up this thing from news.com a or news. Yeah. news.com AU, which is the Murdoc portal. Man's penis shrinks after COVID diagnosis. Now go to the other one first it's it's in a thread. So it gets better when he says it was his above average manhood. It
Leo Laporte (01:42:03):
Was above average man.
Jeff Jarvis (01:42:05):
Right. Which, which, which strikes me as, this is a reference to the George on Seinfeld shrinkage ocean. Yes. Right. COVID is the new shrinkage
Leo Laporte (01:42:14):
Shrinkage. It was above average. I swear. <Laugh> the best part is doctors warn. It will likely be permanent. <Laugh> that's Rupert right there in a nutshell.
Mike Elgan (01:42:29):
That's basically the opposite of long COVID. If you know what I
Leo Laporte (01:42:32):
Mean? That's short COVID oh God. Oh, oh, whoa. I'm so glad Stacy's not here. <Laugh> what do you think of this? I don't know what I think of this. I saw this in the New York times, a 22 year old, a actor. He he came to New York city from a small town in Georgia to talked like crazy about his tiny apartment and how he came to New York, you know, to achieve his dreams of stardom on Broadway said, I'm gonna be tomorrow. I'm auditioning for a Juilliard school's undergraduate drama program. Most one of the most prestigious acting schools in the world he's does, does a live stream. When he gets the verdict from Julliard, after his audition reads it aloud for his audience of 2.4 million followers in TikTok, it was a rejection. You are no longer under consideration for admission for fall 2022.
Leo Laporte (01:43:30):
He read MIS this is New York times. Mr. Weber looked crestfallen. Now we're going to have to find a different way to be an actor. Thanks for watching the journey. The next night, tens of thousands of fans flooded Juilliard's Instagram account to express their anger. <Laugh> you are so done for not getting axle in 21,000 likes on that comment users started the hashtag justice for axle left more than a left more justice justice. You know, he's probably a terrible actor, right. Left more, but he's a to star. So left more 1,001 star reviews of Juilliard on Google tanking, the school's search results with negative reviews. Some fans spoke of planning and in person protest at Juilliard's campus Weber, by the way, to his credit, he's not encouraging his credit. He says, I do appreciate all the responses, but people are absolutely tearing them in shreds. I'm grateful. We don't have, have to Bashard. I want to spread positivity. Maybe he had something to do with all of the TikTok, right? He was working at a, as a bouncer at a pirate themed restaurant. <Laugh>
Jeff Jarvis (01:44:46):
Yeah, I love the pirate theme was just the perfect. That's just the greatest touch. I, I probably probably what he wanted for his audition. R he probably played a pirate. I am the pirate. That's all I know. Now I have a monologue part I'd like to share with you. It's too bad, but jar strong of pirates.
Ant Pruitt (01:45:05):
But again, if he didn't fit what they were looking for, he didn't fit. It happens.
Mike Elgan (01:45:11):
You know, I was I going to apply to Juilliard, but I saw their, their, they only had two stars. So
Leo Laporte (01:45:17):
<Laugh>, well, they've really gone downhill. They only accept 20 kids a year. It's not a big program. Yeah. Does not mean that he is not, you know, he's just not right. Or whatever there is fit with.
Ant Pruitt (01:45:32):
They were looking for at that particular time. Yeah. That happens.
Leo Laporte (01:45:36):
2 million followers, including many influential content creators. It looks like he's in LA now he'll do just fine. What
Mike Elgan (01:45:42):
What's hilarious is like, oh, I'll have to find another way to be an actor. He said to more people than saw the last, you know yeah. The last bond movie. So
Leo Laporte (01:45:59):
You're on fire, Mike. Yeah, that's true. He anyway, so that's, I don't know I, is this good or bad, or is there anything to say about this hashtag AEL did it, it is bad.
Ant Pruitt (01:46:11):
If Jillard comes back and says, Hey, you know what? We made a mistake that would be bad. You're hired. That's that's that, that would, I would have a problem with that, because that means they only reacted because of some fans on a social media platform made them look bad. That's
Leo Laporte (01:46:28):
Not enough. He does now have a talent manager in Los Angeles. The Cordero who I also represents an actor on euphoria. I think he's probably gonna find there
Mike Elgan (01:46:40):
Was a series of stories a few years ago about how, you know Hollywood TV shows and Hollywood studios wanted to get in on this whole influencer thing. So they thought, oh, we'll, we'll bring in some YouTube Insta, you know, influencers and have, 'em be a, have a guest spot on our show. Yeah. And so they would send, they, you know, they'd send a note to, to the influencer saying, Hey, you know, we have a huge opportunity for you. Finally, you're gonna make it big and you can be on our show. And they, and they, they get a reply from the agent saying, well, Mr. Soandso or miss so-and-so is willing to do that under the following conditions, they need 10 million and they need their own trailer and they need the be because the power was really at that point with the influencers and Hollywood, hadn't gotten the memo point. So the, yeah, so it was, it was, was like, it was really the, the YouTube influencer doing a favor to the TV studio. They didn't get it with all that.
Leo Laporte (01:47:34):
They thought they were doing them a favor.
Mike Elgan (01:47:36):
Exactly. So I think, you know, I think this guy's already got his medium.
Leo Laporte (01:47:40):
I agree. Clearly I agree. Tiktok is kind of amazingly powerful. It really is interesting. Yeah. get ready. Android 12 L beta two is rolling out for pixel phones. That means if I'm saying that it must be time for the,
Jeff Jarvis (01:48:02):
In fairness, there was no way to see that. That was really me. That, that that's, that's somebody taking a little break thinking I'm gonna have a Cacho Pepe puff. Cause wait, I do another story for a four. I have to worry. I waited until
Leo Laporte (01:48:18):
John got up and started to walk away and then I did it. Of
Jeff Jarvis (01:48:20):
Course that was very mean. That was, that was really mean to me. That's really, you enjoyed it. Change way too much. Just kinda,
Leo Laporte (01:48:28):
You know, I can blame. It's all. I blame the, no, it tropics. That's what's. That's what <laugh> that's what's going on there. Google is still not still no word. I keep checking my pixel every day, day. Thank you, sir. Still no update. You know, you are joined now by marque Brownley, who said that his aunt hates his pixel six. He says super buggy, marque. I'm taking the SIM out. This thing is, is gotten bug here and bug year. And I'm putting it back into my Samsung S 21 because I can't, I can't use it. I haven't had the same problems, but maybe there's hardware issues or I don't
Ant Pruitt (01:49:03):
It's it's clearly for me, it's clearly software it, I don't think it's a hardware problem. I think it's the, the OS and it it's so annoying. The little things that I do, I hit the back button and the screen goes back three times, two or three times. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:49:18):
Versus like software. Yeah.
Ant Pruitt (01:49:20):
Bluetooth still just randomly drops in the middle of me listening to the audio book that we're gonna discuss in the club TWI book club. And
Leo Laporte (01:49:28):
How does the fingerprint work for you?
Ant Pruitt (01:49:31):
That's been that's. Okay. it's definitely not as good as the hardware button. I just have to tell myself really press cuz it doesn't work if I don't really press on it.
Leo Laporte (01:49:43):
Yeah. Cause I, reason I ask is Mary Jo Foley also uses a pixel six process. It just doesn't work at all for her, but I think she may.
Ant Pruitt (01:49:53):
And I have a screen protector on too.
Leo Laporte (01:49:55):
Yeah. Here's Marquez's tweet. My pixel six pro has slowly gotten so buggy since launch, I can no longer recommend it at $900 combined with the latest botched update. It's just been a, a bad experience. My SIM is back in an S 21 ultra till the next review. Oh wow. That's pretty harsh. And he has a lot, he carries a lot away. He's not a to star or anything like that, but <laugh>
Ant Pruitt (01:50:18):
But he has also been one to bat Google's pixel projects too. You know, this isn't just sour. Great
Leo Laporte (01:50:27):
Says lots of small annoying things. The display constantly drops way below 120 Hertz. The fingerprint sensor is still slower than the rest of the lock screen and auto brightness bug out all the time. Now the camera app has started slowing down. Boy, that's
Ant Pruitt (01:50:40):
Sad. Camera did slow down for me. Part of my pick of the week, which would get into later, I was out on the shoot using the camera and it, it was a bit slow that day and I'm thinking, what, what is wrong? I thought it was just me. But I noticed it was a little bit laggy between making the contact with the shutter and, and even navigating through the files. But yeah, that all seems like software to me, not
Leo Laporte (01:51:06):
Hardware. He says he's on the November or patches as most of us are. Except for those mm-hmm, <affirmative> unfortunate few who got the update by accident or early when they lost all connectivity. So that bok did more. The bok did even more <laugh> anyway, they're doing the 12 El beta two right now, which means we might be getting close. They had said it'll be delayed. You know, the, the update which supposedly will fix many of these issues was supposed to be released in December. It'll be delayed. They say there'll be one more be beta next month before the consumer release. What in Q1, March.
Ant Pruitt (01:51:45):
That's
Leo Laporte (01:51:45):
Ridiculous. Oh my gosh.
Ant Pruitt (01:51:47):
That's ridiculous.
Leo Laporte (01:51:49):
And I'm starting to agree with, with you Mike, <inaudible> not doing the job. Some, some somebody needs to take the control of that company. Yeah.
Ant Pruitt (01:51:58):
Say, look, folks, we got a too big OS right now with an expensive piece of hardware that people can enjoy. We need to fix. It's our flash. We've already gone through testing before we release. So yeah, this needs to be priority one.
Leo Laporte (01:52:13):
You know, maybe Rick OLOW lost his mojo or something. I don't know. I don't know. 12 L is not the pixel fix. Sorry. Okay. 12 L is something else. Sorry. That's that's coming out. And I don't know when the pixel fix is coming out. Here's what Google is changing to speaker group controls and device setup to appease Sonos. The first change applies when setting up and updating your smart display or speaker, a small set of users will need to use the device utility app to complete product installation and updates. You may, geez, Louise, you may receive a prompted download and run DOA, and it will ensure your device is connected to wifi and receives the most updated version. It only has to be used once during the initial setup of devices that don't have the latest app. Ah, I get it, the non infringing firmware.
Leo Laporte (01:53:08):
So the duo will immediately fix your firmware to be non infringing. And then you'll now have to adjust each speaker individually instead of being able to use the group volume control. That was a nice feature. I remember on my Sonos speakers. One slider would turn everybody in the whole house up and down. It's not so bad. You're gonna get, this is an example of on the screen, you know, a number of sliders and you can control those third party devices have to be updated to new cast firmware. Besides the volume change. Google says speaker group functionality remains the same. Most, most speaker groups should continue to function as expected unless <laugh> you have a speaker group containing other brands of cast based devices like JBL or Lenovo, then they need to be on 1.5, 2.2 7 2 2 2, 2 or higher cast firmware, blah, blah, blah. So you know, the trade commission ruled against him, said, we're not gonna ban your devices, but you better fix this. And this is the fix the pixel launcher at a glance widget. If you are using a pixel phone is gonna have doorbell camera previews. This is also part of the, the Android 12 update. You'll be able to customize the attic glance widget, and even look at that even of a little picture on the attic glance. See that right there of somebody at your doorbell. That's kind of cool. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Woo. Woo.
Ant Pruitt (01:54:46):
It means nothing. If the existing
Leo Laporte (01:54:48):
Platform isn't working worth it, I think you're right. Let's let's not worry so much about that. Let's get the thing working. Yeah. Get
Mike Elgan (01:54:55):
S phone fix people. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:54:57):
<Laugh> this is good. You may remember that Google started doing system patches to Android through Google place store updates, because they could put, push those without the carrier blocking them. They could push 'em to older phones and so forth. So now they're finally, and they never did this giving you a log of what's been changed when you get the play system update just as you do, when you get a version update. Now you can go and click the Google play system update, and it will tell you, you can manually update. But it also tell you what is happening. There's a new support page that spells out what's new in the patches. Here's the January 22nd, 2022, I should say patch the critical fixes. And here's the place store play as you download feature, blah, blah, blah, new features.
Leo Laporte (01:55:48):
So this is one way Google's updating phones that are not, this is not part of the, the monthly security update. So that's good to get that information now available on your phone and also online. And finally Google launches ripple an open standard that could bring tiny radars to Ford cars. So I didn't know this, but Google has been building radar chips for about seven years. That's what tells you how you sleep that radar? In my paddle? Not that paddle, the other paddle, the sleep paddle under my bed. You can control. Wait, what <laugh>
Jeff Jarvis (01:56:34):
I, I want, I want a diagram of all the, all the electronics,
Leo Laporte (01:56:38):
Just stop. <Laugh> where do you put your paddle anyway? <Laugh>
Mike Elgan (01:56:46):
In the basement, of
Leo Laporte (01:56:47):
Course. Oh yeah. The dungeon. Well, you gotta, okay, so you have one in the dungeon, but you might need one in there might be discipline needed. At other times I'm just saying, oh man you could control <laugh>
Mike Elgan (01:56:59):
Oh,
Leo Laporte (01:57:01):
The company's solely radar that's the solely of course was in the last pixel phones, but didn't, didn't really that's the one where you could go like this to your phone and make it do things. Now there is an open source API standard. Stacy, if Stacy were here, she could probably explain this called ripple that will basically put solely in O L I in auto mobiles and other things. Yeah. Ripple quote. This is from Yvonne P the man who led the team at Google's AAP skunk works that came up with solely P says, ripple will unlock helpful innovation that the bin fits everyone. General purpose radar is a key emerging technology for solving critical use cases in the privacy respecting way. The ripple project is open source on GitHub. Oh, well, maybe not it's copyright, but it is on GitHub. Well,
Mike Elgan (01:58:02):
I thought it's open source. So,
Leo Laporte (01:58:05):
So it depends on what you define as open source. You, oh, publishing the source does not necessarily make it open source. It's the license that matters.
Mike Elgan (01:58:13):
It's open source ish, ish.
Leo Laporte (01:58:15):
You have to sign a Google open source license agreement to participate.
Mike Elgan (01:58:20):
Couple of things. When they first rolled out solely, they were talking about a very sophisticated technology that could detect the finest movements. They, they were promising that someday Google would have solely on smart watches and you'd be able to change the time by just moving your fingers ever so slightly. I love that. Oh yeah. Yeah. I remember actual implementation of it is like big, big movements, but I, I just, it could be a problem in a car if it's implemented and somebody accidentally, you know, flips somebody off and then that's perceived as a gesture for turning the, the radio on full blast or something like that. I dunno, I, I'm not sure how this is gonna be implemented, but
Leo Laporte (01:59:01):
Ford would not tell the verge what it plans to do with solely, but only that it's looking at using interior radar to do things it's exterior radars aren't doing today.
Mike Elgan (01:59:15):
What does that mean? Well, people should, should, should know that the, the self-driving cars of the future will have as many sensors pointing at the dash. As there are sensors outside how come pointing at the world, because a big part of how, how they'll function is they'll constantly be detecting emotion, stress, conflict. They really wanna see who's the who's in the car so they can customize information settings in the seats and all that kind of stuff. So there, there's a huge amount of effort in Silicon valley to build up all these sensors. They wanna see if even before the, the self-driving cars are, self-driving wanna make sure that if people are falling asleep or if they're drunk, they wanna be able to tell all that through sensors so they can turn on or turn off certain safety features, certain self-driving features.
Mike Elgan (02:00:09):
And so this, it looks like Google has decided to jump into that existing nascent market with an existing technology. It was originally promised for smartphones and, and wearables. So that's basically appears to be what this is and they, you know, they, they talk, they don't talk so much about super future stuff because they want to get in early, there are certain startups that specialize in this kind of thing that are kind of gobbling up all the mind share for car makers. But so I think go, Google wants to sort of get in there and, and establish themselves as a technology that car makers want to use and build into their cars, not
Leo Laporte (02:00:46):
Just car makers there, there there's like pet chip pet, collar, chip makers that wanna measure your dog's internals, like blood, you know, pressure and heart rate and temperature with one of these things. They, the Amazon's apparently looking into bed sense to measure sleep. There's lots of uses for this.
Mike Elgan (02:01:06):
That's actually the fact is that with AI and, and, and increasingly better sensors, everything and anything, including as we learned light bulbs will be able to detect state of being in multiple ways. And this is especially gonna be true inside cars in our homes, desks and so on, but especially in cars,
Leo Laporte (02:01:26):
There's another company BL MEO has a dev kit for a radar based blood pressure sensor. So that's interesting. So there's gonna be a lot of health implications as well. So good. Solely is not dead. It was a cool technology. The pixel four did not show it off. Well, nobody used it. And so they took it out, but I think there are lots of uses for it. Yeah. And now it's called ripple and that's the Google change law. Couple more stories before we get to our picks of the weekly associated press is gonna sell NFTs.
Jeff Jarvis (02:02:00):
Now that now that makes them totally uncool. And so nobody's gonna do 'em anymore. But when I was a kid, I wanted to wear a Naru jacket. My parents wouldn't let me. Yeah. And then Johnny Carson wore it and they said, okay, now you can wear it. And I said, no,
Leo Laporte (02:02:11):
I don't wanna wear it. It Johnny's wearing it. You probably put this in New York times buys the athletic. What is the athletic?
Jeff Jarvis (02:02:21):
The athletic is, I'm glad we're a fellow, a fellow a non jock here. It is a kind of the major brand for a pay walled service covering major sports aunt can probably tell us more about, do you subscribe
Leo Laporte (02:02:37):
To the athletic ant?
Ant Pruitt (02:02:38):
I do not. Cuz it was pay walled. Oh, yep.
Jeff Jarvis (02:02:41):
Right. And is also pointer.
Leo Laporte (02:02:45):
Right.
Ant Pruitt (02:02:46):
I pay for, and that wasn't one. No <laugh>
Jeff Jarvis (02:02:50):
Of 1.2 million subscribers. What it tells me wow. Is at the times is going to create a whole bunch of subscription products when they were there for how many subscribers, they have 8 million subscribers that counts separately, but included in one, one bucket, the new subscribers, the food subscribers and the puzzle
Leo Laporte (02:03:07):
Subscribers. Yeah. I subscribed New York times, crossword puzzles, New York times cooking a wire cutter has a subscription. Right. and then, and the newspaper, I think though, I, I buy one subscription that covers it all.
Jeff Jarvis (02:03:21):
Or do, but the point here is that if all you subscribed to as food, you are counted as a New York times
Leo Laporte (02:03:26):
Subscriber. Yes. Well, why not? That's his revenue for the New York? I mean, I think that's probably a good revenue
Jeff Jarvis (02:03:30):
Stream for, so I think what they did was they got a million, two added in and so, so my friend, Aaron Piller who's at temple university is brilliant actually New York time. I ex guardian wrote this piece that I have in there saying that this is dangerous for local newspapers. And there's been a lot of debate about this. Does this mean the times is gonna come after the local newspapers? And if you subscribe to the Chronicle, just because you want giants coverage it'd be say, well, screw it. I'll Stu I'll do the New York times the athletic cuz they offered me a bundle deal. And I don't like the local papers. And that's said, I don't
Leo Laporte (02:04:02):
Know, this is what's happened in cable television, all the cable companies, including N Fox and others have created new sports channels where they do local sports in indirect competition, the local channels. And they, furthermore, they cover lo local sports probably better in the more detail
Ant Pruitt (02:04:20):
I was gonna say, I I've enjoyed that. Yeah. Bit of
Leo Laporte (02:04:22):
A pivot myself. It's been good for. It's been good for sports fans. Absolutely. Mm-hmm <affirmative> can you get Clems and games here? Probably through a I do. Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis (02:04:31):
Streaming or that's not that sounded like you didn't wanna confess something.
Ant Pruitt (02:04:34):
Oh, I haven't. I haven't. No I'm saying I haven't missed, I haven't missed a beat with what is it Fs one I believe is how it is. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:04:41):
Fox sports one Fox Fox Fox. Yeah. Yeah.
Ant Pruitt (02:04:43):
And it it's been great to be able to see the, the regional stuff. You know, I know one over here cares about app state university, but
Leo Laporte (02:04:52):
I'm curious, I think that's the idea with the athletic, right? You've got 200 seventies teams, 47, my markets, you get local coverage. And I think that could be a threat to the Chronicle and other local.
Jeff Jarvis (02:05:02):
So the Atlantic came also also when it started, they said, we're gonna, and they did this. We're gonna steal all the best sports writers from all of these papers in the country. Right. They did. They got 'em. Yeah. And then they built a subscription product. I don't understand this. Maybe, maybe could to me ESPN, as I understand, it has kind of been on a, somewhat of a downward slope, but I don't understand why that is.
Ant Pruitt (02:05:26):
Because ESPN has been sensationalizing things that shouldn't necessarily be sensationalized in my opinion. There's a lot of what they call 'em plays that are nothing and they just play it over and over and over and over again. And, and it's not connecting to the true sports fans. It's more generalized it's link. Big basketball is a yeah. Link, bake basketball is a great game, but not everything in basketball is a slam dunk. Right. You know, and that's what ESPN has been doing for I
Leo Laporte (02:05:58):
So proud. That's really true. It, I never even thought of that, but it takes away from the idea of there's a strategic hole. There's a plan there there's a, a way a team plays. You're just focusing on that one shot. Right. I never thought of that, but that really does take it away. Youtube TV has this feature. I was working on Sunday during the, the big Niners game, the last game of the season where they had to beat the Rams to get in the play out LA. Yeah. And but when you go home and watch YouTube TV, it has the key plays and there's 49 of 'em, which was showed you what a crazy game it was. And so Lisa and I said, because she didn't watch it either. It was too stressful for her. We sat down and we watched the 49 plays, but it's completely out of context. It's actually not a very satisfy I experience. You're seeing the touchdowns and the great passes and stuff, but it's like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And you don't have problem. Get, get the shape of the game.
Ant Pruitt (02:06:48):
I don't have a problem with highlights, but I think there's a nuance way of doing highlights to report the story of okay. Team a played team B and team a was down for a little bit, but team a was able to prevail and win the game. I think there's a nice way of doing that and not just having every single thing shown, be a touchdown.
Leo Laporte (02:07:09):
I think there are a number of factories. You're one of them is sports betting.
Ant Pruitt (02:07:13):
Yeah. There's that
Leo Laporte (02:07:15):
Because you know, it's big business. If you're, it gets to the point where you, all you care about is the over under what's the score, you know
Jeff Jarvis (02:07:23):
What's the other point of this purchase is that the athletic has been pure subscription revenue, no advertising. So the New York times can bring advertising to, but what's the big advertising in sports in the old newspaper days. It was tires. Now it's sports betting, it's gambling. And how much does
Leo Laporte (02:07:37):
New York times will be known for betting? And it's a little, I think, concerning they take a cut of sports betting. So suddenly they're profiting based on the take, which I think is, I mean, that's, let's put Pete rose in the hall of fame in that case cuz right. Same thing's complete
Jeff Jarvis (02:07:55):
Well here in New York because New York just opened up sports betting online, Caesars has been advertising like crazy. And you, you see players in the ads.
Leo Laporte (02:08:03):
Yeah, yeah. Same thing. Yeah. Well that's all gone, you know, this is more of the, you know, world timers <laugh> yeah. The world has changed. So I got a, I got a question for you all three of you. We we've been approached by a sports betting, very big name group to do advertising. And I said, no, should I say yes to that?
Jeff Jarvis (02:08:27):
Why not? Well, I
Ant Pruitt (02:08:30):
Don think it, it any differently from us talking about crypto because that's a bit of a
Leo Laporte (02:08:36):
Gamble. We do some crypto ads. Yeah. I mean, we don't ads do ads specifically for crypto, but there's a credit card with crypto rewards. I think we have Coinbase. So yeah. We have some crypto on here and for a while I was a little funny about that. We don't do SIGs. Right. I don't know. It's a little weird. I mean I what do you think, Mike, should I, should I, am I being old
Mike Elgan (02:08:57):
Fashioned? No, I think, I think you called it. I mean, I've, I've always loved your advertising because they're actually really great products. And I basically, I think I've bought every single thing. You've advertised that a person who doesn't have a house could possibly buy <laugh>
Ant Pruitt (02:09:12):
And he's gotten me like that too.
Mike Elgan (02:09:14):
Yeah. And so it's like, so the, there, there stuff where it's like, yeah, I want that. I know I want that. And there are other things where it's like, well, I don't know if I want it or not, but if it's being advertised on Twitter, then I probably do want it. So I'll just get it. And if you veer off into, you know, I think a lot of tech people are like me, which is that not interested in sports. A lot of tech people are interested in sports of course. But yeah, I don't know. It just seems like it's it seems like it's a detour from the, the, the, the, the policy that has worked very well. At least for me as a, as a consumer, we,
Leo Laporte (02:09:47):
I mean, because advertising's been a little scant in, in, you know, our natural environ we've been willing to, you know, we, people still gimme a hard time about doing escaping ads, but so I accept ads in a broader range of categories than we thought we would just cuz to keep the lights on. Yeah. Keep the
Mike Elgan (02:10:07):
Lights on. Well, yeah. But, but see, when, when you do scaping ads, you're, you're, you're going after really, really good products. So I don't know anything about sports betting or any that world at all, if it's superior product or if it's, you know, something like that, if you personally would use it or whatever, I don't
Leo Laporte (02:10:22):
Like to, I feel like, I think my personal philosophy is gambling is a sucker spec. <Laugh> <laugh> and I know, I think our, I don't wanna promote, I wouldn't take lottery tickets either. You know, that's the problem. I'm the same way with lottery mm-hmm <affirmative> and yet, I mean, I don't want to be, I'm not, it's not a moral judgment. I just right. I don't know. I had to really think about, well, it is, it
Jeff Jarvis (02:10:44):
Is a, it is a regressive redistribution of wealth,
Leo Laporte (02:10:48):
But so is everything. So is Bitcoin. I would like to re abuse some wealth myself, like, like I said,
Ant Pruitt (02:10:54):
The same can be said about the stock market. The same can be said about crypto. It's all gambling
Leo Laporte (02:11:00):
In a certain. It is. And I, so it's a, it's a, you know, it's a challenge, you know, it's a mm-hmm <affirmative> yeah. Not to mention the fact that my wife is runs the business and sells the advertising. So I have to deal with deal with her when I say no. So that was another gamble. Yeah. She's actually really supportive. She, you know, she said, well, you don't wanna do this to you. I said, no, we were, we were in agreement on that. So yeah. Yeah. Let's take a little break, final words, your picks of the week. Thank you so much for being here, Mike. I really appreciate your filling in on last, glad to be here last minute. Notice. It's always great to have you on really appreciate. I wanna tell you about code academy, by the way. I know a lot of people ask me how I want to get into coding.
Leo Laporte (02:11:44):
It's one of my passions. I love it. It's my hobby. And they say, where's a good way to do it. I think code academy is a great way whether you wanna become a programmer. And if it's a really good place, if you at a new career, as a programmer, you're just getting outta school and you want to brush up your skills, but it's also a great place. I've taken their classes just to kind of learn a new language or brush up. They've got some, they actually have some really great what do they call 'em? I can't remember, but the little cards with the reference cards and stuff like that, there's lots of great tools. Code academy is a great, great place to learn to code has never been a better time to become a programmer with code academy. You can code in your own terms over 50.
Leo Laporte (02:12:23):
This is an amazing number. 50 million people already know. Code academy is the best way to learn to code that's because code academy not only teaches you job ready, coding skills, it helps you build unique projects for your portfolio. That's very important. Earn certificates. That's also important. Even prep for technical interviews. One of the things I love about code academy is your coding from day one and they have classes. I've taken their Python classes, but they have classes in HTML, CSS. They've got a whole new swift track. If you wanna learn to write for the most popular smartphone platform swift is a great language. Apple's all swift. Now with code academy, you can learn at your own pace, great way to get qualified for jobs that are in high demand. Whether it's building basic websites to artificial intelligence, to robotics and everything in between, you don't need to be experience it.
Leo Laporte (02:13:16):
You can start from zero and you will literally be with your very first day writing real working code in minutes. And I think that's very important when you hit that submit button you'll know immediately instant feedback. Did your code work? Why not? You get feedback so that you're get on the right track. SQL JavaScript. I mentioned Python, HTML. Here's a great way to start. Go right now to code academy.com, C O D E C a D E M y.com. Use a promo code twig. So they know you saw it here. You'll get, they have a little programming personality quiz, which is nice because it's not like testing you for math. It's merely asking you about your, how you think, what you like, what, and it will help you decide what area to go into when Lisa did it. It knew immediately she's a numbers person.
Leo Laporte (02:14:12):
They said, you should learn R you should learn statistics. You be, be good at this. They said, I should, I should get into computer science and algorithms. They're absolutely right. Absolutely right. That's my, my passion. So the course recommendations after you take the quiz will be based on things that you're interested in. It's really cool. It's an interactive form. As I mentioned, you're gonna learn by doing, you can build your portfolio when you build those projects. It's great to get them up on GitHub. People really do look and see what have you done to see if they wanna hire you. You'll also get a certificate of completion. You can put that in your LinkedIn portfolio or your resume. It's a great way to get a dream job in web development, gram and computer science, data science tons more. And it's just a lot of fun.
Leo Laporte (02:14:57):
I really think they've nailed this platform. Join over 15 million people learning to code with code academy. See where coding can take you and get 15% off your code academy. Pro membership, just go to code academy.com. Use a promo twig T w I G you'll get 15% off code academy pro and we'll get the, the little pat on the head from sending you there. And that's important to us. So please code academy.com, promo code twig, C O D E C a D M Y code academy.com. Great way to learn how to code best thing you'll ever learn. I gotta tell you so much fun.
Leo Laporte (02:15:42):
Let's see. Have I told you the story of the LAPD cops who instead of answering radio call to a robbery in progress at a local mall, decided to play Pokemon go, have I told you at that story? <Laugh> wait, what? <Laugh> it's the greatest, this happened in 2017, but they appealed it saying Hey, this this incar digital incar video system, which caught our comments and conversation, shouldn't be used against us. This, so it's a privacy case. Yeah. It's a privacy case, California appeals court upheld the firings from four years ago. So, and I, you know, I guess it is a privacy thing, but yeah, on the other hand, I think public safety officers we, you know, we make 'em wear body cams. There's good reasons for that. Yeah. And, and honestly, they <laugh>, there was a little malfeasance here.
Leo Laporte (02:16:43):
They were on a patrol when a radio call to on to a robbery in progress with several suspects at a Macy's in the Crenshaw mall came in, they told their supervisor, they didn't hear the call, but the recording showed. They ignored attempts to reach them. This is from the actual court ruling that came down this week after communications made a second attempt to contact petitioners off. Lasano asked if they should ask communications. If there's a message, officer Mitchell replied well, it's up to you, whatever you think. I don't want them to think. We're not paying attention to the radio. Lasano responded. Ah, screw it. <Laugh> officer Mitchell alerted Lasano it snor lack a Pokemon co character had just popped up at 42nd, 46th in Lamar. We have private all units, all units, all units, 4 46 in Layar. After, after noting that Lamar doesn't go all the way up to 46th, Lasano said, oh, you know what I can do.
Leo Laporte (02:17:45):
I'll go down 11th and swing up on Crenshaw. I know a way I can get to it. Mitchell suggested a different route told Lasano we got four minutes for approximately the next 20 minutes. The incar CA video system captured petitioners discussing Pokemon. As they drove to different locations where the virtual characters apparently appeared on their mobile phones on the way to their Snorlax location. Officer Mitchell alerted, officer Loza that a Toga tick had just popped up just south. The 50th <laugh> Mitchell caught the snor explaining, got him <laugh> and then let's go get the Toga tick. And they drove off. When the car stopped, the recording recorded officer Mitchell saying, don't run away. Don't run away. Lasano described how he buried it. And ultra ball, the Toga tick before announcing got him Mitchell advised. He was still trying to catch it adding holy crap, man, this thing is fighting the crap outta me. I think it, I think there's movie rights. He's serious to be purchased here. Eventually Mitchell explained holy crap. Finally, apparently in reference to capturing the Toga tick and he remarked, the guys are gonna be so jealous,
Mike Elgan (02:18:54):
Unemployed we're unemployed. So the crooks got away the Toga tick, not so much the
Leo Laporte (02:18:59):
Toga tick, not so much. A lot of people
Mike Elgan (02:19:02):
Don't realize, I don't know how this affects law enforcement, but in the United States, the laws are very friendly for surveilling employees. Yes. In general. Yes. And so, you know, fir first of all, part of it is the de election of duty. Apparently part of it is the use of, of taxpayer funded resources, like gasoline to chase Pokemon characters and so on. Mm. So, you know, I, I, I don't think this is really so much of a privacy issue, right there were on, there were, there was in a, in a police owned car using police owned equipment to actually do something purely in their LIC of, of, you know, public safety. So
Leo Laporte (02:19:45):
There, there is a notice that they were given that for this, the, the DIC vs system is used as a tool for crime documentation and prosecution not to monitor private conversations. But there is a notice that says it won't be used to initiate a personnel complaint investigation or used against an employee in the adjudication of a person complaint, unless there's evidence of criminal or egregious misconduct. Ah, and the court said that notice is sufficient to protect for minor, you know, or private per private com communications. But it's too much to ask the commanding officers be forced to ignore egregious misconduct that is in unintentionally captured on the recording. So the court said, no, no, you can fire these guys. In fact, they did four years ago, but they got the Snorlax and that's, that's really all that matters. I think that's oh, that
Ant Pruitt (02:20:39):
They cared about.
Jeff Jarvis (02:20:40):
<Laugh> clearly. Can you imagine, can you imagine the conversation at home you got fired for doing what
Ant Pruitt (02:20:45):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (02:20:47):
And in all fairness this is 2017 Pokemon go was all the rage. I remember Lisa and I, many of the times we've come into work late or had to stop somewhere in de election of duty, delic of duty. We've done it. I admit,
Ant Pruitt (02:21:01):
Watch jammer B sitting there in the booth waiting there's no Leo still waiting.
Leo Laporte (02:21:11):
Interesting. new plan from wise, w Y Z we're fans of them. I would I would love to get Stacy's take on this one as well. Well, she'll be back next week. We'll we'll but we love wise why stuff is very inexpensive. What I didn't know is after nearly going bankrupt during the onset of the pandemic, we launched cam pro plus our premium service. It's a subscription service with AI and cloud storage features. Last year after much soul searching, we had some of it, a light bulb moment started experimenting with a name, your price concept. So when we gave a premium feature to users with no obligation to pay for it, many users voluntarily paid for it anywhere to support fellow wise, community members. I think this is one of, so this is
Jeff Jarvis (02:22:04):
The service part,
Leo Laporte (02:22:05):
Not the hardware part, right? Yeah. Yeah. The hardware you still pay for, but it's like, they're cheap. There's like 20 bucks. Yeah. They're cheap. And they, they almost went under, out of business. I didn't know that either because of the pandemic, a lot of businesses have gone. Of course. And so they tried the subscription business and then they thought, you know what this is, and this is a measure of the Goodwill people have to wise. Yes. So the they're gonna expand the name, your price experiment, starting now to all current users, it's called meet, I'm sorry, it's called cam plus light 12 second event recordings and wise person detection and whatever price you choose, including zero bucks, but their, their faith in their customers who do let's face it, love them. People love wise. Right? I think that's great.
Mike Elgan (02:22:52):
They're such an innovative company. It's, it's really
Leo Laporte (02:22:55):
Astonishing. So I'll be, I'll be very curious about this experiment, but good, good on them. They're
Ant Pruitt (02:23:02):
Gonna make another email from wise it says where'd it go? There's a free upgrade to something four AI package, including person detection, pet detection, yada yada, yada, yada, for people that already have whatever this cam plus package is. Heck I thought I was already getting that, but how much,
Leo Laporte (02:23:25):
How much it just says free, free. It's not $0 or whatever you want to pay. It's just free,
Ant Pruitt (02:23:31):
Free. Yeah. This says, Hey, Camus users, this is a free upgrade for being a cam user. Interesting. And then cane, after that, sorry about that. Why is this gonna start selling COVID tests?
Leo Laporte (02:23:45):
Yeah. Yes. I saw that too. <Laugh>
Mike Elgan (02:23:49):
Anything. They also sold masks for a while. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:23:51):
You know what, though? This is an example of make a company people love that gives good value for dollar and people will help you. They'll support you. They'll stick with you and they'll stick with you. They think that's great. Good for them. They're also,
Mike Elgan (02:24:06):
So one of the few companies that's similar to apple in the sense that if they come out with an entirely new product, people just buy it. Yep. They assume it's gonna be a good value and it's gonna work great. Yep. And that's, that's pretty rare that, you know, people don't wait for the reviews. They pre-order products in an entirely new category, like the vacuum cleaner and all that kind of stuff. And, and they've got really, really a passionate user base.
Leo Laporte (02:24:30):
Nice. I gotta also give a little credit if you wanna learn to code to your son. Kevin's wonderful project this tell us a little bit about is it chat chatter box chatter box chatter box. That's right. Is it hello? I always, I can't remember the URL. Hello? Chatterbox.Com. Hello chatterbox. Okay. Yeah,
Mike Elgan (02:24:51):
That's right. This is a smart speaker for anyone ages nine and up you build it yourself. It's the outside is made out of cardboard, which is very inexpensive. And once you've constructed it, you have a smart speaker that does literally nothing until you go to as Lego, like skills builder and build any skills you want. It does. It does anything, any smart speaker does, but you have to build each and every skill yourself and in doing so, children learn that AI is just something that's been programmed by a person. They learn how they work. They learn all the parts <laugh> and it's basically teaches what, what Kevin calls AI, AI literacy. So kids who are alive today are the first generation ever to grow up in a world. A artificially intelligent voice is talking to them every day. And so it's important for this generation, especially to understand what it is that's happening there, because this is the interface that's gonna be with them, their whole lives.
Mike Elgan (02:25:56):
And they learn all kinds of stem skills. They learn logic skills, they learn language skills because they're, they're basically constructing conversations. And it's very flexible. So you can say things like if I say, what's the weather, how's the weather outside. Do I need an umbrella? You can, you can have any number of things that trigger the response to go using APIs to get the weather. And so on what ages, what age? These are pretty little nine years old. Yeah. And up now I I'm guessing that to a lot of customers are adults who, who just want a smart speaker. That's super private. It's
Leo Laporte (02:26:28):
Fun to pre play with.
Mike Elgan (02:26:28):
Yeah. Super fun to play with. And, but, but it's, it's really targeted at schools and, and and also parents who wanna buy one for their, for their kid. And again, anyone who wants to tinker, I mean, it's, it's very if people will want to, to use a raspberry pie, for example, there are a lot of raspberry pies out there. This is based on raspberry pie. This is like the most fantastic thing ever to get. You can get the, the version that has no raspberry pie with it. If you've already got one and just use the raspberry pie you have, but it's really fantastic. And it has some features that actually Alexa, and some of the other smart speakers should have, for example, it's out a button on it. So it doesn't listen until you press button. I really like that idea. I agree.
Mike Elgan (02:27:08):
And then all the communication is disentangled from the user. So there's no way for chatter box or any of the companies that that have APIs, that chatter box successes. There's no way for anybody to know who's using it. So there's no possibility of monetization of privacy and violation or any of that stuff. So it's very, very secure. And one of the things that Kevin talks about is it's, it's a good idea to get kids used to the idea that the privacy is not being violated because part of the Ronald McDonald's business model of a lot of companies is just by the time kids are old enough to make their own decisions. They've been they've been surveilled, they've been their, their data's already been collected. Their biometrics have already been collected. You know, this is true of people by the time they're 10 years old, all this has already happened and they're used to it. And this is, you know, this is by design. This is, this I think is why Amazon, for example, has all these children, they want kids to be used to the idea that, you know, their data is being used and then it's being used for marketing and so on. And so chatter box doesn't do any of that stuff. It gets kids used to the idea that they have total privacy. Love
Leo Laporte (02:28:17):
It. Hello, chatter box.com. And and of course Mike's the gastro nomad. He'll be off to Morocco. When do you leave?
Mike Elgan (02:28:26):
Well we're gonna leave in next month, if you can. I think on the 16th, if we can, we're going to Spain for a little bit, and then we're going to Morocco for a while. We always spend a lot of time before the experiences to touch base with everybody to make sure that everything's awesome. And so we're looking forward to that. If it happens nice, we think it
Leo Laporte (02:28:46):
Will nice keep our fingers crossed. Yeah. It was so much fun going to Oaxaca. I can't wait to do more.
Mike Elgan (02:28:52):
I'm so glad I had a great time. Yeah, me too,
Leo Laporte (02:28:55):
With you guys. It was so,
Mike Elgan (02:28:56):
So
Leo Laporte (02:28:57):
Wonderful. Yeah. You saw us dancing to the pu K <laugh>. That was before the show. Thank God, Jeff Jarvis, a number.
Jeff Jarvis (02:29:08):
So this week Jack, the one named Jack at Jack Jack Dorsey. Yes. just tweeted to simply a link to a tech Republic piece. How does standardize on UTC to support remote work? Which makes perfect sense that we hear about UTC on the show all the time. And it just brought an idle curiosity to mind. Cause it struck me that UTC is the, is the, is the successor to Greenwich be time, which is an incredibly colonial way to look at the world. Yes. That's where we use.
Leo Laporte (02:29:37):
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis (02:29:38):
Well even though it is Greenwich be still right, right. So wonder what is the most populous time zone? Oh,
Leo Laporte (02:29:47):
Like that should be where it's got that's the, that's the Senate of the world. Yeah. What is
Jeff Jarvis (02:29:54):
UTC plus eight here which covers 1.7 billion people. 24% of the world's population in that time zone parts of Indonesia, East Timor, Western parts of Korea, parts of Northeast China, Eastern mores, parts of Western Australia. Second part Malaysia inter Mongolia, some parts of Russia. I
Leo Laporte (02:30:15):
Think that's more fair. I mean, I wish we could hear of the world's UTC everywhere, but that would confuse people when the sun rise is at 2:00 AM and stuff, but so UTC plus a UTC should start there instead of that's the center of
Jeff Jarvis (02:30:30):
The world. That's that was just an idle curiosity. Interesting. And God bless the Google. I look and took one second
Leo Laporte (02:30:36):
To find that if you wanna disrupt the fewest people, a quarter of the world's population, UTC should start there.
Jeff Jarvis (02:30:44):
And, and, and I wonder where, where, so, so what is UTC to Australia, if you're, where does is it Sydney where we always see the first new year's Eve stuff?
Leo Laporte (02:30:56):
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, that's the it's actually that's farther east it's the yeah. This time zone is the Eastern mode of Western Australia. <Laugh>
Jeff Jarvis (02:31:07):
So Sydney is UTC plus 11.
Leo Laporte (02:31:08):
Yeah. That's a big difference. Three hours difference. Yeah. That's a good question. Yeah. So
Jeff Jarvis (02:31:14):
Interesting. Yeah. Interesting
Leo Laporte (02:31:15):
Curiosity. I actually had a number two. Yes. This is from Ben Baher who is actually quoting a Morgan Stanley note on autonomous vehicles. Morgan Stanley said autonomous cars are the mother of all I O T AI projects, but this is the number that's interesting. It'll unlock more than a trillion hours, a year of human 10 engine,
Jeff Jarvis (02:31:40):
Which we, which is a, the scarce commodity people wanna buy.
Leo Laporte (02:31:44):
We spend that much time driving. Morgan says we forecast total human hours, including passengers spend side cars will rise for more than 600 billion hours today to nearly 750 billion hours by 2030 1.2 trillion hours by 2040. What's an hour of human time worth in a car with nothing to do. Depends on what you ask. And this is just our view. 1.2 trillion hours, times anything is a very large number. I guess I would invest in audio books. <Laugh> but that's why they wanna put screens in these cars. So you can serve the web and so forth. But, but that,
Mike Elgan (02:32:21):
That number is the answer to the question. Why would
Leo Laporte (02:32:24):
Apple have a car? Exactly. That's exactly right. The car is gonna be as, could be as important to them as the smartphone. You might spend more time. Apple, apple
Mike Elgan (02:32:34):
Can either get a big piece of it or they can just seed all that attention. Right. To who knows
Leo Laporte (02:32:39):
Who? And it just shows you again, Google going, what? Huh? <laugh> what, what do you mean? <Laugh> what are you talking about? Oh Lord. Google. Oh Lord. Here we, we
Jeff Jarvis (02:32:51):
Could do I watch out, watch out, watch out in line
Leo Laporte (02:32:54):
1 21, 23, 3. There is no line 1 23. Oh yeah. There is. There is. Now is an, I have a TikTok.
Jeff Jarvis (02:33:03):
I have a TikTok for every
Leo Laporte (02:33:04):
Occasion. Technology was never supposed to make your life easier. People
Speaker 6 (02:33:09):
Whose jobs have been basically looking at a screen at home, have been told by Boris Johnson that they must now go back to looking at a screen in a bigger building miles from their house. <Laugh> they must go to this building.
Leo Laporte (02:33:22):
All right. You win. <Laugh> okay. That was a good one. And your thing of the week, your things of the week he's muted this shout out
Ant Pruitt (02:33:34):
There and Mr. Steve Brazel. Oh, I love Reka. Yeah. they had me on their show last week are behind the shot.tv and a image critique show. And folks, if you're getting in photography, having your images critiqued is really, really important. Cuz a lot of times you, you put your stuff up on social media and everything and, and you just get all the likes and so much nice shot and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you're not necessarily growing because there are some things that you can do better with your photography and having other photographers critique your shots can help you out. They're not trying to be mean not trying to be rude or anything like that, but I highly recommend have some regular image critiques and his show a good job that about once a month. And I was
Leo Laporte (02:34:24):
On, Steve does great concert photography. Oh yeah. So you weren't a subject. They weren't critiquing your, you were part of the judging
Ant Pruitt (02:34:31):
Group. I was part of the panel, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I was part of the panel. We have the link to that in our, our show notes. And next up hardhead was a model for me and Mr. Jefferson Graham, Jefferson Graham was on my show, hands on photography handful of episodes back. We went out to bombing alley here in San Francisco and did a photo shoot which was sponsored by Flipboard and all that good stuff I love in. Hardhead just had a ball cuz he's so into fashion and photography. He is that
Leo Laporte (02:35:04):
I have to say. I mean, I haven't seen him in a couple of years. He's this guy has all grown up. He looks great. <Laugh> very handsome there. Very good looking boy. I'll tell you. Wow, he's got good jeans. Is he in college now? He's in college. Yes he does. Yes he does.
Ant Pruitt (02:35:20):
He's in no, he's a sophomore in high school. He's in a high
Leo Laporte (02:35:22):
School kid. Look at him. He's
Ant Pruitt (02:35:24):
A sophomore in high school. Great. But you know, we're linked to that to show you that photo walk it's on, it's on this YouTube channel. And I put a couple images on my website and per.com that we shot and it was all bay on smartphone photography. So some pretty good stuff there. And we even made a clip Flipboard magazine that people can contribute to and share their stuff. If they'd like what
Leo Laporte (02:35:48):
A handsome fella walking around the city. I bet you had to beat him off with a stick. Didn't you? <Laugh> he? So he's like into fashion <affirmative> yeah,
Ant Pruitt (02:35:59):
He loves, he loves fashion. He loves photography and he's, he's interested in just design. That's awesome for fashion as well. He bought himself a sew machine to
Leo Laporte (02:36:10):
So he he'll be, he'll be at in New York soon. Yeah. I don't doubt.
Ant Pruitt (02:36:15):
I don't mind right now his goal is to be an Oregon duck so he can, can run track and play football. But the,
Leo Laporte (02:36:21):
I thought you were gonna say organ donor. I'm glad you said organ duck. <Laugh>. Woo. That was a relief. Okay. Cuz that's not, that's not a good ambition and you actually have some more pictures on your Instagram as well from that shoot here. You're in ball. That's right. Yeah.
Ant Pruitt (02:36:37):
So didn't you follow on? I am ANCO Pruit and you can see some of those images there. It was a lot of fun with Mr. Jefferson Graham and had some Tamali it, it, it was a very nice day. What fun?
Leo Laporte (02:36:51):
And he made a video on his YouTube channel. Mm-Hmm
Ant Pruitt (02:36:54):
<Affirmative> good. You go to the Lincoln and notes. It'll it'll send you to his video. He put those up on the,
Leo Laporte (02:37:01):
Thank you an aunt Pruit, an underscore Pruit on Instagram. Of course on Twitter and then TWI TV slash ho. And of course here every Wednesday and community manager in the fabulous club TWI, you've got a busy week coming up.
Ant Pruitt (02:37:19):
Boy, do I <laugh> tomorrow we have our book club with Mrs. Stacy Higginbotham or we're gonna talk about autonomous. Have you finished it yet? I am about 30 minutes shy of finishing the audio. It's pretty
Leo Laporte (02:37:32):
Good. Isn't it?
Ant Pruitt (02:37:34):
I am. I have thoughts. Okay. And I will share those. Okay. Good thoughts on the book club? No spoilers, no spoilers. Not gonna spoil. I I do have thoughts. Yeah. And then Friday Mr. Andy and NACO and I are gonna sit down, we're gonna do an AMA for our club members for ask Mr. NACO anything and gotten a couple question in. So if you're in our discord, go ahead and put those questions in there right now. So we can see 'em and get 'em queued up.
Leo Laporte (02:38:02):
You can listen live, or after the fact, if you're a member of club TWI seven bucks a month gets you ad free versions of all of our shows, it gets you access to the club, TWI discord, which is great for so many things. You, it is a behind the sea chat during the shows, but also there's the conversations about every topic under the sun. And you get the TWI plus feed where you'll hear shows like that. If you're not listening live, you can hear them after the fact and the untitled Linox show and the gizz fizz. I mean, there's just a, there's just a ton of stuff. We've got something new we're working. That's gonna come to the discord. It's gonna end up being, I think a place for us to launch shows, try 'em out before we go public with them. So I think if you wanna, you know, participate in the early beta testing that's just one of many benefits, seven bucks a month go to twi.tv/club TWI. Woohoo. And let's see here. Oh, we do this show. I've lost, lost my train of thought. I guess the nootropics are wearing off.
Ant Pruitt (02:39:06):
It's worn off. <Laugh> it's worn off. We we've now figured out where am I am two and a half hours.
Leo Laporte (02:39:14):
We do this show every Wednesday slash show of the week for me, about 2:00 PM, Pacific 5:00 PM. Eastern 2200 UTC. You know, I should start doing the PTC plus
Ant Pruitt (02:39:26):
At, at which
Leo Laporte (02:39:27):
Is 8:30, 3000 plus eight <laugh> if you wanna, if you wanna listen, was that 6:00 AM 3,000 6:00 AM in hours. Yes. It's early morning in Malaysia. Just to go to live.twi.tv to watch that livestream. As I mentioned, you could chat with us in the discord, but also we have a live chat going on for all@ircdottwi.tv. After the fact you can download episodes from all the shows that our website, twi.tv for the show TWI do TV slash twig. You find a link there also to the YouTube channel, which is a full-time show of all of our video. You'll also find the links to various podcast players. Or you could find one of your own if you subscribe. And those you'll get 'em automatically the minute the show's available, which is nice. Please leave us a five star review if you're doing that. So that everybody knows about this week in Google, which is only a little bit about Google. We were thinking of this week in Wordle, but it seems like a lot of work just for, I'd be screaming the whole time. <Laugh> where are you off my Twitter feed. You jerk <laugh> I'm sorry. What'd you say Mike? The acronym doesn't work either. So this week in 12 TWI TWI twiddle. Oh, wait a minute. <Laugh> thanks for joining us. Thank you guys. We'll see you next week on TWI byebye
Jason Howell (02:40:52):
And Android is constantly evolving. And if you are part of the Android faithful, then you'll be just as excited about it as I am. I'm Jason Howell host of all about Android, along with my co-hosts Florence ion and Ron Richards, where every week we cover the news, we cover the hardware and we cover the apps that are driving the Android ecosystem. Plus we people who are writing about Android, talking about Android and making Android onto the show every tuesday@twi.tv. Look for all about Android.
