This Week in Tech 1002 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
 

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Twit this Week in Tech. This is one of those shows you're going to want to bookmark, listen to, maybe over a period of time, because it is very information rich. Cory Doctorow is here, always fascinating. Our favorite sci-fi author and big thinker, jason Heiner, editor-in-chief of ZDNet, and Brian McCullough from the Tech Meme Ride Home. We're going to talk about Google's victory in court last-minute victory. We're going to talk about the hacking of Kaliya and why that shows. Governments should not have backdoors, some good things the FTC has done and why Netflix is doing so well. All of that and more coming up next on TWIT Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWIT.

00:59
This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 1002. Recorded Sunday, october 20th, 2024, maximum iceland scenario. It's time for twit this week in tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news and uh. This is a unique show on the twit network because we have a rotating uh panelists. It's never the same. I think that's kind of fun. All the other shows have kind of a consistent group of panelists, but this one's always different. However, all three of our panelists this week are old friends who've been on the show many times before, some of the smartest people in the business, starting with cory doctorow. Science fiction author eff representative for a long time. I just found out you were used to be an imagineer at one point. I didn't know that when when was that?

01:55 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I was, uh, it was about a decade ago. I was, uh, I think the title was something like visionary in residence, but it was like disney r&d and blue sky at wdi, at imagineering, and then I still contract for them every now and again. I um, most of what you work on when you're an imagineer you can't talk about because the nda, but when disney discloses that you worked on a thing, you can then talk about it because it's now public. So, um, I worked on a thing called the ghost post, which was like a merch box for Haunted Mansion fans. I like that. That was like a massive success, and I was one of the writers on it. And Sarah Thatcher who ran it who's your friend's wife. When we won a themed entertainment award, she made a point of thanking by name every contractor so that we could then all put it on our resume, which was really sweet of her. That's quality, one of the of her. That's quality, one of the good ones.

02:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's quality. Well, now we know you were involved. Yeah, his newest book is the Bezel. He has a follow-up to that. This is the second in the series, right After Red Team Blues, red Team Blues and then the next one. The story follows Martin Henchch, a uh forensic accountant, and the new one's gonna be picks and shovels. I like it. It's a kind of a it's a prequel yeah, they all.

03:11 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
They go back and forth around time. So I wrote the first one, and it's the final adventure of this forensic accountant who's been busting tech scams for 40 years, and it's set in the early 2020s and it's about a crypto scam. What else right? And uh, um, my eight, my, my, uh editor loved it so much he bought three of them and I didn't know what to do because it was the final adventure and I'm like you know, do you bring?

03:36
it go backwards yeah, like, do you bring him back after he retires? You know like this is uh, you know the the Sherlock Holmes came back out of retirement, but that was because Queen Victoria knighted Arthur Conan Doyle in exchange for it. My, my editor, being a very powerful man at the Macmillan Company, still can't knight me. So I realized I could tell them in any order and that the if you go backwards in time instead of forwards in time, you get to back shadow instead of foreshadowing. Backwards in time instead of forwards in time, you get to back shadow instead of foreshadowing. And the more detail you put in, the easier it is to pay it all off, and you seem very premeditated, even though you're just like pulling it out of your butt. And so it's been just a delight to write these.

04:17
There's three in the can now, two or three more on the drawing board. We'll see if those get writ. But there's lots more books, books in the pipeline as well. I wrote nine books during lockdown, so I'm just finishing up a book about in shitification for for our stress and jeru, and there's a graphic novel that's also going to be based on that, and we've got a bunch of foreign publishers who are going to bring out simultaneous editions in other languages when that comes out. So I forgot to congratulate you.

04:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually. I guess you were on the show when we announced so that the word in shitification had been added to the compendium of real words.

04:50 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
The word of the year from the American Dialect Society.

04:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, as a result, I should probably just introduce you as the man who created the concept of shitification, the man with the poop emoji on his headstone On his headstone Also with us from ZDNet. Editor-in-chief. I told you it was going to be a high-powered team Jason Heiner, our good friend. Hi, jason, great to see you.

05:13 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Hey, glad to be here. I just learned about backshadowing and my mind is still wrapping around that Excited to think about that.

05:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like you might have a novel in your right hand.

05:29 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I don't know. I'm not very prolific with my words. I wish I was as prolific. I wish I wrote nine books during the pandemic. I actually wish I wrote one book during the pandemic, ultimately.

05:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's pretty impressive. And not only that. Corey's books are really, really good. Also with us, brian McCullough has got a a new podcast. We'll talk about that in a bit. Host of the tech meme. Ride home, hi, brian hi there.

05:49 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I only wrote one book in my entire life and that almost killed me.

05:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So um, there you go, yeah yeah, I mean I technically, I mean my name is on a number of books, but really I only wrote the first two and after that I said somebody else can can do this, I'll edit it. Uh, it is. It's the worst, unless you're, I guess, cory, where he just comes out of you.

06:10 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I don't well, I work out my anxieties by writing. Yeah, uh, and so, these being very anxious times, I'm writing a lot yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, like if you stars, you make s-CoV-2.

06:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're definitely hoping that we will be here in a month, but if we're not, write more books, it's good, it's nice to have all of you on the show. I guess we should start with Google. Lots of Google court news. Of course, the DOJ wants to break up Google and proposed a number of possibilities to the judge. The judge is going to have a hearing next year and a rule next spring about exactly what they're going to do with Google. That doesn't solve all of Google's woes, however. That doesn't solve all of Google's woes, however. Another judge in the Epic case well, this has been an up and down story. Judge Donato issued his final ruling in Epic versus Google, saying Google, you got to open the Google Play Store to competition for three years, no-transcript, because of security. And, weirdly enough, the judge said okay, fine, judge Donato has paused his november 1st deadline, uh, and, which means until google uh appeals, which means this isn't gonna happen anytime in in my lifetime anyway, maybe in yours it's just no, it'll happen.

08:01 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
It's just not gonna happen by november. Yeah, you think it will happen? Oh yeah, no, I, I. So look there's the. The foundational problem with the google ad market here, uh, and the app market, is that google competes with users of its own platform and its argument is no, no, we can be the judge in a case where we're also the plaintiff, or we can be the referee.

08:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's clear in the ad business, because they both create the market. They buy and they sell. How is that the case in the app store?

08:32 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Well, google takes 30% of every dollar you make right for transaction fees and they have all these rules that stop you from using other ways of processing your transactions. And you know the industry-.

08:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple does that too and doesn't, in fact, microsoft do it with the Xbox store and, yeah, sony do it with the PlayStation store. In fact, they even in both cases is 30, all the cases yeah, they've all settled on 30, um the you know.

08:57 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
So the European Union is on the verge of making Apple cut that out through the digital services Act, so this and, and so is South korea and japan. So this idea, this 30 percent, it's not the industry standard. It's like because because you can think of it as the industry standard because a bunch of rentiers charge 30 rent on their platform stores, but what they're charging for is payment processing and payment processing there is an industry standard rate for it and it's two to five%. That's considered extremely high, like Visa is now being sued for antitrust violations for it being as high as it is at two to 5%. It's gone up 40% since the pandemic started and these guys are charging 10 times that right. So this is like a just a gigantic amount of money and the difference between 3% and 30% is pretty big.

09:44
One of the main differences here is that there are very few businesses with 30% margins.

09:49
Like 30% is a really high margin for a business to have, and so if you're charging 30%, then the business has to charge more right.

09:58
Otherwise it's going to lose money because if it's cost of, you know, finalizing the transaction is 30%, it's just going to go out of business, and so, on the one hand, that means that our prices are all going up, and you often see this happening across the board, even in places where you just buy stuff with a credit card.

10:17
So, like Amazon charges 45% to 51% on every transaction, when you factor in all the different junk fees they levy on sellers, and you would think that that would mean that sellers were raising their prices on Amazon.

10:30
But the prices at Amazon are the same as they are at Target, where they have a three percent transaction fee from their credit card processor, and the reason for that is that Amazon has a most favored nation requirement, so you have to charge the same at Amazon as you charge anywhere else, and if you lower your price at Target, you have to lower your price at Amazon as you charge anywhere else. And if you lower your price at Target, you have to lower your price at Amazon as well. So the prices go up everywhere when they go up on Amazon, even for the manufacturer's own store. You know, when you have a duopoly like Google Apple, every app is now 30 percent more expensive, as are the things you buy inside of it, as are the things you buy inside of it because Google, apple being a cartel, have settled on this super normal rate of profit of 30%, which is again 1,000% more than the normal rate for transaction processing Both.

11:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Google and Apple claim that we offer more than that. We store it, we download it and, most importantly, we vet it for safety and we provide a quality environment. Apple is saying well, you wouldn't have an app store if we didn't create the iPhone in the first place. Jason, what is it? Is this credible Google's security argument? That, your honor? If we are to do this, it's going to be dangerous.

11:39 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, it's the, it's the trump card that they both try to pull right Like that.

11:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, apple says the same thing.

11:45 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
You know, in order to ensure you know valid transactions, in order to run a platform and all of that, I mean, to be fair, what both of them claim. You know some of these things aren't public but are in the private developer agreements and that is that you know. They both will say that up to a million dollars in revenue, they charge you 15% on the first million, that there are a lot of developers that have small business discounts and things like that. So they are saying that they try to give the small folks a break and that it's only these large, super profitable businesses that are actually paying the 30%. Yeah, some of this is going to come out, even more so in some of the e-discovery, in some of these cases, which will be good to see, and some of it has come out, certainly in some of the Apple versus EU litigation. That's happened.

12:43
But the bottom line is it really is, it does feel too heavy. To Corey's point, you know if these credit card processors are making three to 5%, okay, you know 5% feels, you know, heavy handed. And if Apple and Google are saying they're also getting some net benefits from our network, from some essentially free marketing that they get by promotion, by being part of the platform and the security benefits that they're doing. Some of this like security checks and things like that. It's still, I think, everybody has landed on in the industry that 30% is way too heavy, right, 25% on top of what everybody's getting. And so we're just in this long process of all of that getting vetted, getting, you know, seeing the light of day and for the industry, and now governments and regulations putting pressure on Google and Apple to bring that down to a much more reasonable level. I think all of this is essentially the natural process of that, which is taking a long time and is a bit painful.

13:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People on our shows, like Alex Lindsay, often say well, but your Apple, let's. We'll use Apple as an example, but I guess it's so much true of Google too. Provides an environment I mean there would be without the iPhone. There would be no app store. This is, in other words, you're playing on our playing field, so we should be able to charge you whatever you want. This is, in other words, you're playing on our playing field, so we should be able to charge you whatever you want. Brian is 30% too much for that?

14:12 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
For sure. I actually have two questions for Corey, but number one to answer that question kind of. I had always heard that the only reason that this happened was, you know, when the app stores first came out with the iPhone. You know, prior to that you had carriers charging like 90%.

14:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean, if you went to Ingram back in the day and bought a boxed copy of Microsoft Word, they'd keep half of it.

14:35 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
But I mean historically. Is that accurate, corey? You always see the video of the developers cheering at the 30% figure. Did it seem? Seem at the time everybody?

14:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
cheers at an apple event. You're in the reality distortion field, right you're? You're sucked in by it all, and I'm sure it was steve jobs who announced the 30. Of course he's going to get applause, right? Well that, no, that's a legit question. Yeah so.

15:00 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
So it's important to note that the prices here are not the price for just buying the thing, that this is the price for everything you buy once you own the thing. So this is not just you know Fortnite, it's everything you buy inside of Fortnite, right?

15:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that was the big epic issue was they in fact got in trouble with Apple because they decided well, you know, we give away the game. The way we make money is by selling different outfits and moves, and we don't like Apple taking 30% of that. That's rent-seeking, so we're going to. They came up with a kind of a plan to sell tokens and things and Apple said no and threw them out. Google did the same. So what Apple did the interesting thing is Epic had some experience of sideloading, because on Android, you can check a box In your system and they give you a big warning you're gonna go out. In the real world is very dangerous, but you can sideload an app, and so it was dangerous because it almost immediately somebody Impersonated epic and was people were downloading malware in the form of the pretended to be Fortnite, and Epic abandoned this side loading thing because it was too hard for users and it didn't solve the problem. So they went to court.

16:14 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, so you know, when Apple kicked off, they had this 30% price just for the initial sale, and so that's what people cheered. They cheered okay, so the boxed copy of Microsoft Office sells for 30%, but every dollar of revenue we get from that customer after that is ours. Once Apple had its ISVs its independent software vendors thoroughly locked into the platform, they turned around and they said oh and, by the way, 30% of your lifetime revenue from this customer now goes to us, right.

16:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, and by the way, you also don't get any information about the customer at all. Right, we keep that.

16:49 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
You can think of this as like a multi-million percent price hike, depending on the app, on what Apple was charging. And you know, this is real Darth Vader, mba stuff. Right, I'm altering the deal Pray, I don't alter it further. And so I think that an initial cheer might have been completely valid, because no one liked Ingram. And it is true, right, that when you get a competitor in the market or a new distribution channel, you can often realize some real savings. The problem isn't that there was a novel distribution channel. The problem was that that distribution channel then was able to use digital rights management to prevent people from offering rival app stores. Right, so it's like it's not.

17:31
This is the other piece that we really have to recognize, and I would actually be fine with the court saying okay, apple or Google, we're not going to force you to allow rival app stores, but we are going to take away your right to sue people who hack new app stores into your platform, because the government shouldn't be in the business of deciding that your business model is the law and it's a felony to violate it.

17:55
And that's the thing that Apple really wants. That's the cake it wants to have and eat too. Is that it doesn't want the government to intervene in its business, except it wants the government to literally put people in prison for five years for violating section 12 of the DMCA, for making their own bootloader for iOS that lets them put their own app store on an iPhone. And look, if I own an iPhone and you make an app and you want to sell me that app and I want to buy it and I want to put it on my phone, there is no universe in which it is good for copyright to say that you're not allowed to sell the copyrighted work that you made to me, someone who wants to buy it, unless Apple agrees that we're allowed to consummate that transaction and takes 30% of the purchase price.

18:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it completely specious that Apple does this to protect us from malware and from malicious apps?

18:42 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
They're just not a reliable narrator of whether they're protecting us.

18:45
So, here's a good example, right? So Apple added this great button to the iOS, which is the don't let Facebook track me button. 96% of iOS users clicked it. The other 4% were either drunk or Facebook employees, or Facebook employees who were drunk. It cost Facebook $10 billion in the first year, and it's great.

19:05
But at the same time as Apple turned that on, they started secretly surveilling iOS users, gathering the same data the Facebook app gathered, using it to fuel an ad targeting network that competed with Facebook. So they really did want to protect you from Facebook, but not from themselves. Right, they are very good at protecting you from threats that are also threats to their business. They are very good at protecting you from threats that are also threats to their business, but they won't fix all the longstanding CVEs in WebKit, because making WebKit fully functional and W3C HTML5 compliant would let people just serve up web apps and bypass the app store. So the only browser engine available on iOS is one that is full of longstanding showstopper bugs that represent serious security vulnerabilities. They won't fix them and no one else is allowed to fix them without risking a prison sentence.

19:54
And kind of lukewarm support for progressive web apps which would have the same effect, which would allow you to Well, they would have to fix the browser engine to get web apps Right, and fixing the browser engine would make it easier to make web apps Right.

20:08 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Can I squeeze in question number two? Because, even though this was originally about Google, we've ended up talking about Apple, and this is not just for Corey. Anyone can answer this how did Apple win its case against Epic? And granted, one court case is different from another court case, so you can have different results and things like that, but what was the argument that was compelling that Apple made that allowed them to win their case?

20:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, on the surface of it, one of the problems was Apple's case was adjudicated by a judge. Apple's case was adjudicated by a jury and I think juries kind of saw the. We're a little more clearly understanding the problem here. Apple was smart enough to get a judge.

20:51 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Is there any more nuance to it beyond that?

20:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Interestingly, judge Donato, when Google appealed, actually has now said well, you have till 2027 to fix this. They put a stay. He put a stay on his own decision 27 to fix this.

21:06 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
They put a stay. He put a stay on his own decision, right? Google strategy is obviously to do everybody's strategy, which is keep it going in the courts as long as possible. And you know, like Microsoft in the in the 90s and in the 2000s, eventually you could have a different regime in place, that your eventual remedies might not be as stringent as if they were November, but yeah.

21:23 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Outlast, wear them down, you know? Yeah, that's, that's part of it. The other thing is, google destroyed a ton of evidence, right, they just? And they did this in the DOJ case too.

21:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like, and even you know they've been caught saying things like Whoa, don't, don't put this in writing, and I mean they really clearly understood the risk and acted. Can you get in trouble for that, though? Can't you get in trouble for that?

21:49 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And this is the combination of those two things the thing that Brian just brought up and the destruction of evidence, because we are living in a different era. So, like back when Zuck was buying Instagram, he sent this email at like two in the morning, or 1230 in the morning, to a CFO, going like hey, bob, you want to know why we're spending a billion bucks on Instagram when it's 16 people, 30 million users, half of that active, blah, blah, blah. Well, it's because people leave Facebook for Instagram and they don't come back, so we'll recapture them now.

22:19
So, like normally, you can't win a merger scrutiny case because you have to prove that the merger scrutiny, that the merger was intended to reduce competition. But if the CEO emails the CFO at two in the morning and says, by the way, I'm only doing this for the express purpose of reducing competition, it's very bad for you. And despite that, the Obama administration didn't do anything about it, because the Obama administration was very friendly to big mergers, as was every administration, from Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump, but not Biden, and so Biden's the first one who actually takes it seriously. So we are in a different universe now, because we're enforcing laws that have been on the books since, in some cases, 1890. The Sherman Act was passed by John Sherman, brother of Tecumseh Sherman, and I didn't know.

23:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's interesting yeah, marching through georgia. Uh, of course, lena khan is the the face of the biden administration's antitrust uh regulation. Um, it's interesting to watch journals like the wall street journal um attack her in effect saying oh look at all the failed cases editorials about how she does nothing.

23:32 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Right, rupert murdoch does not pay his editorial board to write 100 editorials about someone who does nothing right sure beggars credulity yeah, uh, she's done quite a bit, in fact.

23:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Most recently, uh, she, the ftc, has ruled that it must be as easy to cancel as it is to sign up for. Uh, all sorts of things canceling subscriptions has is about to get much easier. The click to cancel rule, um, that's, you know it's smart, because that's something everybody can identify with. You wrote, you wrote or you picked an article, cory, that now you can get out of your gym membership, and that's exactly what happened to me is, you know, I forgot to cancel a part of my gym membership and they billed me for six months before I noticed, even though I had canceled in writing for the other part.

24:20 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Um, they've been very quietly holding tech accountable in, like you know, small ways that aren't very, um, that aren't very flashy, right like I think a lot of these editorials and stuff in the wall street journal stuff, I mean, most people aren't reading them, even in our industry, right, even among the people we're with yeah, but there is, I would.

24:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would disagree, jason, because there is this kind of general sense that she's a failure, that she keeps bringing these bad cases, that she's lost so and she has lost a few well-known cases, sure, and so there is that general sense and I think some of it encouraged by the Wall Street Journal that her mission has failed. I don't know if that's the case.

25:02 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Go ahead, go ahead, brian. I was just going to say like the interesting thing is, like I do think at least my sense in the industry is like you know, to Corey's point like that they mean business more than they have in recent years, recent administrations, and you know, I think there are acquisitions and things that aren't even happening because they're like we'll never get this across right now.

25:27 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
That was the exact point I was going to make. It depends on what side of the industry, because on the VC side of the industry, the fact that M&A spigot has basically been turned off in entire sectors, aside from the fact that there's no IPOs, you're having.

25:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
VC firms by the way, that has caused a significant drop in venture capital investment over the last.

25:48 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
This is what I'm saying, vc firms are returning their money, the money to the lps, um, and you have essentially, you know, like, that's why you're having in in the ai space, they're, they're skirting the rules a bit by doing these, these aqua hires that are to the tune of a billion and a half dollars. So they're really acquisitions and all but name. But yeah, so, even though, okay, maybe she hasn't, you know, lined up a big tech company against the wall to shoot them, yet, at least from the perspective of the not yet public part of the market, the startup side of the market, the, the, the there is a real freeze on being acquired by a Google or an Amazon or an Apple.

26:30 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Right now, yeah, I mean, look at, look at Wix, right, they just they just noped out of the largest acquisition offer in world history, right, I think it's $21 billion. Wow for a startup. And, like their, their vc's exit is going to be that wix will make a business and it will be good, right, and then they will like either be able to produce an annuity or you know whatever, right, they'll be able to do stuff, uh, on their, on their, or, you know, do an ipo or sorry, not wix. Uh, what are they called? Uh, just squarespace, no, w-i-z, w-i Wiz.

27:07 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Wiz, wiz.

27:07 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Wiz.

27:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wiz, not Wix. Yeah, I was looking up, I missed that. What happened to Wix?

27:13 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
They're an InfoSec startup and then the other implication of Wiz being a standalone company is that, you know, presumably they do something very good, which is why Google offered them just a gigantic amount of money, and that good thing is very business critical and that means that there's going to be lots of businesses that will be able to avail themselves of business critical security services.

27:34 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
There's gradations to this because, like you know, adobe not being able to buy Figma, you'd have to be blind not to see that that's someone taking out the next generation that's coming up underneath, but it's not even that. It's the sense that, if cloud, everyone understands now that the cloud providers are enabling this generation of AI, but you have the weird sort of catch-22 that if you're an AI startup, you need the cloud providers to get the compute that you need. So, in a different environment, you would be having all of the big cloud providers just gobbling up anybody that became a unicorn in the AI space, and that isn't happening. And so you're having these weird again sort of Rube Goldberg schemes to try to well, we need the money to do the compute, but we can't. We can't get acquired, and so we're getting credits from from Amazon and this and and Microsoft and whatever, so that we're getting this money in different ways that it would have. Just they would have cut a check in the past.

28:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So obviously, the wall street journal is hoping that, come January 20th, lena Kahn will no longer be running the FTC, and there's been some evidence that, in fact, whether it's Trump or Harris that Kahn might in fact lose her seat. You've been very aggressive in your in fact, I have quoted you many times, corey in your defense of Lena Kahn, because I, like you, believe that she has made a big difference and really improved things for regular people.

29:09 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, I think she's remarkable. I also think that you know, so don't count her out too quickly. So, first of all, there's plenty of people on the Democrat side who said that it's going to be a big fight if the Harris administration wants to turf her. But also, like JD Vance calls her the only Biden official that he rates as being competent and good at his, at her job. So it's awesome.

29:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not like the Republican of course for completely different reasons than. Democrats like Lena Kahn but okay, yeah, anybody you'll take on big tech, uh right. Apparently both sides of the aisle.

29:43 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Riley Quinn says you could. You could settle all conservative grievances about social media just by, like you know, those land acknowledgements where you acknowledge that you're doing your work on stolen land. Their boards would have to admit that they were doing all their work on stolen likes that were shadow banned from culture warriors.

30:00
And then that would just settle all the issues forever as a reparation. I don't think it's like. I don't think it's as deep or sincere and I think that the state AGs really like antitrust action against the big tech companies just because it's a way to fund your general operations.

30:14
Like Ken Paxton is not anti big business Ken Paxton is just a wildly corrupt attorney general who comes from a state where they would rather, you know, have a dead gopher governing than a human being, if it could save them a quarter on their taxes.

30:29
And so if you're going to keep the lights on and the roads paved, you're going to need to get your money from somewhere.

30:33
And he's like, well, maybe we can soak Google Everyone hates them anyways, but it gets you the same place. And then you have, like everyone else in the world who's pretty furious about big tech and like the EU is doing some pretty, taking some pretty big swings, you know, mandating interoperability, forcing disaggregation of app stores from platforms and so on. And because the tech firms do the same thing everywhere. So like the bad actions that the EU builds an enforcement case on the basis of in europe are the same as the bad actions in south korea and japan. And so the south korean japan cases against apple are basically just like google translate of the apple of the european case. And because they're doing the same thing there, and like there's countries all over the world where apple and google are cheating in the same way that they do in europe, that can just use the same fact patterns, uh, and the same exhibits to bring do you think it's significantly more difficult to go after these big companies in the us because our politics really is money-based and these companies are very?

31:36
no, it's because they're american, it's. It's that's why the europeans don't care. It's because they're like nick clegg, who's like the ghoul who represents Facebook in Europe, keeps running around saying, no, we're a European company and we keep European cyberspace secure from Chinese communism, but no one believes them. Everybody knows they're like you know if like big tech was Nokia, deutsche Telekom and like Telia and Fiat and whatever, arduino or something Orange or something. Orange, something orange, yeah, exactly uh uh, olivetti right and erickson right, there would be nothing in the european union.

32:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's because there's political space to do something about them in fact, often the the attacks from europe on american companies are stim are stimulated by european companies like spotify. They come out of european company complaints against the big american companies.

32:26 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Uh, competing against them, yeah yeah, although you know spotify like wouldn't exist if it didn't have these sweetheart deals and give lots of shares to universal sony and time warner, uh or warner music, who are the 70 of all the recorded music and who structured spotify's business arrangement and took billions in stock from them. So they're kind of a multinational company but they're we've created a hideous funnel for music.

32:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really a very sad story. Yeah, um, when daniel eck makes more money than any artist in any musical artist in the world's history, that tells you something. Right that controlling the distribution is the most important.

33:05 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
But keep in mind here the labels make a lot of money, they just don't share. It's just they all have minimum payouts every month that are mostly unattributable royalties, because if the stream per stream rate is really low, then the amount of money you owe to musicians based on their streams is quite low. But if you get a minimum payment from Spotify every month, the difference between what you owe to artists and everyone else is an unattributable royalty. You can do whatever you want with it.

33:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How would we fix the music industry? This is completely off topic, but it's an interesting, but it's a good question. You know we look, I know we all love music and we all really love the artists who make music and every time I go on the subway in New York I think there's a lot of really talented people who are forced to busk in subway stations or on the streets of London because they can't get a record label to look at them.

33:54 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Well, and even if they did, they would get squeezed really badly, and then they'd get squeezed.

33:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You look at Chapel Roan or Lil Nas X, who rose out of social, but you know they're making a deal with the devil in order to be successful.

34:08 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I was just trying to find the book that I wrote about this. I wrote a book with Rebecca Giblin called Showpoint Capitalism.

34:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What a great book, by the way. I had you and Rebecca on Triangulation and people could go back and look at that show for an excellent synopsis. So we have a bunch of concrete things.

34:20 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
So one is termination of transfer. So under the U S copyright act after 35 years you can terminate your copyright transfers. So you can just take your music back and resell it. So you bargain from a week.

34:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, Taylor, wouldn't have had to do Taylor's versions of all of her records, just terminated those transfers.

34:36 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Um, you know, if she. So we can make termination transfer 15 years instead of 30, we can make an automatic after 20, unless you take an affirmative step. There's lots of things we could do there. We could have a universal international database of rights holders, because rights net right now all the rights are managed in every country with a different database that's full of holes. We could ban collecting societies from using unattributable royalties for anything except royalty attribution.

34:59
So if you get money for music that was played and you don't know who it belongs to, instead of giving it to your idiot nephew to do you know music development, where he just gets to go to nightclubs and like uh, uh, throw his money around you. Actually, the only thing you're allowed to use it for is figuring out which artists the money is owed to, so the next tranche of money goes to artists. There's a whole bunch of stuff we could do, and then we could have blanket licenses. So once music is being streamed on any platform, you could stream it on all the platforms, provided you pay a fixed fee, which is how radio and you know cover songs and live performance and a bunch of other things work.

35:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's the compulsory so-called compulsory licensing?

35:34 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, compulsory blanket license. But you could carve out. You could say it's only once music is streamed. So you wouldn't take those bands that are like on band camp who you know sell an album for 10 bucks that you really like but you're not going to listen to every day, so a blanket license wouldn't do them any good. So so long as that's not licensed for streaming, so long as it's only a download, you just carve it out of the compulsory, in the same way that there's no compulsory for covers until someone records the song first. So once the song is recorded and out there, then anyone can record the song and play and sell it, provided that they pay a fixed fee to the composer. It would be the same kind of thing.

36:09
There's a whole bunch of stuff. None of it is like comprehensive, but each part of it does something. And then finally like sectoral bargaining and breakups for the big music companies. So break up the big three labels who own 70% of all the music, make them sell off their publishing businesses that own 65% of the compositions and allow the musicians to form a single union that bargains with all the labels the way the screenwriters can because that's how the screenwriters won the AI strike is there's one unit that represents all the workers against every entertainment company in the sector.

36:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like I mean, obviously you've got the plan and this is a great book and highly recommended joke point capitalism but I feel like it's it's kind of a doomed. How are we going to? How could you do all of that?

36:51 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Well, you have ideas lying around and then crises come, and then ideas move from the periphery to the center. That was Milton Friedman's theory, and he was right. That's how our lives got destroyed. So you know, if it worked for him. It can work for us.

37:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We just need our Reagan, don't we? That's all.

37:06 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, we need dark Reagan.

37:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Dark Reagan. That's Cory Doctorow. The place to go is thebezelorg or craphoundcom, which is his website, and all the stuff is stored there. Blog is at pluralisticnet and, honestly, I feel like you're required reading for the internet generation because it's so important to understand what's really going on. Thank you, corey, for being here. We appreciate it. Also with us. Brian McCullough, what's your new podcast? Tell us about that.

37:35 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Well, so when I come on here and you always joke that I put the history hat on.

37:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love the history hat. I'm not knocking it.

37:48 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Well, and I was doing history for about a decade before I started doing the Tech Meme Ride Home seven years ago and I had an itch to get back to history, but I didn't want to write another book, as we were talking about at the beginning of the show, so I'm doing a podcast. That's sort of like my happy place.

38:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I like the people you've had on this is great. It's 80s 90s history From the people who lived it.

38:08 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Exactly, it's called Rad History. Just search Rad History wherever you get your podcasts and, like I said, it's just 80s and 90s stuff. So, for instance, if you go right now, the most recent episode with John Gruber is about the history of the game, golden I007. Awesome. Mg Siegler came on to talk about Blockbuster Video. Wow. Christina Warren came on to talk about the Golden Girls.

38:31 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Hey.

38:31 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I'm going to do an episode with the Wall Street Journal's Pentagon correspondent about the making of Top Gun, the movie Top.

38:39
Gun because they had to work with the Pentagon to do that. The next one's going to be on Calvin and Hobbes with Daniel Kibblesmith oh, that'll be great. Who used to write for the Colbert Report or whatever Colbert show is now these days? Anyway, the idea is I get friends of mine to come on. I have a list of topics. Anything 80s and 90s is fair game. Anyone on this panel. If you're interested, you hit me up. I have a running list of of topics and it could be anything from a movie to an album to. I'm gonna do uh, I already recorded it the history of the answering machine with Tony Trucks. Love it. Who's who's an actress? So any anything 80s and 90s. Look it up. It's called rad history and, um, it's just, it's like I said, it's fun, it's. It's just like I said, it's fun, it's my habit, it's a great idea.

39:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Congratulations, brian. You know how this works, though you launch one and then you launch another, and then you launch another, and pretty soon you're in your attic. Well, okay.

39:35 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Anyone want to do rad sports or rad aughts?

39:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a good idea. That's a good idea too. Also with us, jason Heiner.

39:49 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Editor-in-chief of zdnet and you know I was realizing we're talking about everybody else's book. Don't forget, jason wrote a really excellent book called follow the geeks you're the one who still has that.

39:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, I loved this book. Uh, it may be out of print, I don't know, uh, but it's. It's worth reading. There's biographies of some of the best geeks in the world baratunde thururston, lisa Bettany, gina Trapani, tom Merritt O'Malick. This was the proto-influencer generation, right.

40:12 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
So these are folks that sort of anticipated the including yourself, leo chapter 10.

40:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Including me.

40:18 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I'm in here, Chapter nine, sorry, and people that anticipated the influencer. That really paved the. That anticipated the influencer, um, you know that really paved the way for the influencer economy, uh, and influencer marketing and all of that, but did it in such a an amazing way. You know you own um. Veronica Belmont is in there, tom Merritt is in there. You know so many others as well.

40:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The yachts. This is the closest thing I'll ever have to a bio, a biography, so buy this book. Chapter nine is very special to me. Thank you, jason Heiner. Great to have all three of you on the show this week.

40:54
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44:40 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
So I think a breakup is fine and I think, particularly when we're talking about self-preferencing questions, it's really hard to like enforce a rule that just says play fair, even though you're the referee and you're on the team. So you know, you think about like there's a. There's a case coming up now about Google's ad business that's going to have the same foundational issues, which is, like you know, they represent sellers, they represent buyers, they own the marketplace. They also compete with sellers and buyers. And so I always say it's like you go to get a divorce and you and your soon to be ex find out that you have the same lawyer who's also the judge and is trying to match with both of you on Tinder. And then, when the case is over, they say like hey, it turns out that the most equitable arrangement for the disposal of the marital assets is I'm going to take your house.

45:25
And you know this is like just, it's just very hard to break that up. So structurally separating these companies so that they, they, they just don't have the conflict of interest, is fine. But there is one unbelievably gnarly issue with this breakup, which is what you do with the data. So the judge in the search case found that Google's data was a source of durable advantage. I don't know if I believe that. I think Google oversells how much it gets out of its data as a way of like talking to investors Does that mean the web index, the spider index.

45:56
No, the surveillance data. So the customer data. Like all their vertical data, so Android, chrome, youtube plus, like all of the things like every time they embed a font or do analytics and they're getting data. Plus, like data broker stuff they buy and all this other stuff. They've got that data.

46:16
The judge said, okay, that's where some of their advantage comes from, and so one of the remedies that people I normally agree with have been calling for is like why don't we make them share this data with everyone else? And I think this is a terrible idea. Right? It is horrific that Google spies on us the way it does. It would be even worse if we democratized, violating our human rights by making Google share the data with everyone else.

46:41
There's also the question about whether, if we break up Google, do we give each of the baby Googles a copy of that data, and one of the problems with either making them share it or making them delete it is the way that it would affect every other First Amendment case, because the level at which the order to delete expressive true facts, which is the data they have, the level at which that's considered in the courts when we think about First Amendment cases, is something called intermediate scrutiny where you're saying, ok, well, it violates your free speech rights to be forced to delete something that you own, some information, you own, some expressive true facts that you own best remedy the government has.

47:25
Is there any other way to form to fulfill the legitimate purpose of the government without taking this step? Is there a less invasive to your speech step we can take? And if we decide not, and we do this, then every other case where intermediate scrutiny is applied like are you a journalist who sent a FOIA request to a government agency about their contracts with some sleazy contractor and they sent you the contract and they forgot to redact it, and now they want you to delete that data, which is the thing that happens all the time and is subject to intermediate scrutiny. If we weaken intermediate scrutiny, do we make it easier for corporations to keep their dirty secrets out of the public eye?

48:01
So this is like super gnarly question about what we're going to do with this data, and I think that if we tell Google okay, you've got to share the data with everyone in order to remedy this problem that you have, where you've spied on us and created a durable monopolistic advantage, we are going to discredit the idea of anti-monopoly because people are going to say, oh well, anti-monopoly is a synonym for violating our privacy more. Yeah, no kidding, why don't we just make them burn it? Well, because that's a data destruction order and that weakens the standard for intermediate scrutiny. And if that happens, then maybe other first amendment cases that we care about, with plaintiffs that we like more than google, uh, or defendants, rather, that we like more than google, are going to have a much worse outcome. So that would be a monkey's paw.

48:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It often feels to me, jason, that that the this moves so slowly and the market is moving at a much higher speed. Yeah, and Google's search is getting worse and worse and worse. Maybe the market will just solve this. Maybe the courts aren't the best way to fix this.

49:01 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
We'll solve it. You know the interesting thing, ironically with this the best, one of the best way to fix this, We'll solve it. You know the interesting thing, ironically with this the best, one of the best things that's happened for consumers has been the failure of Google Fiber, and I never would have thought I'd said that.

49:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but I would. I wouldn't think so either. I mean, it seems like they've they've forced Verizon and a lot of other companies to lower their prices and to and to upgrade their fiber, upgrade their connectivity.

49:24 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
For sure it was a failure for Google, but maybe a win for consumers. But I do think that it was a win. Google specifically failing was a win. I remember on a podcast a few years ago, right as Google Fiber was starting to take off, and everybody was like, yes, Google Fiber is going to come to my neighborhood. And on one podcast, one very astute interviewer said okay, this all seems good. Tell me what's wrong. There's gotta be something that isn't good. I'm like well, okay, well, think about everything that Google knows about you.

49:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Google gets even more data. Yeah.

49:54 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
And who's the only one, the only entity that knows more about you than the? One who does your email and that your ISP. And the reason the ISPs can't do do it. They just can't get their act together. They don't know what to do with data and so they don't quite understand or know.

50:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And there there are some loose regulations they managed to sell it on to data brokers pretty effectively.

50:14 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I think they've figured out there's some value there but imagine if they had succeeded and google fiber had become like the number one isp in america. Oh my God, like we would be in a. Really, this pickle would be even more difficult.

50:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That makes me wonder. Maybe Google backed off because they were worried about antitrust issues, providing the bandwidth as well as everything on the Internet, on the internet, uh, I mean, actually isn't that? What meta wants to do in the, in the developing nations, is internetorg is to provide the internet that everybody uses. And oh, by the way, uh, meta will be free and instagram will be free, and yeah, poor internet for poor people right.

51:00
Yeah, I loved into his response, which is no, no, we have a lot of experience with colonialism and and we don't, we're not interested.

51:07 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Well, it was even better than that Cause cause. Google did this push, uh. Or Facebook did this push thing where if you had the Facebook app, it was like click here to send a note to the regulator telling them not to kill Facebook, zero and uh. But then they the letter. The standard letter didn't address the questions the regulator had asked in the docket, and so the regulator got like a bunch of non-responsive answers and they said well, none of these are responsive to the questions raised in the docket, so we're just setting them aside, which, like just an amazing own goal, like they are definitely not sending their best.

51:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, maybe we should be glad, right, Jason? Google's failure is our success.

51:44 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Facebook and Google owning the internet pipes is an absolutely terrible idea yeah, terrible.

51:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now that you mentioned it, I think I, I think I agree. Of course, comcast owns the majority of internet pipes in the united states. I'm not sure they're much better. We're.

52:01 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
We're using comcast right now to do the show but they're not smart enough to do anything really dangerous with it yet.

52:08 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Okay, don't give them any ideas. There is a ton of fiber in the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

52:14
Like just a massive amount and then in california, there's uh supplemental funding to do city, county line to county line or city limit to city limit fiber for free, like at public expense, and then to offer zero interest loans and technical assistance to municipalities, unimmigrated townships and whatever to bring that to your curb. This is why AT&T rang my doorbell a couple of months ago and said we'll give you two gigabits, symmetrical, for what you're paying charter for one gigabit, nowhere near symmetrical and it's never really a gigabit. Uh, that's what I'm using now because they're really hoping that I'll just forget that we're about to get public fiber here in burbank and just stick with, you know the at t forever, that's that's the solution everybody I know, including our mutual friend tim poser, thinks is the real solution is get municipalities to do the uh, the infrastructure here in burbank we have a fiber loop I actually used to use it when I was an Imagineer, because it's what feeds Disney here and the deal with charter is that they won't terminate it in any residentially zoned property.

53:13
So about a third of my property tax bill every year is paying for the bond that they took out to put in the fiber. And the fiber runs under my foundation slab. It's under my feet right now, but I like to use it. Oh Wow. So this is this is why we're gonna get changes to our telecoms policy because so an equitable. Why are you, why are you not allowed to use it? Because that my home is not zoned commercial. So the deal with Charter is Charter provides universal service. They'll bring a line into your house If you live in the Burbank City limits, and the quid pro quo is that the city won't terminate its municipal fiber in a residential property, and so I pay for it.

53:49
It's it's like under my foundations lab, but I can't use it, and so I used to be paying charter just a shocking amount of money for really bad fiber, and now I'm a really bad cable, and now I'm paying AT&T the same amount of money for reasonably good fiber. But I will get rid of at t like as fast as I possibly can, the day we start getting city-wide fiber. You know, I'd much rather have that money stay in the city than you know disappear see see, jason, they're not as dumb as they look they're pretty.

54:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're pretty sad, a little less dumb than they look yeah, but especially when it comes to manipulating government, the, the FCC is looking into something this has always been to me a real red herring these broadband data caps. Everybody, all the ISPs, say oh, no, no, remember the ads, the bandwidth hog ads that Comcast used to take out. We're protecting you from bandwidth hogs with broadband data caps. Well, the FCC is trying to figure out really, and why do they still exist? I used to have this argument with Dvorak and I said it's like water Once you pay for the infrastructure, the cost of the broadband is not that expensive.

55:04 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah, operating much less expensive than yeah.

55:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, on tuesday, the fcc approved notice of inquiry to examine whether data caps harm consumers and competition as well. As I love they threw this in why data caps persist quote despite increased broadband needs and the technical ability to offer unlimited data plans. You can share your experience with broadband data caps with the FCC through a form they invited consumers to comment, starting last June. There are already hundreds of comments there. Do you think that the FCC will eliminate or prohibit?

55:46 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
So wait, but to be clear here, this is applying to both wireless and wired Wireline. Okay, this is wireline. Got it? Yeah, okay.

55:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I guess you could say mobile broadband, wireless broadband is a constrained resource, so maybe you need brand with caps. But I think it's pretty well established at this point. Once you put in the infrastructure, you can. You can throw as many bits down.

56:13 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
That's a funny, but I coincidentally that's a funny thing like I. I keep waiting, and I've been waiting for years now, for you know. Now you know 5g obviously was largely a marketing hype sort of thing, but I keep waiting for the telecom companies to offer true competition by saying hey, by the way, forget paying Comcast, like we'll give you unlimited, uncapped internet service. Just put a little thing in your home that connects to our 5G, ultra wideband or whatever network, and no caps and cheaper. Why hasn't the competition come against that? Because that would be a key thing that you could offer is we won't cap it in your home.

57:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, of course, T-Mobile and Verizon both offer these residential 5G mobile hotspots, but they cap them Absolutely.

57:10 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Calix is a good option here. C-a-l-y-x. They're the first ISP that ever challenged a national security letter. These are the sneak and peek warrants that the Patriot Act created. They successfully challenged one of those. So they're a nonprofit. They're a 501c3. And it turns out that a lot of the spectrum that was allocated to the big carriers was allocated on the basis that they would provide it at extremely low cost to nonprofits.

57:36
And so Calix has a VMNO, a VMMO vertical, virtual network mobile operator, vnmo vertical virtual network mobile operator VNMO, like Google Fi or Win or whatever, and you can get a 5G hotspot from them that has unlimited, untraffic-shaped, non-surveilled, completely unblocked 5G, and some of that is actually tax deductible, if I recall correctly as well. Is it a mesh system? No, it's just. They're just using the carrier's network, but the carriers have to provide service to the nonprofit, to nonprofits.

58:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They also loophole there.

58:20 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
They sell de-Googled Android privacy-focused handsets as well with SIMs, so you can take that on the road.

58:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it uses the T-Mobile network. So if you had T-Mobile coverage where you are, and it falls back to Sprint. Well, is there Sprint anymore?

58:37 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, well, there's two different networks. It's one company, but there's two different networks. I think there's a 4G Sprint network you can get WiMAX 4G and 5G Sprint network If you really want to.

58:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That would be a good episode for you, Brian WiMAX. Why?

58:54 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
WiMAX. My son would get confused, it's very confusing. His name is Max. Yes, that's very funny.

59:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I get it. No, I don't mean that max uh 500 for the first year, 400 thereafter that's for a 4g wi-fi hotspot, or 5g for 600. Yeah so that's 50 bucks a month. Is that a good?

59:20 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
deal that doesn't seem like that good a deal. Unlimited 5g it's a great deal. Is it like if you're going to replace your home broadband with it? For sure? If you, yeah, if you're out in the country or whatever, and you're paying up the you know, I fell for uh, I fell for elon, I gotta.

59:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we're using comcast, but it fails every once in a while. I have a starlink thing up on the roof.

59:39 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yeah, not fifty dollars a month by the way, le, if I do a Y max episode, it's going to be why did they kill the HBO brand and go with max? That would be the one that I would do?

59:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that would be even better.

59:53 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
You can do a Y max anthology show where you just ask all the Y max questions, like what happened to Y max, why is max called, why is HBO called max? And then you pick someone called max and you are.

01:00:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you just bring your son on right yeah, ask him a bunch of questions, a bunch of why, max, did you slide?

01:00:08 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
down the stairs.

01:00:09 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah, right, yeah wow man, I have an interview from um. Why a ymax? What? The head of ymax? It was a t-scud, I think it was from at the time and I was telling I was asking him uh, you know what, if people are we're we're sort of saying we're crapping on um being a dumb, you know what, if people were sort of saying we're crapping on being a dumb pipe, you know, and he's like, look, if we create a dumb pipe that's, you know, gives people unlimited bandwidth and great internet all over the world, like we'll do it all day, and I was like that's not the answer. You know Wall Street's going to love, but obviously people will love it and I thought it was really interesting, anyway, and obviously WiMAX.

01:00:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was ambitious, it was, and Sprint made a big mistake going all in on WiMAX instead of 4G and paid the price For sure. I'm telling you, there's history there, there's a story there. So this Calix is really interesting, it's nationwide.

01:01:04 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, the there. So this calyx is really interesting, it's. It's nationwide, yeah, yeah, the only reason. So I use full at full transparency here. I use fi and I use five because I travel internationally yeah, I do too. Right it's that, it's the only way, like you go to germany or whatever, and you bring the same price them and you, just like you, come home thousands of dollars poorer.

01:01:23
So, and in China, fi gives you uncensored internet. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, or at least I was there, like before the pandemic, so you've used it in China.

01:01:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I oh, that's really interesting. How do they get away with that?

01:01:37 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I think it all runs through Google's VPN.

01:01:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so your endpoint isn't in China, so you're on a VPN. Yeah, yeah, so your endpoint isn't in China, so you're on a VPN.

01:01:48 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
And they have a deal with some Chinese carrier because Google's not in China, obviously, that's right, and that's the same in Italy or Spain or whatever. Weirdly, they now block SMTP and POP in Germany. I was in Berlin for two weeks and I basically spent every day emailing tier three customer support and they would be like well, what is your email address? And I'm like you don't need to know my email address. Here's like your ports, right, and they're like oh well, but you're not using a Google email address, so we don't offer support for that and I'm like, it's not a Gmail address, I just want port 995, please.

01:02:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And eventually I just gave up and just I vpn into e. Why would anybody ever want to use anything but gmail? What's wrong with you? Yeah, exactly. All right, we're going to take a break when we come back. Let's talk about kalia, the communications assistant for law enforcement act, which passed in 1994 and I did not realize this provided a back door for wiretapping into encrypted telecommunications. That proved to be a bad idea very recently. We will talk about that in just a bit. Great panel. Cory Doctorow is here. The new book, the Bezel, is awesome, highly recommended. Pluralisticnet is his blog, jason Heiner, zdnet. The redesign went well. Yes, I love it. Everybody's happy, everybody's thrilled.

01:03:12 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah, did it double your numbers? Best redesign we've ever done and that I've ever been involved with. And yeah, the numbers have been huge as a matter of fact for so much that you could buy ZNet. You know ZNet is small as a staff and all of that. But on Prime Day we did this the fall Prime Day was just a couple of weeks ago and we did this thing where we say, look, our whole mission is just to help people cut through the stuff that is not actually deals, where they like mark it up or they pretend that it's deals.

01:03:46
Like, we're just going to try to help people find the things that are actually deals and products that we've actually used that we actually would recommend they buy. And we we thought, you know, novel strategy won't necessarily work, but we, um, you know, we did it and uh, we had this great um third-party data so we knew it was going well. Like, our uh response was great um, but uh, news dash did a thing on the best performing sites for prime day and it's like all the giant ones, and then eating it was actually number one um, which was sort of blew our minds that we, uh, you know, finished number one just by doing um consumer advocacy, essentially so how has?

01:04:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so let me get this straight you did acquire cnet, am I right? Because at one point cnet bought you. I'm very confused, so so, who owns whom?

01:04:44 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
ziff davis um, which is the original zd and zd net, as you know well yes, I used to work for them yes, so yes so, ziff davis, this is kind of like one of those things like at&t. You know how at&t isn't really at&t and yeah right it's. It's somebody that acquired the brand.

01:05:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So zd net is not ziff davis no, zdnet is.

01:05:03 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Zdnet was and has been, up until September, part of CNET for over 20 years.

01:05:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay yeah, CNET bought ZDNet. I remember that. That's right, I was very you can imagine how confused I was when I saw this story. Please explain.

01:05:24 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
When you saw that Ziff davis was buying cnet, you're like hold on, didn't, didn't see, didn't see that by ziff date, wait a minute, what so? So what happened? Was the company that is now called ziff davis was? Was this other company um called j2 global right?

01:05:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
which was best known for its fax software.

01:05:43 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah, and a number of other things. There's a portfolio company owning over 40 companies that has done this amazing comeback over the past decade. What they did was they sold off some of their internet services businesses in 2021 in the fall, and what they kept were mostly their portfolio of internet businesses, and they renamed themselves Ziff Davis and took the stock ticker ZD because it's a public company. So that Ziff Davis, which owns PCMag and a number of other PCMag, mashable, lifehacker, a number of other brands, ookla, who runs speedtestnet that business then bought CNnet and zdnet from red ventures, which was the company that had owned the two brands, so you have gone through a transition as well then for sure.

01:06:38
yeah, so no longer owned by red ventures, now part of Ziff Davis, which, to be fair, this causes people enormous amount of confusion internally all the time, because now they, when they say Did you have to change Because you had a Red Ventures email address right. So I haven't. So, to be honest, I never used that. There were a few people that had it. I never used it Because, look, I've been through six acquisitions.

01:07:04
My hire- date is still February, um 5th 2001. Cause, I've been through six. When I started at tech Republic, which is actually no longer even part of our portfolio any longer, um so, so yeah, long story short. Uh, I've seen a lot of these and somebody asked me at the beginning of this year, you know, are we going to be sold? And I'm like, look, look, I've been through, at that point, five acquisitions, you know, 23 years. That's one every five to six years. How long? Or four to six years, how? Or four to five years, how long have we been owned, you know, since by red ventures is like four years. I'm like you do the math you know, what does?

01:07:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it is a reflection of the softness, though, of the market for online tech publications, or are you bullish? Because I look at iMore going away and non-tech going away, I really start to worry about my friends. Almost all of our hosts work for online tech publications.

01:08:03 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah, well, I think you have to look at a couple of things. You know we talked about it earlier with Facebook and Google. Right, facebook and Google have squeezed all of the value and the profit out of it. They now, you know, 85 cents of every dollar in online advertising. Like, they keep for themselves the rest of us, everyone else, splits the rest 15%. So again, math sort of tells you that, like, there's just not as much money going around.

01:08:32
That's why you see things like Amazon Prime Day, where it's like, okay, if we can align our interest with an affiliate marketing. It has its own challenges, you know as well, but that's where you see sites like ours and others saying, okay, if we can at least align our interests with the users, where is, if we can make a good recommendation, they trust us and they trust our advice and they buy something, then we get a drag on the sale. Essentially, then that takes us out of being a one-legged economy based on internet advertising. So that's one thing. And then premium you see too, right, more sites are offering some behind paywall information.

01:09:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's good things to that. Yeah, look at what Jessica Lesson's done, at the information One would have thought when she started at $400 a year, I mean, is that a viable? And it is viable. They're expanding, they're growing. They've done quite well.

01:09:25 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
So there's still a lot of business model transformation that has to happen, and I think, to just put a you know to loop it all together, I think the thing is is, ultimately, in a world where there are more content farms, there's a big rush of AI-based content coming. There's a big rush of AI-based content coming. Our bet is that nothing creates demand like scarcity, and where there's a scarcity of reliable information human-to a world where you know, this information is being, you know, sucked up by these AI chatbots and then used right to give people answers based on the information we provide, and so that's one of the reasons you see more of these sites like ours either blocking the chatbots, although they're getting around to that, to be honest, they're finding ways to get around.

01:10:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, they're wily yeah.

01:10:26 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah, because we block every one of the AI scrapers and still information shows up. So all of that's to say we're in a period of transformation. Our bet is on quality and doing right by the audience and hoping that we find really good business models to um carry us, I hope so too, because this is important information.

01:10:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know as, uh, as the tech world changes so dramatically because of the influence of AI, it's really more and more important that you find a reliable, trustworthy source of information, uh, so that you are informed. I mean, it's one of the reasons, uh, I want to keep doing twit. We, you know, we've also gone through a depressed ad market. Uh, that's why we've cut back quite a bit, canceled quite a few shows, laid off people sold, got rid of the studios. We're. I'm now up in my attic, although I think it looks better than the studio. I love it.

01:11:25 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I love what you're doing.

01:11:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's actually an improvement. I miss having people in the same space as me, but otherwise I think it's an improvement Nevertheless. That's an example of having to adjust to a new reality. And the other thing we're doing and I think this is really important, I suspect everybody will end up doing this is asking our community to support us. Uh, we started Club twit one two years ago now. Lisa really was kind of a visionary. She said we really need to do this. Uh, she's also the one who said let's keep it price low. So it's only seven bucks a month.

01:12:00
You get ad free versions of all the shows we do. I do do five myself and then there's Micah and a bunch of other shows, untitled Linux Show on Saturdays All of those. You get video as well as audio. When you join the club you get ad-free versions of them. You get access to a special Discord chat area which is really moving and exciting, and things are going on all the time. That's club members only, so that's kind of fun.

01:12:27
Special events we did a special event on Friday a coffee show with Mark Prince of the Coffee Geek and Sarah Dooley, who is a coffee connoisseur and runs a company called Beans Subscription Company, and I thought that was a lot of fun. We're going to do that again. In fact, sarah tells me that we're going to do a tasting next time and we will send out coffee tasting kits to people who want to taste along, so we'll have a couple of different varietals. It's really a fascinating area. Anyway, these are all things we do because the club lets us do it, your money lets us do it. So if you're not a member of the club, lets us do it. Your money lets us do it. So if you're not a member of the club, I would love to invite you to join. I understand, if you know, we do all of our stuff free ad supported still as well but I I really would love it if we could get the support of our audience that tells us. That's a signal to us that you want us to keep doing what we're doing.

01:13:17
Find out more at twittertv club twit. And now we have a new way that you can get a membership for free by referring people. You get a month for everybody who joins. So just get 12 friends together and you're going to get a free year. All of that at twittertv club twit. Thank you very much to all of our club members who are watching live. By the way, another thing we did because of the shutting of the studios and because of the club, we now stream everywhere you could possibly stream. Yeah, this and you know it's really worked. We're on tiktok for the first time this week. Uh, xcom, uh, facebook linkedin, of course, youtube, twitch, discord and kick eight different places we stream simultaneously.

01:14:03 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Join me on tumblr are you streaming on tumblr? I don't stream on tumblr. I don't know if you can, but I'm on tumblr all the time.

01:14:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am too at least I, at least I got, because I joined, because I want to support matt and and what he's doing with tumblr. I really tumblr is a historic website. Lisa said what's this 70 for tumblr? I said well, I, I, I pay to support them. It's just a porn site. So it's not a porn site. What are you talking?

01:14:28 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
about, very humbly, not a porn site. They made them take all the porn off. They took all the porn off.

01:14:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's more of a quirky place where interesting people. Although I noticed, corey, you're still on xcom. Yeah, and I and that's, by the way, given me permission. I don't post on X, but we do stream on X. I've been thinking should I stream on X? But you're still there.

01:14:52 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
If I could still reach the audience I have there from somewhere else, I'd leave. I'm being held hostage by the collective action problem, which is the whole story of inshittification. It's why I haven't joined Blue Sky, which is the whole story of in-shitification. It's why I haven't joined Blue Sky. I've said I'm no longer going to join platforms unless I know I can leave without losing touch with the people on them.

01:15:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We will talk about that. Actually, that's part of our upcoming stories.

01:15:15 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, I mean they federated everything except that part, and if they federate that part I'll join 1,263 people watching us right now, including on Xcom.

01:15:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We get a lot of people watching X, so you can't. You know it's good, I just want look. We've always thought the best thing we could do is be everywhere. Let anybody who wants to see us, see us.

01:15:38 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
There's a name for it, it's Posse post, own site share everywhere there you go.

01:15:46 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I am a big Posse fan fan. I think the key to you touched on it, leo in terms of the future of media, you know, is, like I I still think, being able to put it out so that it's free, as everywhere, as much as possible, like the information does want to be free, um, and yet give the opportunity for that, like 10 to 15 percent of your audience, who are your most loyal, most engaged audience. Give them like a higher level of service and let them opt in to exactly to pay, like I, I don't like the idea of a paywall, yeah, but I.

01:16:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I also think that if you like what we do we it would be nice to have your support. You know, when we first started, I did not want to do ads at all, but there just wasn't enough, uh, and there wasn't the infrastructure for it to be fair in 2005. It would be nice to have your support. You know, when we first started, I did not want to do ads at all, but there just wasn't enough and there wasn't the infrastructure for it to be fair in 2005.

01:16:34 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
But there just wasn't enough money to make it viable. Remember, you tried the tip jar, you tried the tip jar early on.

01:16:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I still have my seven Bitcoin. I can't.

01:16:41 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yeah, but also the key to it also is you know the way people consume information. Now is the TikTok and Instagramification.

01:16:50
It's 30 seconds. So imagine, I know to use the term sales funnel is shitty, but put all of your content out there in bite-sized pieces and then like a funnel going up, then okay, then our long form pieces that are ad supported then are you know? Then you get to the very top of the funnel, which is, you know, it's the old thousand fans or whatever. But for any creator like, that's why everybody that has 3 million followers on TikTok or X or whatever has either. Why can't I think of the newsletter company at the minute, a sub stack?

01:17:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oops, I'm sorry, Let me turn Jimmy Kimmel off. I just went to TikTok. My mistake, Right?

01:17:36 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
it's either a sub stack or a Patreon, because essentially you have to start thinking of social media as it's sort of like it's a distribution that you kind of get paid for, just not paid, as well as when your fans pay you directly we, uh, we are on tiktok, as you can see live right now, but we also have been starting to put stuff up on tiktok and actually, uh, we got for one of the things we did.

01:18:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We just got a hundred thousand views, which means we, we hit the algorithm right. We did said something that triggered the algorithm. We got on the for you page. Um, you know, my son is a tiktok star two and a half million tiktok followers. He was smart enough to go to instagram and get a million and a half there. Um, so I've been watching him and really he said that you just got to figure out what the algorithm will promote and do that, which I hate because that is not genuine, that's not organic.

01:18:31 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
You can't. You also can't. I mean, I guess there are smarter people than us that do this all the time, but, like you know, I had. I had something on Instagram that that did 500,000 views a couple of weeks ago, but, like, compared to things that I'm like okay, well, this will be something that you can't, yeah, you don't know.

01:18:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you know you don't?

01:18:49 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
it's impossible to and also, it also happened three weeks after I posted it, so you never know what triggers that stuff.

01:18:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So well, I know, for once I'm. Well, we know what happened, which is it got on the for you page, but.

01:18:59 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
But that gets to my that gets to my point is just flood the channels, right, because if you don't know you can't craft it. But like you, leo, and like me who does a daily show, like, if you have all of this content, if it's just sitting there then like chum in the water, if you don't know what's going to be picked up, Right, yeah, we had 224,000 views on this thing.

01:19:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We talked about uh, uh some. What was it? Educate it's on windows weekly. We talked about extended education or some sort of we. I don't know why it got picked up anyway.

01:19:33 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
So I I think there's a really important and subtle distinction to draw between.

01:19:38
I make things that I think the algorithm is going to like and I have things that I want people to know about and I try to figure out how to get them in front of people, because that is that's genuine I, I put a lot of thought into that, uh, and if the thing that, if the hard stop or the the guardrail around the way that you uh revise or present the work that you do, is, is this clearly communicating, the thing that matters to me, as opposed to have I found something that I think algorithm will be pleasing to algorithms, then I think you can do well.

01:20:15
And you know, I think this was the promise of blogging at the beginning was that you went from a publishing world where you would try and find a demographic that advertisers wanted to reach and then you would try and hire people who could produce material that'd be interesting to that demographic. And with blogging, it was. You produced material that was interesting to you and other people who are interested in the same stuff as you showed up on your blog, and I think this is why the early days of blogging were so exciting. Right, because there was that genuineness.

01:20:45 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yeah, the bite-sized stuff cannot be underestimated, though I'm going to mention rad history, but, like we're launching, we launched consecutively with a YouTube channel as well right, but each episode.

01:20:59
Because my friends say to me all the time I watch a car YouTube channel stuff all the time and I watch soccer YouTube channel stuff all the time and I watch soccer YouTube channel stuff all the time, but I don't watch the full shows, I watch the three minute clip or the five minute clip that they put up. And so for each episode that I'm doing for Rad History, I am making and AI lets you do this really easily now 10 different clips that I will also put on YouTube and also put on TikTok. Because, again, what Corey said was what is the thing that I want people? What do I love? What's my passion? Great, I throw it out in the water and sometimes, maybe with YouTube especially, you can get a little bit of money for it. But that is your ability to reach the audience and market yourself with a little bit of change thrown in on the side. So it's the bite-size ability I think is going to where the audience is at.

01:21:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is always a debate it's been a debate as long as I've been in commercial broadcasting which is to chase the audience, which I think is a little like a dog chasing its tail You're never going to really catch them or do you try to create content with integrity that reflects your own personal passions? And I've always kind of defaulted to the latter and my attitude's always been well, he either makes it or not. Uh, and if it doesn't, well, I, I you know I see the local mcdonald's is hiring and I I do have some experience down there so I can get on down there, because obviously you have to make a living too, but I I really hate to chase an audience people know that because I'm so bad at marketing.

01:22:31 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I hate to chase an audience but but also it's like well, I won't make a mobile site right if the form of how people are consuming, the kind of, you can still do the same content. That's your passion, that's your that has integrity. But if you're like I'm never gonna make my website, uh, be easily consumed on mobile, then you just ignored where the audience went oh, yeah, yeah, but at the same time I do three hour podcasts.

01:22:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, I'm not exactly a pandering to the audience, let's put it that way. I do have to that way. I do have to do a commercial. I do have to do a commercial. I meant to do a commercial about half an hour ago and I'm trying to get to it. Let me do it now. We'll get back to the news with a great panel. This is kind of the litmus test for a great panel. If I can't stop the conversation. Corey Doctorow, brian McCullough, jason Heiner great panel and the conversation will continue in just a bit.

01:23:29
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01:26:30
Uh, this is a story from our good friends mike masnick at tech dirt. He says ron wyden has now sent a letter to the fcc and the doj saying the kalia hack proves why government mandated backdoors are a terrible idea. So let me give you the background and cory you. You suggested this story, so I'm gonna let you comment on it. The kalia act is a 1994 law, the communications assistance for law enforcement act. Louis free, who was this the fbi director at the time, said no, no problem with security on this Mandated wiretap back doors. Louis Free reassured us no, no, no, no, these are going to be safe. We're going to protect them. So last week you might have heard a Chinese hacking group, salt Typhoon, had had access for months, or maybe even longer, to the mandated wiretapping system inside the phone system and apparently are still in there.

01:27:32
The most recent one is can't get rid of them so ron wyden is saying uh, these telecommunications companies are responsible for lax cyber security and their failure to secure their own systems, but government shares the blame because we forced them to put these surveillance systems in with kalia in 1994, 30 years ago. Yeah, this is. This is why when, when, when the current director of the fbi, when governments around the world uh, the UK say we need backdoors and encryption. This is why it's a bad idea.

01:28:09 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, and because the US is such a big fish, calea is actually standard in most carrier grade switches that are used anywhere in the world. They just build it in because yeah, it's like California emission standards, right, you're not going to build a separate car for california and everywhere else and you're not going to build a switch for america and everywhere else. So in greece they were hacked in the early 2000s uh, related to their olympic bid, like the most penny ante crap you can imagine. Uh. And they hacked the prime minister, right, they hacked all of his ministers. They hacked uh highest levels of of uh government, but also their largest corporations and so on, and that was in the snowden leagues and by the way.

01:28:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a very good way to pursue it, because members of congress, if they are threatened, if their privacy is threatened, we'll do something about it they don't care about us salt typhoon was in networks all over the world.

01:29:03 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
They weren weren't just in US networks, they were exploiting CALEA backdoors everywhere and gathering intel.

01:29:11
So this is like a major geopolitical issue.

01:29:14
And you know, at EFF we gave a prize to a paper called Keys Under Doormats about the problems with backdoors and about the fact that, you know, necessarily a backdoor that runs on every single um carrier grade switch is one that lots of people know how to access, right like the number of of of insider threats on a uh, on this kind of infrastructural weakening is um can't be overstated. And you know, when we talk about backdoor and crypto and not just switches, we're really talking about the whole game, because we're talking about the same encryption that's used to. You know, uh, guard against supply chain attacks when they update the firmware in your car's anti-lock brakes and also the firmware in your implanted defibrillator. It's how you talk to your brokerage, it's how your you know a company does its payroll and and banning working encryption and requiring that all working encryption be selectively broken.

01:30:15
It's not going to solve any problems that we can't solve through other means and what it is going to do is introduce a systemic vulnerability that's just going to fester in the walls, because the other thing here is Salt Typhoon is the one we know about, right, but you know there is a backdoor. We don't know who else has gone through that backdoor. It would be pretty weird if the only people who've ever figured out how to break that backdoor was the Chinese in 2024 and someone who is very interested in the Greek Olympic bid in the early 2000s, and Corey correct me if I'm wrong, just the two.

01:30:46 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Just those two. You see the headline and you think, oh so they got into Comcast or they got into AT&T. But I wasn't aware of this. There's this whole third-party sort of wiretapping thing, because the ISPs don't want to do this stuff themselves.

01:31:01 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
That's right.

01:31:02 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
So there's a much larger attack surface here because there's these third parties that the isps have contracted out to to do this stuff and a juicier target, right?

01:31:13 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
someone worth spending a lot more money to uh to, to break into and put a lot more energy into breaking into them and do more research for spearfishing or whatever it takes, because once you're in, you get a lot, right, it's, um, it's like breaking into Equifax, right? Um, it just turns out these giant troves of data are, uh, are very valuable and sources of data that you can't get another in any other way.

01:31:37 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
So is the if. If we're assuming that, um, every ISP has, has, has been hacked by some foreign adversary or whatever, what are they essentially? We don't know, it could be everything, but are they going after individual Americans or is it a broader thing where they're looking at military and car-?

01:31:59 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
It's very hard to say. My guess is that there's a lot of signals intelligence, which is, by definition, a big bulk project. So you're slurping up because most of the traffic, thankfully, is encrypted these days Post nearly all of it now, so there's not much that they're getting in terms of the payloads, but they are getting all the signals intelligence. So they're seeing all the headers, they know who's moving around, they can watch the traffic and they can make a lot of inferences.

01:32:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And we know metadata is hugely valuable.

01:32:39 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, and you combine that with other kinds of attacks, like I was just thinking the other day. If you said I want to target ads to people under 40 who graduated from a big 10 or Ivy in politics or law, within a mile of Congress you would just get the entire congressional staffer group and if you could slip a piece of malicious advertising into that, you could malvertise to every congressional staffer and you'd get a few of them at the very minimum.

01:33:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, just by the way, look at what Elon Musk is doing with targeting advertising. I don't even know how that's legal.

01:33:18 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Although he's kind of. There was just a story today that, like at least 25% of the check-ins they had from people who said they did voter outreach for Elon Musk and that Musk billed the Trump campaign. There was a lot of fraud. It's just fraudulent, yeah, or that. I don't know if he billed the Trump campaign for it. I think it's a PAC, so it's, but he billed-.

01:33:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's his America PAC, but he spent $75 million on that.

01:33:40 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah. But if it's just leaving one hand and going in the other right like if he's got, if he's paying door knockers who aren't doing it, but he's just making up the door knocking activity, then it might just be a way of laundering money. You know, around and around he, he I, I take all the numbers about that musk touts, it's all nuts, it's all made up salt.

01:34:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, um, yeah, just uh what he's? He's offering a million dollar prize if you sign a petition a pro-trump petition, yeah, which apparently means he doesn't understand how petitions work, because that completely invalidates the the petition. Yeah, like if you have a million dollar prize for people to sign it, then everybody's just going to sign it. They don't care.

01:34:27 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Well, I like what the folks at Cards Against Humanity have done, where he's also offering an affiliate fee of like forty six dollars if you send someone to his website.

01:34:38
So they're they're paying people to make a voting plan who are progressive-leaning people in swing states to make a voting plan, which is a thing you can just buy, and in their literature and their notes on this in the FAQ it says, like we know that's horrible and gross, isn't that awful that we should really fix this. But they will pay you to make a plan and then they ask you if you want to donate to this. You can donate to them and as a premium, they'll send you a set of 2024 election cards against humanity cards. But you can also do this thing where, if you live in one of these swing states, you can also sign up for Elon Musk's pack with their code and he'll send them another $46 in affiliate fees that they will use to target more left-leaning voters and swing states to actually make voting plans. And they are doing real stuff, unlike you know, the kind of weird fraud, grifty stuff that that musk is doing he did win a victory in the eu.

01:35:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The, the eu, has ruled that x is not important. This actually probably for elon, knowing his uh, sensitive ego is not a win. They decided that x is not important enough to have to worry about fairness in the eu but they did say that they can pierce the limited liability veil and seek to attach.

01:35:55 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
They're fining him for failure to comply, where that fine is like 5% of global turnover or 10% of global turnover.

01:36:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, and may include SpaceX and Tesla revenue Like they did in Brazil.

01:36:06 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, the way that American limited liability works. It's not like universal. No one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets and said you know, this is the one true way to do limited liability. There's a lot of different systems around the world, as Elon Musk is discovering to his enormous dismay. It's again. You love to see it.

01:36:26 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
To be clear, what we're saying is they might fine SpaceX and Tesla and whomever 5% of revenues or whatever. Whatever they think that they need to get out of Twitter for or sorry, x for for fines, they would go to the-.

01:36:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's kind of it's an interesting and you're right. It's just because what we consider a fair is not necessarily widely adopted. But it does feel like you're punishing, like because Elon Musk owns all these companies. If you want to punish Elon, you have to fine all these companies.

01:36:57 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
So it's funny, matt Levine had a column or a newsletter this week about that where in a sense he was saying, yes, everyone says oh, these are five different companies with different shareholders. No, but the boards overlap. And then any time that one company needs workers, elon shuffles workers from here.

01:37:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, pulls them over workers. Elon shuffles workers from here.

01:37:18 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
And so he was making the argument that you could, it's you could pierce the veil legally even here, if you say things like that. Well, these three board members are also on these three companies, and this Tesla worker was working at SpaceX yesterday and boring company today, and so are they really independent today, and so are they really permeable membrane, isn't it?

01:37:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, elon, uh, I'm sorry, x, although tech crunch calls it elon musk's x, and I guess I just call it twitter. It's called twitter it's twitter for crying out twitter too, yeah, I do it all the time on the show. Yeah, changing its privacy actually, just so you guys know, I don't like it being called twitter, because we predate twitter with twit right so I'm happy to call it x and I would encourage you to do the same all right, the porn industry.

01:38:09 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Would like a word, though, about that use of x.

01:38:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
X is the worst it's like if you want to pick something, you cannot find something on the internet with name. It's perfect.

01:38:20 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
The man bought a domain name in 1998 and he is not going to let it go.

01:38:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's my name.

01:38:26 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
And I'm going to name all my kids that At Burning man people like have an idea for a pun for a car or a camp and then they spend the next like 10 years doing it and it's funny and charming, but when it's like the whole internet, not so much. Like I have a campmate who had this idea that like you could make a bus with a kind of Zeppelin made of LEDs on top and you could drive it around the ply all night playing heavy rock and you could call it the LED Zeppelin. And that's all he's done for the last five years is make the LED Zeppelin and it's an amazing art car and that's great. Right, he had a pun, he made it his whole life's work. It's super great. But like he didn't do it to a thing 300 million people were using.

01:39:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If Elon went to, does Elon doesn't go to Burning man, right? Yeah, I think he's gone a few times. It seems like it would be a a natural place for him.

01:39:11 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I I'm sure he's gone. I mean, it's 80 000. Well, it was a lot smaller last year, but at its peak it's 80 000 people. So there's as many different Burning Mans know. There's like dozens of different ways to be a Burning man and the way where you go to a turnkey camp and yoga bunnies give you massages and you don't have to do anything and, um, that's often in the corner there, that's not someone's doing that in a corral made of luxury tour buses and RVs with security guards, and those people can, frankly, just you know, die.

01:39:40
Buses and RVs with security guards, and those people can, frankly, just you know, die. Right, uh, but but you know that's not what we do. When we go, we have a, we have a good time, we drive around in a bus, made it with a giant Zeppelin made out of LEDs on top of it, playing heavy rock anyway.

01:39:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Elon Musk's X is changing his privacy policy to allow third parties to train AI in your posts. You have to go and turn it off if you don't like it. This follows a trend everywhere. Everybody's doing it right and it's a good way to make money. You may just want to know about it. I mean honestly, I can't get all upset about it, because this has been the point of Twitter all along is to monetize your contributions, Right.

01:40:20
That's not why people are leaving right now, though well, the other reason they're leaving is because he's turned off blocking or changed the rules for blocking is that live rules is that live now?

01:40:30 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
do we know that?

01:40:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know.

01:40:32 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
He said he was gonna do it yeah, I I I've gotten the warning a couple times and grant I, I just don't know that it's actually gone into place yet. I saw that it was happening, but yeah, um, it's right uh x will soon let.

01:40:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is from forbes, which is not always my first choice, but anyway. X will soon let users see tweets from people who block them. So, in other words, if I didn't want brian mccullough to see my x's, I don't want to see your exes, my jeets, my anything that's x from you, leo.

01:41:04
I don't want to see. If I didn't want you to see my zeets, I would block you, but that used to work. But now, according to x, they're. They're going to change that. They haven't done it yet. They announced wednesday that, for those with public accounts, blocking a user will stop that person from engaging with your posts, but will not stop them from viewing your posts, which presumably means even if you're not logged in or no.

01:41:28 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
There's very little you can do these days on Twitter when you're not logged in. You can't see anything if you're not logged in.

01:41:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah that's right. People are upset about it and in fact it has been said that people are flocking to blue sky as a result. Blue sky said half a million new users in one day when x made that announcement yeah, that seems about right.

01:41:50 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I mean, that's the the. You know the. The thing is that the equilibrium, like the thing that they're looking for is to have just enough value in it that people feel like they can't leave. But any surplus value that's there either for like business customers or end users that hasn't gone to shareholders is like value that that they need to figure out how to claw away. Right, that's the point.

01:42:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you don't, really even know they were trying to reach and shitification equilibrium.

01:42:15 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I thought they were just giving up and said, let's, let's squeeze every penny out of this well, but I think that if you're going to squeeze every penny out of it, then you have to rely on people not leaving right, because then you can't squeeze pennies out of it, then it's done.

01:42:27
It's killing the goose that laid the golden egg, so they're trying to keep the goose alive while extracting maximum eggs so it's a very brittle equilibrium because, like the difference between I hate this place and I can't, and and but I wish I could leave and I hate this place and I'm never coming back it's just like it's literally if you've, if you've done it right, you've got people right on that threshold and then something bad happens and everyone bolts for the exits.

01:42:51
And the thing about network effects driven lock-in right where you're there because you like the other people who are there and they're there because they like you is that once some of you start to leave, you can get the opposite of a network effect snowball, which is like the network effect unwinding where it's like well, I was here because I liked Leo, leo's gone, I'm leaving.

01:43:10
You know we had a conversation, leo, a million years ago, when Facebook announced that they were going to ignore the poll results when they polled users and asked whether they should claw back or whether they should roll back the privacy policy change they'd made, where they were going to start spying on people after promising they wouldn't. And then they did a poll and the user said no, don't do that. And they said well, we think you guys are probably confused about what we want to do, so we're going to go ahead and do it anyway. And I resigned my Facebook account that day Like you need to come on Twitter and talk to us about it, and I hadn't logged into Facebook in a long time, so it was a really easy decision. But there were like 4,000 friend requests in my friend zone when I resigned that account and I looked at that and I was like there's 4,000 people who are on Facebook, in part because they think I'm here.

01:43:59
And so I should not be here and I can leave at a very low cost. I can't leave Facebook at a low cost now, or Twitter at a low cost.

01:44:07
I would lose a really important channel for getting people out for my tours, for selling my books, basically, like I wouldn't be able to put my kid through college. And so you know I would love to be off Twitter and I'm not going to join blue sky until they federate, because you know, twitter was started by friends of mine and I trusted them a lot and I was one of their very first users. And you know I was a user when you could get it only by SMS and uh, you know, some of them went nuts and some of them sold out and now it's a terrible place and I'm just like not going to be in any place that I can't leave ever again because I invite people to abuse you.

01:44:45 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I know that people have talked about this endlessly, but what do you think of the death of a thousand cuts in terms of, like the death of a thousand sub niches, for example?

01:44:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
like Twitter or or.

01:44:59 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I'm going to use this specific example of, like I said, I am a huge English soccer fan and after the riots what was it? Two or three months ago in the summer and Elon made comments, all of my English soccer Twitter folks not all of them, but a huge percentage of them moved, move to threads and we're like we're done with this. Now I've seen that happen. As leo's saying, with specific niches, there's different thresholds for different things.

01:45:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, there has to be a tipping point at some point where I'm not saying that twitter is ever gonna x, is ever gonna die, necessarily there is the argument, though, that if all the good people move out of the neighborhood, then there's no chance of saving the neighborhood, but as long as cory doctor rose on x, maybe there's a chance of saving it well, that's why everything that I post to twitter it's posse right post on site share everywhere.

01:45:53 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Everything I post to twitter is available somewhere else. You can get it all as like an rss feed by email on the web, on mastodon, on tumblr, on on medium, you know, on discourse, there's like a million different ways to get it and and the ones that I control are ad free, tracker free, analytics free. I don't know how many people subscribe to my mailing list. I get no numbers from my website nothing, right?

01:46:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's interesting, people use the nazi bar analogy, but really this isn't a Nazi bar, because it's more porous than that, because of Posse, because of what you're doing.

01:46:27 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Well, I'm just. You know, if I had my way, we'd have on Twitter what we had on Facebook in the early days. So Facebook had a service where you could give it your login and password and it would log into MySpace as you and it would scrape all the messages waiting for you and put them in your Facebook timeline and you could reply to them and it would get back out to MySpace.

01:46:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think they would be sued into a glowing rubble.

01:46:55 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
But what was sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. You know what was sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander.

01:47:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, and you know, that kind of adversarial interoperability is historically how people escape with from what. Incidentally, that's the way a government can intervene. Yeah, In all of these things it's just requiring interoperability.

01:47:13 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Well, we were talking before about, like the rush timeline for opening up the app, the Google App Store.

01:47:19
I kind of agree that November feels aggressive, because I do care about user safety and there are legitimate user safety issues associated with opening up the App Store.

01:47:27
I just don't think they're insurmountable.

01:47:29
I think that maybe they, probably they do need some more time In the EU.

01:47:33
They're they're mandating interoperability for a whole variety of services, but instead of starting with social media, they're starting with the end-to-end encrypted messaging, which, again, I just think it's like a huge misstep because, first of all, they want to do it very quickly and if you introduce mistakes into end-to-end encrypted messaging that is federated across all the major platforms, you're introducing a vulnerability into all the platforms. So if you make a mistake in a federation layer between Google messages, apple messages, whatsapp and whatever, you make an error that exposes all those users to risk and I think that you know they could really harm people and not just harm people but harm the project of Interop. I really wish they were starting with social media, which is much lower stakes and, I think, much simpler. And also there isn't a huge constituency of law enforcement in Europe who want to break social media and there is a giant European law enforcement constituency who've always hated social media and attend encryption and would love it if there was a vulnerability introduced through this process and they're going to have their fingers in the pie.

01:48:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, I was encouraged by Mike Masnick joining the board at Blue Sky. Yep, blue Sky does have a federatable protocol.

01:48:46 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
But the only part that federates right now is some of the content moderation Right, which is good. That's really important.

01:48:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They have been moving slowly towards federation. I'm going to give them credit for you know they say they want to federate. Threads now does in fact support ActivityP pub and does federate with mastodon. Does that make thread threads preferable to you?

01:49:08 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
yeah, although even more preferable is just staying on mastodon, so that the people who are on threads can follow me.

01:49:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, yeah, even better yeah, yeah, I mean I, I actually yeah, yeah, I mean I I actually hope blue sky uh makes it um. But for the, for the nonce, we are streaming and there are 447 people watching us on X right now and, uh, I'm very happy about that, although there's like, as you say, every number that Elon comes up with is suspect. I think that that number always goes up and never goes down, which tells me it's a cumulative number uh, they're not counting the drop-offs they're not.

01:49:44
They're just counting the people who have tuned in at any given time. Do we want x to go away, or do we want x to get better, or do we care?

01:49:54 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
it at some point. Elon musk is gonna lose interest. I think you know agreed agreed, he has a uh a history of.

01:50:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It might be november, it might be november 6th. He'll lose interest it could be.

01:50:05 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
It very well could be. Um, at some point he's gonna lose interest, um, he's gonna not want to waste his time on this and he's gonna, you know, sell it off, uh, to the lowest, but he does right now have a bully pulpit there, does he not sure?

01:50:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and I have some concerns. My nightmare scenario is, uh, a disputed election on november 5th, that then elon uses this bully pulpit, um, and there'll be many others who will uh, including rupert, murdoch and fox to destabilize our democracy. Yep, that is a serious risk. That's, that's a real. I'm very concerned about it. More than destabilize our democracy, actually fuel violence, yep, and uh, and I worry about that. I think that that's, that's a, but I don't know what we can do about it, but it just really scares me, because I don't think Elon is in his right mind at this point.

01:51:07 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Whether or not, it was a good financial investment you have to give Elon credit for understanding that this platform, to this day, even if there's been a diaspora that's gone out maybe it's not the, it doesn't punch with the weight that it did in 2016 or whatever it still has the capacity to set the conversation. And so, if it was in his interest to whether politically he believes in Donald Trump or whatever if he wants to have more influence over who is in the next government, or to have the bully pulpit, or to set the conversation, you have to give him credit for seeing what Wall Street didn't see, because it was a wounded duck that people thought was a, a a failing company, and that that people also continued to, um, consider to be sort of like the, the children's table at media, which, even after him sort of hobbling it, it still isn't.

01:52:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's still incredibly powerful I think he saw the power. It was very obvious the power was there and I think he saw the power and I don't think it was. The guy is, on paper, worth almost a trillion dollars, losing $44 billion, especially since he was able to finagle banks into lending him half of that. Yeah, it's not a huge cost for gaining what he did gain, which is an incredible number of people who will laugh at his dad jokes.

01:52:37 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I think that's true of people who will laugh at his dad jokes. I think that's true, and I think, although obviously a forced liquidation of his twitter holdings would, of his tesla holdings, to make a margin call would be really bad for and cascade through a lot of his other. How would that? What's this? How would that happen? So if he has to, if if, like, they want their interest payment and he can't make it because twitter didn't have it and he staked his, his Tesla stock as collateral though for liquidation, and forcing a mass liquidation of Tesla stock would tank Tesla share price, and so that would be really bad for him. It'd be really bad for his future at Tesla. It might empower his board to finally do what they keep trying to do and kick him out and so on.

01:53:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But isn't the board. His a tame board. It's not a tame board.

01:53:22 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Well, I mean, the board can be replaced, right, because the Shareholders can replace Many shareholders. Yeah, I want to go back to the thing you said before about do we want X to fail? So you know, if you've seen the documentary "'Fiddler on the R? Uh, if I were a rich man yeah so you know the tragedy of that movie.

01:53:42
it's not that they like um, that anatevka is a good place to live, right, like the basic plot of of fiddler on the roof is every 15 minutes, the cossacks ride through and kick the shit out of everyone, right. So so if this is not a good place to live, but they're there because they love each other, and the reason the ending is tragic when they're all like, okay, we're leaving Anatevka because the czar has kicked the Jews out, and you know, I'm going to Chicago and you're going to New York and he's going to Krakow, and we're just never going to see each other again. Like nominally, you'd think leaving a place where you get the beaten out of you every 15 minutes would be a happy ending. But the would be a happy ending, but the fact is that they're going to lose each other, and so I don't care if Twitter succeeds or survives, but how many communities were lost forever when LiveJournal liquidated or became what it became today? The Russian held.

01:54:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you're saying Twitter is Anatevka?

01:54:35 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, Twitter is Anatevka. That's really an interesting take.

01:54:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It really is, and the czar is elon yeah, elon is the czar.

01:54:44 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
You need to write that article, cory that's it.

01:54:47 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I think that's the best take I've heard yet.

01:54:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and cat turd is the cossack uh and and drip is one of the people we love. We lost, yeah, drill, I mean not drill, drill, uh, wow, I, you know what you just justified sticking around well.

01:55:08 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
except, you know, it's it like it would be better if we could just leave, right, so like it doesn't have to be anatevka, right. Like my grandmother was a soviet refugee. When she left, she lost touch with her family for 15 years. My dad has this memory of being in the kitchen and the phone rings and my grandmother starts crying and saying Mama, mama. She didn't know if her mother was alive or dead back in Leningrad.

01:55:31
And you know, like I grew up in Toronto. I then moved to San Francisco where I met you, and then I moved to London and then I moved to LA and then I moved to London and then I moved to LA and then I moved to London and I moved to LA and I kept all my stuff and I'm in touch with my family and it's not a big deal. And like I go home to Toronto for I was just there for my brother's wedding Like it's fine, like I didn't have an Anatevka ending, so we can have. Like we can turn this, this fortress where he's holding us hostage, into like a place where we can just leave when we want to go. And not only will that force him to treat us better, if he's being rational, but if he's not being rational which is a thing that I think is very likely then we can just leave.

01:56:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But that's your point that you always want to be able to take the people you love, who love you, with you. You don't want to have to leave them, yeah, and you don't have to make the people you love who love you with you.

01:56:19 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
You don't want to have to leave them, yeah, and you don't have to make the hard choice, right? Is it the people I love, the business I've built, my ability to send my kid to college, or is it? Um, you know the my sanity and leaving the nazi bar? Uh, and you know that's the biggest problem with the nazi bar. Analogy is like you can leave a nazi bar and it doesn't cost you anything. You and all your friends can just go. You can, you know, post something to the group chat saying oh, it's a Nazi bar. Now you can catch us at the non-Nazi bar across town. But there's no way to coordinate that, although technically there's no reason there shouldn't be, because this is something computers would be incredibly good at.

01:56:53 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
And, as you said, you make your living on X, and so the analogy to the Nazi bar is I'm the one that has big buck hunter, I put big buck hunter in your bar, and so it became a Nazi bar, but I still need to put my kids through college by putting I'm a vendor to your bar.

01:57:12 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Right, I don't know what big buck hunter is. Is that a coin operated game?

01:57:17 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
It's a video game where you yeah a light gun, where you shoot, uh, deer oh, that one right okay, hey, listen. I was a bartender in the early 2000s. All right that was a forced analogy. That maybe doesn't work. I like it I like it.

01:57:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh or or uh could be the axe throwing concession. You get the idea, although I think twitter is more likely to have the axe throwing concession.

01:57:38 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
How about the person?

01:57:39 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
how about the person that comes in on wednesday and does karaoke and that's usually those people were uh contracted out. Yeah, there you go right, big buckhuntercom.

01:57:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
ladies and gentlemen, the big buck hunter world championships 18 are coming up it was a huge game in the early 2000s. That's all I can tell you uh, you can go to joe's on weed street in chicago, oh no, it was a magical time uh, you're watching this week in tech with a great panel, cory doctorow.

01:58:13
Uh, brian mccullough, host of the new rad rad history history yes, from the 80s and the 90s, and ZDNet's editor-in-chief, the guy at the top, mr Jason Heiner, our show today, brought to you by Thinks Canary. Oh, I love these guys. I've got one over here. It's a honeypot, looks just. It looks like a USB, you know external drive. There's a little black box got a power connection and ether connection, but it's not. It's something a bad guy will look at and go, hmm, tasty A honeypot. It can be deployed easily and if someone is inside your network, you will know. And that is so important, that is so valuable. On average, companies don't know that somebody has intruded into their network for 91 days. That's three months a bad guy can use to exfiltrate all your private information, to look around where all your backups are, so that when they trigger ransomware you'll never be able to get back online. Three months because you never figured out they were in there. Now picture yourself with a few things canaries sprinkled around these little black boxes. They can make files, lure files that look just like pdfs or docs or spreadsheets or whatever, spread them around and when a bad guy tries to open one of those files or brute force your fake internal SSH server, your Thinks canary will immediately tell you hey, we got a problem. There are no false alerts, just the alerts that matter. Now I said SSH server, but your Think things canary can be easily.

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02:01:25
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02:01:49
I'm going to tell you two important facts, though, to add on to this. If you use the offer code twit in the how did you hear about us box, you're going to get 10 off right off off the top, and that's for life. And here's another thing that's going to reassure you if you go well, that sounds good, leo, but I don't know you can always return your things to canaries, for you have a two month, 60 day money back guarantee for a full refund. So you, so you, there's no risk at all. But I I do have to tell you we've been talking about things to canaries for more than, I think, seven years. That refund guarantee has never been claimed no one, not once. And we have sold a lot of things to canaries.

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02:03:12 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I can't resist I just want to know can your things, canary, be a whopper emulator out of war game? So wouldn't that be fun, a nice shall we play a game.

02:03:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, I don't know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna write to them and say I want whopper w-o-p-r.

02:03:26 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I just looked it up while you were talking and all the prompts are online so you can like. I want to play maximum iceland scenario.

02:03:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love it I have somewhere I have the, the sound effects from that movie. I try not to, I'm very tempted. I have a very rich library of goofy sound effects that I created way back when for John C Dvorak, because he has no attention span and so he would get so bored when we did the radio show. So I gave him a bunch of stuff so that he wouldn't get too bored, and I and I still have a few of those. I think, let's, shall we play a game or john c devorek adhd memorial soundboard exactly, and he would you know.

02:04:12
And the thing is he would drop him in at random. I mean, he had.

02:04:14 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
There were always non-sequiturs, you know that system probably contains a new data encryption algorithm You'll never get in there.

02:04:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's one of my favorites, actually Looks military, to me, definitely military.

02:04:27 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Probably classified too.

02:04:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
OK, you're sorry you brought it up now, corey. No, I don't. I don't think you can do that with a, with a canary Thanks canary, but I should suggest it to them. With a canary thinks canary, but too bad, I should suggest it to them they do. You know, it's like I put like little spreadsheets around that say things like employee payroll information, things like that. You know, that's stuff modern, modern hackers can't resist. I guess you could put like uh, eighth grade class grades, right, do change something like that the US is now.

02:05:03
I have to say I drove a Tesla. When I drove a Tesla, I had a Model X. I used full self. Well, they didn't have full self-driving yet, but I used the driver assist stuff. Occasionally it would drift off, start to drive into a median strip or something, but I was never like in the backseat knitting. I was always with my hands on the wheel looking and I just would gently nudge it back into between the lines and so forth.

02:05:31
Tesla has been promoting the idea that it has full self-driving and there have been four crashes driving and there have been four crashes. So the us uh auto nizza, the national highway transportation and safety administration nizza, has on friday opened an investigation into all 2.4 million teslas equipped with fs3 after those reported collisions, including a fatal crash. Uh, last year. I don't, I, you know my car, I have a bmw that drives itself and I same thing. I pay attention, I don't, you know, and, uh, and I pay and I keep my hands near the wheel. You don't have to have it on the wheel but that's, that's level two it's level two.

02:06:17
Yeah, now the problem is more a marketing, in my opinion, a marketing problem that elon's promising more than it can do and there are some drive some foolish tesla drivers who are trusting it more than you're supposed to, right? I mean, look, in the time there have been those four accidents. There probably been 40,000 accidents with human-driven vehicles, maybe 400,000. I don't know.

02:06:43 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I guess the point is that this isn't just about disciplining Tesla or taking care of the drivers who are foolish enough to believe Tesla. It's also about the harms to bystanders. Right, these are not single-driver-involved collisions. These are things where other people are harmed or even killed. And they're harmed or killed because the world is full of people who have a variety of degrees of credulity, especially when it comes to the pronouncements of this very famous, charismatic billionaire who's had lots and lots of press about being the smartest man in the world and Disney made him Iron man and all the rest of it. And then he goes around and he goes on stage and he says this is full self-driving. Your car will drive itself from Los Angeles to New York and you won't even have to put your hands on the wheel once and it'll charge itself. And blah, blah, blah and someone goes. Well, elon Musk said it's so and that person's dumb and maybe that person has some culpability.

02:07:36
But it's not that person who suffers, it's the person they run over and kill that's a good point that suffers, and so that's why we we have rules and we have a, a national highway traffic safety bureau uh.

02:07:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It also would impact his plans for a? Uh cyber cab, because he'd have to get nizza approval to do that yeah, it's nowhere close.

02:07:57 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
The cyber cab and robo taxi, you know, is nowhere close. Right 20, 27, I know they're saying. And full disclosure, I own a tesla, um, I have since 2021 and you don't let it drive itself. You pay attention, oh my god, no, I would never right like put my hands off it and I.

02:08:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I do remember when autopilot right came out yeah, you spent a lot of money for it too, didn't you?

02:08:23 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
well, I know I did yeah, no, I I didn't, but when autopilot, that was what you were talking about earlier yeah, autopilot yeah in and people were doing that, they were taking a nap and driving back seat.

02:08:35
To all the reasons, for all the reasons that cory said, what one of the things where I think that this has really been a failure, a government failure. Them calling it autopilot and not being sued for that, calling it full self-driving Now they call it supervised full self-driving, but being able to get away with that and not as false advertising it is the absolute definition of false.

02:09:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I agree ftc should go after him? No, it has to be dot has to be dot they don't have jurisdiction yeah.

02:09:10 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
So the fact that they've been able to get away with that leads to what I think what cory is talking about, which is that then people believe that they say, if it's out there and you can buy it, and it's, it must be true.

02:09:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When you were a kid, did you? I remember when I was a kid, I guess I was maybe one of those credulous people you're talking about, Corey. I remember we used to say well, if it's on a commercial, it has to be true, they can't lie, Was that ever true that they couldn't lie.

02:09:44 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I mean it remains broadly true. It's not as well regulated as it used to be. Some of that was down to there being a kind of special zone in relation to the First Amendment that had to do with the public airwaves.

02:09:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, so this is not broadcast for the most part anymore.

02:10:03 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
You don't have the same I sometimes get people saying, oh, we should restore the fairness doctrine, and there are lots of problems with that. I mean the fairness doctrine, wasn't it?

02:10:11 - Benito (Announcement)
wasn't as much colored as they think it was, but also, it only applied to terrestrial broadcast.

02:10:17 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Right, right, by all means, apply the fairness doctrine. For all the good it's going to get you, it's not going to reach any of the people you're worried about.

02:10:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And the First Amendment isn't going to let you Fox News is not on broadcast, nor is MSNBC. They are.

02:10:29 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
But that's not how most people are getting them Right. Yeah, and you know it's it because it's private. There isn't the same compelling First Amendment.

02:10:43 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yeah, I hope I'm going to hide some things so that hopefully this doesn't bounce back on them. But I have a very close friend and they are a chief scientist at a let's call it a biotech company, but let's PhD level, uh, and they told me recently, this past week, that oh, yeah, I drive with uh hands off all the time, full self-driving. Uh, I said all the time and they said, uh, yeah, every day going to and from work. And I was like, okay, I thought you were a smart.

02:11:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My, uh, my BMW, uh, does not require me to put my hands on the wheel. In fact, they have a feature where this seems dangerous. It says you know it's faster in the other lane, if you just check your mirrors, we'll move over there. And if you look at your mirrors, it goes and zips over and zips over. Um, but it's got a camera looking at my eyes and if I pick my nose or drink a drink, it says you're not paying attention. It will. I mean, it really alerts me. And, uh, there are times when the road becomes confusing to it. That it's that it beeps loudly and flash a red light saying grab the wheel, so I for on the highway, it won't do it on the local road, and I think you're right.

02:12:03 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Right, the highway makes way more sense. Yeah, uh, but the way it was described to me is they seem to be fully convinced that this was 100, and I was thinking in my head I might do this for 10 minutes or 15 minutes, but on a highway yeah, on a highway as an experiment, but I wouldn't be doing it every day.

02:12:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, part of the problem is, if you're not paying attention fully, there is a second or two that it takes you to kind of grok what's going on and respond, and so that second or two can kill you because you're not paying, you're not painfully paying, attention someone else going on or someone well you're right.

02:12:44
In fact, so nizza opened this investigation because it seems that these crashes happened where full self-driving was engaged during reduced roadway visibility I'm reading from a reuters story like sun, glare, fog or airborne dust and a pedestrian was killed in arizona, november of last year, being after being struck by a 2021 tesla model y um. So you're right. That pedestrian did not sign off on fsd, did not agree to be a beta tester for elon's driving skills.

02:13:18 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I don't want to be enrolled in a self-regulated, full self-driving experiment held by an auto company. Right Like I opt out of that. Thank you, right.

02:13:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And that's one reason doing it only on the highway is probably a good idea, because if you're a pedestrian on the freeway, you've got other problems.

02:13:36 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I mean, but it can also cause a wreck involving another vehicle.

02:13:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's true.

02:13:44 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
It's a separate set of problems. You know, in automation theory there's this idea of centaurs and reverse centaurs. So a centaur is someone who has to do something and part of the hard work is being done by the computer. So, you know, you're the human body on top of the horse's body, but a reverse centaur is the other way around. It's when, like the, the robot uses you to do some tasks that it can't do so, like you know. That would be like you having full self-driving in your car and your car does some of the stuff that that humans aren't good at in terms of being attentive, like the thing where it shouts at you when you take your hands off the wheel or whatever.

02:14:15
Or or if you're about to run into something and yeah, I've got a much less fancy car, but it it tells me if there's something in my blind spot when I turn on my signals.

02:14:23
Yeah, I think that's good and I've yeah, me too I've, I've missed, I've forgotten to do a blind spot check more than once in my life. That it's. I love having that feature. But if you're an Amazon driver, uh, you know, your eyeballs are being monitored while you drive and it's like docking your pay if it doesn't like the way you use your eyeballs, and also if your mouth is open and it looks like maybe you're singing, they dock your pay. No, singing, yeah, and you have to meet a certain quota. That involves driving really dangerously. But if they catch you driving dangerously, then they dock your pay again and like that's a reverse centaur. And I think, when we think about this automation, it's really important to like, ask yourself like, is the human helping the robot or is the robot helping the person?

02:15:05
Cause that's really the difference between you know nightmare and I want my Amazon driver to feel free to sing at all times Can you imagine if your boss came by when you were on your own working at home or in your car and said you know, laporte, no singing, this isn't a choir practice Actually, bonita does that a lot and the chat room constantly.

02:15:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They do not like when I sing. All right, quick break here and we will have more with our esteemed panel. You're watching this week in tech, our show today, brought to you by NetSuite. What does the future hold for business, will you ask nine experts? You'll get 10 answers. Rates will rise or rates will fall. Inflation's up or it's down. If somebody invents a crystal ball, will you let me know?

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02:16:37
Speaking of the opportunity, I want you to download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning. Every CFO needs to learn about this right now at netsuitecom slash twit. The guide is free to you. Check it out. Netsuite N-E-T-S-U-I-T-E. Netsuitecom slash twit. We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech and we thank you for supporting twit. We thank him so much for supporting this week in tech and we thank you for supporting twit by going to that special address. So they know, you saw it here. Netsuitecom slash twit. Uh, french, a french court has this will be interesting to see how this plays out has ordered blanket blocks of porn sites. They have 15 days to implement age controls. Now this is historically a very challenging thing to do without violating the privacy of everybody involved, including the adults involved. I'll be very curious how this plays out in france. Any thoughts?

02:17:39 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
anything to say age age verification is historically different difficult yeah, I, I mean, I think the main way that people envision doing this is through something like a credit card, and you know there's there's a way to think about that, which is that you then end up producing a uh uh sort by net worth list of everyone's pinks. Yeah, which is just like. You know you're just asking for blackmail. You know there are cryptographers who talk about less invasive ways of doing it. Like maybe you have an authenticator who knows that you're over 18 and who issues you a token but doesn't know how you use that token and that you present that credential and just says I'm over 18 and that's all it is, of course, token, but doesn't know how you use that token and that you present that credential and just says I'm over 18 and that's all it is. Of course, it doesn't stop you from providing it to someone else, and so that makes the whole project kind of pointless, because you can imagine that kids are going to figure out how to get it.

02:18:31
Share your token with me man yeah, exactly, just like driver's licenses always prevented kids from buying liquor right except you won't even have to show the driver's license to a person who can tell you're under 18, right, you're just going to have to have the token there.

02:18:46 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Black market for token would be huge, yeah.

02:18:48 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, and there's a kind of intriguing possibility, which is that you create a system of voluntary marking, where porn sites use metadata to mark their site as porn and then you have a parental control that says I am not going to uh, allow this account, I prefer that I think it's up to the I give it.

02:19:10
Putting the power in the hands of the parents to me seems the right way to handle a lot of these issues yeah, I think so too, and I think that it won't work perfectly, and I think that the illusion is that the other thing will that making everyone have an age verification token will and I think that we're not comparing something that works with something that doesn't work own ways at achieving the not terrible objective of helping parents help their kids look at the stuff that, uh, you know, is appropriate to their age. Um, and there is no one great solution to that, you know.

02:19:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But, but we can minimize the collateral damage there is, of course, a gold rush of companies claiming they could do age verification.

02:19:58 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Sure, and I'm sure a lot of them can do it with ai.

02:20:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There are some that can look at you and tell you what your age is.

02:20:07 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, you could do world coin, which is rebranded as world it's world.

02:20:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not just a coin, it's world. This is sam altman's weird startup, uh, where you especially if you're in a developing nation and you'd like some world coin can walk up to this orb and give it your iris and become part of some sort of network of nightmarish, dystopian network of identification. They have a new version of the orb, now powered by nvidia the onion could not have written something this good right no, it's like it has five times the ai performance. Also uses fewer parts.

02:20:50 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Uh, the venture says the new orb will allow for a broader rollout including self-service kiosks so to me the the most interesting thing about this is they're not saying coin anymore, because that is just not like a magic grifter word anymore.

02:21:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so now we've got new.

02:21:06 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Ai is the magic grifter word of the moment yeah, um is it web three can we use it in the metaverse?

02:21:16 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
do you feel unsafe going to worldorg? Like am I, just don't look into the orb.

02:21:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Whatever you do, don't meet the orb's eye. Winamp is in a little bit of trouble. I've just I I have a soft spot for winamp um because I interviewed.

02:21:37 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I interviewed justin frankel on the internet history podcast years ago.

02:21:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's history, right, right. So in fact that would be a good rad history episode, because it was 80s, 90s. When did win app come out?

02:21:51 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
uh, but it was before napster, so like 98, 97, maybe even earlier than that.

02:21:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I remember it's actually so. I was working at MSNBC's, this site, in 1995 and and a friend of mine who was a kid said Leo, all the college kids now are sharing music, they're putting up servers with this new thing called mp3s on them and I actually in 1995, went on MSNBCc, told soledad o'brien about this new technology called mp3s. And so I'm thinking, when it probably was you know next couple of years, right, mp3s. It was an mp3 player, had visualizations and it really kicked the llama's butt. Did justin explain what that means?

02:22:39 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
by the way, whipped the llama's butt right by the way, released in 1997, but wikipedia doesn't tell me when in 1997. But there is an internet history podcast somewhere on the web where he would have told me so when the 21st yeah winnip is owned by a belgian company aptly named the llama group.

02:22:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Winapp is owned by a Belgian company aptly named the Llama Group, and they thought it'd be a good idea to open source the code. So they put the so-called legacy player code on GitHub on September 24th. Less than a month later it's been entirely deleted, because the license was not exactly collaborative. You may not distribute modified versions of this software and only maintainers of the official repository are allowed to distribute the software. So it wasn't open source.

02:23:34
Justin Frankel actually was asked about it. He said that even if he had some desire to open source it, the license terms are completely absurd in the way they are written. They're terrible. No, thank you. But also the Shoutcast software, which they don't have a license to, was included in it. So Justin, who wrote Shoutcast, may not have been thrilled about that. Large portions of other projects' code was included in the repository. They may have leaked the source code for shoutcast server software. They just deleted it, by the way, uh, which means instead of rebasing it, which means, if you know how git works, it's nothing's ever deleted, so it's still kind of there. Apparently there were also proprietary packages from intel and microsoft. Too bad, because I really love the idea of using winamp to play mp3s.

02:24:31 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I was pleased when they re-released it in 2019 or something leo, I remember at one point you saying that you had enough mp3s and you're talking about the ones that you. The number of songs you had that it would take you like three lifetimes. You couldn't listen to all of them if you listen to them continuously throughout the lifetimes that's because I went to napster and downloaded everything. Downloaded everything, the whole, the whole catalog is it?

02:24:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is it as the statute limitations passed? Is it safe to reveal? That now? Yes, okay. Okay, lars Ulrich is not going to come to my door and beat me with his drumsticks.

02:25:07 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
He might Hard to say with Ulrich, but I, I, you know, I have a framework laptop, one of these user service. Oh, I love the framework.

02:25:16
Yeah, and they they upgraded the motherboard again and so I've got my old motherboard and there's a cooler master case so you can build a bookshelf PC. I'm going to build a Plex server and stick all my MP3s on it and I'm going to be able to use them again with my, my Sonos, which now the only that's the only way you can get your own music on your Sonos, which is the most fabulous.

02:25:43
Oh, oh, sonos brutal. Hey, they released a new soundbar this week. Yeah, fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice. We don't get fooled again. Just like george bush told us, I will never buy another sonos product of any kind.

02:25:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apparently they're having trouble selling their headphones as well, mostly because their software is so bad oh, my god, I can't.

02:25:55 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
So. My new, my new sonos trick is uh, it turns itself on in the middle of the night. The backyard speakers that's what you want it's like. Why is there music playing in the backyard, god knows, oh man.

02:26:08 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
But if what you wanted to do was play a song right now, five seconds from now, impossible.

02:26:13 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Right, absolutely impossible.

02:26:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, my God.

02:26:19 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah impossible.

02:26:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my god, yeah, we actually. Uh, we figured out that the sonos amps you know, I had a a bunch of in-ceiling speakers of the sonos amps in our house. We're sending gigabits of broadcast packets throughout the network, killing it. Oh, I couldn't figure out why the show was just stopping in the middle. We finally figured that out and took the amps off, but it was the sonos.

02:26:39 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
It was the sonos yeah, our audiences love sonos. Like it's been a long time thing and it's been really interesting how it is just completely, you know, flipped in it was so cool when it first started, we all had sonos right 18 months ago, two years ago, if you had said what?

02:26:56 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
what are you most passionate about, brian? You know, do one of those things what's in your house, what's in your bag, whatever I would have been like. Yeah, obviously, sonos is how I listen to music and the craziness with how they've destroyed that.

02:27:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is there anything to take its place? Is there anything? That is the next Sonos. Apple has a thing, I think. Apple, in fact they say, and Gurman says that next year Apple's going to kind of reenter the HomeKit market with a new, improved and better than ever. I have just as much trouble with Siri. To be honest, I will talk to Siri in one room and there's a little HomePod in the corner here and she'll respond here for some reason. It's just annoying as hell. Uh, let's see. Are you gonna buy a color kindle?

02:27:46 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I'm guessing, cory, that you do not use kindles uh, I don't, not because they're proprietary, because ultimately most things are proprietary, but because, uh, I don't like reading long form off of screens oh you know, I like I, I like paper.

02:28:00
Huh yeah, I don't wanna, I don't wanna have to like, exercise the monk-like self-discipline to stop myself from hitting alt tab and seeing a guy put a lemon up his nose on tick-tock I want to be like I, I just wanted to to like have a thing that does nothing, but I don't think you can watch tick-tock on your kindle, I think you can probably do distracting things on your kind you can. You can watch tick tock on your kindle. I think you can probably do distracting things on your kindle you can.

02:28:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can do distracting things yeah, they now have some color. I actually got the the libra kobo color and you know color on e-ink is very washed out. This looks much better than it really is.

02:28:30 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
It's very washed out, but I like it. They said that they did a lot of things to make the refresh better and and all that good stuff.

02:28:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
To get back to my this is panos panay's work, by the way. He former chief at microsoft for windows and hardware.

02:28:46 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
He's now it is interesting that they finally did color now after all these years after he he came in. But, um, if, if you to go back to what's what's in brian's bag, what's his favorite gadget? I live on my Kindle and the thing that is killing me is that they're killing the Oasis. So now you have no Kindles without physical page turn buttons and every time I say this, people are like why is that so important?

02:29:14
Well, because to lift up your finger to turn a page. Well, but, brian, if you turn a page on a regular book, you gotta, I know. But if you can just leave your thumb on the device and not have to tap the screen a thousand times when you're reading a book in an hour, that's why I switched to kobo and thanks to calibre or caliber, I was able to move all my amazon books over.

02:29:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, and now I have buttons again.

02:29:41 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah I also kindle oasis um the one thing I wish I love my oasis that they don't do because, for the same reason, the physical buttons much, much better, but I didn't.

02:29:51
When I bought it, I did not get the cellular version, and now they don't sell the cell, and so when I'm when I'm traveling, it's like I have to turn on the hot spot on this is the first world problem, but I have to turn on the hot spot on my phone and, like you know, and then connect the the kindle to it to like sync up with you know my reading where, and so it's, yeah, definitely a first world problem, but I wish that I had gotten it. I've even looked on ebay of like maybe I could get one of the old versions you know of it that has it.

02:30:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wanted advice I could. I could read a book and then switch over to TikTok and watch a kid stick a lemon up his nose, and that's why I'm using the iPad mini for all of my reading.

02:30:35 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, I have a phone and I have a and I have a and I have a computer and I the tablet. I I have owned many tablets in my life and not a one of them has ever been useful to me in the slightest I keep hoping I actually got a scribe, because I thought it'd be nice to write notes and stuff.

02:30:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I you know what I end up doing. Listen, I can't read books, cory, because I'm too old and my eyes aren't good and the it's just do what I did and get when I get cyber guys yeah, maybe I need your eyes. I'm gonna get my new eyes, get your eyes lasered, because what? Happens is I'm reading it, it just falls on my face and it's just no good when I fall asleep. So I do audiobooks now almost exclusively.

02:31:11 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I do a lot of that too I love I love audio. I librofm drm free. I. I have an underwater mp3. I stick them on there when I swim every day. I swim a mile a day at the pool across the street.

02:31:23 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Wait, can you give us more details about what that means? The underwater MP3 player like so?

02:31:30 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Are they aftershocks? One of these things? Yeah, yeah. I used to use these no-name Chinese ones from Amazon, and they got progressively worse, which was very funny, but you know, and anything that you use underwater eventually breaks, so they've got a pretty short duty cycle, like maybe a year, if you use them every day.

02:31:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're bone conduction, though they don't go in your ear.

02:31:51 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, no, the other ones did, but these ones ones, yeah, they're bone conduction. You just put flanged head um earplugs in which I use earplugs when I swim anyway.

02:32:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, and so that muffles the water sounds, and so actually that would work really well.

02:32:04 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Come to think of it, yeah yeah, no, they, they're great, uh, and yeah, I just download audiobooks from librofm.

02:32:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm concerned that audible I mean we're talking about amazon kindle and now we're talking about audible, which is an amazon company has 65 market share for audiobooks more than that, it's 90 in most genres so 65 overall. Well, one of the ways they, uh, they have. We were talking um steve gibson and I were talking the other day about one of our favorite authors. He wrote the Bobaverse series, dennis E Taylor, and his books are only available initially on Audible.

02:32:43 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, and because they make a sweet deal.

02:32:47 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yep, they are. They're terrible to work with, though. I mean the book that you mentioned earlier, that I did um, follow the geeks, um, and you know what that's where it's still in print is on audiblecom you can listen to it there, right? They don't let you set the price like they. You upload it. They set the prices, it's. They change the prices. They put it on sale when it's really. It's really terrible for an author. It's an awful platform. I wish there was a better.

02:33:18 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
It's much worse than that, though. If you Google Audiblegate or Kaji Audiblegate, they sold at least $100 million from independent authors with an accounting trick, and one of those authors was a forensic accountant who wrote crime thrillers and who figured it out.

02:33:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
ah, wow, a forensic accountant. Huh yeah, you see, they're everywhere, that's why?

02:33:44 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
that's why I write books about forensic accounts. Taylor uh.

02:33:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In his blog, in his frequently answered question or asked questions where is the kindle version? Says audible likes to have an exclusivity deal with authors. They will try for a six-month gap before text versions are produced. Audible pays for the narrator, pays for the cover. They do the marketing. They offer a much larger advance. He says audible is responsible for two-thirds of my income. So what am I supposed to do?

02:34:13 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
my agent told me that if I didn't boycott audible, I'd have paid off my house and would have enough money to god bless your uh integrity cory, yes yes um, it's so author hostile that they will never, you know, sponsor this show again.

02:34:27 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Sorry, leo, but um, but maybe they will, because they want no, we lost them a long time ago.

02:34:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know we used to love the Audible ads. It was even more fun when Corey was on at the same time. I love it. He'd be holding up signs saying Librofm, librofm. Well to be fair.

02:34:44 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
The one time that that happened, you said oh, corey, you don't like Audible much, do you? Oh no, I'm sure I lead you on and then I said something and then a bunch of, uh, leo stans came at me, uh, for the next like five years going, like, oh, you're trying to mess up leo's good, no, no, no, no, I led you on, I did.

02:35:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like when I asked adam curry you don't think neil armstrong landed on the moon, do you, adam? Just, sometimes there's something in me that I I can't not ask the question. Oh, you gotta poke the bear I gotta poke the bear amazon, by the way, is joining microsoft and a lot of other companies investing in nuclear reactors. Google's already said that the amount of energy it's using for its training its gemini ai is going to mean that they miss their net zero goals by 20 in 2030 them alone.

02:35:39 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Everybody's missing them, by the way.

02:35:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
AI is a monster when it comes to energy consumption. Uh, so Microsoft's reactivating Three Mile Island? Yeah, which is not as bad as it sounds. They're only one of the reactors had a problem and they're going to reactivate the one that didn't have a. They remediated that problem. They fixed it. What could possibly go wrong? Amazon is going to invest more than half a billion in small modular reactors. This is what Bill Gates has been working on is these little sodium cooled reactors and there's two different.

02:36:16 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
There's two different startups, right like because um didn't, google was the one.

02:36:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's two different startups and amazon did one and google did the other, or I can't remember my stories aws has announced an agreement with dominion energy, which is for the virginia utility company, to explore the development of a small modular nuclear reactor near Dominion's existing North Anna nuclear power station. I'm sure they have investments in this, as does Google, as does Microsoft.

02:36:45 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
So the startups that are doing this are what modular means is. One of the reasons that there's only been two nuclear power plants in North America, or at least in the United States, built since 1996, is that they're always bespoke so that you let's say-.

02:37:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And they're very expensive, right.

02:37:04 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
And so the modular means hey, could we come up with a framework that is let's create sort of like a cookie cutter, sort of like a modular home or whatever, where, once we do this, once then we can cookie cutter, put it in you know 180 different places? And so there are multiple startups that are chasing this idea of once. If you have the demand to create more nuclear power stations, once we have the modularity, then you get economies of scale. The fascinating thing is that this is something that, like you said, bill Gates and other people have been investing in for many years. Now is, the demand hadn't been there, and so, while there was a lot of investment in this idea, there was no one clamoring to build new nuclear power plants until ai and tech. So tech is basically um kick-starting an industry that that had been moribund yeah, there's.

02:38:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Amazon is going to develop these with uh x energy that's the one, yes a developer of small modular reactors and the fuel so it is net zero, right? These nuclear reactors do not have emissions, right? Yeah, there's a. Really, we know how to make them safer, don't we?

02:38:22 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
yeah, there's a really good take on this in the new. Uh well, there's your problem, which is this great civil engineering podcast. It's a podcast about, about disasters, and they open every podcast with a section called the goddamn news.

02:38:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love it.

02:38:41 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
And so this week the Philadelphia refinery explosion. So you know, it's a bunch of civil engineers, funny, funny civil engineers or various kinds of engineers and so they talked about it and they had a good take which is like look, if there's already a nuke around and it's not on, by all means turn it on for your dumb bubble economic thing. That's fine. Maybe we'll keep it on when it's done, but the reality is that people have been singing the praises of modular nukes for as long as they've been promising new efficiencies in solar and wind. And we got those in solar wind, like beyond all expectations. The solar and wind curve is stunning. You've never seen the like. It is just the most incredible new production all the time getting cheaper every day in ways that are just like, staggering to the imagination.

02:39:26
And nukes just aren't Like. Even if they're safe, they're not cheap. They're not getting cheaper. Maybe they'll get cheaper eventually. Maybe this might make're not getting cheaper. Maybe they'll get cheaper eventually. Maybe this might make them marginally cheaper. Maybe, if that happens, then the residue from this bubble bursting will be that we get some cheap nukes after we stop trying to cram AI into everything In the same way that after WorldCom's fraud collapsed. At least we had a lot of fiber in the ground that now we're lighting up thanks to the bipartisan infrastructure bill. But it's such a Rube Goldberg machine, uh, and really the only reason they're doing it is green washing the wind and uh solar, though, are um not consistent right.

02:40:06
They're not baseline yeah, but we also have like new batteries and we have new baselines yeah, we need battery technology, I mean where's the finish thing? The gravity. The gravity battery wasn't that cool an old coal mine and they're just like hoisting giant rocks to the top of a multi-mile shaft during the day and then lowering it at night. And every abandoned mine in the world has a high availability electrical connection.

02:40:28
Because you have to, because that's how mines work, and so all of them have giant shafts that you can just lower rocks down all day and there's more than enough to provide the world's baseload. If that works out, there's a lot of there's a lot of possibilities.

02:40:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's options. All right, let's take one more break and a few. Brian really wants, says I have a lot to say about Netflix, so we're we'll give you a chance to say a lot of things about Netflix. Their quarterly results came out Looks like they're doing well, but maybe Brian has some other thoughts. We'll find out in just a bit.

02:40:58
You're watching this Week in Tech with an excellent panel. I just I never want to end the shows when I have people like Corey and Brian and Jason on. It's just. They're just. I learn so much listening. I hope you're enjoying it and we're glad you're here. Our show today brought to you by Fundrise.

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02:43:21 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
And more than half of the signups in the third quarter were for the ad tier. That's amazing In countries where it was offered 43 billion in revenue for the year 2025.

02:43:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
43 billion in revenue for the year 2025. Sounds pretty good. I'm going to presume their profit margin is pretty good as well. Right, and the market liked it. Earnings per share $5.40. That's well over expectations. Revenue 9.83 billion Also above expectations. So of all the streaming services which seem to be struggling mightily, netflix seems to be the sole winner, right.

02:44:04 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Brian. Yes, and you thought I was going to do a contrary take.

02:44:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought you were. Yeah, I was setting you up to say no.

02:44:12 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
No, no, no, no, no. What I want to point out? Because, since I do a daily show Tech Meme Right Home, when earnings season comes around, people yell at me. They're like my eyes glaze over with the numbers or whatever. So on this one, I was like listen, they're adding subscribers, their margins are growing. I want you to focus in on one thing, which is they had net income of $2.4 billion this quarter, which means they're about to pass net income of $10 billion a year. That's amazing. So, but here's why this is amazing. It was less than two years ago that they had lost subscribers for the first time, so that they had 5 million additional. I just said no numbers. We thought that growing subscribers in a quarter by 5 million was in the past because they'd hit the law of large numbers or whatever. But also, if you're doing 10 billion dollars a year in in income, that is more than anybody in hollywood is doing. Now, all of these hollywood studios are under conglomerates, so they have theme park things. They've got you know, uh different.

02:45:28
The movie business per se the movies and movie theater business is terrible well, what I'm saying is is netflix won and this is the point that I want to make which, okay? Oh, brian, you're saying it's game over.

02:45:42
Well, here's what I'm saying. First of all, listen to the trajectory of this company, and by me saying netflix is an amazing company I'm not the brian is not sticking out any new thing, but they beat Blockbuster right. They they created the first streaming product that was that people wanted, even though Bill Gates and the cable companies, everyone in Hollywood knew it was coming for 20 years. Netflix went and did it. They survived the Quickster debacle. They survived everyone and their mother jumping on jumping on their turf with their own streaming products.

02:46:15
And then the thing the last two or three years about them was well, yes, but they have all this debt. Because they had. They took out $15 billion in long-term debt to continue to make the content. And everyone on wall street was like or the bears at least were like it's great that they're spending all this money on content, but when are they going to pay for it? They're paying for it now. They're going to make $10 billion this year in profit. They only have $15 billion. So what I'm saying is remember like we'll bring it back to like Elon and Tesla when Elon, in 2008, was saying what his long-term plan was for, when Tesla would be profitable and will take over whatever and and electric is the future. Netflix said to us 15 years ago that this is how we're going to take over Hollywood, and they've done it and so the the global box office.

02:47:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Global box office for last year was only 33 billion, all 34 billion. So they're, and that's revenue.

02:47:18 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yeah, that's not even the profit that's revenue, so their profit is one-third of the global. That's amazing now I.

02:47:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So here's a larger question. I mean, yeah, good, good on Netflix, but is it over for movies, motion pictures, going to a theater, sitting in a theater watching motion?

02:47:36 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
that was my second point. They've done this sort of in a jujitsu way, because they encouraged everyone to try to be like them and bankrupt themselves, right. So all of the Hollywood studios have tried to be like streaming, and now they are not responsible for the global pandemic, but now like, like you're saying, that was certainly a catalyst but the, the, the going to the movie theater is maybe something that doesn't exist anymore, so they literally could be the only one left standing in 10 years. They could be the one app for entertainment.

02:48:09 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Which is where they were going originally, but I'll give you an alternate take on this. Okay, Do it. They spend the most money to have the worst catalog of content. They, they, they're, um. But it works for them, doesn't it? It works for them, but I don't. I think that they are. You know, um, the content business is a hits business and there is, they are a whole, um, a whole service full of filler content, of the second best stuff that you'll watch when you don't have anything else to watch. So great. You're the stuff that you watch when people don't want to watch the, the stuff on the other services that aren't making money and that have struggle with their business model and all of their operations and all of that kind of thing. But they are. They're not your first watch, they're your sort of what you watch when you don't have something else.

02:48:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But here's the point you never cancel it.

02:49:02 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
And also I have two retorts to that, which are number one what you think is the crap content now would have been like what you would have called Goonies or whatever you would have called crap content 30 years ago. 40 years ago. As they're creating a library of content. It'll be the evergreen content, like the Godfather or whatever that you're saying they don't have right now. But also wait 18 months, three years, when all of the other players in streaming throw in the towel, they will start relicensing to Netflix, and they know that and so.

02:49:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Netflix will have the catalog here's why Netflix wins because there's always something to watch on Netflix. It may not be the the one thing you want to watch, but there's always. And and really that's how people watch TV they sit down. It's not destination, it's not appointment programming, no matter what the networks want you to think, they sit down at the end of dinner and they say what's on, and netflix is going to win in that situation. Unless you know apple tv can do better, or disney plus, I'll be honest, like I I made that argument but I'll be.

02:50:09 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I want to like put my cars on the table like I really don't watch any of them. Like I will watch, I watch youtube, but then that's really well, that's an interesting point, because isn't that really the future of consumption?

02:50:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
a hundred percent, yeah, I mean nobody under 40 watches, anything but youtube.

02:50:25 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
You're just a outlier, jason and also like the pluto tvs of the world. You're saying what's on that? They're, they are and they're free. They're killing it right now. Anything that's doing like that, free with garbage what you would call garbage, but what?

02:50:39 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
you're saying is right. Well, they survive a federal privacy law whom are we talking about?

02:50:45 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
uh, any of those free?

02:50:47 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
those free to view, yeah because the federal privacy laws in the offing. Too many people want it. We have an updated privacy law. Since 1988 the last privacy law consumer privacy law congress passed is the video privacy protection act.

02:51:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That makes it a crime for video store clerks to tell newspapers which vhs cassettes you have well, and I think we've learned from the national public data breach that we are, oh yeah, really being owned by these companies oh yeah, yeah.

02:51:14 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
No, it's grotesque. And there's people who want a privacy law because they think Facebook made Grampy a QAnon, or Insta made their kid anorexic, or it's why.

02:51:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you think that we're actually going to have a comprehensive privacy law?

02:51:27 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Oh yeah, no, we keep getting a string of bills, each of them unacceptable, each of them better and each of them getting closer to the line. I think the, the, I think the writing's in the wall, I, I and I think that and so how does that hurt pluto? Oh well, if you know, if these are data driven, data broker driven services, right, they're just like riddled with with surveillance, and the way they make their money is by spying on us, then will they still exist if they're not allowed to spy on them?

02:51:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so they're ad supported right but they're not ad supported.

02:51:55 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
They're data supported right like the ads are are one thing, but like I don't know about pluto specifically, but a lot of these free to free to use video like amazon's free tv, for instance yeah, and there's other ones, ones that are like just I read about like what are all the millennials watching now? And I'm like I've never heard of these.

02:52:13
Yeah, and freezy freebie yeah they're just, they're super data hungry, and it's what all the tvs are built around now too. So all these tvs are just terrible. Uh, like, tvs are like the worst category of consumer goods. We have tvs and cars, um, and so you know like there's not a one being made that's fit for service in terms of of its privacy.

02:52:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's funny People are worried about their Amazon echoes or their series or their Google listening to them.

02:52:40 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Guarantee you your TV's listening to you and watching I don't know if they're all are, but certainly you know, cox, they. There are all these leaked slide decks where they said oh, we're listening in on smart speakers and we're using that to target it, we're sure.

02:52:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're sure it's not amazon doing it, it's it's.

02:52:55 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, it's a samsung yeah well, or just these like off-brand ones, because cox is a cable operator and I bet they've got deals with with you know tv companies you've never heard of that'll sell you an 80-inch television for 60 on prime day and well, amazon got that business themselves yeah yeah, and all of a sudden, these, these TVs, are equipped with cameras.

02:53:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, don't you want to Zoom from your TV?

02:53:18 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
No, no one's Zooming and also don't you want your TV to know when you've walked away during an ad and pause the ad until you come back and sit down again?

02:53:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I presume you don't connect your TV to the internet.

02:53:30 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I just buy monitors, I don't buy TVs.

02:53:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't like smart tvs. I would. I would just buy monitors if I could, but they're not the same quality, I mean you, I mean, I have a 55 inch oled, but I don't think I get a 77 inch I don't want to.

02:53:44 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I don't want a giant tv either, I mean, but most of our living room wall is covered in, you know, framed art, and then there's a tv that's I don't know like oh, you're some sort of hippie, I see my wife would like a bigger tv, but you know this is the compromise we've settled on and mostly she uses it for gaming. She's a former professional gamer she's the first woman to play quake for england, uh, and she's playing cod all night, screaming at her friends and having a great time quake for england yeah, it sounds like a motto almost.

02:54:15
Yeah yeah, exactly, quake for england, quake for england everyone the english colonized did they quaked because england was coming. They quaked, don't panic, quake for england cory.

02:54:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, I am excited about your new book. When is that going to come out?

02:54:30 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
so this book, where'd I put it?

02:54:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this book picks and shovels out february the 15th, I want to say and I'll be touring western east coast and maybe some midwest days as well nice, but if you want to read it, you should probably pick up red team blues and the bezel so that, for completeness, you have read the entire. And will it only be a trilogy? I'll tell you when I met Martin.

02:54:51
Hinch, I thought this is the next Jamesames bond. I think you've. I think you've got. You've got a movie film worthy series here, by the way, don't you? This is an old post. He is not going to all those places. This is from april last.

02:55:06 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
That's the last one. I've been out on tour for like three years. I, like I said, I wrote nine books during lockdown, so that's incredible constantly, but uh, I, I, uh. I have some others on the drawing board. There's just so much else I want to write, though I got to finish the inch edification book. Then there's the graphic novel. There's probably a documentary in the offing.

02:55:24
I'm writing a series for a national broadcaster. So there's just a lot of other stuff, and then it's like I do my. My brief at EFF is um, antitrust, right, this is like the busiest time in history of tech antitrust ever. So I'm busy with that and my kid's going to college and I'm working with her on our college applicant. Wait a minute.

02:55:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, posey's going to college.

02:55:47 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Yeah, and I can't believe it. Homecoming yesterday she had a frock and everything.

02:55:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow yeah, yesterday she had a frock and everything. Wow yeah, a frock, a rock. She had a frog. It's not a frog, dad is she anglicized?

02:56:06 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
is she kind of got that kind of no, no, she, she, she's lost her accent entirely. When we moved here she had an actual cockney accent from growing up in east.

02:56:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love that I wasn't doing nothing.

02:56:12 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Nothing, I'm not doing nothing, but yeah, now she just she's. She grew up in the valley. Valley girl, okay, burbanker sure.

02:56:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So chuck point. Capitalism and the internet con yeah, those go together for sure.

02:56:26 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
They're really like awesome books and in shitification when it comes out and there's posies, but posy the monster slayer, there's her book, so it's all there.

02:56:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
craphoundcom, my friends, and what is your preferred way for people to buy them?

02:56:43 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
any way, you want to buy them is fine with me. Uh, you can buy the ebooks for me and they come drm free. But you know, as we all know, um, the platforms have made it very hard to sideload content. So unless you're oh well, well, the kind of person who watches tech TV, you might get caliber.

02:56:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You want caliber. Everybody should have that running full time in the background.

02:57:02 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
But but you know you can get them anywhere. They're DRM free everywhere. I don't allow my books to be sold with DRM, so you know, get them wherever you want. Ebook audio book book bookshoporg, if you want a hard cover the audiobooks are not available at amazon because they require drm audible. It's not optional. It's optional for the kindle but not for audible but you can get them at librofm you get to, you get to nominate your favorite local bookstore and they get a little piece of the money every time you buy something I love them.

02:57:36
They're just absolute menches.

02:57:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We didn't mention the Internet Archive. You mentioned a little bit earlier that some of your stuff is there.

02:57:46 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
They host my podcast, so my podcast is offline right now.

02:57:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They are slowly getting back up and running. They got another note from the hacker saying hey, I still have your email and your zoho account. You might want to fix that I feel so bad for them. What as, as brewster kale said, somebody wanted to kick the cat. Um, don't do it. That's terrible and it's an opportunity I say this every uh, I've been saying this every week for the last few weeks to donate to the internet archive.

02:58:15 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
It's a good time to give money. I give money every year. My wife's employer matches our donations. Oh, that's nice. Double it up.

02:58:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's nice. Yeah, it's such an important resource as are you. Mr Corey Doctorow, thank you so much for being here.

02:58:29 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
It's been 25 years, I think we've been hanging around now.

02:58:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
leo, isn't that awesome we did our thousandth episode a couple of weeks ago.

02:58:36 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
Thousandth, that's a lot of podcasts, corey, wow oh, you know what I'm going to tell you what uh picks and shovels has got a cameo from your friend and mine, suzanne stefanak, who worked with you at tech tv. Yes, she ran our website. She's in.

02:58:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's one of my burning man campmates and she was jello biafra's roommate in the 1980s when this, oh my god, uh, she's now a dj, does a wild kind of rock show in uh public radio in the midwest somewhere yeah, wyoming, wyoming yeah that's the montana montana montana. Uh. Yeah, well, give suzanne my uh regards. She was our uh. She was the editor-in-chief of Montana Montana. Yeah, well, give Suzanne my regards. She was the editor-in-chief of the website, of the site, and tell her if she wants the old site sign. I have it right here.

02:59:23 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
I fixed it up. I don't know what I'm going to do with it. Got a big place in the Rockies.

02:59:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you need a big place. My wife won't let me hang it up. She says what are you crazy? It'll hit you in the head and you'll die. It weighs like 100 pounds. It's huge. Maybe, I don't know, maybe Jason Heiner would like it for the new ZDNet offices or something like that. Jason, editor-in-chief at ZDNet Always a deep pleasure, my friend, Thank you. We asked Jason if he'd be willing to not only be a regular on our shows but fill in for me from time to time, and you very kindly agreed to do that. So you will see more of Jason on our network and we're very glad about that.

03:00:04 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I like learning from people smarter than me, and it's always a great chance to do it here today.

03:00:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why I've been doing this for 20 years. What do you think? I'm not doing it for the money. I can tell you that I'm doing it for the brain power, the brain stuff. You guys are amazing. Same for you, brian. Good luck with the new podcast, rad History. Everywhere you get podcasts.

03:00:27 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
What a great idea for a show I love it Right Right now if you subscribe or listen right now, John Gruber and I talk about Golden Eye 007, Wednesday Always a favorite. Always a favorite, It'll be Calvin and Hobbes, and then I think we're going to do I'm trying to line up something about Rick Moranis with somebody that worked with him the career of Rick Moranis.

03:00:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice and, of course, he continues to host the tech meme ride home every day. Well, certainly monday through friday, and not, uh, not occasionally on the weekends as well. Bonus episodes, yep, bonuses. Thank you brian, thank you jason, thank you corey. What a pleasure, what an honor to have you on. We'll see you soon. Take care, guys, we do twit every sunday. You, yeah, we stream it now live. You can watch us from uh, 2 pm pacific, 5 pm eastern, 2100 utc on those eight different platforms I mentioned youtube and twitch and xcom and linkedin and facebook. Yes, we're on tick tock. I don't know what benito did. When we're on tick tock, are we all squeezed into a just a little narrow vertical wind? How does it work on tick tock? I'm actually not sure I should. I should check Benito. When we're on TikTok, are we all squeezed into just a little?

03:01:35 - Benito (Announcement)
narrow vertical window. How does it work on TikTok? I'm actually not sure I should check.

03:01:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe there's big black bars top and bottom. I don't know.

03:01:41 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Get in touch with me. There are some platforms that make this very easy. If you have multiple video feeds, to stack them on top.

03:01:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oops, I'm sorry. Every time I go to TikTok it autoplays. It drives me crazy. I just. Every time I go to tick, tock at autoplay drives me crazy.

03:01:57 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I think we use autoplay, we use um we use ai to do our, by the way, our twit tick tock feed is called twit talk get it. My point is check it out and it's landscape. So we are.

03:02:10 - Benito (Announcement)
It's landscape, it looks normal on the website, okay so what I'm saying is is that there are many tools now.

03:02:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There are big black bars.

03:02:16 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Good Lord, many tools now, if you have a multiple video feed, to put them together, to stack them, to make them look nice on TikTok and Instagram. Nice to know, yes.

03:02:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice to know. Yes, we will be in touch. Thank you, mr McCullough, and and thanks to all the people who are chatting on all of those platforms. I do see all the chats come in. I have a combined chat room that I see all your comments and I appreciate them all. Thank you, it's really nice to have you 1,239 people watching, but of course, most people watch after the fact. We put all of our shows up on the website twittv. There are YouTube, I think think, youtube channels for everything everything that has video anyway. So if you go to twittv, you'll find the links to the YouTube channels for each of the shows. But the best thing to do if you really want to get those shows is to subscribe, because that way you'll get them automatically the minute they're available and you won't have to think about it. You have something to listen to on a monday morning. Please join the club. We appreciate it. All our club members. Thank you for your support and we will see you all.

03:03:25
One more thing leo one more thing, benito, oh, benito, I forgot yeah, we'd like to.

03:03:30 - Benito (Announcement)
Uh, you know, have everybody go to uh goodtv slash bestof and you can contribute clips to our bestof.

03:03:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This poor guy has to put together a bestof episode every year for Christmas.

03:03:41 - Benito (Announcement)
Yes, and he wants your help. If you want to contribute clips to that, you can go to twittv. Slash bestof yeah.

03:03:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So if there is a moment in any show this year that you remember and you're excited about and you think would be good in the bestof probably about eight minutes from this show just go to twittv slash. Best of Thank you. I almost forgot Thank you. He's the guy who's got to do a lot of these, so I appreciate your help. Make Benito happy. Thanks for joining us, everybody. We'll see you next week and, as I have said now for 20 years, Another twit is in the can. Bye-bye.