This Week in Tech 1020 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, we got a great panel Jennifer Patterson-Tui is here from the Verge, abrao Alhidi from CNET, from Connect Safely, my old friend Larry Magid. We will talk about well many things the new iPhone for one, amazon's revamped Echo may not have its intelligence built in, and a massive lawsuit to fine the national public data broker that leaked all our social security numbers. California wants $46,000. All that and more coming up on TWIT Podcasts you love.
00:39 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
From people you trust.
00:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is TWIT. You trust this?
00:43 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
is TWIT.
00:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 1020, recorded Sunday, february 23rd 2025. Smell my mouse. It's time for TWIT this Week, week in tech, the show where we get together with the smartest, most interesting and best looking people in technology to talk about the week's news. Larry maggot, president and ceo of connect safely.
01:21 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Larry, you and I are the grandpas on this show yeah, I must be either the smartest or the most interesting, because I know I'm not the best looking.
01:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, nobody's all free yeah okay, good to know.
01:31 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Nice to see you. It's been a while, leo. Yeah, it's great to have you.
01:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
President of ConnectSafelyorg, which is all about protecting families on the internet, and God knows they need it.
01:43 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Thanks, for joining us on the internet and god knows, they need it.
01:46 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Thanks for joining us. Are you wait a minute? Are you wearing your meta glasses? I am wearing my meta glasses, so be careful. I can take your picture oh, my goodness gotcha.
01:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's funny. They don't really look like you know smart glasses they look like normal spectacles that's what actually my wife thinks.
02:00 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I look better in them than I do in my regular you look smarter. The problem is the battery only lasts three hours, so I have to constantly be putting them back in the charger or buy four pairs. That's a possibility.
02:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, also with us, abrar Alhiti from CNET. Always wonderful to have Abrar on what's a weekend, what is a weekend, what is a weekend.
02:26 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I've got to be on with that epic intro uh yes, smartest well, you gotta guess which one, yeah, smartest cleverest, best looking.
02:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think you get all. I think you got all three very kind. Thank you, jennifer pattison too. He is also here again. Qualifies in all categories from the Verge, hi JPT.
02:46 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Hello, hello. Such a pleasure to be here too, very excited for this, and we're already half an hour in, so we're all warmed up.
02:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The pre-show which will be released to the club will be dynamite. By the way, I apologize. I didn't realize you were also going to be on Tech News Weekly this week, so we're kind of using a lot of your time. I thank you for being here.
03:07 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Oh, I'm a big fan, always happy to be here. It's a real privilege and a pleasure, thank, you.
03:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If Molly White were here, she would be talking about the largest ever crypto purchase theft. I guess theft is the word uh by bit 1.4 billion dollars in uh eth eth based tokens. Uh, stolen, stolen attackers took control of a what's called a hot wallet belonging to the bybit cryptocurrency exchange and we, once they took control, they moved $1.4 billion of tokens out. It's gone. Bybit CEO, ben Zhou, confirmed the attack on Twitter. They actually, I have to say they did the best one could with a bad situation. They've purchased now back I think, 200, some almost 300 million tokens. No individual user as far as I know of Bybit got bit, so to speak.
04:20
Bybit ETH multi-sig cold wallet just made a transfer to our warm wall about an hour ago. This specific transaction was musked. That's interesting. I didn't. I don't know what that verb means. All the signers saw the musked ui, which showed the correct address and the url was from at safe. However, the signing message this is the kind of communication you want from a company when it's breached or hacked very specific uh information. He says rest assured, all other cold wallets are secure, all withdrawals are normal. I will keep you guys posted where did the money?
04:54 - Larry Magid (Guest)
whose pockets did it come from, though? Who lost the money?
04:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I, I'm I. What I gather, by the way, musked, according to crock in the context of the bybit hack, refers to transaction payload being obfuscated or spoofed. So it was spoofed. I don't know why they chose the name musk, but maybe you can imagine. Um, it sounds like it was from them. It was by bits own holdings. Wow, uh, so that's a pretty big uh loss, it doesn't uh? And Joe also uh posts on X by bit is solvent. Even if this hack loss is not recovered. All of clients assets are one-to-one backed. We can cover the loss. Wow, um, now let's, let's hope that's true. This exceeds even the Mt Gox theft many years ago. This is a big one and it kind of is a good reminder that custodial wallets are not necessarily safe. You have to really trust the security of the place you're storing your wallet with.
06:02 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, they didn't really say what happened, right that we don't know how it got musked I wonder how that compares.
06:09 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I mean, how could you? I don't imagine you could have ever stolen a billion dollars from a bank from a bank I know, that's what I was gonna say a billion dollars to I mean
06:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's amazing, not even, not even goldfinger from fort knox was gonna get a billion dollars, I know. So, uh, yeah, that might be the not just the largest crypto heist ever. Who's going to get a billion dollars? So, yeah, that might be the not just the largest crypto heist ever, it's got to be the largest heist ever.
06:30 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I mean, I don't know how much. I don't know how much gold is in Fort Knox, but I wouldn't surprise me if it's not a billion.
06:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me ask how much gold is in Fort Knox In dollars? In dollars, I don't know. Yeah, she might say tons. Or pounds? Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, she might say tons or pounds.
06:44 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, I don't know a meta how much gold and dollars is in fort knox I'm gonna get my voice assistants going here this is a large number more than my boss mark zuckerberg has
07:01 - AI voice (Announcement)
actually it's funny because there is this meme going around the exact amount of gold held in Fort Knox, the US bullion depository, is not publicly disclosed. However, it is reported that Fort Knox holds about 147 million ounces of gold, which is roughly 4,080 metric tons. This gold represents a significant portion of the United States gold reserves. If you have more specific questions about gold reserves or Fort Knox, feel free to ask.
07:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How much is that in U S dollars? Now the government only values it at $42 and 40 cents an ounce or something like that, but obviously gold is more than $600 an ounce. Last time I checked.
07:41 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
So I think your next episode will just be voice assistants talking to each other.
07:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You could be, for all I know, a voice assistant Anyway chattering away in the background.
07:57 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
What did Meta say? Nothing, nothing.
08:00 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Didn't like the question.
08:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Unfortunately. So the assistant I'm using is from BDOT Computer. We interviewed him on Wednesday at Intelligent Machines.
08:09 - Larry Magid (Guest)
How are you getting the sound into the mic? Are we hearing it through the speaker?
08:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I have my iPhone. You know how you put the iPhone on your computer screen. So it's that, and apparently it's also taking the sound. But she's also apparently very busy, so you know you'll hear the answer yeah she'll get back to me. Um, anyway, yeah, that's a good point, it's? I don't think you know. No armored car heist, no bank heist.
08:35 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Nothing approaches 1.4 billion dollars because no one could physically move that. So once we get to technology, you know this is- online bits a light right right speed of light.
08:48 - Larry Magid (Guest)
A heck of getaway car to get away with a billion dollars of anything, yeah the next oceans 11 movie is gonna be very boring.
08:54 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
People sit at computers I'm in.
08:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's the classic line, right? I'm in. Um, anyway, I think there's nothing more to say about it. Except now I should say that it's probably more convenient to have a custodial wallet, a wallet that's held by Bybit or Coinbase or whoever you do business with. But there's always that risk, and certainly a lot of people who had their coins at Mt Gox lost quite a bit. I have a wallet that I keep locally. There's there's problems with that too, as, as people, longtime listeners will know, I forgot my password and I have 7.85 Bitcoin just cooling their heels Cause I can't figure out how to get to them.
09:38 - Larry Magid (Guest)
But how is that different than a bank account or an investment account? Isn't that essentially a custodial wallet?
09:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, if you're well is yeah I mean, if you think about it, we trust our banks or our stock brokerages wherever we store our money.
09:50 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I mean they don't have a pile of dollars in the vault I print out my statements because I want to have at least something that I can show so old school larry well no, but it's all bits. How do I know that tomorrow the bits aren't going to all turn to zero?
10:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
just because you put it in ink on a piece of paper doesn't make it less bitwise. At least I can show it.
10:09 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I can see it. I have it here. I also printed out my Social Security statement.
10:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
given what's going on, your money's not here, Mr Maggot. It's over there in the houses that were built Exactly. There's never been any money in the bank, it's just. There is a requirement. Actually, that is a difference. I don't know if crypto banks have the same requirement, but regular banks have a requirement to hold some small percentage of their deposits in the bank.
10:39 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Not in cash though.
10:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In actual cash. Yeah, I think so Really. Am I wrong? Maybe not, I don't know. Sounds right. I think it's changed quite a bit over over the years. Uh, but yeah, there was. There was at one point a requirement, but there's also insurance, there's fdic, and so you remember the run on silicon valley bank and many of the holders, account holders had more than the quarter million dollar insurance, but the government ended up making them whole, which they didn't have to. They didn't have to but they did, for probably you know too big to fail reasons. I doubt anybody's going to make by bit whole. I don't think they have fdi insurance no fdi insurance there that could come.
11:22 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Maybe that's something elon, something Elon could make happen.
11:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know, I think it's all in uh Flux. I mean, uh, the president has talked about a strategic uh Bitcoin Reserve kind of like Fort Knox, but lighter you can carry it in it in his pocket or with the nuclear codes in the football, See I think that reasonably should make people nervous.
11:51
The reason there's gold in Fort Knox is because we used to be on a gold standard. We haven't been in years and at the time the idea was the government will back up. You know, you could in the old days, really old days, bring a dollar bill to the bank and they would exchange it for gold. Then it was silver, then it was. We got off the metal. And then, of course, for years have been conservatives who said let's get back on the gold standard, the silver standard. I guess. I mean, what are you going to do with the gold? You had it, so keep it. I guess by keeping it, they keep gold prices artificially raised, don't they? If they were to release those 14 million troy ounces or whatever it was, uh, the price of gold would drop, although gold does have an intrinsic value, I mean it does it is nothing like the, nothing like the face value yeah, right, and diamonds, of course, are just totally yeah, lifted up.
12:43
Gold has an industrial value that is probably just a few dollars an ounce. Not let me see what the current price on gold is, because copper has a very high value these days.
12:57 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Yeah, copper's very. If you own a Prius, you're in trouble because, well, your calendar it's.
13:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's actually one of their yeah. So, oh gosh, I was off by a lot cold's almost three thousand dollars in this. I was off by an awful lot. Um, that's why we got rid of or Trump's getting rid of the penny I actually agree with him on that one oh, but wait.
13:19
Yeah, there's a problem. First of all, pennies haven't been copper in a long time. They're zinc slugs made by one company which has been lobbying for the preservation of the penny for years at penniesorg. This. Americans for Common Sense Get it. They make the zinc. They make the zinc blanks. This is why they're lobbying for this right. They make the zinc blanks. This is why they're lobbying for this right. They make the zinc blanks. It's very popular. They have a monopoly that the pennies are made of, then a thin cladding of copper on top of it. Here's the problem with not making the penny. You eliminate the penny. That means there's demand on the next coin up the nickel. Yeah, pennies cost about 13 cents a cent to make. Nickels cost a lot more. So you're not saving the treasury any money by abandoning the penny. I mean, yeah, but you're going to end up probably costing more because people are going to go to nickels.
14:17 - Larry Magid (Guest)
You know the funny thing I was in Europe a few months ago and I didn't bother converting any of my currency into your, into euros, and I was there for two weeks and never missed having any cash at all I mean yeah I, I didn't even use my phone. I use my phone for literally everything. Yeah, same, so yeah they're much more.
14:37 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I mean we've got better here. But apple pay and google pay and everything I mean everywhere accepts it in europe, whereas here you still. There are still times. But also they got rid of a lot of coins in the UK, I remember, and no one really cared. It all worked out fine. It's kind of sad. I think it's sentimental. Really, people feel attached to physical money, just like you know, with the issue of digital money being stolen, I mean, or printing out your bank accounts, have actually been able to hold physical money and as it starts to go away, it's sort of almost like the beginning of the end.
15:14 - AI voice (Announcement)
I'm going to London on Friday Dollar bills will be next right.
15:17 - Larry Magid (Guest)
When I go to London on Friday, I don't think I'll bother going to the ATM machine. The ATM, it's not an ATM machine, it's a cash point.
15:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Cash point. Yeah to the atm machine. The atm it's not an atm, it's a cash point in london. So the only argument against going all digital and I think trump could actually do this, but the only argument against it is the only truly anonymous way to make a transaction is cash. That's right. We now know cryptocurrency bitcoin's not fully anonymous it's it's. It's more anonymous, it's not fully anonymous, it's more anonymous. It's not fully anonymous. It can be traced back to an address, a wallet. But that aside, why aren't we all digital? What are we making? Pieces of paper or zinc slugs that we use I mean, we rarely use? Doesn't everybody have a jar full of coins that just are getting growing and growing and growing?
16:09 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
and then you take it to one of those machines and you put the coins in and then the machine like takes like half of it. Yeah it takes a fee, that's for sure, yeah and then spits out the things like canadian pennies well, you don't even need pennies and cash for for yard sales anymore, because everyone takes venmo, it's all yeah, that was the last time you really needed. It was for like and like farmers markets.
16:31 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Now the farmers markets will take venmo and now marijuana is legal, so you don't even need it for drugs. I mean well not that we still need it for other drugs actually they don't take credit cards because it's federally still illegal, like oh yeah, you don't want mastercard to come down on you right, say, hey, what are you doing?
16:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so there are about there are 240 billion pennies in circulation. That's about 700 pennies per person, most of them in jars. Yeah, I've got more thrown out that's not very lucky yeah, you know, it's an old, uh, I think, an old, uh, jewish uh Superstition, I think, to throw pennies in the corner of a new office or new home.
17:17 - Larry Magid (Guest)
When we left the studio, there were pennies in the corners, oh interesting yeah, I actually dropped a penny the other day and I really thought it's not worth picking it up. Well, I figured the x is said. Well, it's good for me. You know I need to go for the stretching. There was no other advantage. I probably earned more money on the interest in my savings account in the time it took me to pick up the penny I.
17:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have a policy never to pick up anything under a quarter.
17:42 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Oh okay you've got something. Well, you're richer than I am. Lou you think. Policy never to pick up anything under a quarter. Okay, you got standard.
17:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you're richer than I, am lou and I don't want to bend over save it for the next guy.
17:53 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
That's what it is.
17:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're just paying forward, yeah in other uh news um, apple has caved to the uk. We've talked in past shows about the united kingdom snoopers charter, the investigatory powers act which the united kingdom had decided. Apparently it's not public, but rumor had it and a number of news organizations confirmed it. Uh had sent a letter to apple saying you must provide us with unencrypted access to anything stored on iCloud, including advanced data protection, which is end-to-end encrypted. Apple does not have the keys to that. Intentionally they don't want to be able to respond to subpoenas from law enforcement and say you know, here's what's in Larry's icloud. Uh, uk said not only does apple is, are they going to require apple? And presumably it leaked out about apple, but presumably that's everybody else too.
18:54
Uh, you know they could easily have sent the same letter to google and signal and a bunch of other people. But uh, they said you must provide unencrypted access, a backdoor in effect to this iCloud information, not just for UK citizens but for everybody worldwide, which of course raised the hackles of the US Congress. And letters were exchanged, angry words were exchanged. Apple has decided to remove advanced data protection for UK users. We will never build a backdoor to user data, says Apple. It announced this on Friday. I don't know if it actually responds to what the UK is asking, because it still wants access to your information and mine, even though we're not in the UK.
19:41 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, that's what I was wondering about. I think a lot of these you know changes, although they might start in the UK or in the EU, tend to spread over here too, so I don't know where this is headed or what it's going to affect. That's right.
19:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, apple says we're gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP, the Advanced Data Protection, will not be available to our customers in the UK, given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy. That's what ADP is in response to. Adp protects iCloud data with end-to-end encryption, which means data can only be decrypted by the user who owns it and only on their trusted devices devices. Bloomberg got the scoop, but a number of other journalistic entities also got the information. Two weeks ago, the uk government had ordered apple to build a backdoor into customer data globally what does that mean to people who travel?
20:39 - Larry Magid (Guest)
like american could go to the uk.
20:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, they were saying even if the icloud data is stored in the us, we want access to it, which is incredibly offensive so if I'm talking to somebody in the uk, then my data.
20:52 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I'm trying to figure out how this affects well.
20:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Adp is for your data, specifically, not your phone calls. Uh, if you are using I message, right, it's, it's on, it's on everybody's phone. If somebody in the UK's got it, then the UK authorities can get it. But the truth is I think iMessage is still.
21:10 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Imessage is not included in this, because that is is it still end-to-end encrypted, like passwords, health data, payment information and iMessage logs are staying end-to-end encrypted. It's iCloud file backups, photos, notes and voice memos are among and I'm reading from thevergecom among the data types that will no longer be encrypted. So it's not so because I mean in England they have, you know, whatsapp. There are several platforms that have end-to-end encryption, so an iCloud iMessaging will stay Hat still has has by default. That is, in your iCloud is end-to-end encrypted by default. But it's this extra layer of your iCloud file backups, photos, notes and voice memos and other data types.
22:00 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Storage, yeah filing.
22:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I should point this out. Have any of you turned on advanced data protection? No?
22:09 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah. So who's using it and I think that's probably the government's argument is like if the people that are using this are the ones that we want to get to the data. But obviously that's not, you know it's not just criminals, it's also members of.
22:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, it was intended originally for members of Congress. Yeah, it's also members of. I mean, it was intended originally for members of Congress. Yeah, it was intended for. You know, people who are need a higher level of security than Apple provides at its base. The problem for a lot of people is every single one of your Apple devices has to be upgraded to the latest version of the operating system to do this. That's what's stopping me. I have one device that is not upgraded um, but also it. It takes away some capabilities. It's like, um, google did the same thing. They had a higher level of protection, which I never used because you had to have two hardware keys. It was all this rigmarole, but that's what it is to be secure, you have to go through there's always payoffs for the security.
23:04 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
You lose conveniences and some benefits. I mean you see that throughout security cameras, if they're end-to-end encrypted, you lose access to things like person recognition or smart alerts, because the more secure you are, the harder it is to add these extra features. But yeah, for the people that need it and want it, this is pretty bad news and it's interesting that Apple did cave.
23:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's interesting is the law. The Investigatory Powers Act forbids Apple from telling anybody that they got this notice. The law makes it illegal for companies to reveal when the government has made such an order, much less like our national security letters in the United States from the Patriot Act. So Apple is, in a way, admitting that this is true. What Bloomberg said is true yeah, we did get this notice, but I still think it doesn't go the full distance that the UK government is asking. In order to do that, I think apple would have to withdraw from the uk and say, no, we're not going to do it at all and you're not going to be able to buy any apple products, which seems like an unlikely thing from apple drastic yeah they haven't withdrawn from china, which makes similar requirements.
24:20
um, they did withdraw, didn't they withdraw from russia? I feel like they they are not doing business in Russia, although they have acceded to Russian government requests to take some apps off of the App Store.
24:33 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Well, I mean I feel like their stance has always been you know, we follow the laws of the countries, that we Right? So I mean that's kind of a universal stance that they've always had. I mean, they can tell when they're unhappy about it, but you know, if you're doing business in that country, you follow the law of that country, which is why Google withdrew from China.
24:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, apple has. This is the latest is Apple has significantly reduced its operations in Russia. They closed their headquarters and stopped selling new products directly in the country. But and this is why they can accede to russia requests they still provide access to apple music tv plus. The app store is active, uh, and, as a result, when russia says you have to take those vpns out of the app store, uh, they do. Or take down those they. You know, lately it was youtube, uh, taking down videos that the government of russia requested. Um, yeah, it's a difficult position if you're a multinational.
25:33
I don't envy apple in this. In fact, apple, especially since the ascension of the trump administration, has got to deal with every country, including the united states. Yeah, delicately, very delicately. Tim cook's very good, he's very diplomatic. He's managed, for instance, to keep tariffs from biting into iphone profits, um, but that may not stay, that may not continue. So it's uh, I don't. I. All I could say I don't, not that anybody's ever offered me a job like that, but I can't imagine being the CEO of a multinational these days. And and and all the different governmental requirements and requests. I think that Apple caving in this request is the smallest caving it could do. Okay, fine, no, adp, if you're in the UK, I don't think it fully complies with the uk's request. So you know, balls in the uk's court. Maybe they'll all save face by just saying oh good, thank you, and leave it at that.
26:35
It is amazing how political everything has become, including, you know, running a tech company yeah, it's hard to do business these days, although business has always complained about regulation, and I think we're in an environment where regulation will not be as uh, what's the word? Stringent? Stringent, that's a good word. What does stringent have to do with astringent?
27:03 - Larry Magid (Guest)
after your watch. I don't know maggie.
27:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, I named it maggie because it sounds a little like maggie smith's although, you're right, it's more like uh, helen, mirren. Yeah, I should call her helen apple has added a priority notification support. You had this story jpt uh for robot vacs in 18.4.
27:28 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yes, we have. Well, there's lots of new exciting things in iOS 18.4 better, which just dropped on Friday. Apple's a bit behind the ball. That's kind of unusual, I think, for Friday, but I'm sure most people in the chat and everyone listening is far more interested in priority notifications. But I'm really interested in robot vacuums. Being a smart home reporter, this is something we've been waiting for.
27:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple promised Wait a minute it didn't support robot vacuums before.
27:57 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Apple Home has not supported robot vacuums directly. Siri shortcuts is one way you can control some robot vacuums using Siri on your phone, but not on your Apple Home. Pods and such. And this is one of the big things that people have been excited about Apple joining Matter or Apple creating or helping create Matter, because Matter was supposed to bring new device types to the Apple Home app. Because Apple has been relatively slow in adding new device types, support for new smart home device types in Apple Home since Apple Home launched and Robot Vacuums was sort of a glaring missing one, because that's one of the more popular smart home devices alongside cameras, which is still not part of Matter. But obviously Apple supports cameras through its HomeKit, secure video and some other ways you can use cameras in Apple Home.
28:53
But robot vacuums everyone was looking forward to. They announced at WWDC that it would be coming this year, as in 2024. But, like a lot of the things in iOS 18, it got delayed and we were expecting it in 18.3. There was some hints in the code that it was coming but not hadn't arrived yet. And then 18.4, we got Friday and one intrepid smart home reviewer managed to. I haven't downloaded the better, yet I'm not a dev better. I'm a more of a public better gal because I don't want my house to fall apart. Yeah, I haven't downloaded the better.
29:25 - AI voice (Announcement)
Yet I'm not a, not a dev. Better, I'm a more of a public, better gal Cause I don't want my house to fall apart.
29:29 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Um, but he managed to download it and get it going on the switch bot S 10, which is a very fun robot vacuum that I've um, that I have in my house. Um, and that switch bot is a great company. They they've been sort of on the matter bandwagon. They they added support for robot vacuums a while back, but so Matter helps add robot vacuums to all the smart home platforms. But most smart home platforms had supported robot vacuums before.
29:54
This is big news if you use Apple Home, so it basically now allows you to not have to worry, not have to use your robot vacuum app for most things If you just wanna start, stop, change type from vacuum to mop or strength or dock your robot. But in theory, the whole point of the smart home isn't necessarily pulling out your app to control things. Now you can add your robot into routines. So, for example, when you go to bed, your goodnight routine could include starting your robot vacuum downstairs. Or when you leave the house, it could include starting your vacuum when you leave the house and then ending your robot vacuum when you arrive home so that it's not running when you get there.
30:34
Um, so it's got you know, and you can do these things already in some of the robot vacuum apps themselves. But this way you know Inside the Apple ecosystem. And it also brings local control, which one thing I think a lot of people are interested in, who are sort of more into the local side of the smart home, is to see whether you'd be able to use your robot vacuum without having to rely on a connection with the internet. I don't know if that's gonna be possible, but it'd be interesting to see what kind of function and capability you'd have, because a lot of these robot vacuums haven't had. There've been quite a few sort of security issues or scares around um Robot vacuums in our homes.
31:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They map your house. They have cameras.
31:18 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Most of them are made in China and most of them are Chinese manufacturers.
31:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If at some point there were pictures surfaced of a guy on the toilet that the robot vacuumed, I was going to say that was actually Roomba. That was Roomba.
31:29 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Yeah, it's the only device in my house, the only camera that has access to my bedroom and bathroom is the robot. It's a vacuum cleaner. We don't have any other cameras in bedrooms and bathrooms, so there's privacy.
31:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's internet, but I think also for most just users, the idea that you don't have a different app for every single device and, in many cases, a different hub for every single device. If you could have a single hub and a single app, you could maybe even use Apple shortcuts to script it and that's how it would know that you're not home. The robot vac doesn't know you're not home, but your phone does. Or your cameras, might you know there are other devices that might not, might know if that kind of integration I think is necessary before the home really is smart, instead of just a bunch of individual devices doing their own thing.
32:14 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Right the way they work together with the things in your home, so that, ultimately, you know your, your home can respond to you, as opposed to you dictating to it what needs, what needs to be done. Um, and and robot vacuums really are useful devices. Um, yes, you can get out of vacuum and do it yourself, but who loves to vacuum?
32:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
there aren't many people, um and I found that I, even after having a roomba for some time, I still had to vacuum, like the room, but not as often this is a segway.
32:41 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I don't know if you guys I I just reviewed the newest, the newest roomba, the the 10 max, which is this like 1400 vacuum cleaner, jeez louise and they are very expensive. Now you can get cheap ones though oh yeah, but the fact is that it's fun and it's useful, but I have a 300 dyson which does a better job picking up dirt than a $1,400 Roomba.
33:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So what is this? Well, they don't have the power, by the way, I see you can get it at iRobot now for $899 instead of $1,400.
33:11 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Oh wow, it's down to $899. That's amazing. They probably realized nobody was going to spend twice that. They dropped it dramatically, this thing washes as well as vacuuming. It mops. It's a mouthwash kind of.
33:22 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Well, this one, yeah, has a little bit of a mop. There are some very moppy ones out there, though, the Roombas they just added mops quite recently, but the ones from Roborock and Ecovacs and SwitchBot have big oscillating mops that look like the mops you might actually use yourself, as opposed to the Roomba, which has this teeny little mop pad, these little rollers underneath it. Yeah, it's not, but some of the robot vacuums now have very good mopping capabilities much better, but again not going to be as good as doing it yourself.
33:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't trust a robot to mop my floor. I feel like that's something that requires a little bit more attention than just some machine.
34:00 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, oh well, they do a good job.
34:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What about? Do you have pets?
34:06 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I do. I have cats and a dog.
34:10 - Larry Magid (Guest)
What about machines?
34:11 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
so you you worried about pet messes, so most of them now have artificial. You know they have ai um obstacle avoidance, so they've been trained on specific obstacles they're going to find in your house so hot hot dog or not hot dog? Right and they know. So. It's very funny because you so, for exactly. The rumor is actually one of the better ones at this, so it can identify the difference between a pile of popcorn and a pile of poop, so which one would?
34:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you want to suck up Is there anything it can't do?
34:42 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Exactly. So if you would, you want it to suck up the popcorn yes, probably would you want it to avoid, and it's very careful, it'll go. It gives the poop a wide berth, whereas if it finds something like a cable or a shoe it will get up closer. Um, because those are things it can recognize, it will get up closer. There's actually a new robot that just came out at ces that has an arm that will pick up.
35:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I saw that, so dopey does it work.
35:14 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I well, I saw what's it do with the socks, throw it behind it.
35:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Putting them does it walk over to the bin?
35:21 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
where to put it. So in theory it can take them all, the socks, and put them in a basket. And then there was another one that was on show that can actually lift up shoes and it will go and put like you can tell it to put the shoes by the front door. Or you could even get to the point where it can identify shoes and you can tell it which like okay, these are my son's shoes, so go put it in my son's room.
35:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Christian, who's watching on YouTube, points out that, while I am a big fan of AI and I feel like you know AGI is just around the corner I won't trust a robot vacuum. I think there are things mainly my attitude, benito, you'll confirm this. Our producer and I were talking is that I like AI in conjunction with humans. I don't really trust especially AI that has agency like a robot vacuum. I don't really trust it. Ai that has agency like a robot vacuum I don't really trust it to always do the right thing and it only needs to try to clean up poop once.
36:12 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, yes, well, actually, roomba has its, has its poop promise. It's pet owners promise that if it, if it does accidentally clean up pet poop, um, it will give you, they will give you a new one.
36:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hilarity will ensue if it picks up the poop and puts it where your shoes go.
36:29 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I hope you don't have to send it in.
36:32 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
That would be problematic. It is, and they I mean this is sort of the beginning of and we've seen some reports of Apple and Google in the last few months, you know, working on robots, humanoid-style robots for the home, I mean really a robotic vacuum is the beginning, is the foundation of what we're going to see when it comes to, it's the easiest, it's the low-hanging fruit in robot.
36:54 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I want one to be the dishwasher for me, yeah.
36:58 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Well, I mean, yeah, it's pretty tall.
37:00 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Yeah.
37:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We are so freaking lazy. You know it is true, since I got thousands of dollars, so we don't have to empty the dishwasher.
37:11 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
It's such a hassle. I don't know why. Honestly, I actually enjoy vacuuming, so I'd be okay bypass yeah I don't mind a little tidying.
37:16 - AI voice (Announcement)
I think it's satisfying you're like, oh, wow, it was. Yeah, you got something.
37:20 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, you like hear it as it's like. You know that's the weird things, it's the weird asmr angle of it. But but doing the dishes is not like. I guess I have a dishwasher but yeah, loading and unloading it a pain in the butt. Why I don't know, but it is.
37:34 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Well, a dishwasher is a robot. So there you go, I guess.
37:38 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
We have an arm now, a simple robot.
37:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but it's the next washing machine a robot.
37:48 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, I mean it's a. It's a device that is a mechanical device that is cleaning our clothes for us, like the dishwasher is a mechanical device that's cleaning our dishes for us. But yeah, the next that it doesn't have the intelligence, although some dishwashers and washing machines now are smart and they know adapt how to clean.
38:04
Yeah, my washing machine with AI and honestly, I think those purposes, like single purpose robotic devices, make much more sense to me than like a Rosie the Robot, although the dream, the ideal, what a lot of companies are working towards is this humanoid robotic figure that will kind of do everything for you in your home, but that's mildly terrifying, seems like very, very far away away, incredibly expensive when and when and if it ever arrives, whereas having devices that can help make chores easier or help save you time just you know Flintstones and the Jetsons. You see, this is what the people that are developing these all grew up on, that's the problem right there.
38:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's exactly the problem.
38:55 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Would you call a Tesla with full self-driving, a robot?
38:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is. Yeah, I mean, what is a robot? I think sometimes we think of a robot as humanoid, yeah, but it doesn't need to. Yeah, yeah, I mean, what is a robot? I think sometimes we think of a robot as humanoid, yeah, but it doesn't need to be.
39:06 - Larry Magid (Guest)
No, in fact, that was a breakthrough from Roomba when they first started Roomba. That was one of their breakthroughs is we don't need our robot to look like a human.
39:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We just need it to be designed to, or walk upstairs, climb stairs. I mean the Roomba doesn't.
39:26 - Larry Magid (Guest)
There is one. There's something called MyGo, if I'm not mistaken. You might know, jennifer, there is a robot that was shown that will climb a robot vacuum, that will climb stairs.
39:34 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
So well, there's the dreamy. One will climb one step, but there is one that, yeah, it's not great Right.
39:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It gets one step up and then just stops.
39:43 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I had to carry my Roomba all the way up my staircase.
39:46 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
It's for, like you know, houses that have like a transition or something. It's to help. But you know what?
39:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you can do one step, it should just stop and then do the next step. It's just, it's all.
39:57 - Larry Magid (Guest)
one step all the way up the funny thing is, I actually did carry my Roomba upstairs to do by upstairs today and I can't remember whether it's upstairs or downstairs, like where it is right now. The only thing I know is it won't fall down the stairs.
40:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you had matter you could press a button and it would play the do-do-do-do-do-do sound and you'd know where it was Last time I picked up a Roomba and positioned it. I positioned it underneath my wife's tire in the garage, hoping she would back over it.
40:26 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Oh, can you see this?
40:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's saying clear a path, check for items, what Can't pick up the socks, what I don't know, and this is that's what bothers me.
40:40 - Larry Magid (Guest)
There's a locate button.
40:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Press the locate button.
40:42 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Is there a locate button? No, there is. See what happened. What bothers me is I do have to intervene. I have to intervene pretty often. Yeah, and you know that's the point of the arm.
40:54 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Less, less needed if it can only pick itself up and move it up I mean stairs.
41:00 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I never have to intervene with my dice and I just carry it around with me, and but you're doing it.
41:04 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
That's the difference.
41:04 - Larry Magid (Guest)
That's why you don't have to intervene larry, do you have to intervene with my Dyson? I just carry it around with me, but you're doing it. That's the difference.
41:05 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
That's why you don't have to intervene, but Larry do you have to intervene with your Tesla full self-driving.
41:10 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I was going to say that analogy. It's different levels of robotics, I guess, if that's how we're going to talk about it, because the Tesla isn't a robo vehicle Technically it can't be done yet, right, but it's like some level of automation. So I guess we just have different tiers of well we were talking about the waymo earlier. You've ridden the waymo.
41:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's a. Is that a robot then?
41:31 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
it is because you don't. It's not like level five autonomy, but it's still. You're able to get in the vehicle. You don't have to intervene in any way. It drives itself.
41:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All you do is get in, get out and, like, start a ride, um, so that's, like you know, the next level of autonomy and what we don't know no one has to be in, it'll come pick you up, and that's what we don't know and has never been really fully revealed is how often it phones home and gets a human driver at the office to handle it. And we know that that happens and may even happen more than anybody's admitting yeah there are human drivers back at the home office.
42:06 - Larry Magid (Guest)
That are manipulating it through a joystick or whatever. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, kind of like long road ahead.
42:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, I asked my uh, my uh B computer to tell me it was when it was time for a break, and it neglected to, so I better do it myself. It's time for a break now. We have a great panel. I thought we would. Jennifer Patterson-Hutui is here. From the Verge, larry Magid from Connect Safely and from CNET, the wonderful Abrar Alhidi. All three of you, so good to have you. Thank you for joining us.
42:35
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Why is ExpressVPN the best? Super secure. It would take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to get past ExpressVPN's encryption. It's easy to use. You just fire up the app and then you're protected. Big button on it. I love that. And then you're protected. Big button on it. I love that. And it's on every device iPhones, android phones, laptops, tablets and more so you can stay private on the go. And it's rated number one by top tech reviewers at well, cnet and the Verge. It's the only one I use. Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpncom slash twit. That's e-x-p-r-e-s-s. Vpncom slash twit right now. Get an extra four months free when you buy a two-year package expressvpncom slash twit. Uh, let's see what else is happening. Oh, I didn't mention. I meant to mention the 18-4. You mentioned that the beta is out. The developer beta adds nice support for robot vacuums, but siri is still a yes, siri is still sad.
44:59 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, sad, siri, sad. So all the a lot of things that were announced in WWDC about how we'd be able to Siri would be able to use context and Apple Intelligence would be able to kind through your text messages and figure out who mum was and which airport it was from and what time she said she was gonna be there, and then pull up the map and send you your route and what time you need to leave. All this kind of smart stuff that they promised us with Apple intelligence, which right now has not arrived. It was supposed to arrive at the end of last year. I think was the original sort of idea and hope, and now, although they never were really specific, they were like there'll be lots of great new features coming to Siri in the future, and there was just a line at the end of the press release that came out this week about iOS 18.4, which was mainly focused on the Vision Pro, because that's finally got Apple intelligence. That said, and we'll be bringing more to Siri soon, soon, that was it Soon.
46:15
So, yeah, and that's something I'm really looking forward to is a smarter Siri, because it has, in the smart home in particular, fallen well fallen behind. It's always been behind, and this is an area that there's so much opportunity, especially with the context that Apple has, where other voice assistants in the smart home don't have. That. I'm you know. I understand it's complicated and difficult what they're trying to do, so I'm guessing the reason we're seeing delays is that things right now, as you add artificial intelligence generative AI into the home environment, you start to really hit some major roadblocks, and we've seen Amazon and Google also having delays in bringing this type of intelligence to our home, so it'll be interesting to see. I mean, what do you guys want? A smarter Siri?
47:04 - Larry Magid (Guest)
for what?
47:04 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
do you feel like we?
47:06 - Larry Magid (Guest)
need. It also brings up some privacy issues. So, for example, one of the things I love about chat GPT is one of the things I hate about chat GPT. I can go in I recently what was it? I was, I had some kind of medical question and I asked it and it actually gave me the answer based on what it knows about my medical situation. Well, because you take this drug, it knows about this Because at one point a long time ago, I asked it about a certain drug, and so it has a complete dossier on me, which is incredibly useful but incredibly creepy, and the same thing is true. I mean okay. So yeah, it knows.
47:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you've got to get over. That is my position, because if you want an AI to be useful, it does need to know what drugs you take, right?
47:47 - Larry Magid (Guest)
But isn't that a challenge for Apple? Because that means somewhere on the server, unless they can do it on the device. But do you want it on the cross device If you go out on your Mac, your iPhone, your iPad? So somewhere on a server it has to know about what time your mom's flying in, where she's flying from, what time she went to the bathroom in the airplane. I mean, do you remember?
48:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
for a while, google had this interface with cards and it would know things like that because it would know about your calendar and would it pop up your airplane tickets right, and it would probably you're going to work, it would pop up traffic conditions and they stopped doing that and I think it was because people were now this was quite a few years ago, maybe it's eight years ago. People got creeped out by it. I understand Apple's reluctance because they're the privacy company, but it's always been my contention that's going to hold Apple back from a useful AI.
48:39 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, I think, especially with where Android has been headed, with things like Gemini I mean, if you get you, you get any Android device these days you're going to have a Gemini that's very deeply integrated into all of your tasks and routines and you'll see the Samsung devices have that now, brief, where you're going to know what your traffic conditions are going to be when you're leaving the house, because it's looking at your calendar and it's looking at all the stuff that you do on your phone and again, to try to suggest things that are helpful.
49:03
And I tend to be kind of cautious around AI because it's creepy, but as I've been kind of diving into testing more devices and that includes things like Gemini because it's just so baked into any Android phone these days you start to realize how helpful it is, and so I think, once you get over the creepy factor, you think, okay, I actually have become quite reliant and, like my, my Google home speaker has not been upgraded to Gemini. It's still the Google assistant and I feel like it's the dumbest thing like I've ever interacted with, because it just doesn't know anything, like it doesn't know context. It gives me really terrible answers. I tried, like it still has a really hard time connecting to my you know smart TV, even though it shouldn't, like I have to restart it all the time. But anyway, I just think you know I I personally have been on this journey of getting over the creepy factor of ai and just embracing it for what it is, where, if you do want it to be helpful, you just kind of got to let go of privacy.
49:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We haven't had privacy in a while anyway, so might as well oh, god, there are people that were cringing as you say that this is where.
50:04 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Apple has the advantage, though, if they can make this work in this and sorry I'm bringing it back to the smart home, but because Apple already has and Apple has a foothold in the smart home already that is focused on local and private, and the difference being, if you add in generative AI, you need the model, so you need the cloud, but if they can manage to connect a smarter Siri with the smart home and your context but keep all of that the context it has about you on the phone, but keep it all within your devices in your home, like using your Apple TV, which is a hub for the Apple Home, or a HomePod, they have the ability to do some of this and still keep it on a local level.
50:50
And this is again what Matt is helping with, because that is all local connections between devices, and I think that's sort of a holy grail for them. I think they're going to potentially and we've already seen them do this with Apple Intelligence offer two levels, like you've got your local Apple Intelligence and then you can go out to ChatGPT or you can go out to the rumor is now Gemini is coming next as the option on your iPhone. When you talk to Well, that's Apple punting isn't it when Apple says oh, I don't know.
51:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You want to use ChatGPT, they're going to know everything about you and I'm sure they'll have the same morning with Gemini. That's Apple saying. You know? It's funny because Siri was apparently smarter back in the day when it would say well, I don't know, but here's what I found on the Web about this Right, that was Siri's stock response. Now it makes up stuff. John Gruber and another blogger whose name escapes me, I apologize Asked the mod, the new Siri who won all of the Super Bowls. They even went through Super Bowl 60, which is in the future, and it only got about five or six right and the rest it was just wrong. In the past it would have said I don't know, but here's what's on the web which would have been a better, frankly, a more accurate response. So I think Apple, if you ask me, that's why you're not getting the promised smarter Siri in 18.4. Incidentally, it's not just Apple.
52:12
Amazon has an event on Wednesday. They're going to announce new Echos, but there won't be any new hardware. They were going to make that event be all about the intelligent. You know, I can't say the A word, a word pro. I don't want to trigger people's echoes. And they've put. They had a meeting on Valentine's Day last week and apparently decided yeah, it's not ready yet. It was answering things wrong. It was here's the Washington Post story Amazon's new echo delayed again over incorrect answers.
52:45 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I think they will announce it. The delay is we probably won't get it.
52:51
They'll announce it and they'll say coming soon, which is what they did over a year ago, because they actually announced the revamped smarter Amazon A lady in 2023 in the fall and they kept saying it was coming, was coming. It kept getting delayed and we've had lots of reports from bloomberg and reuters and the washington post talking to people inside amazon who say it, it, this is. This is this meshing of the existing voice assistants that we have in our homes and on our devices and the generative ai poweredLM models are that they can't. Apparently the new Amazon voice assistant can't do things that the old one can, like turn on lights reliably, Because they're not able. They're struggling. The reports are to mesh the existing capabilities with these enhanced capabilities, so it's gonna be interesting. I think we're going to get something on Wednesday which I'm going to be there. I'm excited.
53:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh good, thanos Panay. You'll get to see his debut as an Amazon employee. He was, of course, the guy who, famously, was always pumped about the new Surface from Microsoft. He left Microsoft probably, I'm imagining, because he was a little dissatisfied with what he was getting to do there and is now in charge of hardware at amazon. So this is his debut, isn't it right?
54:10 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
this will. So he, they had new kindles. They did a little event last year at the end of last year for kindles, but this is his first big one. Yeah, um, this is the press, the pre. It's a press event and I don't think they're not streaming, otherwise we would cover it.
54:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would like to yeah, so it's it.
54:26 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
But yeah, this is his first big show and I mean he's most likely the reason that this has been delayed, because I mean, he's coming in, this is his first big thing, even though it started long before him. I think we will get a new echo device, so we will get new hardware. I'm I'm fairly certain we haven't seen the original, an update to the original Echo smart speaker since 2020. So it's long overdue and it would make sense that they would debut the new or launch, because they've already debuted the new Alexa, or the remarkable Alexa, as it is reportedly known as with some kind of hardware, although it is going to going to work, they've said on all previous echo devices, and so I think we'll get some hardware. I'm thinking, my guess. Well, we're going to get maybe glasses and earbuds too because I don't think they want this to just be in the house very well with it.
55:20
Exactly smart glasses are very popular right now and they have. Amazon has the echo frames, so they have a, that's right, they already and they have earbuds, but the earbuds haven't been updated in a long time.
55:32
They're not that smart they're yeah no, but I think, you know, I think this will be a big push to take alexa out of the home, um, which they've tried to do for a long time, um, but not successfully, and so I think we may could see glasses, we could see new buds, we'll almost certainly see a new speaker, but whether this is the real new Alexa or whether we'll get sort of what we're getting with Siri like incremental upgrades and we're seeing this with Google too, on the Google Nest devices in the home, it's got a little better, but still not at the level that they're just. None of these companies are quite ready to unleash this into our homes yet.
56:11 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Well, one of our sponsors at Connect Safely is Amazon Kids, and speaking of the home, I mean one thing many homes have are kids, and I think that they are way ahead of Google and Apple when it comes to products aimed at children, including a robot. We're talking about robots Astro, which is a robot aimed at children Well, not aimed at children, but children.
56:33 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
My kids loved it.
56:35 - Larry Magid (Guest)
But they're older but you know.
56:39
So I think that Amazon is going to have a very interesting opportunity when it comes to home automation in general. The other thing it knows is what you buy. I mean, I actually recently, this week, reviewed some personal finance management programs and one of the things I did is figure out where I'm spending my money, and I was shocked how much money I spent on Amazon. I knew it was a lot, but I had no idea how much it was. And the point is that it knows about many of the things I have in my home because that's where I got them, whether they're from Amazon or a third party, and I think that they could figure out ways to integrate all this stuff, you know, without having to ask you questions.
57:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It won't be the first time poor Panos Panay has been blindsided by the company he works for, when he I think this is one of the reasons he left microsoft. At the microsoft build conference in 2023, he was scheduled to do a keynote about ai and satchin adele had decided to do it first. Oh no, and poor. I don't know if you remember this, but poor panos p all his talking points had been excavated away.
57:46 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Oh my.
57:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
God, and he just basically kind of BS'd for half an hour. Everybody who watches it. I certainly felt like a humiliating situation. And then shortly thereafter he left for Amazon. He's got to be a little bit thinking oh my God, here we go again. I'm going to get on stage and I'm not going gonna be able to say anything about a smarter amazon echo. The rumor is it's gonna cost five bucks more a month yeah, the old echo will still be available, right.
58:14
So if people want to set kitchen timers, and uh, what do you use it for? Mostly kitchen timers playing music, asking for podcasts, maybe Finding out how old.
58:26 - Larry Magid (Guest)
TV stars are because I want to see if I'm older. Isn't that weird?
58:29 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Maybe, it's an age thing, Larry. Are they still alive?
58:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm always asking that Like how old is that person? Right?
58:35 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Turning on lights. I use that often on lights. Turning on lights. Yeah, see, that's because you're a home automation experts there are, I mean, and Amazon's got a fair amount. Can I tie my echo to the cassettes.
58:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have cassettes. Yes, can I the Lutron? I could make it turn on and off lights, oh sure.
58:53 - Larry Magid (Guest)
That's the only way I turn it on. We don't even have a light switch in our bedroom. Oh, that's a mistake. I could tell you right now.
58:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, it is going somewhere, but I haven't used it.
59:01 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I don't know where it is. It's somewhere in the corner.
59:04 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, I think Amazon's big problem, though, is that it has the context of the home, but it doesn't have your personal context, which is what Google and Apple has, so it'll be interesting. I'm expecting to see some kind of element if they do launch this AI where you can feed it more information about you, a bit like your bee on your wrist, and I was just this. Last week I just put a review up on the Verge for a calendar digital calendar. I was testing. That has its own sidekick AI that you send data to so that it knows. So I can send my son's tennis schedule and it will put all the dates and times on my calendar for me, which is just what's the name of that?
59:46
Life-changing. It's called Skylight Calendar.
59:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Skylight. Yeah, yeah, I saw your review, yeah.
59:52 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, and so the Sidekick is the new feature new-ish. It just came out a couple months ago and there's a fee. It's $40. Well, it was $40 a year when I was testing, and like an hour after I posted my review, they doubled the price to $80. But my question immediately from my editor was like well, would you still pay for it? Was it still valuable? And it was very valuable.
01:00:18
I would be tempted, and I think that's what Amazon needs to do with Alexa, if it's going to add this charge which it needs to do because, as we've seen reports of, it's lost a lot of money on its Echo devices and its smart voice assistant that it's got to add that extra value. And I could see this type of thing, like what Sidekick does for Skylight Calendar, which is help organize your family. I mean, that's Amazon's wheelhouse. You know, as we were talking about earlier, they're very much in people's homes and used by families quite extensively, more so, probably, than the other two. So it will be because they're so inexpensive as well. They need that level. They need to bring the context to Amazon Smart Home, which Google and Apple already has. And again, though, who will trust it with their privacy? Well, as a parent, having someone fill out my calendar for me is worth it, if there's value to it.
01:01:18 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
You're willing to trade out your privacy.
01:01:20 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Significant value, just like we use Gmail. We're willing to trade out our privacy.
01:01:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll be honest I read your review and it made me want to have kids. And you've got kids, yeah, but they're 30 and 32. I don't need that I don't have their schedule. I wish that I had piano lessons and tennis lessons and soccer games to go to. This looks so cool hanging on the wall of your kitchen.
01:01:41 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I love this. Yeah, it's neat and we talked about it on Tech News Weekly and, as I said, I'm sure a lot of your audience would be able to roll their own with Dacboard and like some E-ink screen and do something amazing. But if you just want to plug and play, solution that just that works. This really does. And the AI assistant portion has been incredibly useful, and this is what I want to see come to.
01:02:06
I could see this coming to Amazon's assistant. I mean, siri and Google could do this too, and the charge you know this is they're charging $80 a year. Chatgpt can do some of this, so can Gemini, but you have to pay for the higher tiers. So, people, you know, if they can show value and, like you say, if it's something that is going to help you, just like you know, if the robot vacuum can clean your floor for you, you're going to pay for it. If the assistant can keep your life in order for you, you may consider paying for it. So I think that's.
01:02:39
But can they bring enough value? And that's what I'm interested to see on Wednesday, when they hopefully announce this new Amazon Alexa revamped, re-architected, who will hopefully be a lot smarter and be able to do a lot more in your home. So, and a couple of the other things they've said that it's going to be able to do is like multiple commands at once, which is something that none of the other voice assistants managed to do and that could be really useful. So you can say, turn out the lights, turn on the TV, turn down the thermostat and lock the back door, and it would just do it all for you.
01:03:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the goal, that's the holy grail of home automation. Or even better.
01:03:19 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Tea. Earl Grey hot Tea.
01:03:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Earl Grey hot exactly.
01:03:25 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Why couldn't you, for example, connect ChatGPP or some other AI agent to your Google calendar and have it organize it for you and then project it?
01:03:34 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
So I did that, I did that and you had. So what ChatGPP did. Well, I couldn't connect it to the calendar. What it did was it spat out an ICS file and let me import that. But that was. That's too many steps. That's sitting at a computer. That's not helpful.
01:03:48
Whereas with the Sidekick on Skylight. I just sent the file via email and it did everything. It added it all to the calendar for me, automatically, got the times right, the place, the person whose calendar it was. So, yeah, it's that extra step. Chat GPT is too general, I suppose. It's just not. That's not what it's specifically designed for, and I think that sort of specific artificial intelligence, when you have something that does, going back to the robot, like when it does one thing and does it well, that's valuable.
01:04:20
Whereas when it tries to, do too many things and messes most of them up, which?
01:04:24 - Larry Magid (Guest)
is like what most of them do today I have, as I'm sure leo does as well a gazillion things that track my sleep and my health and all that and half the time I don't. I can't understand them right. I still don't know what hrv I mean, I don't know what it stands for. But so I actually started feeding in the screens from some of these, like the the screen for my fitbit and the screen for my my smart ring, from some of these, like the screen for my Fitbit and the screen for my smart ring, into ChatGPT and said would you explain this to me in common English so I can do something with it? And it's actually remarkably useful. And the same thing I had to analyze a lab test and a radiology report.
01:04:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
RIT guy Russell feeds terms of service and end user agreements into ChatGPT and says are there any issues I should worry about in here or is there anything I need to know from this, Because nobody reads the terms of service? That's genius. I love it. Yeah, there are some. If you give it something and it analyzes it, there's some very good things. It will be ironic, won't it?
01:05:19
You're sending your instructions via email, Jennifer. It would be ironic if we had these great smart machines, but you had to use a command line to tell her what to do.
01:05:29 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Well, you can also upload a photo and it can pass that.
01:05:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you worry about hallucinations, though? Like being set off on a wild goose chase.
01:05:38 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
So it did. What I thought was neat about this is it will send, it will do everything that I've asked, so I'll send it a picture, everything that I've asked. So I'll send it its picture, a picture of my son's schedule. Or I'll forward an email from my son's coach, which somewhere in the email mentions a date, and it will pass that data. But then it sends me an email after it's added everything to my calendar and shows everything it's added, and right next to each entry is a delete button. So anything it's added that it shouldn't have I can easily delete. But that does require me going to check it. So, yeah, I mean being able to. I would worry about hallucinations in my smart home, for sure, and this is what I like about this. So far, my sort of dabbling with artificial intelligence in my home is, or generative AI, is that I'm able to check its work and that you know you kind of.
01:06:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a shame because ultimately the best, most useful thing would be get the human out of the loop yeah, ultimately, but you can't if you can't trust it. You can't.
01:06:33 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
No, and this is this is the problem with generative air and the smart home is if it went wild, there's a lot that could go wrong in your home, as opposed to if you're just sitting and talking in a window with a chat bot and it wants it starts saying it's falling in love with you. You know the worst thing that can happen, whereas if it can start adjusting your thermostat in the middle of the night or unlocking your doors, without you doing anything.
01:06:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this is where I'm. I noticed jennifer forgot to close the garage door locker doors and turn off the lights downstairs, but I know she would want me to, so I'm going to do it.
01:07:06 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, long overdue that we have a seat.
01:07:09 - Larry Magid (Guest)
My security system will lock my door, but it won't unlock it for me, and I think that was a deliberate.
01:07:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a better, that's a good, that's probably a good thing. There are some things that are more dangerous. Right, it's analogous to the Waymo, you know at first. I mean, if you think of it, a self-driving vehicle could cause horrendous problems, right. And so we first get in gingerly and kind of watch, holding on tight onto the oh shoot handle, but eventually we kind of relax into it and say I okay, I think I can't trust it and that's the danger.
01:07:40 - Larry Magid (Guest)
That's when you get in trouble that's when your troubles?
01:07:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, it's true yeah, when.
01:07:43 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I when I first got, when, when I had Autopilot on my Tesla, I completely didn't trust it. I mean, I knew it was a piece of crap and so I used it, but I watched it every minute. Both self-driving is like 98% good. It's those 2%, it's that 2%, that can literally kill you yeah. Right, let's take a break.
01:08:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're yeah Right, let's take a break. You're going to take a break. We've got a great panel Having a lot of fun, going to have some more fun. It's not over yet. Jennifer Patterson. Tui Abrar Alhiti. Larry Magid I like to mix up the order just to see if Benito's paying attention. He got it Bang on. Thank you, benito. Our show today brought to you by Zip Recruiter.
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01:11:18
We've been talking a lot about AI. I think there's no question there's an AI boom According to OpenAI. This shocked me. Ai boom according to open AI. This shocked me. Uh, chat GPT now serves 400 million users every week. 400 million weekly active users that's kind of mind-blowing. I mean, there's only 350 million people in the US. Uh, that's worldwide.
01:11:45
In december, uh, open ai said they had three million weekly active users. It's now up. What is that? 33 percent. They don't say how many of them have paid. That's the question, right? Yeah, I think even if all of them paid the 20 bucks a month, it still wouldn't cover the bill. No, wouldn't cover the electric bill. Yeah, but I mean this is why the stock market's going crazy and investment firms, vcs, are going crazy over AI, because the upside is very high, is very up, even if it's a money loser right now. Right, developer traffic for Open ai has doubled in the last six months. Uh, enterprise wise, open ai has two million paying enterprise users. I don't know if that's the 200, I think that might be the 200 buck a month plan. Um, anyway, open ai, obviously a little stung by the chinese deep seek, is uh quick to tell you that they're. They're doing fine, we're doing fine.
01:12:52 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Thank you very much very much broken through into the mainstream and that's, you know, where we've seen for a lot of tech products. This is, you know, just going back to the robot vacuums. Like there's the one area where all my normal friends talk about, like they all want robot vacuums and video doorbells.
01:13:09
And then they all started talking about chat, gpt, when it's been interesting and even my husband was like oh, someone at work said I could use this new thing called chat GPT and I was like, oh my God is your husband a tech Luddite?
01:13:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is he a?
01:13:23 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
complete, stays away as much as possible, mainly because he's forced to live in a smart home. That'll do it, that'll do it, Honey.
01:13:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is there a way just to turn the light on, Please, yes, yes, that's my life. Stacey Higginbotham always talked about her husband like honey, why are the blinds going up and down? And the poor guy. He was so happy when she got out of the business.
01:13:49 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Stacey and I have you know we need to get a spousal support group going, I think so.
01:13:53 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Discuss this. My wife would definitely join. I drive her crazy, but it is, I think, chatgpt really has become.
01:13:59 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
You know it's mainstream and everyone is familiar with it. You know it's mainstream and everyone is familiar with this and I think it coming to the iPhone, even though that's still quite limited because you have to have a certain type of a certain model of phone to use it at the moment. But, yes, this is a clear indicator that generative AI is, you know, is going mainstream and we're going to. Everyone is using it now for mainly for mainly for work. I would say, is where we're at the moment, like it's useful for things like spreadsheets and and the things like larry was talking about earlier, about, you know, deciphering um, complicated details this three-page letter from my investment firm, which I think is important, and I I got the idea from leo.
01:14:46 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I'm going to scan it and, yeah, the chat it and figure out what the hell it's all about, because I don't want to read it.
01:14:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You've seen the New Yorker cartoon Maybe it wasn't a New Yorker cartoon, Maybe it was XKCD where the guy says I'm going to take this bullet point and have AI generate a nice long email to my boss telling him what I've done, and then the boss saying I'm going to take this email and distill it down using AI to one bullet point.
01:15:07 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Wow, federal workers could use it to report the five things they did last week Five things I would be hard pressed to tell you five things I did last week.
01:15:17 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I think 300, half of those 400 million are probably students using it to write essays as well.
01:15:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a little scary for teachers. I would imagine Teachers take two tacks. Jeff Jarvis tells me this. He's a little scary for teachers. I would imagine Teachers take two texts. Jeff Jarvis tells me this. He's a professor, deals with college kids a lot. They take two texts. One is they ban it, they say you may not, and they try to use tools to find AI generated texts and so forth. The others embrace it and I think this is the proper way to handle it and say look, it's going to be in your life from now on, so let's use it, but let's use it appropriately and I think that teaching people how to use it.
01:15:59 - Larry Magid (Guest)
One of the biggest challenges I have as a person who gets paid to write is I will sometimes use ChatGPT or Jeb and I for ideas, for outlines, for verifying and for not verifying information, finding out some things, and sometimes it phrases it so well that it's just tempting to steal it. But I figure I'm not allowed to do that because people are paying me for my original writing.
01:16:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, is it? First of all, is it stealing? I agree with you.
01:16:22 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
The New York Times is now using AI. I saw that I I was shocked that was very surprising, yeah so not writing, not writing stories, but for sort of around the work. Sure, I use it all times, yes, but they're very well, we're very specific at the verge, where we we do not use, yeah, the verge broke this story?
01:16:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
actually, it was Jesse Weatherbed. The New York Times adopts AI tools in the newsroom, encouraging staff to use AI to suggest edits, headlines and questions to ask during interviews. I was pretty shocked when I read this story, to be honest.
01:17:05 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I think the reporters at the New York Times are a bit unhappy as well, from what I heard.
01:17:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The staff were reportedly, jess writes sent new editorial guidelines detailing permitted use for and this surprised me Echo and other AI tools. No, okay, new York Times, do not use Echo for your AI. That's good, yeah, oh, wait a minute. No, no, it's not Amazon Echo, okay, sorry. No, it's a new internal AI tool. Yes, Because, Amazon's is.
01:17:37 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Alexa, and Echo is the speaker.
01:17:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yes, but that is a bad choice of word, it seems to me they were encouraged to use it, encourage newsroom employees to suggest edits and revisions for their work. So in effect, I don't know that new york times, but I know a lot of places copy editors have been, you know, banished to some degree right.
01:17:57 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I feel like copy editors are even more important now, if that's what I think into.
01:18:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ai right, do you still have copy editors? You do, and I hope that remains true for the foreseeable I can always tell when a blog, uh, or a website doesn't. Yeah, because they're typos they're grammatical errors.
01:18:13 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
They're just little mistakes absolutely also, I saw a posting um that I pulled up here. It was from um gannett. It was a ai assisted reporter, um you'll be assisted by technology to create a high volume of stories from trusted press releases and similar sources. That was a job description. It's crazy. It's unreal. Who is that for this is for the USA Today. This is not a beat reporting position.
01:18:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wait a minute. I just want to make a note that that reassured Jennifer that it was for USA Today.
01:18:45 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Well, that makes sense, but yeah, um, it was the connect. People read you in the usa today, but it was gonna it's.
01:18:51 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
You know they've been, they're not known for their journalistic but yeah, that's excellent.
01:18:58 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
So to hear it says, to see something like this from the new york times as startling, because I don't think people don't expect that from well it depends on how they're used, I mean I have no problem using it as an idea generator.
01:19:09 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Um, you know, did I miss something? And but I I don't. I think I've used it.
01:19:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, when you interview authors, you're always given from the publicity department a, a one sheet. That just that's basically. If you would like, you could describe our author this way and ask them these four questions. And I think there are a lot of lazy people on Good Morning, muncie or whatever, that use this. I know because I used to be on the West Coast, so I'd be the end of the book tour back when I was working at Canberra in San Francisco and I always had all the authors on and they would have answered that same four questions a hundred times by the time they got to me. So so I knew first of all I couldn't use those. I wouldn't, and they were always so relieved when I asked them a question that wasn't in that set of, you know, proposed questions. Here this scares me a little bit. Jess writes that they want to use this echo AI to suggest edits and revisions. Okay. Copy editor generate summaries okay, good. Use promotional copy for social social media okay. This is the one that bothered me and seo headlines that's scary.
01:20:22 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
So there was a yeah, so the verge cast podcast that the verge has um, uh, executive editor Jake Krasnakis, and uh, and David Pierce, who hosts it, was talking about this and this was Jake was saying, well, we don't do this on the verge there are, I mean, and um, you know you guys, you use humans for the link bait, right.
01:20:46
Well, no, no, just that when you write. So the writing's the fun part. Right, we were just saying that we love writing, but there's so many menial tasks. Once you've filed your story, you have to fill out like three different headlines. This is what they're talking about. So you have to. You've got your main headline Then, then you've got your headline for your social media dissemination. Then you have your SEO headline, which will be different from your main headline.
01:21:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's not the main headline, that's a special SEO version. Is that the?
01:21:16 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
subhead or is it only in the page? No, it's the search. When you search, you may notice. If you look at the headline on this vergecom article and then you go back and Google it, it will have a headline the headline in the verge article is very exactly straightforward.
01:21:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The new york times adopts ai tools in the newsroom.
01:21:34 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yes, and it's perfect and this may and some, not all headlines get rewritten, but most will have four different versions of headlines, and let me go back to see this is what they do at cnet too? I don't know.
01:21:46 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
But we, you used to, we don't necessarily anymore. Yeah, so our work. It takes a lot of extra time, yeah, and our main headline ends up being what we optimize for seo or try to optimize for seo, but we used to write kind of separate, yeah yeah, because there'll be.
01:22:00 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
The main seo headline is normally very dry. Yeah, the verge quite often will have more quirky headlines you might notice on our front page, and those wouldn't be as good for.
01:22:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
SEO. It's like I name shows, like I'm going to name this show Muskie, and that's terrible for SEO.
01:22:22 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I don't know. A lot of people search you on Muskie.
01:22:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But then our editors will come in and they will put a subhead in that is like the three different things we talked about yes, yes, so you've.
01:22:33 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
So this is by the way.
01:22:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hate that. I don't want SEO. I always get I've always loved you guys' headlines.
01:22:39 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
They're so fun.
01:22:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The headline should be my position is we're going to cover 30 news stories. There's no way you can in a subhead right summarize what we did, so just use the stupid funny headline. And then the whole point just between us kids is we try to pick headlines at the end of the show so that people are forced to listen to the entire show to find out what to get to it.
01:23:00 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Yes, perfect, it's like you take the transcript of this show and feed it into a generative ai and have it boil it down to whatever, it'd be an hour and a half shorter, yeah.
01:23:10 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I'm kidding. I feel like your strategy for naming is like when grocery stores put milk at the back of the store, so that you have to walk through everything else to get to it, it's genius.
01:23:18 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I mean, it's just like all of it. The stuff you want is never at the front of the store.
01:23:22 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
The, but you know what is interesting about this?
01:23:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
through the gift shop.
01:23:26 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Exactly what's interesting about this SEO thing is the main thing we hear about in media is the death of SEO with AI right. So to have AI optimized for SEO and then kill SEO is hilarious.
01:23:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is. It's a. In fact, to some degree, I think a lot of ai is talking to other ai, just like that cartoon. Yeah, you know? Yeah, if I name the show musked, people will think that we talked about musk in the show, though it's genius. We haven't, and we haven't and we won't.
01:24:01 - AI voice (Announcement)
I'm trying to avoid it, good, you don't want to be honest, come on. Yeah, if you want to. I mean, there's plenty of places you can.
01:24:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can hear about musk, yeah, uh, it doesn't have to be here everywhere. Yeah, every well, that's. You know. Uh, we used to talk a lot about it and uh, I realized that people are coming to us as a, as a refuge like relief.
01:24:21 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I know we had the first week of everything going kind of crazy a few weeks we had a story about an ice cream maker. That was our most popular story and I was like I just want to read about ice cream.
01:24:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
More pudding.
01:24:38 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I'm watching a lot more just mind-gumming television these days on Netflix and a lot less CNN and MSNc and fox than I used to watch oh god, yeah, because it'll it'll uh agitate.
01:24:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The system triggers me, you know it's triggering and uh and I understand any better people feel like well, we got to pay attention, but not not 24 7. No, I noticed I'm watching more documentaries about the 60s, like about how we protested things and stuff like that, and I'm kind of it's a little reassuring because I had forgotten, but things looked pretty bad in 1968. History repeats itself. Yeah, they really. I mean, we thought this was the end of the world and we made it so I don't know I like that.
01:25:24 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
It's a note of optimism. That's good.
01:25:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Looking for it wherever we can for it, where I long for the day. The richard nixon I know he was, you know he seems so mild in in comparison. He could be shamed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah uh. Amazon is shutting down its app store for android.
01:25:42 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I thought that was a weird thing I thought it's weird that it still existed like well, they need it for the tablets for the, you know the amazon fire tablets around for that that's going to stick around.
01:25:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but well, and this is funny because microsoft initially, when they put in their android subsystem so that you could run android apps under Windows, you didn't use the Google Play Store, they used the Amazon App Store. But Microsoft shut that down pretty quickly and shut down the use of the App Store. So, starting in August, august 20th, you'll no longer have access to the Amazon App Store on your Android. I didn't even know you had an Amazon.
01:26:22 - Larry Magid (Guest)
App Store on my Android.
01:26:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Well, you'll like this. Did you know about the Amazon coins program? You used to be able to buy coins with real american money a coin was worth a penny and uh and then use it for in-app purchases. I I dimly remember this. I could never figure out I think what amazon's hope was you'd buy some and forget about it.
01:26:49 - Larry Magid (Guest)
And then they would keep it Like your Bitcoin, you know yeah.
01:26:53 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Well, amazon's on a turd getting rid of all sorts of things. They shut down Chime RIP, the worst video calling service in existence. Oh, they did I used it just the other day. Well, they have announced it shut down. It's going to last for another year but it is no longer, you can no longer sign up for it.
01:27:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know it was. Why do you use that? What is it?
01:27:13 - Larry Magid (Guest)
we're partners and the problem with connect safe because we're partners with all these companies, so talk to them. We have to use their.
01:27:19 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
You talked to yeah, anyone at amazon uh blink ring Ring, any connection and the employees hate it as much as I do.
01:27:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it was their version of Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
01:27:37 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, it was a work video calling service which you know they launched around the time of the pandemic and when everyone was launching new video services and I think they were having many partners encouraged to use it. Or if you have AWS service, it was like a package, but never very good and not a great experience. And it really seems like. Amazon used it no one else.
01:28:02 - Larry Magid (Guest)
The other problem is that I mean, even if it were good, how many interfaces can you remember, Like, where is the chat button? Where is the record button? How do I mute my microphone? You know, there are so many of these out there.
01:28:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And they're all different interfaces. They're all different.
01:28:15 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I know Zoom well, but the others I have to think about.
01:28:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why did I mean? Why did Zoom take off during the pandemic and Skype didn't, teams didn't, chime didn't? What did Zoom do right, that they all did wrong?
01:28:32 - Larry Magid (Guest)
And none of it they'd ever heard of. Very few people had even heard of Zoom prior to the pandemic.
01:28:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's right. I mean it was used in business.
01:28:39 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, I was going to say for work, it was what we were already using, but I would have expected something like Skype to really take off, because Skype's going to forever and it's not as abhorrent.
01:28:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It feels like Microsoft fumbled that.
01:28:49 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Microsoft fumbles a lot of things. I feel like um, outlook and teams are probably the worst things they've ever created.
01:28:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, but speak your mind, speak your mind.
01:28:59 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Sorry, guys, I love working with you all, but you need to fix that.
01:29:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I agree with you a hundred percent. You're amongst friends.
01:29:07 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, but no. But no. I'm surprised that zoom took over from Skype, mainly because Skype had people were aware of what it was before the pandemic and I think a lot of people learned what zoom was for the first time. But I don't know, I don't know if it was the interface. It wasn't particularly more intuitive than Skype, so I don't know what.
01:29:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
E Rosner in our youtube chat says it's very simply in two words skype blows.
01:29:32 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Okay, there you go. Don't overthink it, just that's that. You use that routinely for the show.
01:29:36 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
You you had skype-a-saurus I remember skype-a-saurus.
01:29:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, you really did listen in the back in the day. Yeah, skype with the twit wouldn't exist, frankly, without skype, because none of our hosts were in in the same we're in panaloma, california, so I had to zoom everybody in and, uh well, it was skype for the longest time because skype was the best.
01:29:56 - Larry Magid (Guest)
When I was at cbs, we were required to disclose that we use skype. We had to put their logo on there. Yeah, they always wanted us to but I never did.
01:30:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I noticed, uh, the news networks. When, when there's a skype call, we'll have a little, yeah we had to that was a zoom doesn't do.
01:30:13
I don't believe zoom asks us to do that. I don't think so. Yeah, so I will give them a plug now, though as soon as. When did we switch to zoom, benito, do you remember? And we, you're right, we had Skype, a source Colleen, our first chief engineer, built us. It was, it was four Mac minis, I think, and they would, and each would call, make one of the calls, cause we there was no way to do individual mixing in in Skype, so we had four different calls that we would then mix together and feed the call back to everybody. Uh, so it was a pretty complicated, hairy thing. We used that, I think, well, after we moved into the last studio, the east side studio, but at some point zoom got better than skype, plus, everybody knew how to use zoom right and google meet never took off as much as I expected.
01:31:03
It still did pretty well, but you know, the irony is as a company, we use Meet for almost all of our, which is so weird. I don't know why. I have no idea why.
01:31:14 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Zoom must have. Zoom didn't require an account, right? So I think that was probably why.
01:31:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you could use it on the web. It was more flexible.
01:31:22 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Skype. You know, downloading anything that's Microsoft is always such, you know, a painful experience.
01:31:28 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Microsoft is not.
01:31:29 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Directing grandma to download Skype, just, I mean, I use Skype a lot because it was a great way to call friends.
01:31:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right in the UK, In the UK from the. Us many years ago, when my daughter was going to school in France, I bought her a $90 a year Skype phone number and we were able to talk freely. Seems so expensive. Today is it more expensive probably no, it's free now.
01:31:53
It's free now, okay well, I don't know about Skype, but I mean Jammer B, who is the mind uh of the of the company. He was our studio manager for many years. He's now retired, retired, but he still watches Nice to see you, john, he says. Alex Lindsay, who was one of our hosts in Mac break weekly, insisted we moved to zoom. He said why are you still using Skype? And he was right. I mean, if you watch the show, uh, it's the quality's very good.
01:32:21 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I think we use Zen caster for our video podcast Cause it does a little bit better job on the video than Skype and plus it's all in separate tracks.
01:32:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we do. We are using something called Zoom ISO, which does that as well.
01:32:34 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Yeah, so the separate tracks are useful when you're.
01:32:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh God, that's why we had Skype-a-saurus, because I needed separate tracks, because Patrick Norton would always be like under a car on the show fixing his car and I'd have to mute him. So we needed separate audio tracks. That's why we had Skype-a-saurus. Yeah, zoom now with Zoom. Iso is a pretty painless process. I'm on Zoom, you are all on Zoom. Benito is actually. It gets a little more complicated from there on. He is the Zoom call, then goes to a macintosh in the cloud at mac stadium which is running ecamp. No, so you're running zoom locally and then, but you're running ecam locally also. Ah, so we don't use the mac stadium server anymore, or you're not using it anyway. Well, that's better, isn't it? Is it better for you? That's why I gave you my old mac.
01:33:42 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, I got a mini and you're no longer working out of a big studio anymore. Right, oh, this is my attic, okay, you?
01:33:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
want to see it sure, for real. This is, this is the fake. This is the fakes. This is what it really looks like. I love that.
01:33:58 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Oh, look at that, the wheel, the cog.
01:34:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love the car oh yeah, we saved that from the studio I show you a secret.
01:34:04 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Let me, let me grab my little webcam you're gonna see where to see your wardrobe. I keep a wardrobe in my office. Yeah, you never know, because back when I was working for bbc a couple years ago, they would put me on the air and I had to wear a suit and tie.
01:34:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, oh, because it would be, it's unlike broadcast news, right? Uh, william hurt was gonna go on and he had a starched pressed shirt in his drawer that he would took out and put right over there and put on a shirt and my wardrobe is in another room, larry. I've decided to separate my wardrobe from. I'm lazier than you are also.
01:34:37 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I had tighter deadlines. Sometimes I wouldn't have more than a couple of minutes before I had to go on the air.
01:34:42 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Leo, your lighting is fantastic, though that's what I'm, yeah we brought in a gaffer, a really good lighting guy.
01:34:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So in fact, if you go back to that over the headshot I can show you we, this is a Kino flow. It's very bright, elgato duo lights, oh God. And then, but you don't see, but behind me there's another duplicate Kino flow, the Diva light behind me.
01:35:07 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
And then there's some up spots. There's all sorts of stuff going on, so how hot is it in that room, right?
01:35:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
now it's very pleasant because they're all led lights oh that's perfect back in the old days.
01:35:12 - Larry Magid (Guest)
It would have been unbearable yeah, I, I have a studio light just for show.
01:35:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It actually doesn't work, but it looks fun, it looks good, yeah, and that's what counts exactly.
01:35:21 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, looks like it'll send a bat signal or something yeah, it turns out that um good lighting is very important.
01:35:27 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Yeah, good lighting and good microphones make yeah it covers a multitude of defects.
01:35:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then anthony uh and burke cobbled together this neon uh twit logo so that's that's pretty good.
01:35:40 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Is that a real macintosh behind you or a fake?
01:35:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, no it's jammer b gave me when he left. When he first the first time I met jammer b, he gave me that old phone. The last time I saw jammer b, he left me his mac. That's the original 128k mac. Not only that, it's actually running. It's running flying toasters.
01:35:59 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Is that worth anything? Is that like a oh no, too many, too many. No one would want it. No, it's a great prop.
01:36:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a good prop, but you know what it's funny? It introduces a huge complexity because it's a CRT screen. It's the only CRT screen you see and of course it has a. You remember in the old days the scan lines going across it and finally Burke figured out how to tune this camera shutter rate so there'd be no scan lines, lines and so it actually works pretty well, probably using more energy than everything else in your office.
01:36:30
Oh, I guarantee you, yeah that single thing is using more wattage than anything else. Anyway, I guarantee you, uh, let's see spotify, uh making it easier to release audiobooks narrated by ai.
01:36:44 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I don't like this or I'm going to turn into like a curmudgeon, but are you a luddite? On that, we're going, so I love human readers.
01:36:52
I listen to audio books on audible and they're, they're actors yeah, yeah, so it's being brought to life exactly I um, I'm reading a book that, or I'm listening to a book that. I'm not going to say what it is because I don't want to bash the person who's narrating it, but they sound like a robot and they're not. So for it to actually be a robot, I don't particularly enjoy it. But that's the thing is like. I think you know it's, it's two-sided, it's I want people who do is a cause for concern honestly.
01:37:26 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Would the AI know what to emphasize? I mean, a good narrator knows, does a pretty good job. I think that's the other part of it.
01:37:32 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Right, it's like. These are like you mentioned. These are professionals who know. They know how to act with their voices and it sounds more human, it's more enjoyable to listen to. I think it's not just about hearing something, it's about how a story is told and there's an art to that, and I think AI is smart and I think it will do its best to replicate it and maybe in time it will, but it's just, it's not the same.
01:37:54 - Larry Magid (Guest)
And rarely is the author the best person to narrate a book Once in a while, but usually they're not that great at it. Exactly.
01:38:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Would you like to hear some of the 11 AI voice? Yeah, this is from their. Hi there. This is the voice of Adam from 11 Labs. Hi there, this is the voice of Antony from 11 Labs.
01:38:15 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Hi there. This is the voice of Arnold from 11 Labs.
01:38:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hi there. This is the voice of Bella from 11 Labs. I think this might be old, because I think they've gotten better. This is the voice of.
01:38:24 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Callum from Hi Callum, how you doing I've heard. I mean, I could do a much better job than that.
01:38:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's not yeah, these might be old, I'll have to do another. A better google search, I mean notebook lm.
01:38:36 - Larry Magid (Guest)
When I I mentioned that fake podcast, it did about me or anybody. Just feed it your bio. They sound like real people.
01:38:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's depressing because they sound like real podcasters.
01:38:46 - Larry Magid (Guest)
They sound like what they sound like like bad podcasters for real bad podcasters, including the ums and they're not that different than a lot of real, real cat podcasters yeah, uh, I know that's kind of sad.
01:39:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was playing with before the show, my, uh, my computer, and it actually has some pretty good voices.
01:39:08 - Larry Magid (Guest)
That British woman's great, not as good as the real British woman we have from Jennifer.
01:39:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If Jennifer would just give me her voice. Well, that can happen. I'm using a voice that we decided that sounds like Helen Mirren, right? Yeah, let me see if I can.
01:39:26 - Larry Magid (Guest)
But, jennifer, I won't put you out of work, you're still better.
01:39:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's my guess that these are actually 11 Labs voices. I think they.
01:39:32 - AI voice (Announcement)
As the room erupted in laughter, peter's face turned crimson and he wished he could disappear from this embarrassing moment.
01:39:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's how I feel all the time. Isn't that good, it's not bad. You could hear that reading a book.
01:39:44 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I could, and that's what I don't like. That's scary, isn't it? Listening to that, I'm like, oh no, that's the whole thing about AI when it's good, it's scary yeah.
01:39:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One of my favorite readers is the now sadly discredited Neil Gaiman, who's this is. You know this is hard Like do you listen to Michael Jackson music to read Neil Gaiman stuff. He's a great writer and he was a horrible person.
01:40:06 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, the Sandman 2 isn't coming out now, and neither is the next, so Good Omens is like my favorite book ever.
01:40:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I love Good, I love his writing. Anyway, this voice sounds like Neil Gaiman.
01:40:18 - AI voice (Announcement)
This is awesome, it's the chaos, Chloe's mind raced Right. The thoughts are whirlwind of worry and doubt desperately seeking a way out.
01:40:27 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
It's not exactly neil gaiman, but it's close enough. The voice of an audiobook narrator is so key, like when I really I know I want to listen to the book, but I will read the reviews to see if people could handle the voice, because if it's wrong, if it's not quite right, it's just you just can't listen.
01:40:41 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Luckily, audible gives you a free sample which I always listen to before I buy.
01:40:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't that interesting and that's something you you voice actors should remember is that we actually choose the book, sometimes because of the voice actor.
01:40:53 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Yeah, sure, it's like watching a movie.
01:40:56 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
It could be a great screenwriter, but if the well, and you can follow the voice actor and go and listen to more books by them If you like them which you like them, which is like following the author I do.
01:41:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, all right, time out. Did I do a time out? Did I? Benito? Where am I? Am I do? I need to? You were supposed to tell me when it was time. All right, we'll take a little break and we'll come back lots more.
01:41:18
I I don't want to complain too much about spotify. We are now on spotify, both audio and video. So I, even though I think that in many ways they've been the bane of podcasting and now maybe they're going to be the bane of audiobooks, I don't know. But at the same time, if you can't beat them, join them. Uh, more to come in. Just a bit with a wonderful panel. Uh, thanks. We're streaming, by the way, and I see people chatting in all of our streams, which is wonderful. Uh, on, of course, discord is for our club members, if you're not a club twit member. We're streaming, by the way, and I see people chatting in all of our streams, which is wonderful. And of course, discord is for our club members. If you're not a club Twit members, seven bucks a month gets you ad free versions of all of our shows and lots of additional content. We've got some special events.
01:41:58
Stacey's Book Club's coming up. On Thursday, stacey Higginbotham and I will talk about Micaiah Johnson's those Beyond the Wall. It's a great book. It's very difficult not difficult, but real, challenging in that regard and a wonderful reader too. I'm listening to it on Audible If you're not yet a member. It makes a big difference in terms of our bottom line. Yes, we have ads, but ads don't cover 100 of our costs, so clubs members do. Uh, we've cut back as much as we can shut down. The studio was one of the ways we cut back. Um, but in order to keep doing what we're doing and if we want to expand at all, we need your help.
01:42:39
Twittv, club twit. Or scan the qr code in the upper left of the screen and join the fun. Seven bucks a month. Twittv slash, club twit. And it's thanks to the club members. We've got the discord and a youtube stream and a twitch stream and a tiktok stream and an x stream and a linkedin, facebook and kick. We're on eight different platforms that you can watch us live on. Thank you to our club twit members. Oh and, by the way, another good reason to be a member of the club We've got a really great show coming up for you on Wednesday on Intelligent Machines.
01:43:14
Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Wolfram Alpha, will join us. We want to ask him about AI. He wrote a book about how LLMs work, but I think he's really up to date on the latest new reinforcement learning. Steven wolf from our guest wednesday on intelligent machines and I I thought you might want to know that our show today brought to you by us cloud.
01:43:36
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01:44:09
These are engineered. They get the best engineers with an average of 16 years experience and break-fix. They know how to do support. They're faster too Twice as fast average time to resolution which is the amount of time that you really care about versus Microsoft. Let me say that again they're twice as fast as Microsoft, so half the cost, twice as fast. Better, now, I got your attention right. They also do things for their customers that are really remarkable. For instance, microsoft's not going to tell you if you're overspending on Azure right, they're going to encourage it.
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I'll give you a testimonial review from Sam. He's a technical operations manager at Bede Gaming B-E-D-E. He gave US Cloud five stars. They did the Azure engagement. We found some things that have been running, he says, for three years, which no one was checking. He said those VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend on Azure, but once you get to $40,000 or $50,000 a month, it really starts to add up. It's simple Stop overpaying for Azure. Pay for what you need obviously Identify and eliminate Azure creep and boost your performance, and you can do it all in eight weeks with US Cloud. Just one more reason to call us cloud right now visit uscloudcom. Book a call. Find out how much your team can save uscloudcom. Book a call today and get faster, better microsoft support for less uscloudcom. We thank them so much for supporting our show.
01:47:06
California has a pretty good privacy policy and a pretty good privacy regulator and I'm kind of proud of them. The California privacy regulator is now reaching out to fine the national. Remember this breach, the national public data breach. Hundreds of millions of social security numbers and other personally identifiable information leaked in this breach All legally, by the way, all legally collected by NPD. The California regulator is asking the court to fine them. Uh, 46 000.
01:47:49 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Well, that's pathetic.
01:47:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I also laughed at that, yeah I didn't read the number until I until I looked deeper here. Uh, they failed to register as a data broker in the state man. This is pathetic. They released, they. They released records including social security numbers of as many as 270 million people. Some of it was inaccurate, although I searched the database, found my social steve gibson searched the database, found his social. It was the one of the largest data breaches of last year. Uh, they filed for bankruptcy, which only honestly, I suspect, means they'll change their name, reorganize and get back in business. It's just too lucrative and the worst thing is there's no law against it. So California is doing the only thing it can do, which is is filing a claim against it for failing to register with the agency as a data broker 46 000.
01:48:48 - Larry Magid (Guest)
That's like a two dollar parking ticket.
01:48:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's nothing it's a slap on the wrist. This is the best they can do. Wow, this is, uh, the california privacy protection act. Cppa says brokers have to register by january 31st 2024. The fines are 200 a day. It's almost embarrassing. At least they have to register, and I would think you know it's cheaper to register than not register. Uh, salvatore verini, the owner of jericho pictures, the, believe it or not, the parent company of national public data did not respond to tech crunch for a request for comment. Owner of Jericho pictures, the. Believe it or not, the parent company of National Public Data did not respond to TechCrunch for a request for comment. Salvatore, what are you doing here? Jericho pictures okay, I guess, uh, that I was going to be a great big story. I thought they were looking for millions 46 thou yeah, I also had to go back and check that's.
01:49:49
That seems wrong somehow, that we don't have anything better than that's that.
01:49:53 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
By the way, that's the, as far as I know, that's the only penalty these guys are going to pay for this 270 million person data breach shows you how much well, I'm just getting like I get mail almost every week from companies saying we're sorry, but we've exposed your social security number and your children's social security number and all this other stuff, and here has a year's free Experian data protection yeah, thanks.
01:50:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like constant.
01:50:22 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
It's constant, constant. Which is, I mean, you know, I almost feel like I kind of ignore it now, but it's like, should I? I probably should be quite worried about this, but what am I supposed to do? It's like, yeah, we can't change our social security numbers, we can change our passwords, but Privacy's dead, my friends.
01:50:43 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
That's the title of this episode, just kidding.
01:50:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I still want to go with musk. I'm just, but I'm just. You know, I don't know. I'm uh speaking of, uh, speaking of the current administration. Uh, there is a very good organization in the us government called cisa, the cyber security and infrastructure security agency. Uh, the president doesn't like it. Historically, he didn't like it since 2020.
01:51:12
When CISA said no, the election was free and fair, immediately fired the director of CISA, chris Sigoyan. But CISA has been continuing to do its work, trying to thwart security threats, deter the spread of misinformation. Um, now, uh, the their, the cyber security and infrastructure security agency, has frozen all of its election security work. This is from eric geller reporting, for wired is reviewing everything it has done to help state and local officials secure their elections for the last eight years. The move represents the first major example of the country's cyber defense agency accommodating President Trump's claims of election fraud and online censorship. In a memo sent Friday to all CISA employees and obtained by Wired, cisa's acting director, brid Bridget Bean, said she was ordering a review and assessment of every position at the agency related to election security and counting, countering misinformation and disinformation. Wouldn't want to do that, as well as every election security and misdis and malinformation product activity service and program. That has been carried out since the federal government designated election systems as critical infrastructure in 2017.
01:52:33
Um, chilling, it's. Well, it's scary. I mean there's a lot going on, but that's pretty scary.
01:52:43 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Cece has been very valuable how is washington's uh election integrity systems working? I mean how you know, because they they've got free and fair elections, of course.
01:52:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah um, I mean, there's not much more to say about it except that just you know, an alert, something to pay attention to, literally gives me chills when I hear you talking about that something to pay attention to the fdc. Give me chills when I hear you talking about that. Yeah, it's. It's the first thing you do if you want to undermine election right for the next that's right.
01:53:12 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
So when we get to, what do we when? When does it come in 20? Well, there's going to be midterm elections in 2026 2026. That's the first one. They're also yeah. So we mean are there any? What are the alternatives? I mean there was a lot of work being done when when he lost on election fraud and making sure everything's secure. So is that going to continue? Is that all just going to go away and there's no chance of election fraud anymore? Is this what we're hearing?
01:53:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, the ftc has launched an inquiry into tech censorship. Um, I I fear for the future of section 230. Both democrats and republicans have been hollering for the modification or elimination of section 230 of the digital millennium copyright act. Um, section 230 protects both big companies and little companies like mine. It it indemnifies us, prevents people from suing us. For instance, we have a Mastodon instance at Twitter Social. We have forums at Twitter Community. We also, of course, have, at last count, eight different chat rooms going during the shows.
01:54:22
In any one of those, if posted something, uh somebody didn't like, section 230 prevents us from getting sued. Uh, the judge would immediately throw it out saying you can't sue the publisher for comments people put on their forums. Uh, but of course, there are a number of people on both the left and right who would like to hold the publishers liable. Now, maybe, if that's meta or Google or Twitter, ok, they can afford to defend themselves in court, but it would put us out of business. Yeah, it's interesting, under the new chairman, andrew Ferguson, an inquiry into quote, tech censorship which will help the FTC better understand how these firms may have violated the law by silencing and intimidating Americans for speaking their minds, one of the things Section 230 allows is moderation. Without it, moderation would be dangerous. I could be sued if somebody goes on my right now. Now, if somebody goes on my Mastodon and says you know something awful, I can kick them off or I can delete the comment. I have the right to moderate it.
01:55:33 - Larry Magid (Guest)
You relate the contradiction. They're basically telling you you're responsible for what everybody posts, but you can't do anything about it, it's like they're taking it away on both sides. It's just ridiculous.
01:55:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I think one of the reasons people think this is a good idea is they. They really think of google and meta and the big companies. They don't realize this affects everybody who has a forum, who has a blog. Anywhere there is commenting the verge, cnet, and and much smaller local news outlet, just about.
01:56:02 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Yeah, the only area where I think it has any validity is algorithms. You could argue that if meta isa is promoting, or X or TikTok or anybody is promoting certain content and shoving it in your face, you could argue that they're playing some publishing role, but simply allowing for a forum, you know. So some bozo wants to say something defamatory through the bozo.
01:56:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Honestly I think algorithms are protected.
01:56:27 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I think that's a free speech well, that was yeah and that was the isn't there. There's the supreme court case about that with google, about the algorithms, um, in terms of like, um, pushing a person to do something because of what videos?
01:56:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you don't, you can't tell the new york times what stories to run or not run. Right, rightly, so right but, the government should not be in the bit. That's what the first amendment protects.
01:56:52
The government should not be in the business of policing speech right, but the question is, if the new york times were to post something that was defamatory, then that person could sue using libel or laws right, right, that's sufficient right, but but the point, by the way, that still holds if somebody puts something defamatory on my mastodon about larry maggot, you could go sue them you can't, but not you but not you? Right? Exactly why should you be able to sue me, sue the person who defamed you?
01:57:21 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
exactly exactly and also freedom of speech does not, is not about the freedom, it's not about where you speak and so, in terms of like, if you're publishing on a private platform, that's not freedom. Freedom of speech is the ability to say whatever you believe and whatever you want, but it's not specifically about where you can do it. So if you have a private platform, a private company can moderate whatever they want. They can moderate, they have the right to put what they want on their platform. But then this is where the issue with the FTC here, with the act we were talking about, that will make it illegal or not illegal, will make it difficult for you to publish anything you want on your website because you could get in trouble. So you'll kind of get. You've got this hamster wheel going around, it's like well, there's a certain irony.
01:58:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because I think it comes down to the. This comes down to the decision by meta and Twitter at the time uh, after january 6th, to ban the president's account. Uh, they, they both have since reinstated his accounts, um, but it doesn't. But the funny thing is, you know, elon is absolutely shadow banning people, just shadow banned grimes for saying grimes. Uh posted on x. Hey, elon, uh, you're ignoring me and our kid has a medical issue, please help. He just shadow banned her and the irony is that's legal, I guess.
01:58:54 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Well, private entities, the only entity that doesn't have a right to send you the government right, so they can.
01:59:00 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
The only, they're the only one, so he's. That's what the first amendment applies.
01:59:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're defending his right, however reprehensible to do that yeah, any, any platform.
01:59:07 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Can I mean? They're not like you said, they're not the government, they're. They don't have the. They have the right to put what they allow, what they want, on their platform. But section 230. If then we're going to end up saying, okay, well, anything that anyone says on your platform you're responsible for, well, then you're going to want to either shut down your platform or have much stronger moderation on your platform, because you can't and that's going to cost. Like you say, the small companies won't be able to do that, but the big tech companies don't want to moderate. They're trying to push further away from moderation in the interests of supporting the idea that, well, we promote free speech on our platforms. Anyone can say anything they want, but it's yeah, it's a mess.
01:59:48 - Larry Magid (Guest)
And it's not. The other irony is that if the, if the government is telling you that you must moderate or you must not moderate, that actually is a violation of the First Amendment, because the First Amendment only applies to government, meta can do whatever it wants. It could moderate, it could not moderate. I mean, that's what you know, that's what private free speech is about, and I mean so. We're just mired with contradictions. The point about saying you know you must moderate but you can't moderate, the mere fact that the government's even getting involved in that conversation is arguably a violation of the First Amendment.
02:00:22 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
And I think, even just taking a step back and looking at what social media has become and what it means to so many people, the reactions from both the left and the right about what should or shouldn't be on social media as a reflection of how powerful echo chambers have become and how people really just want to see content that reinforces what they already believe, and the fact that, like so many people on either side are unhappy, I think, just like from a societal reflection standpoint, is really interesting about what we actually want when we go online. I think, just like from a societal reflection standpoint, is really interesting about what we actually want when we go online. I think people are less receptive to alternative viewpoints. There's a lot of misinformation out there. I'm not saying things like there are things that need to be.
02:00:57
I think getting rid of content moderators was an interesting choice. I'm not sure how helpful that is, but in general, when it comes to people presenting ideas, whether political or societal or otherwise people don't want to see things that contradict how they see the world, and so it's trying to walk this line of how do you present enough ideas to people and create a space where people can maybe communicate with each other, but then also make sure that what they're accessing is real information and not misinformation and disinformation. So it's just it's chaotic. I think social media has become so unenjoyable recently because of that.
02:01:32 - Larry Magid (Guest)
If you want to come over to my house and have a conversation about politics or religion or dress codes or whatever, fine. When you start calling each other names, yeah, absolutely, and then I'm going to kick you out of the house and stop talking. Yeah, and I don't know why private companies don't? They do have that right.
02:01:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I do do that on our Mastodon server, for sure, and I do that on our forums as well, for sure. I try to preserve. We have rules, we have written rules that say, among other things we want to have polite discourse, it's okay to disagree with somebody, but there's a limit. And I course it's okay to disagree with somebody, but there's a there's a limit, and I certainly will ban people for going across the limit, and I think that's my right and duty to do so. Totally. Last year, the supreme court, when asked about the texas state law, uh, which prohibited large social media companies from moderating posts based on a user's viewpoint, supreme court said that the court has quote many times, held in many contexts, that it is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expression to. It's not government's job to unbias what it thinks biased, rather than to leave such judgments to speakers and their audiences. That principle works for social media platforms as it does for others.
02:02:47 - Larry Magid (Guest)
They were only clear about that was for a while.
02:02:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Public airwaves but even that's been, and that's only because you're using something that's owned by the public. You know you can't say the seven dirty words, but I can on a podcast, because I'm not using the airwaves right. Um, I still don't, but that's another matter.
02:03:04
Uh I don't because I mean, I don't want to get. It's a private choice. Yeah, that's, that's my choice. You can't force me to swear. You can't force me not to swear unless I'm using the public airwaves. Now, by the way, there are people at the fcc who would very much like to regulate podcasts, uh, and that's what's next. But incidentally, uh, you know, this is a, this is an aim to control speech, not not to make it. They say it's free speech. It's not.
02:03:32 - Larry Magid (Guest)
It's about controlling well, what happened to the ap they got? They got banned from the white house press office because they choose to use the term gulf of mexico, and you know that's it'll always be the gulf of mexico to me, and you know that's it'll always be the Gulf of Mexico to me. Well, good luck getting into a White House press conference, and I will never be invited to a White House press conference.
02:03:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The FTC has a request for information. It's seeking public comment until May 21st. However, if you go there to say things like, ah, let free speech rule, you're in trouble, because what are they asking for? They're looking for tech platform users who have been banned, shadow banned, demonetized or otherwise censored. You're encouraged to share your comments, so it doesn't look like they're looking for anybody to defend free speech what a time to be alive they're gonna.
02:04:23
They're gonna do what they're gonna do, right, um? Brendan carr, who's the new fcc chairman, has slammed big tech for censorship. He says that quote facebook, google, apple, microsoft and others have played central roles in the set. He says censorship cartel, along with fact-checking groups and ad agencies that helped enforce one-sided narratives. By the way, the ad agency's bit comes from the fact that elon musk is suing advertisers because they decided not to put ads on x. I wish to god I could sue advertisers for not advertising on our podcast you'd be really wealthy.
02:05:01
Seems like a bad idea. Seems like a bad. It seems pretty like almost whiny, like, oh, you didn't ever. Yeah, that'll make them come back. What? What kind of thinking is that? All right, anyway, we're gonna take a break. Uh, come back with more. I pray that section 230 is not eliminated or modified. You know, certainly if it is, I will have to reconsider whether we have chats and forums and social media.
02:05:32 - Larry Magid (Guest)
You know, the irony is I can't afford to be sued. There's a certain guy who happens to be in the White House right now that might have been kicked off some platforms if 230 hadn't been there, Because back when he was posting on the old Twitter another. They could have sued the old Twitter for some of the horrible things that he said online. Oh interesting, so he should be careful.
02:05:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's true, section 230 is a knife that cuts both ways, absolutely Just as the First Amendment does. Somebody quite wise said you know it doesn't mean anything to defend the First Amendment for people who are saying things you agree with. What really matters is if you defend the right to speech for people you disagree with absolutely. It's probably somebody like oliver wender holmes or somebody like that. I don't know. I'll ask my ai. You're watching, uh, this week in tech great panel we're getting. We're getting ready to wrap it up pretty soon. You, you, you been very patient. Abrar Alhidi, wonderful to have you A regular in as many shows as we can get you on.
02:06:31 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Just think you're fantastic, thank you. That means a lot.
02:06:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Technology reporter for CNET. Of course, same goes to you, jennifer Patterson. Toohey, I think you're both. Are you not both regulars in Tech News Weekly? I think you are. Yes, yeah, think you are. Yes, yeah, we are co-hosts. Yes, yes, we love having you, uh. And, of course, uh, larry maggid and I are the old guys. I could say it, I'll say it now. I said it at the beginning of the show. I said I wouldn't say in the show, the, the, the panel reminds me of the saturday night live 50th anniversary audience, which was filled with old people, old, old guys with young, good looking wives. It looks a little bit. A little bit like that, but really that's not the intention at all. No, we just we're glad to have you for your brains, right, that's right.
02:07:16
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02:10:01
Oh did I? Oh I forgot, forgot to take it off there. There we go. This is the Fragrant Mouse. Asus apparently not new to Asus even has a Fragrant laptop. This mouse has a little scent fragrance module. It comes in white and rose clay. I guess they figure nobody wants a black mouse, wants smells. Anyway, it's a fragrance-producing mouse, which is it's got nice. You know, it's a nice. It's like the G502 or the G Pro X, but which means it supports 10 million clicks and low noise levels. It doesn't require Logitech software. It has three DPI settings 1200, 1600, 2400. But you don't care about that. What you care about is that under the mouse, right behind the AA battery housing, is a small semi-translucent container designed to house oils that give the mouse a pleasing aroma I actually really want to try this I think it's a neat idea.
02:11:14 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
It was good in here.
02:11:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's going on to get your house?
02:11:16 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
smell nice smell my mouse. It put them everywhere. It reminds me of this um thing I tried out called movie scent, or like while you're watching a movie, it'll like release the senseents of if there's a rain scene.
02:11:28 - Larry Magid (Guest)
That's cool. You smell rain. It's smell-o-vision the mouth could create smells related to what you were looking at on the screen.
02:11:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That would be cool, it would be really wonderful.
02:11:36 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I don't think I want that I don't know what you're looking at.
02:11:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's no limit to what scents can be used, because the container can be washed and refilled with different scents. Asus also makes an aroma dispensing laptop that has a fragrance yeah, I remember our laptop review was walking around sniffing it there were. It came with three fragrances.
02:11:58 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Be a new her, oh sure yeah, that one be a new her. That's my favorite aroma oh, and here's a combination you're dying for basil and mandarin it kind of reminds me of like joe malone scents, like it sounds weird, but it'll be like orange bitters and something and you're like, okay, sure, so.
02:12:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But like I don't know, maybe it's some things, that's I like the smell of basil or, as you might say, basil. I don't know. Do you say basil in the uk for the herb? Basil, yes, basil, that's also a man's name, which is why I prefer basil, because then you know that's the herb, and basil, like basil, wrath bone. That's the man's name anyway, confusing. Well, how do you say mandarin? You say mandarin. No, mandarin, mandarin, mandarin, and this is like the scene from Love Actually Bottle.
02:12:49
Great movie, by the way. I watch that every Christmas. What? A great. That's the best. Christmas movie ever. And then there's another one, called I don't know what, the. I guess it smells like roses, rose of Man's Land. Yeah, that one I want to smell.
02:13:03 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
That sounds lovely, weird.
02:13:06 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I don't know. I'm gonna pass on that one, leo I don't know.
02:13:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If it were rows of man's pants or something, then I wouldn't. But what is man's land? I?
02:13:17 - Larry Magid (Guest)
never understand why people buy buy cologne from athletes, like the athletes actually smell good. Oh yeah, the guy's playing big basketball for four hours.
02:13:25 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
You want to smell them the robot vaccines have little fragrance.
02:13:34 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Some robot vaccines have little faggants things that makes sense. Whenever I get my car washed, they say do you want scent? I say no, god. No, what are you doing? No, my room but sometimes smells after a job.
02:13:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean mean not a good smell, oh, it's true it can smell a little funky Dusty. It smells like money. We should have money scents Now that I would go for we're going to have cash. What does Venmo smell like though?
02:13:58 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
This mouse kind of makes me think about. You know how you associate smells with moments, so is it just going to remind you of work every day, Like you use your mouse and you're like that's the work smell.
02:14:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like what? Oh, that's true.
02:14:09 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
You have a stronger memory for sense than almost anything else, so you might never want to smell it, unless you're actually like.
02:14:15 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I remember Jeff Bezos. Years ago I was listening to him give a talk about the smell of books and how people love the smell of books and he said it's not that books inherently smell good, it's just we associate them right with positive, pleasant, you know reading.
02:14:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, here is, uh, here's a picture, for some reason, of a guy dang a shadow of a guy dangling his keys over the mouse I don't, or is that like a scent dropper?
02:14:44 - Larry Magid (Guest)
oh, it's a scent dropper yes, so one more thing you have to do you now have to feed your mouth essential oils now. Is that something elon will cut out of the work schedule? As you know, inappropriate for federal employees to be taking time putting.
02:15:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tell me if your mouse smells. Let's see. Boy, I think we've run out of stories. Let me do I can't believe it.
02:15:16 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Well, we didn't talk about the iPhone.
02:15:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh God, the biggest story All right, let me take a break and the biggest story of the day. I didn't even do it.
02:15:23 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
What is wrong with?
02:15:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
me.
02:15:24 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
That's for us.
02:15:27 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
No, it's so that, yeah, save it for last everyone has to listen the whole way through.
02:15:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're gonna talk about the new iphone. I'm dying to hear it. You're gonna be disappointed, that's all I can say. But yeah, we will talk about apple announced a new iphone this week. That's right and I think you can. You can order it this next, this coming week, for delivery. I don't. We'll get the details in a bit.
02:15:48 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I think it went up for order. On Friday It'll go on sale.
02:15:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I'll save this, because I've got to do an ad.
02:15:55
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02:20:37 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
My colleague had a article go up, but my colleague David Long, that says the E and iPhone 16 E might as well stand for expensive and I feel like Apple really walked into that one, because why is?
02:20:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it that price? I don't know what the E stands into that one, because why is it that price? I don't know what the E stands for, but that's an important point. Because they don't now have a low cost phone and for many markets like India, China, they're going to basically be aced out of those markets. They don't have an offering.
02:21:03 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
And it's interesting that the priority was more let's pack in more of our advanced features like Apple intelligence, regardless of what that means for price, rather than focusing on price, which I think was what was so alluring about the SE line in general. And so to then switch up the priorities to say, well, look at all these features you get and you get an action button. It's like okay, but like why is it?
02:21:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so much money. It seems like it was pretty clear that they wanted to have apple intelligence available across the whole line, right, and that making a another 429 iphone se wouldn't wouldn't be possible yeah, and so there's that shift in priorities.
02:21:44 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Right ai matters more than anything else interesting and, by the way, in addition to all those developing countries you mentioned, I would add american families to the list of people who can't afford it. I mean, that's a lot of money, for you got two kids, three kids, five people in the family, that's two, you know. Three grand just for basic phones to start with, do you?
02:22:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
think Apple. I mean, this is really interesting to me. I mean, Apple must have researched this. Do you think they've maybe decided that they're the value proposition of an iPhone is sufficient to overcome this extra cost? Steve?
02:22:16 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Jobs would have felt that way.
02:22:18 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
And you know it's interesting, like, what people care about the most with phones, for the most part, are cameras and battery life, and so they've touted the battery life a lot, but you know it's still one camera and it's a good camera. I mean 48 megapixel it should be pretty decent, but it's to still. There is the Apple factor that comes in here, where if it's something that's made by Apple, you think, okay, it's worth the money, it's worth the premium, but it's not a premium device compared to other devices, that you pay $200 more and you get the baseline iPhone 16. It's this weird, really awkward middle. You know pricing tier, and I'm really curious how consumers will actually respond to it.
02:22:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They did drop a lot of the older phones, so it's not like they have a whole bunch of less expensive older phones. A couple of people in the in the YouTuber are pointing out maybe they padded it in anticipation of tariffs.
02:23:10 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Tariffs. That's what I'd heard. People say, yeah, that maybe it was going to be cheaper, and they because losing that four, 29 in the lineup. But that only came in a few years ago, so for a long time they didn't really have three SEs, yeah, and my daughter had the, has the SE and it.
02:23:27
You know that was we. My daughter has the SE and it was the first time I actually had to buy a phone for her. Normally my kids would get my hand-me-downs and that's also probably what happens with a lot of families is the hand-me-downs. But the thing that I was surprised is if they were going to go with a more expensive phone and go with all the extra features Apple intelligence, the better camera, why no MagSafe, why no UWB radio and why no thread. But that's because I'm a smart home person. But it's like, if this is, if this is meant to be the bottom level to bring people in, and you've got all these new technologies that Apple's championing, championing. I'm sorry it's late and I haven't had my glass of wine yet.
02:24:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my goodness, go get your glass of wine, by all means. You're the one who said we had to cover the iPhone. It's your fault.
02:24:16 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
But why not If it wasn't with a cheap phone? Why did they leave out some of these key technologies?
02:24:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You could argue that UWB might be really much more useful than Apple Intelligence.
02:24:26 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
That's the thing that lets you point your phone to find your keys right and your AirTag, and then the new smart unlocking that they're bringing to door locks.
02:24:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right, there's all this new home hardware that will use uwb.
02:24:39 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah so I'll walk up to the door and unlock because it sees me coming yeah, although you can still use the nfc, the tap to unlock, so that it's not like they wouldn't be able to use it.
02:24:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah, really, you know my car because I have a bmw that supports apple's car key. I just walk up to the car, it unlocks, says hello, play some tunes, stuff like that, and I wanted that for the door instead of having to tap this right and it's not in the 60s.
02:25:06 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Oh, poor guy, you have to tap your phone to open the door. Oh my God.
02:25:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It wasn't.
02:25:11 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Bluetooth.
02:25:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
LE. It's not BLE, it's UWB.
02:25:16 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
UWB yes, so currently there are smart locks that use BLE and Wi-Fi and GPS. Three location, like three triangulation locations.
02:25:26
But it's not perfect, it's not. It's very bad. Yeah, unless you're super lucky and you have really good service and all of you know, all the stars align and you have the app open, running on your phone. That's the other thing, whereas UWB is just going to be a simple radio to radio communication from your phone to your lock, just like it is for your car, and going to make auto unlock just hands-free unlock, unlock simple and work, which it hasn't really to date I will vouch for that, because I had a mustang machi that used those older technologies and it half the time it wouldn't open, and I I actually got locked out of my car once because I was waving the phone and tapping it and nothing worked because that bluetooth works with a tesla flawlessly.
02:26:08 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I mean, I never have to really, yeah, really think of it.
02:26:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I never had a problem with the tesla, yeah, um, but for some reason the mustang did and you know for door lock you've got is it wants to be really helps with location too.
02:26:20 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
So it makes sure it knows you're not inside the house to unlock.
02:26:25 - Larry Magid (Guest)
You know it'll only only unlock if you're outside, which is which you definitely important that doesn't matter so much for your car because you're you walk by the front door, let's unlock it well, the one thing in the car that I don't like is it unlocks all the doors, which means if a thief wants to get into my car when I, when I get near it, um, there is that possibility.
02:26:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I you and I must have a disaster mentality, because for some reason I always envision me running to the car to escape thugs and and I want to get in quickly, but I don't want them to get in exactly exactly what is wrong with us.
02:27:02 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Larry, has that ever happened to you my old prius, my 2012 prius. When you unlock the door, it only unlocked the driver's door, unless you hit the button twice.
02:27:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah that was yeah, that's a lot of sense. Yeah, that's the right way to do it. Yeah, it also doesn't have and I don't think anybody cares the dynamic Island.
02:27:19 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I I love dynamic Island.
02:27:20 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Okay, I will be is that, a new show on CBS or that or again they wish to be on Saturday.
02:27:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Night Live, didn't they? Oh no, that was Lonely Island. So I do think, and I don't know, if it's related to Dynamic Island. I like the live activities. Yes.
02:27:42 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Is that related?
02:27:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't think you can get it without the Dynamic Island. Ah, so that's nice, like when I was watching the football the Niners football it would show the score in real time in a big box on the bottom of the phone and I have Carrot Weather will tell me it's going to start raining any minute now and things like that. I like the live activities. Your phone gets wet when it's raining, just hold it out, and if there's drops, it's raining.
02:28:09
As you said it doesn't have MagSafe, but it does have standard Qi charging, so it does do wireless, just a little slower. Yeah, I guess the theory is if you're buying the cheaper iPhone you're not going to have a UWB-E but it's not that much cheaper.
02:28:24 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
That's the problem. I mean, I saw ScooterX drop a link in the chat about why you shouldn't buy the 15, but I'm seriously tempted by the 15 over the 16E for my daughter. My daughter needs an upgrade. It's $100 more, but you get all of those things that are missing. Other than you don't get Apple intelligence, which I don't really need. Apple intelligence.
02:28:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is Zach Hall's piece in 9 to 5 Mac why you really shouldn't buy this iPhone.
02:28:51 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
But you get dynamic Island, you get um. You get the UWB, you get to spend a hundred bucks more and you get a lot more. And you get the mag safe Um, but you don't get Apple intelligence.
02:29:05 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
This is like the classic um Apple strategy of let's take the lowest price thing and only make it a little bit less expensive than the next level, so that people just pay more for that next level thing.
02:29:15 - Larry Magid (Guest)
It's really Apple's formula, and that's right. The problem is then you have to buy the most expensive.
02:29:22 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
And they win.
02:29:23 - Larry Magid (Guest)
It's true in every level.
02:29:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they're slowly moving you up the ladder, right. Well, I don't want to be in the bottom, right? Yeah, exactly, moving you up the ladder right?
02:29:30 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
well, I don't want to be in the bottom, right?
02:29:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, exactly, maybe the next one up. Well, but if I'm going to spend that much, you might as well spend another hundred dollars and get apple intelligence?
02:29:35
yep, yeah. One thing apple is doing, apparently, is binning its a18 chip so it has the same chip that's in the iphone pros, but it isn't exactly the same. It's missing one gpu and what? What that tells us is that these are all the same chip. Tsmc is making these a18s, but every once in a while one comes. Every once in a while, probably more often than not, one comes through with some broken component, like a jeep, like missing gpu core, and they bin that, they throw that in a bin and that's what they're putting in the iphone se.
02:30:08
Wow, interesting, yeah, that's that's a bin and that's what they're putting in the iPhone SE. Wow, interesting. Yeah, that's a longstanding process in the chip industry where you test the chips and you bin them. They all come from the same wafer, but some chips don't run at the full clock speed or get too hot and so forth, and so you bin them. And this is what Apple wants a way to sell these lower-bend, less-capable chips.
02:30:34 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
So that's you know, maybe that's why Now, speaking of chips, this has the C1, right, which I know nothing about, but I'm sure you guys do that's the most interesting thing.
02:30:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We'll talk about that a lot on MacBreak Weekly. But Apple has been in the thrall of Qualcomm all this time for its modem chip. They actually went to Intel and had Intel build a modem chip. That was so bad they put it in some of their phones and it was so bad they had to throttle the Qualcomm modem so that it wouldn't look like some phones are twice as fast as others, depending on which chip they got. They stopped buying chips from Intel. They still buy them from Qualcomm for all the other ones. This is the first time in apple and they spent billions of dollars and hired many, many people to make this c1 chip. This is the first phone with a c1 chip. It'll be very interesting to see reviewers.
02:31:21 - AI voice (Announcement)
Yeah, I'd really curious what the speeds are going to be yeah it's data speed that will suffer.
02:31:26 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Satellite communications yes. Well, that's important. That's a speed that will suffer. Will this one have satellite communications? Yes, that's important. That's a good one, that's universal now.
02:31:31 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
But no millimeter wave.
02:31:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like anybody cares. This is the 5G that's always you know. Look how fast 5G is. But you have to live within three blocks of a millimeter wave antenna, which means you're either in downtown New York or downtown Philadelphia it's not very widespread or in a football stadium. Apparently they put them in football stadiums, so I don't think that's a big loss?
02:31:56
yeah, I don't think who cares right, uh, there you go. That's the story of the week. You made it were you gonna talk about your smart, uh, smart ring oh yeah, you know, I, I just got this thing, it's, it's there.
02:32:15 - Larry Magid (Guest)
It's not the aura that everybody has, it's the ring con which is the only major difference is it doesn't you don't have to pay eight dollars a month, or whatever it is, to use it yeah, I pay a subscription from I have the aura 4 I've had every aura we used to we.
02:32:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we got to know the creators of the aura back in the day. They were on our show the new screensavers and so I got one then and I've worn it ever since. They're of dubious value, I'll be honest.
02:32:38 - Larry Magid (Guest)
What's weird about it? So I have I mean, this is kind of TMI. I've got my smartwatch. I've got my Fitbit on the phone. I've got my ring Exactly I've got my ring exactly. My smart bed. I've got my nest radar system that somehow tracks my sleep. And they all disagree.
02:32:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I agree, my sdl2 is all over the map, and you know, by the way, what good is it when you told you had a terrible night's sleep, which is pretty much what tells me every freaking night? How does that help me in any way?
02:33:08 - Larry Magid (Guest)
it just makes me feel bad, okay in theory, you're supposed to think back about what your night was the night before. Did you drink too much? Did you watch tv late? I?
02:33:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
do the same thing every time. Yeah, I know, I got a. I got a 69 sleep score last night.
02:33:23 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I think I beat you. We can compete on this one I oh, I can see what I got my wife used to, lisa used to do that.
02:33:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She said, what you? Because we had the, the uh serta sleeper or whatever. They had the pads under the bed and uh, sleep con created that company, you know anyway.
02:33:41 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Um, yeah, there's a name from the past. No, I have his current bed. I've got the tempurpedic, tempurpedic. Yeah, I've got felice bed. Anyway, the fleek's the reason why the fleek's, the reason why I have sleep apnea or the reason I know I had sleep apnea?
02:33:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, actually that's one thing that's useful. The aura did tell me that I that I occasionally have some breathing problems, but not sleep apnea that's good some variation in your blood oxygen levels are detected, this can indicate that you experienced occasional breathing disturbances in your sleep. But not enough to say I gotta get a c-pap or something. So that's, I guess useful.
02:34:16 - Larry Magid (Guest)
But honestly, the rest of it. I was 69 last night too.
02:34:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think we tied my, my wife used to do this with the sleep thing in the bed. She said what was your sleep score? 70. She got 85.
02:34:28 - Larry Magid (Guest)
My wife always gets better than I do compete with me.
02:34:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She always beats me on the yeah. Well, yeah, lisa always beats me too. She sleeps very well sometimes.
02:34:36 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I get up early and she goes over to my side of the bed, so I'm thinking that maybe you know it's getting mixed up here. Yeah, well, that's why I wear the ring and I wonder when somebody's gonna you know, you know be on vacation or be on a business trip and notice that someone slept on their side of the bed and it wasn't them.
02:34:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There used to be a setting where you could say you know, my dog slept there after I got up. So this is supposed to have ten. This only the. The aura is only maybe four or five days.
02:35:05 - Larry Magid (Guest)
You get three times ten days, yeah it seems to work about eight or ten days you get. It does tell you your apnea index, but again, it's not necessarily. It tends to go. If my apnea index, according to my CPAP machine, is high, this is going to be high. If it's low, this is going to be low but they're never the same number. They tend to go together and it does tell you your SpO2, which is all over the map and doesn't necessarily agree.
02:35:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I actually have, if I want to wear it, a WellU, which is kind of a medical grade. Yeah, I bought one of those during COVID to see if I was dying.
02:35:38 - Larry Magid (Guest)
It intends to go in the same direction of that, but not the same it's interesting that they're directionally matched but not quantitatively Exactly, If one is high, the other is going to be higher. But you know, I have to question whether or not how useful all this information really is. I don't think it's made me any healthier. In fact it's probably made me even more neurotic than I would.
02:35:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what it does. It makes you crazy. Yeah, do you, jennifer or Brar, have any of this good stuff?
02:36:05 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I got nothing. I'm living in.
02:36:09 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
You're living blissfully unquantified self.
02:36:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh god, it's the best self you know what?
02:36:13 - Larry Magid (Guest)
how do you know if you feel? Good yeah how do you?
02:36:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
know if you're happy or anything.
02:36:18 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I don't know you just wear a movie, tell me, and then it turns blue and you're sad and then you're no I think the unquantified.
02:36:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's kind of like holding the iphone up to know if it's raining.
02:36:26 - Larry Magid (Guest)
You know you don't need to look at the screen it's looking for wet. You feel good.
02:36:31 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
You feel good if I wait, I'm tired, but look I in.
02:36:35 - Larry Magid (Guest)
In all fairness. There are people who are alive today because apple told them that they were having the watch is good.
02:36:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look, I wear an apple watch and I'm very happy with that.
02:36:42 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I think that is very uh useful yeah, I wear the either, wear the watch and I have a sleep number bed. I haven't done the ring, I'm just not interested in the rings.
02:36:55 - Larry Magid (Guest)
What I like about the ring is you don't have to charge Like I'm going on a business trip next week and I don't have to bring a charger with me. Yeah, that's nice, I like that idea.
02:37:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's good. You don't have to charge this useless thing that you don't really need.
02:37:13 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I was going to say I don charge my jewelry.
02:37:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Amazing, amazing, wow. You mean your jewelry works without being plugged in? Geez, louise, I like the unquantified self. That's my new goal to live the unquantified self. Why do we need to show that? I think I am Forget Musk, right, abrar Alhidi, such a pleasure. Thank you so much. Abrar, of course, works at CNET. You'll read her writings. Abrar, of course, works at CNET You'll read her writings there and, of course, appears on once a month on Tech News Weekly. We love having you on. Thank you for having me. Anything you want to plug.
02:37:39 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
No, I mean you can follow me on xalhiti underscore three or on Instagram.
02:37:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You haven't left X huh.
02:37:46 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
No, I haven't. I don't post as much, but I think some people are really funny on there, so I'm still on there. But yeah, I don't really share that.
02:37:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm increasingly feeling like being on X is kind of feeding the animal.
02:38:02 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, if you want to feel doomsday, it's a great place to go, highly recommend.
02:38:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We stream on X. There's 387 people watching us on X. There's 387 people watching.
02:38:11 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
So you're still on there, yeah, but yeah, also on Instagram, uh, and um, yeah, that's that's.
02:38:18 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Zuckerberg is so much better than Musk, Do you?
02:38:21 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
you don't, you don't ski, I don't. I'm sorry. Can you repeat that?
02:38:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're not on blue sky.
02:38:27 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Oh, is that what people are calling it? I am on blue sky. I've never posted um. I should probably do that, but it's just another account and there's too many. I'm on tiktok. I think tiktok's my favorite. I don't do anything work related on there, though, so, but you can find me on there and I have one more question.
02:38:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, are those little fishes on your scarf?
02:38:43 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
they are flowers. I wish they were fishes now I need to get fishes. But these are just flowers. They're pretty little flowers, yeah fishes.
02:38:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that would be a good one. Yeah, I'm gonna. I don't know why I said that I have mexican hats.
02:38:55 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I love it your shirt is really strange.
02:38:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love it thank you for being here, brar, really great to have you always a pleasure ditto jpt j Patterson, tui love having you on Smart Home. Mama on the what Blue Sky Twitter.
02:39:14 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
That is, threads, threads, threads. And then I'm at JPTui everywhere else. The only reason I'm not on Threads because I that's your Instagram handle.
02:39:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why.
02:39:25 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
But at JPTui is my personal account. Smart Home Mama was my work one but my home mama on threads and and at JP to II, everywhere else, and I'm still on X, don't really post but Still. And then I'm on this, I skeet, I do skeet quite a bit actually and I'm a mastodon. I'm on, I'm on them all because you kind of have to be in this, in this job. But then next week, on Wednesday, I will be live tweeting. No, I won't be live tweeting, I will be live blogging that old fashion thing, the Amazon event.
02:39:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm so thrilled to hear that You're going to cover that. Do you have to go to Seattle for that?
02:40:05 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
It's in New York, which is very exciting. The last event was in dc, at their new headquarters, and the the last one in 2023. That was a little easier for me, but new york's not too far from you take the excella, how are you going to get up there?
02:40:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
fly, fly in an airplane. You are a brave soul. I'm quite brave right now. Just don't fly out of national, okay, but yes that'll be, we'll be.
02:40:31 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I've got the three of us from the Verge will be there live blogging. So vergecom, if you want to find out about the new Alexa.
02:40:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that drives me crazy that they don't stream it. I would love to cover it. Well, good, we'll watch you on the Verge and keep up and let us know how often Penos Pene says pumped Okay.
02:40:50 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
We'll keep a running score. I want the pumped count, okay. Thank you, jennifer.
02:40:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Great to see you, Larry Magid ConnectSafelyorg. You've always got stuff going on there. What's the latest from ConnectSafely?
02:41:00 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Well, we just had our Safer Internet Day event in Sacramento.
02:41:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh that was on the 11th.
02:41:11 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Yes, I'm sorry. 2011, so that went well. What do we got? We haven't been on the site today. I mean, let's see what we're featuring. We probably have an update. Ask Trish Trish what is Deep Seek? She writes a column for young people. She's our youth advisor for kids. Nice, we have another. We have a youth advisory board. So one of our other young people wrote Pixels, prompts and Policy AI through a youth lens. Yeah, what's the difference between a news outlet and a news influencer?
02:41:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
one of our people wrote See, this is great and it's young people talking to young people, helping them navigate this crazy world. And you and I you know we didn't grow up with this. It's a very different world for us than it is for them.
02:41:48 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Very different. I have a piece about deep seek which is I actually think it's pretty good, but I will not give it any personal information.
02:41:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it doesn't know my medical history. Did you see that grok, which is you know elon, spent a lot of money for a hundred thousand nvidia h100 gpus, going to 200,000 soon. It's just down the road from you, I think, actually Jennifer, so it's the most expensive trained AI ever. I know where you're going with this, okay let's hear it, but it isn't uncensored and I thought that was very interesting. Well, I think it is now. Did they change it Because somebody?
02:42:26 - Larry Magid (Guest)
posted Right, you know what?
02:42:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The question somebody asked who should be murdered, or something like that. No, the simple question of who posts the most disinformation on X Right. And one of the things that Grok will do, as all of these new deep research tools like DeepSeek do, is show you its thought process. And one of the first things it says is well, I'd like to say Elon Musk or Donald Trump, but I'm prohibited from saying that. So then it continues on and it comes up and says you know, it really is Elon and Donald, but I can't say that. So I'm just going to say I can't answer that question, but it told you that. But unfortunately, because it's showing you the thought process, it's like a toddler.
02:43:06 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I'm sure they fixed that since then.
02:43:08 - Larry Magid (Guest)
It's like when a kid isn't supposed to say something that was worth all that money for in gpu just well, and deep seek you can't you know if you're using the one that's sourced in china.
02:43:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It won't talk about tiananmen square, but but because deep seek is open source, there are other people running in the us. I use it on perplexity, for instance, and you can ask it about tiananmen. I actually just said is there a famous photo of a man standing in front of a tank? And I said, oh yeah, that's the tiananmen square. You know tank man photo and explain the whole story behind it. So it's not prohibited.
02:43:38 - Larry Magid (Guest)
It's just that the app in china blocks it even when I was using it at the very beginning, when it was blocking tiananmen square, it told me all about hong kong. I ran it an expert, a friend of mine, who's an expert about Hong Kong and he said, yeah, it got it right. It was pretty, pretty interesting.
02:43:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But again, it's hard to censor these things. They really want to tell you what they know.
02:44:00 - Larry Magid (Guest)
And I like that about them Interesting yeah.
02:44:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, larry, great to have you Thanks to all three of you.
02:44:06
Really a fun show. You Thanks to all three of you. Really a fun show. We do Twit and you can, as I mentioned, watch us live every Sunday afternoon, 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern, the middle of the night for Jennifer Patterson, toohey, no, it just feels that way, jp, just feels that way. That's 2200 UTC. Watch live on all of those eight platforms. But you don't have to because it's a podcast. You can always download a copy of the show after we edit it up. Uh, on the twit website, twittv, there's a youtube channel dedicated to the video and you could subscribe to audio or video of the show in your favorite podcast client. We've been doing this for 20 years. If your podcast client doesn't know what twit is, it's not a very good podcast client leo, unlike saturday night, live.
02:44:48 - Larry Magid (Guest)
You and I were here for our intellect, not our good looks uh, very clearly, yeah, or our sense of humor.
02:44:55 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, I was gonna say your humor, obviously yes, yeah, we're here for the jokes, no, no and everybody's here for their in a way, we'll see you.
02:45:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We'll see you next week. I thank you all for being here. Uh, and as I've said for now 20 years. Our 20th anniversary is in april's coming up. I know, isn't that amazing? And I don't look a day older, which is I don't know how I'm doing that. One another twit is in the can. Bye, bye, everybody.
