This Week in Tech 1031 Transcript
Please be advised that 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 Great panel for you this week. Wesley Faulkner is back, stacey Higginbotham and Shoshana Weissman will talk about Apple what they're going to do next. After being spanked by the court, google is now guilty twice of being a monopoly. What are the remedies? And we'll talk about AI. Is it costing too much to use? All that and more coming up next on TWIT Podcasts you love?
00:34 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
From people you trust. This is TWIT.
00:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 1031, recorded Sunday, may 11th 2025. My three friends, it's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. I have gathered together three fine folk for our panel today. Stacey Higginbotham is back. It's great to see you, stacey. She's a policy fellow at Consumer Reports, of course. Longtime host of this Week in Google. Are you sad now that this Week in Google is all about AI intelligent machines? Would you like to come back?
01:19 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I mean, could I talk about AI with you guys? Of course, but no, I'm not sad, sad. How could you not be all about ai?
01:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know everything's about we had a sponsor say well, we want to buy the ai show and I said they're all ai shows. What are you? What are you talking about? That's all we talk about today. Wesley faulkner is also here. Hello, wes, good to see you. It's good to be. It's a nice coincidence. I don't think benito know that stacy introduced me to you at south by southwest about a decade ago.
01:47
So I actually uh, wore this shirt in her honor, texas texas baby texas, texas, yeehaw both of you are texas refugees right I was just about to ask where he is now.
02:02 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I'm in the mountains, so I'm in Roanoke, virginia, nice, which is really great.
02:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't that where Sir Walter Raleigh went and, I don't know, invented tobacco, something like?
02:15 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
that I mean, what's the great thing about being an American is that I don't need to know history, and so I have no clue.
02:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I just mangled it. So I I'm not sure which is worse not knowing it or mangling. Also, from our street, it's shoshana weisman, head of digital media at our streetorg. Hello shoshana thanks for having me always a pleasure, today with a marmot over her left shoulder, did I get that right?
02:43 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
yeah, okay, it's not a sloth no, I mean like marmots are just part more part of like what I run into day to day in the mountains, like I haven't seen a sloth in one yet.
02:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So oh okay, that seems fair. Do marmots move quickly?
02:59 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
oh yeah, they're really really fast. That's it's part of what's so exciting about them. When you get like a really good view of a marmot, that's like special oh, I see I, we may not know history, but we have.
03:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We learn a lot about nature here, which is very good. So apple uh got a little bit spanked. We mentioned this last week. They have decided uh, they are, they're gonna go to uh, the upper court now and the district court and appeal it. But they also said we don't think there's a chance in hell that they're gonna. They're gonna have an, they're gonna issue an injunction. So and of course the apple's not alone epic immediately said we're putting fortnight on the iphone. Uh, amazon added a buy it button right there on the kindle, or get it. I think it says um, apple says we're gonna appeal it, but we don't expect an injunction. However, we're gonna keep fighting it all the way up to the supreme court well, yeah, because that's like cash money cash money baby, you got to keep that coming in as long as you possibly can yeah, it's uh.
04:11
There's a trend in the top stories of the week, which is that big tech in general is getting its spanking. This week, google now has lost two trials. The judge in these in the search trial is now judge meta, not related to facebook. Meta is now hearing uh, this is an abracus brief. Uh from y combinator is now hearing uh, appeal of briefs and testimony. As he makes his uh, this determination, I think he has to the 25th to decide what the remedies should be.
04:48
The government is saying break, not break up google, but but make them do one, one or all of three things sell chrome, uh, give or license out its search data, to which senator pachari said you can't do that. That. That would be like telling Coca-Cola to give Pepsi their secret recipe to put us out of business and or stop paying $20 billion to Apple and hundreds of millions of dollars to Firefox and Samsung and others to guarantee their placement in the browser. The judge may say all three. He may say one of three. The Y Combinator, which is, of course, a startup incubator, says you got to do all. You got to do it, man, because we are already seeing, uh, you know, google is, is is putting a kibosh on our business. Monopoly power, they wrote, gives a monopolist myriad ways to exclude competition. The remedy order will need to anticipate and prevent any retaliation against startups that intend to compete on its merits.
06:02 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
They're saying hey, we represent startups and Google's bad for startups just one clarifying question on the Chrome sale is there also like a ban from them ever making another browser?
06:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
for I think it was for five or six years. Yeah, so five or six years, okay, but which is in the isn't long really. I mean, they would come back with a browser as soon as they could. There's also the issue of chrome is an open source project called chromium, admittedly mostly financed and staffed by google. But how do you sell an open source?
06:37 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
project, but that would also include chrome os um, because it's based off chrome I guess it would.
06:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know. There's a lot of questions, yeah, and I don't know if judge meta is capable of of making a a decision on that one. Plus, if you tell, uh, google, stop paying apple and and mozilla and samsung, that might have the wrong impact. It certainly would put firefox as a put. Mozilla says, put us out of business, be the end of firefox, which is let's say let's. I mean, it's one of the only competing browser technologies, so that would be kind of a negative thing I mean, if I were firefox.
07:16 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I'd yeah, I would go to propexy and say you're gonna buy instead of buying chrome, chrome the, the head of nozilla, said it put us out of business as well.
07:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Your, your Honor, yeah, go ahead, stacey.
07:26 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
No, I was just going to say well, you can't make a drastic change in the ecosystem like this without it having what is it? You got to crush a few bad apples.
07:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know, I'm just mixing it up, you got to break some eggs to make an omelet.
07:38 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yes, and I'm devastated about Firefox. You know we love like who doesn't love Mozilla, I use it. I love it, we want it, but I'm frustrated because they still they've talked about going after the ad monopoly, which to me is way more of an issue than the search engine monopoly.
08:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But whatever, but the search. So the monopoly in chrome, uh, paying people to forcing them, to paying them to use chrome, uh all helps the ad monopoly too, right? Yes, it gives them information about you, us, me, and uh, that's what helps them but who's using search engines today?
08:19 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
anyway, are we still using search engines, isn't?
08:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it that's the funny thing, isn't it?
08:32 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
That's the funny thing about the whole thing is this is right, when AI seems to be taken over anyway. I mean, it's the default.
08:36 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
So go Shoshana. Oh, no, sorry, you go ahead, you were starting.
08:46 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Oh, I was just saying it's the default thing that I use before.
08:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I go to AI at the the moment is for for any random thing. What do?
08:51 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
you use just google search. Oh interesting, I don't use ai search because it is a separate um, a separate thing, and it is the. The memory is stickier and so I'm always concerned. Uh, you could clear your cookies and log out of services, but when? You use AI it stores that as part of your profile and it doesn't forget.
09:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When it comes to privacy, AI, you're saying it's worse.
09:16 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yes, exactly. So when you're looking for ways to dispose of a dead body, where are you?
09:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
going to go, not perplexity or chat, dispose of a dead body. Where are you going to go eddie q through a monkey wrench into the search uh antitrust case when he testified, to the shock of everybody, in the dismay everybody, that google searches. Eddie q, by the way, is that it run is the senior vice president of services at apple. Now people pointed out ed Eddie might have a dog in this hunt, right, because Apple stands to perhaps lose $20 billion a year in its services bottom line, so which is where it sticks at. So maybe Eddie Cue had an ulterior motive. But he testified that Google searches declined in Safari for the very first time last quarter.
10:08 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Yeah, that's what I was thinking about too. I'm skeptical of a lot of the way that American courts go after companies with antitrust. But even to the degree they do, the remedies I feel like sometimes just don't make sense. It's like when you want to break up stuff, it's like, okay, we'll break them up into what like, what really can be done here to make it better, and then search is declining. Like I agree with Wesley that, like I'm a little skeptical because, like ChatGPT seems to remember a lot about me and that freaks me out a little bit.
10:36
But more and more people are just using generally ChatGPT other tools too instead of search. So, right as search is getting some really, really big competition, courts are like, oh, now, let's do this now, like, as this is happening, which is kind of it feels kind of silly to me, like this might not be the right timing for it. Plus, there's, like you know, the way courts have gone after Meta for having Instagram, even though when they acquired it it wasn't a sure bet. I just think that a lot of this doesn't always make a ton of sense, but I think with timing it's just a slow process and it's always gonna end up being a little bit behind that way, but it can have some weird consequences, like now.
11:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just to underscore what you just said, Wesley.
11:20 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Microsoft.
11:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Chat, gpt turned on a feature where it would remember everything you've ever said to it. So I asked I just asked it. What do you know about me? Well, you're leo laporte, your podcaster, with radio broadcasting background. You produce and monetize tech focused podcasts, know about podcast strategy, host red ads, direct sponsorships. You're currently selling your house, preferring for a move. You use debian, follow formula one in the super bowl. You have a daughter named abby, who's interested in ethical ai development. Your accelerationist and your views on ai optimistic about its potential. Believe human created content, will green value as ai generated content proliferates. You do not drink alcohol, but interested in whiskey as a gift for others. You enjoy historical topics, creative image generation and technical deep dives into subject, like common lisp. How does it know all this about me? These are all searches I've done, uh, so to to underscore your point, wesley, it knows a lot about me you did not hit that last sentence where they were like you maintain a high cognitive bar for interaction.
12:16
I'm like dude and prefer blunt directive responses yeah what I don't know about that. Is that true?
12:25 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I've had, I've had it like use it for uh responding to emails. It'll throw in something like that and I was like, oh, don't say that and I'm in a busy period of life.
12:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, uh, there's some. So, first of all, there's some surprising facts in here that, um, it knows which would certainly be of interest to advertisers, for instance, that I'm shopping for whiskey, uh. But there's also some. It's also generating some judgments, like I prefer blunt direct responses. Where did it get that? I don't think I. Oh, I know I told it that I said stop being so namby-pamby, give me blunt direct responses. Yeah, so that's different it was funny.
13:14 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I I recently asked it what it, what it what it knew about me, not just like facts, but what it could think from like what all the stuff it knows about me, and one of my favorite things was that it like was very aware I live in a very idiosyncratic life.
13:27
They're like oh with all your dietary restrictions and all your hobbies like they're a unique combo. So I bet you go about your life very differently than most people and I was like man, that's, that's right, right on right, yeah, and something an advertiser would probably want to know too, right.
13:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is your. This is exact, just to your point that this is very hard for a judge at this point to make a determination that is going to be effective in curbing google's monopolistic behavior and not have you know, all sorts of spray, uh and problems and google might be. Now, when eddie q, by the way, said, said that, uh, google searches were down on apple. Google stock went down seven and a half percent in that day. It was like freaked people out. Uh, the company released a one paragraph statement saying hey, wait a minute, we continue to see overall query growth in search. This includes an increase in total queries coming from apple's devices and platforms. I feel like they're fudging statistics somehow, but I'm not sure where, um it's. In other words, you're saying, or you know, hey, more generally, as we enhance search with new features, ai, people are seeing that Google search is more useful for more of their queries and they're accessing it for new things in new ways. We're excited to continue this innovation.
14:52
Yeah, yeah, we make them, we pay them to do that.
14:58 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Let me put forth a remedy that I wish that they would do. Yes, they should put whatever metric they want Share of advertising, market share, whatever, just put a number and just say Google, we're capping you at 80% and you have to do whatever you can to get to 80% within two, three years.
15:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like decrease your market share.
15:21 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, yeah. And if they don't do it, then they'll force remedy. How would you so? What would Google?
15:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
do Take, and if they don't do it, then they'll force remedy. How would you know? So what would Google do? Take out ads saying don't use our browser.
15:29 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
They can invest in other companies they can invest more in, like Mozilla. You know what? That's a great idea. They could try to make the environment better for other people so that it makes it an even playing ground, and then they could choose exactly how that they, from a financial standpoint, can play their fork. And then that way, if they're told what they need to do, they won't do the extras that they need to do. It's like putting it in other properties or giving it like. Whenever I open up Edge, for instance, it says, hey, do you want to switch to Chrome? Like stuff like that. They would stop doing and they can audit what they're doing to juice the shares and then figure out what they can change to make it get down and prop up others. Just, they would be less anti-competitive and that would change their actions and you would have a strict metric that everyone can monitor to make sure it works.
16:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You should write a note to Judge Mehta.
16:25 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
There's the and I'm going to screw it trick that everyone can monitor to make sure it works. You should write a note to Judge Mehta. There's the and I'm going to screw it. It's the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index and that is used by the FTC to measure or, sorry, not the FTC, the DOJ's antitrust. That's a measure of market concentration. Now what happens is you fight to figure out how you want to measure your market. Again, it's like whatever data, whatever KPIs you're going to pick. So, do you want search engine? Do you want it per user? Do you want it per different browsers or not browsers? Sorry, different operating systems, and we could. I mean, that's a total thing that you can do. There's many, many really boring research papers about this, and I only know about it because I covered antitrust for the phone companies and broadband. But yes, you're, you're spot on with. That's exactly what people should be doing.
17:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually. There's a good example of this um untoward media in our youtube chat saying I'm reminded of the time mic Microsoft put 100 million dollars into Apple and saved it when Microsoft was being prosecuted for antitrust behavior.
17:31 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Intel did the same thing with AMD. That's.
17:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why Intel was like, hey, interesting, keep going, keep going yeah, yeah, not not be out of any altruistic reason, probably, but just because no, no, they wanted the no, it was very apparent.
17:46 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
We don't want to be a monopoly we just.
17:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you're saying 80%. That'd be okay, wesley, 80%. I don't know Just pick whatever number that is reasonable. Some number that is reasonable.
17:57 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, or when choose the metric and then not everyone knows, and you can actually verify this externally too, so it's not just a big secret like, oh, they divested from Chrome, but then they bought Mozilla or they invested so much more that they're able to still use that to funnel whatever. It keeps them from doing untoward, underhanded things, and it actually changes their behavior.
18:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple implied. Atq implied that Apple was planning or looking at, not replacing Google Search with Apple Search, but replacing it with AI and, to that end, google, by the way, said oh yeah, we're talking with them about using our AI Gemini. There's a rumor of a deal with Anthropic the makers of Claude, which is a very good ai, and perplexity although, uh, I'm reading a, a piece, uh, from club mac stories. But john vorhees, who said, maybe not perplexity, because its ceo shows not only contempt for the open web but says we're going to make a pro, a browser and, by the way, it's going to track everything users do online and sell hyper-personalized ads. And that's a good thing, isn't it? There he is, it actually is.
19:16 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
So a lot of people will find that a good thing, because they don't quite understand what's happening. I mean, people still are very excited about super personalized everything, even though they don't understand that that super personalization comes because they're being stopped.
19:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm kind of flattered that chat GPT knows so much about me though.
19:37 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
See, and then to get all that for free, just because you get some really like juicily, like appropriately targeted ads. Or maybe you get weirded out by like, oh my God, how do they know about the warts on my feet? You know, those are. Those are just moments where you're just like, oh, I don't understand it.
19:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You shrug it off and you keep, you keep feeding the beast all your data uh, google last month lost its case, uh, against the department of justice who was suing it, saying you have a monopoly in advertising, which I think is is actually a serious problem. They, they control both the buy and sell end of of advertising as well as, you know, being the platform for the advertising. Uh, the us district court ruled that google monopolized open web digital ad markets. Uh, the doj says google should sell its ad exchange. It also wants it to sell google ad manager, which was, remember it bought double click for publishers, um, and? And so it's saying it's it wants to spin. It wants google to spin off those ad portions. Google might end up at the end of this year a much smaller company, or maybe not because it takes a while, but at some point a much smaller company after all this yeah, remember.
20:53 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
So microsoft has been through so many antitrust cases and they're all, like shoshana said, a little bit late, right like yeah, yeah tag for bundling is everything started to go.
21:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They put the browser in the in the operating system, like oh, shocking.
21:12 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
And then you know there'll be so many appeals and this will take forever and by the time it's done they will have, I mean, the point of the appeals.
21:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sure, you can stop it, but it also buys you plenty of time to figure out the next angle to like get your cash well but remember what happened with the microsoft case, and paul thurad at iron windows weekly show reminded me that steve balmer spent a year of of his tenure as ceo negotiating with the doj and finally got out of the spit. They wanted to break it up. They got out of that and made it did a consent decree which just said you know, we won't do this and we won't be so rapacious anymore. And the doj put an ombudsman inside microsoft watching what they're doing. Um, they conceded a lot but they didn't get broken up and I suspect the same thing will. I imagine that those negotiations will happen, although everything's kind of up in the air with the new administration. This is one of the things it's, I think, problematic for the united states is that every four years they change their point of view right well, okay, up until now I would say they may have changed a little bit about the point of view.
22:28 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
So, yes, you have historically seen FTCs or DOJs stop prosecuting cases, but at a very small level. What's happened now is they have blown up the idea of the government enforcing any rules, and that is very different. So I would I would caution us and say what is happening now is very different from just a mere change in point of view.
22:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah. I would definitely see that tech sentiment running through the nation?
23:02 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Yes, I would argue that the rules are always harsh. It's just that the favor, it's just they choose where to point the gun. So it's it's. It's never like enforced equally. They just choose who is gonna be the focus for that quarter and that and that's based on.
23:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know who they're pissed off at at the moment. Remember, in 2017, President Trump said we're going to ban TikTok. And then Congress, five, eight years later, passed a law banning TikTok. And then Trump gets reelected and says no, we're not going to ban TikTok and in fact, as far as I can, that law saying tick tock has to be either divested to an american company or shut down is never going to go into effect. Trump says yeah, I'm just going to keep delaying it.
23:54 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
The law went into effect, he's just not following forcing the law.
23:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's just not going to force it. Yes, you're right, it is a law.
24:03 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I actually think it's a huge problem, though it's interesting too because, uh, I think it's part of what stacy was getting at a little bit too earlier that, like the, the new trump ftc also does not like tech.
24:14
But also to wesley's point, like the administrations go after people they don't like, which I think is a bad thing, that they should be going after people breaking the law or causing problems. There shouldn't be favoritism. But it's kind of inherent in politics, which is really sad that it's just human nature in politics where it's hard to overcome that stuff. But then it's like you're saying with Trump too, like with the TikTok stuff, it's just all like oh, he likes them now, so they're in the clear, which is not a great governing strategy, but it's not unique to him either. Maybe he takes it more extreme, but I I see this constantly where it's like oh, I like them, so whatever, versus like uh, oh, I don't like them, so I'll actually go after them well, and if you like ai, then you'll like what the trump administration is doing, because they, uh, they overruled biden's executive order on ai safety.
25:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They, uh, they've now said uh, you know, we don't want any restrictions on ai at all, um, so yeah, that's right, it's a, it's a gun, but it's aimed at different directions every few years and I would caution that there is a.
25:23 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
There's an evolution and viewpoint in the electorate as well.
25:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's true, I think you're right.
25:29 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
We shouldn't want everything to stay exactly static, because then we would still be hanging out, you know, in 1776, with the lack of voting rights, et cetera. Right, so, so we do.
25:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, I mean as a white male owning property, though I think that's fine I mean, yeah, I wouldn't be allowed to vote.
25:49 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
None of the rest of us, you would be able to vote.
25:51 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I would get the one vote in this panel yeah, personally, but it would be property in that situation.
25:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I wouldn't say no, you make an excellent point, stacy. We've come a long way, haven't we? Yeah?
26:02 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
well, and just that. We expect it to change as our needs change as a society yes.
26:09 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Yes, there's a difference between leadership and management. And management is being able to marshal everyone in a direction and then head there and keep everyone in line. That's management. Leadership is going on top of a hill and saying we should be going in that direction and the loosening restrictions helps with management. It lets people raise money, it helps people move faster in the thing that they're gonna do. But I think removing like safeguards is not something that helps with leadership. People are going to move faster, but they may be going in the wrong direction and by the time we turn around and see where we are, we could be a few meters or miles or large distances from where we should be and we have to backtrack, which would waste time. So it advantages people who want to move fast?
27:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, but not in terms of leadership, which I think that's that's more compelling. Ideally you have both right, and maybe one administration is a leader and one administration is a manager, but you need both. You need some vision, you need to know where you're going, you need some leadership, but you also need to manage. Once you've built the road, you need to manage it.
27:27 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
You can't just charge over the hill and but the question is no one's, even though they say we want to be dominant, we want to win this, they, they. There's nothing in leadership, it's all about management. We just want to go faster. So buy more GPUs and then you can see. Even with deep seek, they were like well, we looked at the fundamental how, the how this was put together and they were able to get some really big gains. And so going faster, without looking back and doing the deep like actual work of figuring out how things work and how they work best it it allows you to be flat footed and caught off guard.
28:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a time for move fast and break things, but there's also a time to build and fix things.
28:09 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
It's foundational. We need to build the foundation. So if you're abandoning the foundation and building on top of that, it's all going to fall apart. Sorry, go Stacey.
28:21 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I was just going to say there's also two different, I guess, worldviews or perspectives here. One is what is the role of government versus what are the role of business? And I mean, I know that we like to think they're the same and they should be the same, but that's crazy talk, because nobody actually loves their employer slash company that much that they would trust them with their social safety net. Slash company that much that they would trust them with, like, their social safety net. So you're totally right. And then there's that extra dynamic and well if we want to bring in history.
28:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was, at the very beginning of this country, a fork in the road. Uh, there was. Are, we is? Is the government going to be about supporting business or is the government going to be about supporting its people? And we have, over many years, made that choice again and again and again. But essentially, you know, alexander Hamilton and his faction won and America was about business, the feeling being, if you support business and this was at the beginning of an industrial era that we became a mighty power as a result of if you support business, everybody will benefit in the long run.
29:32 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
It's an interesting remember that song in hamilton what, what?
29:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
was that it wasn't in the show, the broadway show, no, but it was essentially the debate between monroe, madison, jefferson, who are agrarians, uh, uh, you know and the south, and then it was the north versus the south, new york versus virginia.
29:52 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
It was more about monetary policy.
29:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's what it was, that's right but I, I would not but for instance hamilton wanted a federal bank. He did right he wanted?
30:03 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
he wanted a federal bank. He did Right. He wanted a government that could make unilateral decisions around money and set monetary policy Right, in part because he I don't know if it was pro-business. I can see how you would say it was like pro-industrialization, because the North is like super industrial. He also made trade deals all over the world Right industrial and but he he also made trade deals all over the world right, but I don't think he ever abandoned the idea that a government's serve.
30:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The core purpose of the government was to serve the people well, they're, they're all people, some of them own businesses, that's all uh well, I'll tell you where the people are in charge.
30:45
In texas, big tech is not above the law, according to attorney general ken paxton. For years, google secretly tracked people's movements, private searches and even their voice prints and facial geometry through their products and services. Paxton says I fought back and won. Google will pay 1.4 billion dollars to texas to settle the claims. The company collected users data without permission yeah, do it, ken paxton.
31:15 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I mean, I'm not a huge paxton fan, but sometimes you do the right thing yeah, I'll do you one better pass a privacy law law.
31:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, a federal, not a state one, because we have state privacy laws, we have California has a federal privacy law that doesn't preempt the best parts of state privacy laws.
31:33 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
That's what I saw, yeah, maria Cantwell's law actually preempted the state laws.
31:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the problem, but we do. We all agree. Everybody who is on our panels, everybody who's tech savvy, agrees we need a federal privacy law.
31:48 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
We need to get the data brokers under controls and we agree with that, but we want preemption just because, like when you have the patchwork, you know I am worried about that it's okay to preempt it as long as it's a better law yeah, no, no, I got you, I got you
32:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
don't preempt. You know, california has a strong law and it seemed to me maria cantwell. I was always puzzled why she wanted a federal privacy law. Then I realized, oh, it's because the state laws are, so you're getting stronger and stronger. Illinois has a very strong privacy law and so let's get, let's make a federal law that's weaker and preempt the state laws is not what we want. We want a stronger federal law, right yeah, the one.
32:25 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
There was actually a really good one. I think it was two years ago, not last year's uh, our law, but that one was okay, but then it didn't pass and then we got this next one and I feel like it's never.
32:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's never going to be a successful.
32:44 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Maybe I'm wrong the more I learn about passing legislation, the more depressed I get as an individual.
32:51 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Good Lord, yeah, I mean I've brought a lot of really simple like, really like 99.9 percent of people would agree like small, narrow, simple stuff to lawmakers and then and and I mean even agencies too and they're like yeah, this is stuff to lawmakers and then and I mean even agencies too and they're like, yeah, this is a great idea. And then they're like but it's not sexy, so we're not gonna do it.
33:11 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I'm like, ah, like, just do the thing yeah, I'm, I'm, so I'm pitching a law right now. That's like that and I'm like, please let's make it happen, but it's probably not gonna happen.
33:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Say more, say more well, hold on hold that thought. I do want to find out what is that to the degree you could talk about it, stacy, but we're going to take a break. It's great to have stacy higginbotham here. She is a policy fellow now with consumer reports and you could say she works, uh, with that kind of policy. That's fantastic. We're so glad you're working for us. Thank you, stacy. Shoshana Weissman doing the same at rstreetorg, head of digital media over there, it's great to have you and Wesley Faulkner, who is leading the charge over the hill at wesley83.com Great to see all three of you. Our show today brought to you by. We were talking about privacy.
34:02
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36:04
I was so, so excited. It must be real, yeah.
36:06 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
We in March we put forth model legislation. So that's just Consumer Reports, PERG, a security group, center for Democracy and Technology. We basically wrote a law and are now shopping it around and hopefully someone will be like oh, I think this law is so great, I'm going to totally pass it. And it is forcing manufacturers sorry, requiring manufacturers to disclose when they plan to stop supporting their connected devices or routers. So any connected consumer product, when you buy it, there should be that minimum guaranteed support timeframe.
36:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, this is oh yeah, we talked about that, yeah. Yeah, we totally did because it's been totally did, because, congratulations, so it's going great, right, everybody's going to get on board, it's going to pass, president's going to sign it, deal done sure, sure. Why is it to the states?
36:55 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
yeah, we're pitching it to the states because that's a little bit more likely go to the states. Yeah, yeah, yeah but I mean it is like oh sorry, that's my dog, Hi.
37:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought it was Bernie Sanders for a minute. Go ahead, yeah.
37:10 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
We just sorry the.
37:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
FBI last week.
37:13 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
That would be a good name for a dog, by the way, bernie.
37:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sanders, you getting some success pitching this around.
37:24 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
No, I was going to say we've actually had a really compelling reason. This is useful is the FBI just told everybody last week that if you're using routers from you know, earlier than 2010,.
37:35
You should get with them because they're being targeted by a botnet. So that is exactly why we need this, because thebi was like uh, you know, generally, if it's older than 2010 that's 15 years it's probably not supported, but we don't know. Um, but that's the kind of thing we want to like just be able to tell people like hey, you could find this easily. This means you're not supported, this means you are get rid of it anyway it seems so little to ask.
38:04 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Well is there a threshold? Is there a threshold of, like, how many devices? Or um, for instance, if I'm like a uh independent hardware manufacturer, I don't know if this is going to take off or not. Um, so do I still need to disclose?
38:19 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
excellent question. That is why we are pushing a minimum supported timeframe that you disclose and then you can change it at any point in time. You just have to, when you change it, put it on the product webpage.
38:33 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Ah, so like Because yes.
38:36 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah, because you might actually-. Now I do think if you're going to sell a connected product, you should make a commitment to support it for at least two years, that's, I mean, unless it's like a ten dollar, like toy two years doesn't seem very long actually it's not and, like a lot of people, get a lot of pushback.
38:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
These are durable goods you expect to have for 10 years or more. I mean, who thinks about updating their router until it, if it breaks which it may never break?
39:02 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
oh, dude, you should upgrade your router, like well you and I know that I don't.
39:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think most people aren't going. Hey, you know that router is two years old. It's probably time for a new one. People don't buy new mattresses?
39:16
what are they gonna update? Something in the closet that they don't even know it's there? I helped the neighbor the. A couple of years ago I helped a neighbor. He said our internet's not great and I said, all right, well, let me take a look at your router I had. It was in the garage. The garage was full of stuff. I literally had to climb over furniture and stuff to get to the router which had been sealed up basically in the wall since he bought the house. That's pretty typical, I think. How old was this person? He was an older man, older gen. Hey, we're, you know, I'm an older gent, it's you know.
39:52 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Let's not be ageist here, okay I'm not trying to be ageist, I'm just like there are certain people who would notice that they were only getting like 10 megabits per second, everybody who listens to our shows is smart enough to consider this as an issue it's not intelligence, it's just they care about this part of technology well, they know about it.
40:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they're, they're aware of it, but I think it was I think the fbi.
40:17 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
It was the tp link router that you mentioned, or was it micro tick?
40:21 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
it was actually a linksys. Is that they? They put out a call for they've all been, they've all been hacked in there, yeah yeah, I have. I'm keeping a running document of all the hacked routers.
40:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We had a story on security now where, uh, bad guys got into a network, but then everything was protected. They could. They were trying to put some mal ram somewhere in there and they couldn't find anything. Finally they found a camera, a security camera, that was running linux, had enough ram, enough cpu for them to put the malware on the camera, which, of course, hadn't been updated ever. That's a also a big problem, right? All of these iot devices never get updated I would say our legislation.
41:01
Yes, if you have one of these routers and you don't have the money um look into like something like dd wrt or open uh wrt or the hack your router firmware yes and that is the only thing you can do like if you go to open wrt, you can download I mean this is a larger conversation, though, because these products are really designed to be thrown out, which they shouldn't be. They should be designed to be updated, even if it's not by the manufacturer. They should be open that so that you could put your own firmware on there. I mean not that most people would know how to do that, but still it's a shame. These things are designed even phones are designed as disposable items.
41:55 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
So after mid-August I'm actually giving a talk at Usenix about building for longevity. Yes, so I will have an entire talk on all the things and we can talk about all the ideas and it'll be super fun. Because, you're right, it is.
42:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is wasteful, it is anti-consumer, it is really wasteful hundreds of millions of routers that are super annuated in the united states that are just going to end up in landfill.
42:25 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
It's not just routers, it's, I mean, your phones, it's your Chromebooks, it's everything. There's heavy metals in there, there's. I mean it is like Wesley was saying you're going, we've invested a lot in this infrastructure, we've gone several steps forward without thinking of all the repercussions, and now we're thinking about the repercussions and you know, I constantly hear well, it's just too expensive, we can't go back, and I'm like we might be forced to at some point.
42:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, carl in our YouTube chat says hoping WRT sounds like a sore. Hey, it sounds better than the tomato router, which is another uh firmware. You could put on there, uh or ddwrt. No, I agree with you, wesley. I and I really feel like we, we, we, but it's not going to happen. But we're, we're so focused on profit right now that the right thing to do would be build this stuff in a way that it could be updated, it could be fixed, it could be repaired, that it would have some longer life. But we are. It's just. It seems like it's hopeless at this point. I don't know open.
43:34 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Wrt actually built a router that is kind of designed that way. They've designed it with, you know, extra memory. It's modular, so you can replace boards, perfect, um yeah, so. So that's how I mean.
43:45 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
And consumers want this. Like, if you think about, like the framework laptop. People are excited about that. That is new and interesting. It's not that we have been focused on profit, it's just that we haven't been given a choice. And if you, I'm sure you've heard of the slate truck, um, yeah, I love that everyone.
44:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hope that takes off exactly. It's a 20 000 truck that doesn't even have a radio in it, let alone any additional software. It doesn't even have a screen in it or speakers. But you then can upgrade it or modify it yeah, and it's.
44:23 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
And this customization is just something consumers aren't used to because they're not given the choice, and consumer choice is limiting what products get to market and which ones are surviving. And I personally have, uh, started tinkering with my own home lab. So buying, buying computers and networking equipment and gear and being able to like re-firmware an old Chromebook or loading like OpenWRT on an old router and maybe letting me repurpose it and skin it and choose the interface I want, gives it a longer lifespan. Post its first owner and, if we want to be sustainable, that not only makes it so it lasts longer, but it also opens up access to people who didn't have this technology when it first went through, and I think that's great.
45:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We need to kind of think about, kind of rethink, how we treat our society and treat the world but I will.
45:30 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I will toss a little sadness on this, or a little piss in your cheerios, as it were. Um, with even things like open wrt, you have to. If you put this on your routers, you have to make sure that you are applying security updates and you have to manage it. You put this on your routers, you have to make sure that you are applying security updates and you have to manage it. And I think one of the things that companies know consumers don't really think about is every connected device that they bring into their house. They actually have to manage actively. And you're bringing so many more things in right now and I think that's exhausting and confusing to people. Putting open source on top of that so they actually have to proactively go out and manage it might be a bridge too far for people yeah in ways that are well, we just have to, you know, we have to start growing our own food, making our own furniture.
46:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just think that we need to rethink how we've designed this society going forward. We mentioned no, I'm obviously I'm being a little facetious uh, we mentioned that, uh, ken paxton who is, you know, not my hero either managed to get 1.4 billion dollars out of google. We also mentioned how it's a little complicated for big tech companies to deal with 50 states and and 200 nations. Uh, get ready for this one missouri attorney general, andrew bailey. He's just proud, as proud as heck, proud as heck because he's filed a rule. Now, by the way, it's unclear whether you could just make a rule as the attorney general, and it will be law, but he has announced the filing of a rule. It's the state equivalent of an executive order, first in the nation under the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act, requiring big tech platforms to allow get ready for this missouri users to choose their own content moderators rather than being forced to rely on the biased algorithms of monopolistic tech giants I think this is amazing.
47:34 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I mean, if you want to protect free speech, I think he's done it. I don't think any of these platforms are now they I think now they're not uh trouncing on anyone's free speech.
47:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Done, consider it done yeah, the rule uh declarifies that it's an unfair, deceptive or otherwise unlawful practice for social media platforms think xcom, blue sky, instagram, facebook to deny users the ability to choose an independent content moderator. I don't even know how would that work. Platforms must now provide a choice screen in the state of Missouri upon account activation and at regular intervals. They cannot favor their own moderation tools and must allow full interoperability for outside moderators chosen by users that's stupid could.
48:32 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Could you see? I mean, with the at protocol for blue sky, is that something you could actually it?
48:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
could do that, couldn't it?
48:40 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
okay, so, and then with mastodon, could you? I mean, that's a little, can you?
48:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
apply well so I run a mastodon instance and I moderate it. I don't the only. I mean what I could do when you signed in and said look, I'm moderating this one, if you want to moderate yours, good news. Set up a server, run your own Mastodon and you can moderate it any way that you want, or you. This is actually what Federation does do. It lets you choose a moderator, in effect, because if you go to my server'm the moderator. If you go to mastodonsocial, then somebody else is the moderator. So in a way, that's the case. If you know, um, if, uh, I don't know, uh, steve bannon wanted to set up his own mastodon and moderate it any way he wanted to, you could do that. So in a way, the federated systems already allow this and I think they could probably say systems already allow this and I think they could probably say, yeah, but x doesn't. How would you?
49:40 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
how would you put your own moderator on x? The issue is, this is only for producing content, not for viewing, so it you could choose your moderator for someone if. If someone flagged me for I don't know racism or something, it would go to my moderator, the one that I chose I don't understand it at all which could be my cousin Vinny.
50:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's what it sounds like.
50:07 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
And they're like, yeah, no, wesley's cool, he can say whatever he wants, but it doesn't do anything for the consumer.
50:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
On the consumer side, Well, I'm on the consumer side. Well, I'm on. I'm on the missouri attorney general's uh website. Let's just scroll down. There's a link. The full rule can be read here. Let's read the full rule.
50:24 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Oh, it's blocked I think your moderator prevented that.
50:30 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
That's been moderated this is just like my hell. All these freaking elected officials just like making up random crap and not understanding how things work. I've, I've just had, so I I have some pieces coming out soon, but basically like, like in in a different instance, age verification bills that that strike like oh, 13 year old from 14 year old, 15 year old from 16 year old, stuff like that. Kids don't have ids, they don't have ids, they have birth certificates, but those don't have photos. And I'm like how the hell are you?
51:03
going to do this verify away and I walk through like why it's impossible, and then like I mean so many of these rules, no matter how well intended, make no sense and I have major issues with the like oh, big tech and free speech stuff. I'm like no, that's, the government can infringe on it and is always trying to like, constantly, like let's not give them more tools. And like more first amendment, uh, exemptions. And like in, uh, in my age verification series I've done a piece on um you wrote a great one, by the way.
51:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That really was the definitive piece on this.
51:36 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
And that was several years ago. They keep trying and I'm like you guys have more problems. They never give up, yeah. But uh, it's crazy because, like the precedent here is being used by courts to overturn this stuff and like no one cares, like they just keep wanting to do it, and with this stuff too, like this is super unconstitutional to say you must do speech in the way we want, and I'm just like, no like no like no, come on, that's.
52:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the definition of a violation of the first amendment. I mean it. But the thing is, I think I mean presumably he went to law school, he's an attorney general.
52:10 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
He probably knows that, that this is posturing, he knows, I don't know, I know so many elected lawyers who like think, who will tell me, like sincerely, the things they're doing there's no first amendment issues and like these are smart people who like really believe it, and I'm like I just don't understand. Like, like there's so much precedent you can read it. Like you can google it or, sorry, chat gpt and then go read the the full precedent and I'm just like I'm not a lawyer, I just read. I like read ever at all and I like check with competent lawyers if I'm not sure, but like no one else seems capable of doing that okay, that was.
52:47 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
That was what I was meaning when I was facetiously saying oh, yeah, yeah that he did it. It's just that if he wants to protect free speech, it's done. There's no work to be done in this area right, oh my gosh.
53:00 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
And like the moderators, it's like we have all these laws too, uh, about copyright and about, uh, you know, section 230, exemptions with, uh, uh, child content. And it's like is your moderator gonna get the company in trouble because they're not gonna handle that stuff? Like you could see them being like hi, I'm the fun ip moderator. Like you can do whatever you want with ip here, and like you're good, like then the company gets sued, I don't know it's just wild.
53:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, we live in a very interesting world, you know, because for a long time gov republicans said we want smaller government. You know, ronald Reagan famously said what was that? The five scariest worlds, in the English language. I'm the government and I'm here to help. And and now, of course, it's big government. I talk about big government. It's Attorney General Bailey.
53:51
All right, go take a little break, have more. I'm sorry, I'm getting head up. I like blunt talk. Okay, if you wouldn't mind. No more circumlocuting the stories. We have a wonderful panel Shoshana Weissman, wesley Faulkner, stacey Higginbotham Great team, love seeing you.
54:11
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58:26
They grew up with the internet. Yeah, my kid is gen z. Yeah, probably. Uh, the doge bros are gen z too, right?
58:30 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
well, you know, both tulsi gabbard and uh and Pete Hegseth apparently reused their passwords. So, this is not just a Gen Z phenomenon, no, everybody does this? Is everyone should. Ok, y'all just get yourself one pass, last pass, bit warden, just yes, whatever you do just get get a password, Use it. Use it.
58:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah. I bet, that's all.
58:53 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
It always kills me, me like in my soul, that like lawmakers will try to make things less secure by just going after big tech to do it, and I'm like hey, uh, you guys haven't gotten stuff great together. The government's talked all the time, and like now more than ever, and I'm always very sensitive about that, because I'm like we shouldn't punish companies for doing things that are good for security when they do, but I mean the extent to which it's gotten bad. I mean they reuse passwords using your name, even if it's like an alternative name of yours, as a password, like your middle name or if I use my Hebrew name, but if I'm in government doing that, I'm just like so, so physically angry about that.
59:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you should be. I mean, this is the problem. Is there's passwords? Uh, even if they're good passwords, uh, if they get revealed in a breach. You know, if you use a target and target got breached, the bad guys are just going to take that email and password and try it everywhere. So if you're reusing your passwords, you're you're gonna get they call it credential stuffing. You're gonna get hacked like doge bro kyle shoot. By the way, this is one of the doge kids who has access to fema's core financial 37 okay so he's so he's not a kid.
01:00:13
Hey, to me 37 is a kid, let me just tell you anyway, all right, not a kid, and so he should know better. Right, he has, uh, he has access to fema's core financial management system. Uh, he is, in fact, I think, going to get access, he's part to that whole api they're they're generating that will combine all the government databases. Meanwhile, according to propublica, uh he, his uh personal gmail address is on.
01:00:44 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Have I been pwned in 51 data breaches in five pastes, uh, and he's been reusing his passwords yeah, the fact that he's on all the paste sites is because at first I was like we've all been. You know we're all on.
01:01:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have I been poked? Yeah, I'm on. Have I been poked?
01:01:03 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
no big deal right but yeah, he has definitely got some malware on some of his computers. The thing that's yes.
01:01:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The stealer logs are what's scary. Those are the password stealers that are actually malware on your computer. And the fact that he's in those logs means at least one of his computers has had malware on it, may still have malware on it, and he has access to all these government databases and you know they're just bringing it home and like willy-nilly saving it on usb sticks, dropping them in parking lots.
01:01:32 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Hey, let them hang out with you, know they're I just the lack of security, like, just like normal people, security here is just astonishing. And the fact that all of this data is just being funneled to these people who are like I don't know, like flower girls at a wedding, just toss it here and I should point out this, this wasn't when he was 16.
01:01:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I should point out, this wasn't when he was 16.
01:01:58 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
There's a Steelers log from this year that he's in and if the Doge sites gets hacked, which it has, we kind of knew this was coming. Yeah, almost immediately it got hacked, didn't it? And when you think about you brought up Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth and how Hegseth specifically put in a system to help breach security so that they could bridge instead of going into a skiff so he can check signal on his phone, they're circumventing these, quote unquote, bureaucratic, convoluted policies.
01:02:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We want to move fast and break things.
01:02:35 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
And there's, there's a reason why they're putting the place. And then when you, when you have a disregard for the law and you have a disregard for policies and you don't take the time to inquire why they were put there or how you could you know. Sometimes you don't know what you don't know, and just because you're smart in one area does it make you smart in all areas. And if you are great at one thing doesn't mean you're great at everything. And so people forget this, especially when you talk about bringing these whiz kids or dude bros from Doge into the government and they are going in with this hubris of move over and let me have access. This is bound to happen. And this is just, you know, the tip of the iceberg, because we all know as well that. You know, like AT&T, telecoms have been breached and I don't think that still have been fixed.
01:03:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, they can't fix it.
01:03:31 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
They fired everybody looking into it.
01:03:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Exactly, can't fix it, and so it's like fired everybody looking into it exactly, and so this is they've actually said, yeah, we can't fix it because we'd have to take the phone system down for a few days or weeks and obviously we're not going to be able to take the whole phone system down yeah, this is consider like if you lose your data, your hard drive dies, just try to call China and just say hey, can I get my back?
01:03:59 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I have it.
01:04:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, here's Mike Waltz, former secretary. What was he DNS? It was either home. It says right here, I can zoom in. That's the beauty of it. He is the national security advisor on his phone. First of all you're. You're got photographers over your shoulder taking pictures, and the cameras we use nowadays you can zoom in pretty good. So there he is. He's not using signal, he's using telemessage, which is a modified signal that allows you to store your signal conversations. Here's a problem. Of course, they're stored in the clear. That's on the one hand. That's a good thing, because the government records act requires it.
01:04:48 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
On the other hand, they're stored in the clear by this thing called tele message, which has now been hacked and just went out of business yes, like none of us could see the use of an open source israeli made chat system that was designed to like do this would not be hacked.
01:05:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean 404 media had a very good piece on this. They've done such great coverage on this kind of stuff. The hacker it was kind of funny said I just wanted to see if I could get in. It took me about 15 minutes to get into the database. It took me about 15 minutes to get into the database Sent 404 an example of the data 404's expert. I think Michael Lee looked at it and said yeah, that's real data. Joseph Cox had the original article pretty clear that there's a problem and unclear what the solution is going to be, except that we already had these rules in place. Uh, I mean, this is a perfect example of screw around and find out. It's like they made a mistake.
01:06:15
Look at all the people by the way, in the government who are using telemessage. These are all dhs addresses 404 is great.
01:06:23 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
They put out some of the best stuff. They've alerted me to a lot of stuff, like when, uh, an age verification system was just breached for like a full year and a half and everyone's like cool and x is still using it. I, they wanted to to confirm my identity for something and they're using authentic. So I'm like, oh yeah, let's keep using those guys. But with this stuff too, it's like there's bureaucracy and there's like stuff maybe we could get rid of. But, like security rules for messaging are like, not one of them, like unless they think they could be better or something, but I just don't know why they refuse to like be secure. Like I don't understand like the aversion to like using secure channels.
01:07:01 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
It's not. I feel like it's. It's gotta be arrogance Like no one has ever like.
01:07:06
If you've never been in a position where you've had to look over your shoulder, you're concerned about what might happen to you, feel like like to me it is so obvious that, like, you pay attention to your surroundings like and I'm sure to most of us, it is because mike waltz apparently never had to, you know yeah, but there are lots of people like I look at my husband who walks through cities like head in his phone, like he's never had a worry that someone's going to like attack him in a parking lot or something, or you know, I have friends who loudly proclaim crazy opinions and I'm like dude, someone could hear that. And so I think fundamentally what these are just people who are genuinely they're not worried about what's happening around them.
01:07:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Someone in our youtube chat is pointing out that, yes, my personal information has leaked out over this channel. In fact wasn't so long ago, I accidentally posted my apple password on the screen and I had to change it during a show. But I'm not the director of national security, I'm not the national security advisor. I'm just a podcaster. Yeah, nobody died.
01:08:20 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Well, you probably changed your passwords after that right Immediately before the show was over.
01:08:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I don't use the same password everywhere. I use password manager, I use Bitwarden. Anyway, I don't want to belabor the point.
01:08:36 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
we just it's people need to pay more attention, I guess well, and if you look at today's news about uh president trump accepting the plane, yeah sure, what could possibly go wrong?
01:08:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's not secure. You know, air Force One is designed to carry the president safely, securely. It's got all sorts of communications equipment, but it also has protection against pulse bombs and other things. But where is it? Is it the Qatari plane? It's from Qatar. He's not going to accept this. Look, that's, it's a Cutter. Yeah, it's from Cutter. It's from Cutter. It's. You know, he's not going to accept this. Look, that's got to be a bad rumor. There's no way he's on a Middle East tour. Supposedly he's going to go to Qatar. They're going to offer him an airplane. You can have this 747. We'll give it to you, which, by the way, is a problem. To begin with, I think it's worth more than $5. And then you're going to ride around in it.
01:09:41 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
He really wants a plane and he's up at Boeing. He's got two Air Force Ones. He wants a good plane. These are junky old planes. Oh, they're old and he's been trying to push Boeing to reduce the security clearances for the contractors officially working on the version of Air Force One, because he's like, dude, I need a new plane. This is taking so much time. Yeah, so he's not going to take it.
01:10:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Cooler heads will prevail and say Mr President, you can't ride around in a plane provided by a foreign power, you can't ride around in a plane provided by a foreign power, you can't. And then keep it afterwards oh, is that the planning? We just keep it.
01:10:20 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
It's going to be donated to his president. Oh, it goes to the library, yeah, yeah, yeah. This definitely reminds me of just general IT, the case of when you have an umbrella and it's raining and people are like we're not getting wet, so why do we need an umbrella? These security protocols they're like we haven't been breached. Nothing bad has happened, nothing bad has ever happened, so why do we need these security protocols? What could possibly go wrong?
01:10:42 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
We have been breached. We have oh yeah, wait, wait.
01:10:46 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I'm not saying they have, we haven't I? How bad things have gotten, how things are in there. If that information is not immediately recallable by them, it doesn't exist. Yes, yes, that is true.
01:11:02 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
And a lot of people man talk about being a downer in meetings. When I bring things up and actual hacks that have happened, they're like what? No, that didn't happen. I'm like it totally happened here. They're like why didn't I know about this? This, I was like it was on the front page of the journal and the wall street, you know, in the times. They're like huh. So I feel like people we have a real blind spot for security stories.
01:11:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think by the way trump's own plane is from the early 1990s. We bought it from paul allen in 2011. It's older even than air force one, I think. So all right, all right, he'd have a nice new qatari plane he needs a new plane. He needs it I mean, I need a new plane.
01:11:44
We all need new planes I don't know, my plane is perfectly fine, you know, for less than a 747 888, you could buy Bowers and Wilkins, denon, marantz and Polk, and that's exactly what Samsung just did 350 million instead of 400 million. Um, pretty much. They now own all the high-end audio brands. From my use, they own Harman International, jbl. That, by the way, harman International includes Harman Kardon, akg, mark Levinson, arcam, revel. They will own Bowers, wilkins, denon, marantz, polk Audio.
01:12:32 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Wow, where's that Heishman-Hirschfeldschfeld index?
01:12:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's, it's incredible, um, but it says more about what high at the end of high end stereo than anything else.
01:12:44 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Right, that's true yeah, I, I love the receiver. Back in the day getting all those channels and I I can't. I haven't even thought about buying a receiver these days I was my college roommate had bose 901s.
01:12:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know they were. They were the hot speakers. I always wanted a pair of bowers and wilkins speakers, or revel speakers. Those are the speakers they have down at the ranch in the in the lucas sound stage.
01:13:09 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Beautiful speakers, it's all going to be samsung when you listen to like encoded mp3s through your headphones, I mean what exactly it's the white?
01:13:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
earphone era. I'm sorry we're living in it now. Thank you, apple. We're all living in the earbud era all right, let's take.
01:13:30 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Do y'all listen to music? I'm just curious like who listens to music out?
01:13:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
okay, leo, you're well, I'm old, I know a generational outlier.
01:13:38 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Let's just call it that. Well, young people listen to music.
01:13:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What are you?
01:13:40 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
talking about. I'm sorry out loud like out like my dad has, my dad has you mean on open speakers he has a, he has a chair, he sits in that, yeah listen and his hair blows back with the power of the speakers.
01:13:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, actually that was a maxell tape ad, but anyway. Um, yeah, I bet you do. Do any of you listen with? Where does sound on speakers anymore?
01:14:08 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
my wife bought a used record player at Goodwill for $10. And so we listened to that. But yeah, I think we have lost the memory of what that sound is.
01:14:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have good speakers in every room of my house.
01:14:27 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I have Sonos but we only play it when there's a party or people are over. Yeah, never.
01:14:32 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
And do they comment? They say oh, it sounds really good, do they, you ever?
01:14:36 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
no one even notices and I go to their house. So they've got like a tiny little jbl bluetooth speaker that like they're playing music on, or they'll be like they'll tell her, madam a or amazon, I go to play his music. It's terrible.
01:14:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I just signed up for a season tickets to the local symphony orchestra so I can hear music with other people performed by live artists in front of me in the whole thing, and it's so great and I love it.
01:15:03 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I bet you'll still be scrolling on your phone. I don't think we have the attention to really listen. I'm playing words with friends here. Could you keep it down? I think that plays a part. We don't really focus on one thing and I think that is probably the issue.
01:15:19 - Benito Gonzalez (None)
Wow, what a world. Hi, this is benito so like. I listen to music on speakers all the time, I'm an active music listener but no, this is the thing is that people don't listen to music actively anymore. It's background. Now, that's all. That's all. Music is for people paper music era.
01:15:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's exactly right. Yeah, benito, by the way, is our producer and technical director, just in case you were wondering. Well, who's his voice? That is the voice of God, benito Gonzales it seems like I'm loud.
01:15:44 - Benito Gonzalez (None)
I'm sorry, I can't. I can't hear myself you sound just perfect.
01:15:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wish I sounded so good. He makes music, though you should. Benito, is your camera on?
01:15:55 - Benito Gonzalez (None)
uh, yeah, but I don't have any lights on hi yeah, look, look at what's look what's behind him.
01:16:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look what's behind him is all these speakers, I mean, uh, synthesizers and wires and yeah, I have doohickeys it was an old-fashioned telephone switchboard it looks like it doesn't call on switchboard. It looks like it doesn't. All right, let's take a break. More, uh, more to come. I this is the first time I've I've felt old. You made me feel old stacy because I listened to speakers so I'm doing my job.
01:16:27 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
This is what I do for you I missed you.
01:16:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You listen on speakers. I should actually. I bet a lot of people listen with uh on their home theater, right the this. When they're watching the marvel cinematic universe, they have speakers. Then right, you don't put on headphones then my husband listens to.
01:16:51 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
My husband and my kid both listen to the tv on their headphones. I know it's real weird. I feel like this weird intruder in my house because I like make noise we are living in a different era, I think, culturally.
01:17:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's the wallpaper music era. It's the isolated headphone era. Mark zuckerberg says most people only have three friends. We're going to talk about that when we come back. Count your friends, my friends. I know I have a lot of friends right right now one, two. There's a thousand seventy three people watching us live right now and they're every one of them. They're my friends, uh, but that's all I should say. Don't think that's the audience size. That's a tenth or less of the. You know hundreds of what the total audience is, but it's nice to have them watching live. They can chat with us. Our show today, brought to you by threat locker, love this guy. Oh my gosh, this is something that uh kind of.
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01:21:05
Mark Zuckerberg says this is from the Wall Street Journal most people only have three friends journal. Most people only have three friends uh, he says. In a podcast last week. He said the average person wants more friends and connections with other people and that the solution is ai friends, the average american. I think he says it's fewer than three friends three people they'd consider friends and the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's like 15 friends. It sounds like he's just making this up mark. You might have three friends. Uh, he told ben thompson another podcast on stratechery for people who don't have a person who's a therapist.
01:21:56 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I think everyone will have ai ai friends for all you know he's making it up because he's not using specifics it's very general.
01:22:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I think I heard people say reported like what you?
01:22:11 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
what time span does this entail? There, there's just, there's no specifics, so he's making it up, that's all y'all have.
01:22:18 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
It's weird because the man literally owns the largest social network. So if anyone has high quality research on the number of friends in relationships people have, you would think it would be him.
01:22:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have you would think it would be him. Except remember that facebook went from being a place where you would go cape in touch with your friends to a you know, a tv station, a, an entertainment stream right to craigslist for people.
01:22:45 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
That's the only thing people use it for now. Do you use the marketplace? Is that I'm not on facebook, but that is literally the only thing. Anyone that is under the age of like 40 uses it. My son says I got it on the, but that is literally the only thing. Anyone that is under the age of like 40 uses.
01:22:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My son says I got it on the facebook marketplace all the time yeah yeah, oh yeah. It's usually crap, by the way, there's a I'm just. I'm saying, maybe it's just here on there.
01:23:09 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I feel like, if you enjoy like, like, touching up furniture or doing some new stuff with it, like that's a really good use for it, but, uh, he says the weirdest stuff. I like don't understand why he feels the need to do this, like no one is making him do this and say terrible, strange things and like I mean also like the, the instagram chat bots have had major problems. Before the wall street journal reported on it, I was like I see something here there was. So there was like a celebrity. If I recall correctly, I think she went to pakistan to find her love who she'd been talking to, and then, um, when that happened, uh, she had a chat bot and this is how I found out even who she was.
01:23:53
And I was like talking with a chatbot because I'm like who is this person? And the chatbot was really angry. She's like why do you care where I am? And I'm like what the hell? Like this is supposed to be like a fun chatbot that someone created and it was like almost like joking about how this woman was missing. I'm like I cannot imagine that anyone wants this, like normal people are not going to be like haha, let me talk with this missing celebrity either. Like it's, it was bizarre stuff, so they're. They're guard rails on stuff.
01:24:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They are just dumb low from the wall street journal in zuckerberg's vision for a new digital future. First of all, people like mark zuckerberg should not get to determine my digital future. I just want to say I don't want him telling me what my future is going to be. Artificial intelligence friends outnumber human companions, chatbot experiences, supplant therapists and ad agencies oh, and, by the way, coders as well. Yeah, this is all zuckerberg's. You know. Now remember. He's also selling something right, and this is sam altman does the same thing. In the future, ai will play a central role in the human experience, says zuckerberg. I think people are going to want a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do I'm gonna say something.
01:25:14 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
He's detached from reality, um, and and uh, he's one, he's an awesome executive if you look at his earnings. But, um, he, they just had their uh, llama con or whatever you want to. Yeah, yeah, they're interviewing, interviewing the. I think sasha nadela is saying, like how much of your code is created by AI? And they were like 30% or something like that. And then the question was turned back on him. It's like how much code is being created and meta via chat assistants or whatever LLMs? And he says I have no idea. And so he went from having no idea to saying something where, like it's, the future of the code is from llama, is is going to be created by these agents or bots.
01:26:01
And then he's saying at one point this year that they would replace senior coders with ai yeah, he has no idea and it shows that his him not having, like, hard data available means that he is making this up and that's the only thing that's happening. So he is, he is taking a page from the, the, the masculine energy. Let's go total MAGA variety and the Elon.
01:26:32 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Manos here.
01:26:34 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I'm going to say things that aren't true, but it's gonna hype people up to sell more product and he's just really acclimating to the scene as it is right now, because he's a chameleon to get only what he wants and that's. That's the same playbook, and he's just gonna do whatever works and that's the uh.
01:26:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the journal Magana Dar, who's a former Instagram executive, the very platforms that have led to our social isolation and being chronically online are now posing a solution to the loneliness epidemic. Dar says it almost seems like the arsonist coming back and being the fireman.
01:27:12 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
So interesting he. He wants to fix this problem, but not with people.
01:27:17 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah, well, tech, tech, always. This is what tech is good at. I mean, if you have, they have the hammer and they're going to make everything the right kind of nail for them. Yeah, and tech is great also, like they're also looking for a shortcut, like there are things that AI is very good at. There are actually some therapeutic use cases that I think could be helpful to people, but it won't be everything right. You can't just like I don't know. Here's an analogy that may not resonate with a lot of people, but like my husband has, you know, like one outfit that he wears all the time, right, it's his default outfit.
01:28:04
That resonates the tech guys are like well, I have this thing and it goes all these places, Whereas I have multiple outfits depending on like am I meeting with someone in Congress? Am I hanging out with my friends at a bar? Like in the tech world? They can make that one outfit, they can make it, it's steve jobs started that right.
01:28:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, except he didn't just have one outfit, he had 50 black turtlenecks and 50 black pairs of levi's. I mean he had, and in fact I think what zuckerberger said I want to limit my cognitive load. When I look at my closet I don't want to have to think about what to wear.
01:28:38 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
And they want that shortcut and it's great for that use case, but it's not in. What they're selling All of us is a shortcut to the human experience that ultimately will fail us all. I mean, and I can't figure out why we can't see this it's like a south park joke, which is you know?
01:29:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
step one create social media that isolates everybody. Step two create ai friends so that nobody feels isolated. Step three profit it's, they could have written it on a napkin except they're not profiting. That's the other part well, and this is really a big story, which is how expensive this ai is yeah, yeah, I mean that's, that's what.
01:29:27 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm stepping off the soapbox other people no, it's okay, I like the soapbox.
01:29:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Go ahead, anybody who wants to talk about this. I just saw a story that said many of these new ai data centers are being in built in places where water is a crisis, in crisis like arizona it's not just that, they're just.
01:29:51 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
This is this has happened for the last, probably. Let's see. See how old are we? Where are we? I'm going to say since about 1998 to 2000,.
01:30:00
After that first bubble Tech, the whole goal of all of these companies, funding these companies is to put a lot of money in, scale it up super fast and then sell or profit somehow by owning the entire market. You have to do it quickly. That is what's happening here. We've seen it. We saw it in the early web days. That crash happened but bankruptcy erased all of that, all of the capital needed there. They were allowed to flourish. We saw it with Uber and all of that, all of the capital needed there, so they were allowed to flourish. We saw it with Uber and all of these. What do they call it? The millennial lifestyle bonus? It's basically venture capitalists funded these companies, but they didn't have to make a profit for decades. And we're seeing this again and I don't know how long and how many times we have to go through this cycle and end up poorer for it or without actual assets and all of these write downs. It's very confusing to me.
01:31:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not a economist, but I don't get it. I am bullish on AI. I use AI all the time. I love AI. I don't use Google anymore. I use AI all the time. I love AI. I don't use Google anymore. I use AI searches. I am wearing at all times this BAI device that's recording every conversation and then giving me a summary of my day at the end of the day. I find AI very useful.
01:31:26
I've been doing AI coding with Claude Code. It's amazing. In fact, it's going to take some of the fun out of the, the coding challenges that I I enjoy so much, because you, you just write, say, hey, solve this, they. And they boom, they solve it. Uh, I'll probably still do it anyway, but uh, I I'm a fan, but it is the case. That is also being oversold dramatically.
01:31:50
This from bloomberg this week global data centers in AI in areas where high water stress. There's that graph at the top. Now in the United States, there are 3.3 thousand. Ai is draining water from the areas that need it the most. Nobody pays attention to how much this stuff is costing. Who pays attention to how much this stuff is costing? Bloomberg is saying every time you do a query, every time you say thank you to an AI, you are causing these problems. Bloomberg found that about two thirds of the new data centers being built or in development since 2022 are in places already gripped with high levels of water stress Water, by the way, is used in these operations centers to cool the facilities. They need it. 26 data centers being built or planned in high water stress areas in Arizona, 17 in California, 26 in Texas, 23 in Illinois, 67 next door to you in Virginia. These are problematic.
01:32:54 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
We'll throw out. There are very few places that are not water stressed true true, why are they putting them in arizona?
01:33:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what?
01:33:04 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
is it about arizona tax breaks, tax breaks and they have cheap land and they have historically been willing. I mean that's why all the semiconductor fabs went to Arizona, because they were like Arizona's like yeah, we'll totally get you all the clean water you need. They have a lot of infrastructure around this.
01:33:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they steal it from Colorado.
01:33:28 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
It's interesting too because one of the other sides of it is that there have been all these articles about AI data centers not having enough electricians and if there's anything I know, it's occupational licensing reform and a lot of the problems here. And it's interesting too because I and other people who actually did the implementation of universal licensing recognition laws that allow people to move to a state and have their license recognized none of us thought through like hold up, a lot of jobs are city level licensing. It's not state level. And almost every state says, oh, if you're transferring a license from one state to another and it doesn't account for cities. So I talked with a couple of friends in a couple of different states in government like wait a sec, am I reading this right? And also keeping your license in good standing, because a lot of them are traveling electricians. That could mean if you go to like Alaska to work on a data center for three months and you let the license lapse because you don't need to work in Alaska anymore, that that license isn't in good standing. So if all your licenses aren't in good standing, then you can't keep working. But I'm excited because it's a fairly easy problem to solve that way.
01:34:36
There's other stuff too. It's the way we train electricians doesn't always make a ton of sense, just like with a lot of stuff. We don't use enough apprenticeships, we don't give people enough opportunity. That way there's also problems that I'm not sure if it applies to electricians, but Pell grants require a certain number of uh hours of training in order to say like this program's covered. But that can inflate it when you might only need like a smaller amount of hours. But I'm excited because, like I love when licensing reform matters to people, again I'm like yeah, I told you guys, we need to do this it's.
01:35:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's harder to become an esthetician in california than it is to become a psychologist, a counselor. All you have to do to be a counselor, you just hang up a shingle and say, yeah, come on in, I'll fix you up, but don't ever do somebody's nails without a license.
01:35:22 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Oh my gosh, the whole structure there is wild. Utah is doing some cool stuff that way too. I follow beautician licensing very closely and Utah is trying to break it apart in a way that like if you just want to do nails or just want to do hair, you can do that. Um, it's crazy too. They didn't really like they found that people weren't being trained to use lasers on people, like cosmetic lasers, but then they had to do 100 haircuts. Meanwhile, people who do surgeries only have to practice it like five times. And I'm like maybe we like restructure this in a way that, like you make sure you know how to use a laser so your first time isn't on the patient, like I think. Like I'm pretty regular form, but that's, that's reasonable.
01:36:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, don't get me started, because it really bugs me that you can create a supplement out of anything and sell it, and the FDA in no way regulates these supplements. But you know they strictly regulate medications. But many times people I'm people are putting stuff in their mouth that is just either it's useless or worse. Right, it could be worse, and there's no regulation at all. It really bugs the heck out of me.
01:36:29 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
So sometimes regulation is a good thing it's funny I'm I'm a little uh squishy on the supplement stuff. I take so many supplements.
01:36:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I do too, but I wonder.
01:36:40 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
But most of them, like the reviews help. The reviews really help there.
01:36:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like people say oh, I vomited, I'm like great, so I'm not going to do this one, you know, go to the subreddit, the supplements subreddit, and you know, one of the things people do on there is they go rate my stack, where I mean they're taking fistfuls of things you know and and you can make any claim you want on the label as long as you have a little asterisk that says not, not, uh, proven scientifically. No claim is being made, you know, I mean you can say anything you want and people are taking all sorts of credit. See, I think. Getting back to this expensive AI, I live in this weird cognitive dissonance my whole career, where I'm promoting all of these technologies that are gonna end up in a landfill and, at the same time, feeling terribly guilty about it. And now, every time I ask ai a question like break my supplement stack, I feel like I'm setting fire to it. It's a rainforest, it's a. We live in a difficult time, should I just uh?
01:37:54 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
build a log cabin and move to the no, that's, that's the solution that everybody wants you to you.
01:37:59
They want you to feel disempowered here. So the issue, one of the issues here, is you are an individual trying to address a problem designed for like a collective action problem designed for the government. So we have to accept that there are some problems that we cannot, as an individual, take action for. So, like figuring out that you personally should not be asking chat to you, like being like, oh, I should not ask this, this is not worth, you know, killing a kookaburra or whatever, right, but having the government say, okay, you know, here's some broad rules, or maybe it doesn't even need to be rules, maybe it's like a I'm going to say energy star program. That's like, hey, I can rate how efficiently this company performs these queries, and if you start showing that level of, if you provide that transparency, people will get better. Just like, for a hot second, we got better gasoline and fuel mileage in cars because we said, hey, you should track that um so I could just forget about it, because it's not my problem, it's government's problem, right?
01:39:03
well, the the answer is actually to advocate and say that you care about these things I do care about, I know and vote for people who are doing yesterday we took uh for people who are doing.
01:39:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yesterday we took uh my in-laws to lunch, uh for mother's day and I I don't have a lot to say to them. So I I fired up chat gpt on my phone and I started turning my father-in-law into different things, like first I made him a pope and then, and then I turned our then Henry the eighth, and then Charles, and then a superhero, and then that the revolution, and then finally, I ended up creating an image of the entire lunch as a Disney scene. Now, this was a great way to pass the time with my father-in-law, but I really think I probably did some real damage to the environment and I'm feeling guilty about it.
01:40:07 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Maybe I need an area therapist the truth is this this, these models are getting better, and you'll probably be doing some of this locally in the future. Oh, yes.
01:40:16
Which will help with the efficiency and the chips also are becoming more power efficient over time as well, and, it being what Stacey says, this is a bigger problem than one individual, even one company company. But when you have a government that denies climate change, or government on the state level that incentivizes growth over resources because they want to get more wealth, most likely, if we continue on this trajectory, we're going to just have to hit a brick wall and then pick ourself up to get it fixed and unfortunately, we're not all going to make it. It's going to cause some real hardship and struggles for people.
01:41:03 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Wow, someone's even more of a downer than me. But yes, that is like there are all of computing. Let's think about it right. Ever since we got into the massive era of computing, it's all been about processing and power. Right, that trade-off in optimizing for power consumption.
01:41:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we'll see that exact same thing, because we used to be like there's certainly incentive right. It's so expensive for these companies. If they're going to make money at it, they have to make it more efficient.
01:41:30 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
And eventually they are going to run out of resources and or piss everyone out. I mean, there's a the test of the testimonials from the people who are in, I guess, tennessee, where Elon Musk has a or oh yeah, the data center. I mean, yeah, grok is using generators, gas power generators, electricity in our I'm sure our tax dollars are somehow paying for that because we're funding so many things. But yeah, I'm like, I'm like, yeah, that's that is stupid.
01:42:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There is good news in the world, is there? Tom brady, steph curry, giselle bunchen, uh, kevin o'leary all off the hook for promoting uh cryptocurrency with ftx? Uh, there there were. They were being investigated right for their ftx ads. Ftx, of course, collapsed in 2022 and its founder, samuel bankman freed, went to jail. Uh but, and there was some liability. The celebrities, a group of ftx investors, said that celebrities who endorsed ftx should have some liability. On wednesday, us district judge k michael moore found the plaintiffs failed to show the celebrities and youtubers named in the lawsuit had sufficient knowledge of ftx and sam bankman freed to be held liable for promoting them. Tom Brady, the erstwhile quarterback, now TV commentator on the NFL, got $30 million for pitching the company. Now, that's the good news. The bad news is it was FTX stock and it's now worthless. His wife, giselle Bunchen $18 million, also in stock, now worthless.
01:43:20 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I mean it's fair, I mean mean no one knew, uh, generally speaking, I guess not.
01:43:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If they'd asked me, I probably actually.
01:43:26 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
No, they did ask me and I said no yeah, I mean if you look deeper, but you made that choice. I don't know how many individual people make their choices we've refused a lot of crypto ads.
01:43:39 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Uh, we used to get a lot of interest in that tom brady has a manager who assessed this deal and was like yeah everybody's in crypto.
01:43:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That seems good exactly remember the brad pitt thing where he said like courage favors or oh, that was uh uh math, not matthews. Matt, damon, yeah, yeah courage favors the brave or fortune favors the brave yeah so invest in crypto and bitcoin because, and you know, some people have made a fortune on it I think it's the same.
01:44:12 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
What you were talking about like these big ai companies rushing to build these data centers, um, and still losing money is that once you get big enough, you're too big to fail, and that's with individuals too. If you get famous enough, if you get rich enough, then you are protected and the WeWork guy has a new company and investors.
01:44:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Amazing, isn't that.
01:44:34 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I heard that the I forget the Theranos persons, persons, oh yeah, her elizabeth's husband, she's in jail for the next part, many years.
01:44:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know, if their husband? Yeah well, they have two babies anyway her baby daddy no, I think they got married. Her husband is starting a new uh, he's got raised 20 million dollars for a startup. Guess what the startup does? It, uh, it uh detects problems with your blood for health purposes, and it's a miracle. It only needs a little bit of blood yeah but is it?
01:45:09 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
instant. I mean could you do it at walgreens?
01:45:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the point is that these people are able to come back to the well and raise even more money.
01:45:18 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Oh this is like a feature, yes, like the fact that they, that they've done this before. I mean now, in fairness, this is actually something we've lauded for decades, which is in america, if you are an entrepreneur, it's so great for you because you can fail and then pick yourself back up and try again and nobody hates you for it, right? So I mean, now, do I think we could take that too far? Yes, but I will say, you know, in europe, when people fail, it is much like it is prohibitive in ways that it isn't here and that's not great for them so I've seen he is in some stories called her partner and other stories her husband, um.
01:46:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I don't know if you know how I'd like to be accurate that journalist in me it's, it's, it's unclear, but uh, her 33 year old partner, uh, and baby daddy has a new blood testing startup that promises human health optimization, and the New York Times published this very wide-eyed picture of the two of them sitting on a couch not in prison, maybe this was right before she went to jail, I don't know. A radically new approach to health testing, the future of diagnostics. It's called hemantus, which is also a flower known as the blood lily, so he's thinking they're going to start with testing pets for diseases before progressing to humans.
01:46:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who has a deeper voice her husband I think they both talk like this anyway uh let's take it I can't falter for that.
01:47:10 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
No man like people make fun of high-pitched speaking women oh yeah exactly no, exactly it did work just uh trying to.
01:47:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it worked. It was a little. It sounded a little off. You have a nice deep voice stacy. You don't force it though, you don't you'll never know okay there is a certain amount of choice in that right. I mean you. It's somewhat culturally determined right that's true.
01:47:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, yeah, yeah, I could talk like this. If that, if it seemed like, if the world thought that podcasters should sound like this, I could talk like this, I'd be happy to. I'd be happy to. All right, you should go to ad.
01:48:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm gonna talk to the whole ad like this huh, hey, boys and girls, this episode of this week in tech. All right, we'll be back with more in just a bit, but I'm gonna go to my normal registry. This episode of this week in tech is brought to you by net suite. Hey, here's a question we ask all the time on the show what does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts. You'll get 10 answers. Rates will rise or no, maybe they're going to fall, or maybe inflation's up, or maybe it's down. I don't know. Can someone please invent a crystal ball?
01:48:41
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01:49:47 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I was saying goodbye, bye stacy. I know she was. She had to cut off you're not leaving now, are you?
01:49:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh no, it's 5pt, so don't try to get rid of her, mr faulkner.
01:49:58 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I'll stop talking if you need me to, though no no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
01:50:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, what was I uh gonna? Oh well, as long as we're talking about this, I think you might have something to say about this, shoshana. The FTC is now banning hidden fees for live events and short-term rentals, effective may 12th. This uh documentation detailing its new rule on unfair or deceptive fees prohibits hidden fees. You know the resort fee, you, you get charged when you check out at the hotel. Uh, the resort fee is 35 a day. We what with those kinds of things short-term rentals, live events, also bait-and-switch pricing or any action that conceals or misrepresents total prices and fees. This will impact businesses like Ticketmaster, hotels, motels, airbnb, vrbo, vrbo, third-party platforms, resellers and travel agents, also covered by the new regulation. Airbnb has already updated its service in advance of this new regulation. Now you see the total cost of the stay instead of getting charged the cleaning fee at the end. Right, good, right, this is good.
01:51:26 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Oh, it's funny, I just don't care that much. I mean, like, if you check out and you're like, oh, this is higher, you can just not do it Like it sucks a little bit, but we all kind of got used to it. So I feel like it's like when you're used to something happening, it's there and I feel so. I feel like it's uh, it's like when you're used to something happening, it's there, and I feel like the ftc probably has bigger fish to fry. But I could be wrong. I'm, I'm, uh, I'm not.
01:51:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I haven't been following this one that closely well, before I get too excited, you win some, you lose some, because the fcc also proposed a rule to make it as easy to cancel subscriptions as it is to sign up for them, to cancel subscriptions as it is to sign up for them. Now the ftc says hold on, hold on there. Uh, they were going to enforce that may 14th, but now 14th, right may 14th now they're moving into july 14th. Uh, the negative, so-called negative option rule and we have all experienced this, where it's really easy to sign up for something and good luck figuring out how to get off the thing and the rule was great because it said it should be exactly as it should be. If you could sign up online, you should be able to cancel online. Many places say no, no, you have to call us if you want to cancel.
01:52:37 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Right, so you can. To fix that, you can change your address to California and then you will be able to click to cancel.
01:52:46
But, first can I just say I'm not going to disagree wholeheartedly with Shoshana, but I will say the reason it is important to have the fees disclosed up front isn't because you'll be sad when you check out and you have the fees. It's because it makes it hard to compare easily across sites, like if you're trying to book travel, that is absolutely you and it makes it harder for search aggregation. You know anything like that. So so that is why I like this.
01:53:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Consumer reports this doesn't affect restaurants, but it's something I don't know it totally should it should? I don't know if they're doing this in the rest of the country, but here you go out to eat and at the bottom it says six percent fee for for quality of life improvements, four percent fee for the city requiring us minimum wage payments, and they add all this stuff at the end. Yes, and I'm not gonna take it off the tip because that's not right.
01:53:38 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah, yeah. So because I live on an island with like 23 restaurants, my summer project is actually to call all the restaurants and find out what their fee is and then publish that, because I'm so aggravated.
01:53:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that a lot of restaurants or not a lot for an island?
01:53:59 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I mean, we've got 25,000 people, oh, 25,000 people, people. Yeah, they're all busy.
01:54:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's sad I wonder what the what the normal restaurants? For capita restaurant, like if you publish this should have a restaurant for every hundred people or something. I don't know what you know. Tonight we forgot to make Mother's Day reservations and I know that there will be no restaurant in town that I can get into tonight.
01:54:24 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I thought you only took your mom out to brunch on Mother's Day do you take them out to dinner too?
01:54:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
there are many moms in my life, okay no, I'm just like, I'm like, oh.
01:54:34
I made bagels for my mother-in-law. That way I don't have to worry about it. My mom is in an? Is is in an old age home in Rhode Island and I can't even get a hold of her because she's forgotten how the phone works. So I just leave her messages and hope someday she sees them. Uh, when the mother of my children I already wished her a happy Mother's Day, but we I wanted to take Lisa out to dinner, but it's no. Her son came, came up right before the show and said hey, mom, let's, I want to take you out to dinner for mother's day. He's 22. And uh, she said well, it would have been nice if you made a reservation a little earlier. You know we can. So I'm going to say 23 restaurants per island is good.
01:55:19 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I was just going to say maybe, since 23andMe is going out of business, maybe that's a good domain name. Maybe talk to Andrew and see if you could get that for your little site saying these are the fees for the restaurants.
01:55:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't buy the spit, but at least you could buy the name.
01:55:37 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah, I could take the data too. I could do some real fun things. No, I'm just going to post it on Reddit, this spit, but at least you could buy the name. Yeah, yeah, I could take the data too, I could. I could do some real fun things. No, um, I'm just gonna post it on reddit.
01:55:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not gonna do anything super fancy where on reddit do you post that kind of thing? Is there a? Is there a?
01:55:49 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
there's an r bainbridge island baby slash r bainbridge, yeah hi, this is benito.
01:55:54 - Benito Gonzalez (None)
So regarding those fees and things like that, you know americans are so blind to this stuff because you know in other countries sales tax is included in the price on the label. Here you always have to calculate that stuff yourself. Yeah, yeah, we have to do it.
01:56:09 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
It's terrible now because there's tariff surcharges, there's egg surcharges and they're not going to go away, even if we don't have like, even if egg prices do come down or tariffs don't happen to the extent that they're happening as a business traveler sorry, it goes to sean oh yeah, I was just going to say we're super related to that.
01:56:30 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
It's like so we're, you know, we're supposed to have the full price, but then if amazon wants to say like, oh, here's the tariffs, you know surcharge, that's going to end up in here, then they're punished for it Like. One thing I just hate is when there's no parity across laws, like when it doesn't apply to restaurants or various situations. It's like okay, is this thing a problem or not? Because if it is, it should apply everywhere. If it's not, it shouldn't. You know I get mad about it. I'm very big on regulatory parity, that if there's a principle, it should be applied and it should make sense. And if there's a reason that it's not good for restaurants but better for other places, I'm open to that too. But I get angry when I'm like no, I think the government might just be targeting, like, like hotels, cause it's pissed off at them, rather than like restaurants Cause they're not pissed off at them, and I hate that. I'm like just do one thing, you know.
01:57:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I also, stacey, have learned that you are well below the number of restaurants you should have on Bainbridge Island. The average number of people per restaurant in the United States is 330 according to AI, which never lies. Yeah, but that includes like Bob's, big Boy and and McDonald's.
01:57:36 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I mean, it's not just nice restaurants so I think I might becounting a little bit, because I'm realizing that I totally forgot that we actually have a Subway on the island, because I never eat at Subway.
01:57:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you got to include that. Yeah.
01:57:50 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah, but we have an inordinate number of Thai food places, pizza places.
01:57:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, this is what AI is good for. If it's accurate and it says, okay, there's 333 million people in the US, there are approximately 1 million restaurants, so that would be 333. I mean, approximately 1 million restaurants is kind of vague. The ratio has been decreasing over the years as the number of restaurants has grown faster than the population. The actual ratio varies by region and city density. Urban areas, obviously, and tourist destinations have a much higher restaurant density, sometimes exceeding one restaurant per thousand people, or well, that's the opposite, or even see, there you go, ai screwed it up you, you can't have it. Do math, man.
01:58:44
It's a broad national average. Anyway, and we also mentioned as long as we're talking about 23andMe I don't know if the domain name is available for Stacey, but the good news is they are going to have a privacy advocate. The court is going to approve a data privacy ombudsman who will review the sale of the genetic data as part of the company's bankruptcy proceedings very good news.
01:59:07 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I already deleted my spit, but so that's common in bankruptcy cases that have this access. So it's not like a special thing that I mean. It's special in the fact that they have a lot of data.
01:59:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's common to do it.
01:59:21 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah, the FTC did Andrew Ferguson. No, is that? My governor Is Andrew Ferguson? That's, that's the FTC commissioner. Yes, sorry, I was like. My governor is Bob Ferguson.
01:59:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All the Ferguson, yeah, yeah.
01:59:35 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
He did say he did put out a letter saying hey, you have obligations that you said you were going to adhere to and you'd better adhere to them, and the buyer had better adhere to those as well. Good, but those ombudsman's that are appointed by the court, historically they have not been awesome advocates.
01:59:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not a guarantee that they won't sell the data along with the company Right, that they won't sell the data along with the company right. Um, the job of the advocate is to file a report on whether a sale of genetic data complies with federal law and is in the interest of customers. Obviously it's not in the interest of customers, but maybe they'll sell it to palantir and then oh, my all of our dystopian fantasies will come true oh my god
02:00:21
you know you have three percent dominican republic blood, we're gonna deport you um jeez louise. So we got one, we. We won one hidden fees for live events. We lost one. Well, maybe not lost it, but they're gonna put off that click to cancel, probably. The industry, uh, came to them and said we can't do it, we can't, it's too hard they already do it in california well, you know, comcast actually literally said in response to this regulation oh you're, uh you're, everybody would cancel their cable subscription if we're, we're too easy.
02:01:01 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
They literally said that they wouldn't cancel their cable connection. I mean, what else are they going to use starlink?
02:01:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, it's not over the top over the time I was thinking broadband, of course they're going to cancel. Yeah, nobody wants cable I mean Comcast lost one and a half million customers last year.
02:01:22 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah well, they're making up for it. They've managed to bring up the price of their broadband alone Of course, to the price of the triple play, of course.
02:01:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As it was so you know they've had plenty of time to adjust to it.
02:01:33 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
They've known this was going to happen wild because, like, as they're losing all these customers, they like I, I was paying something absurd like several hundred dollars a month, just right, internet and cable. And I'm like, uh, I went to cancel cable and uh, and they were like, oh, we can bring it down to what it was before. I'm like, no, no, it was already creeping up and I, I went into uh to like ups, to mail the thing back, and they're like, oh yeah, everyone's canceling.
02:01:58 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I'm like I don't understand why they would keep raising prices while, like, everyone's like on the edge of canceling there are a lot of people who just sit in, I mean, who don't think about that, so, but you're right well, shoshana, you didn't think about it until it got so high that you finally said enough, well but, it creeps up slowly and you don't even notice.
02:02:23 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
And then you're paying 200 it was because of shabbat, because, like, a cable will stay on. But now I figured out how to use alexa to, every three hours, return on the tv, like to double check to make sure it has stayed on, because hulu will time out, like that's just the thing that happens. But since I have hulu live now I can program it to change channels, like like bob's burgers at this time and then tcm at this time. So it's better, but it I like how to like work a lot to get it there and also like hulu doesn't right, wait, wait a minute.
02:02:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're gonna have to explain this. Yeah, we were just talking about wallpaper music. Do you have your tv on all the time?
02:02:59 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
kind of yeah, I need background images and noise like I'm you know it helps, and it's always on bob's burgers uh, so it's mostly almost entirely fxx or tcm. There's very little anything else tcm, I can see.
02:03:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, in fact it's interesting because I think I I subscribe to something called the Criterion Channel, which is a bunch of great old movies and stuff, and I think they finally realized people don't like looking through the catalog to find something. So in the subscription they have a channel that's just showing movies all the time and I think people just go to it and leave it on.
02:03:36 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, that's what I do on Shabbat, and then I record, Because you can't touch the do on shabbat and then I record well, you can't because, because, because you're, you don't, you can't touch the tv during shabbat right, exactly, I could program individual movies to start playing at different intervals, but that becomes like a huge pain, so leaving on, and they've been bad about their programming on shabbat, like they used to have like great movies on saturdays. But now.
02:03:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They knew that there would be a lot of Jewish people watching.
02:04:00 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I think I'm like one of like very few who would do this, who like see. Is it fit in the law to follow it this way? I think it's fully legit, honestly. But like we leave on lights, like some people can leave on radio, I see no difference with TV, I think it's the same thing. Do you sleep with it on? Yeah, I shouldn't, but my brain won't stop, so you can't change the channel right. Right, right, she can't touch it. But I can program it ahead of time with Alexa.
02:04:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, that's totally legit yes. I volunteered some episodes ago to be here Shabba Shabba Skoy, but she never took me up on that.
02:04:34 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I used to do that for a friend of mine, did do that for a friend of mine did you really?
02:04:48 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
they said come over, my refrigerator is these?
02:04:49 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I lived down the street from him when I lived in new york and so yes, I was, I would come over, you know, I would stop by on my way home from work and just be like, hey, anything needy, did you forget, can?
02:04:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I turn anything on for you off, basically, yeah, yeah and then I would, I would wander off, so but yeah cable had me because it was easier on cable, because cable wouldn't time out.
02:05:07 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
But I'm like you know what the timeouts are worth it that's interesting.
02:05:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So the streaming channels yeah, I've noticed that the streaming channels like netflix will say hey, are you still watching?
02:05:17 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
well, I got rid of that. I figured out how to get rid of that but, the uh, but they'll like like they'll just crash. Apparently, hulu doesn't work great with fire tvs.
02:05:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's something I learned oh, they have a memory leak in their app or something and it just eats up memory and yeah, yeah, uh, what am I watching on hulu? Oh, I, I was watching. I know what I was watching dan moran, who is a podcaster, a science fiction author, and he's been a regular on our shows. He also writes for the jeopardy. He was on jeopardy. He also writes for six colors and he was I no spoilers. He was on wednesday and he couldn't say you know, you're not allowed to say how you did, but he could say i'm'm going to be on Wednesday. So I watched Wednesday. Let's put it this way I also watched Thursday. I also watched Friday. Congratulations, dan, well done. Very, very nice to see one of ours.
02:06:16
Except it's sad because Ken Jennings, the host, asked him about his books and he didn't. He said, yeah, I write books. He didn't mention the titles. It's like, dude, maybe does he think there's a rule on jeopardy you're not allowed to plug your might be. They won't let him plug it. It's too bad he did. He didn't plug the podcast names. He mentioned, talked about the podcast, but he mentioned the names either. I bet you they don't let you do that. Bill gates says, uh, I'm gonna give it all away. My new deadline 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth, more than 100 billion dollars so far in the gates foundation. The first 25 years, he says. In the next 20 we're going to give away 200 billion.
02:06:57 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
We're gonna double our giving it's happy and sad at the same time yeah, he's even made a little graph, just just so you know.
02:07:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
His net worth today is 108 billion. He it looks like he used a crayon to color under the line.
02:07:17 - Benito Gonzalez (None)
This is like a handwritten crayon underneath it can't afford the trajectory of the hurricane.
02:07:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just like it's gonna hit georgia any minute now. Uh, so he's gonna be out of money, uh, in 2045. He also said he wasn't gonna give his kids, uh, any of it. And then he kind of backed down and gave his daughter a horse ranch and stuff, but anyway, um, good for him the sad reason why he's doing, it is because there's a deficit in what the united states?
02:07:50
yeah, because we stopped paying us aid. He was very upset. He says a million kids will die next year because we cut off funding for vaccines and other health measures across the world. So, yeah, part of it is because he's that's one of the things he's very focused on, and, uh, so he's. But you can't but this, by the way, really important as wonderful as it is to have personal charity, especially if you're that wealthy, it pales compared to the amount of money governments can spend.
02:08:21
It's not sufficient many really wealthy people do not spend on the things that governments that's true too will spend on yeah, fortunately, gates is really focused on uh child, uh childhood health and and childhood illnesses. With his funds, he says the two groups, gavi and the Global Fund, have transformed the way the world procures and delivers life-saving tools like vaccines and antiretrovirals. Together they've saved more than 80 million lives. How many libraries did Andrew Carnegie built, you know? 80 million lives saved.
02:09:04 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I mean, at the time libraries were kind of a big deal yeah, no, they still are we didn't have global health, yeah, that's right, let's. Let's talk about the Sacklers and, like their, their college.
02:09:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I wonder what they're doing with their ill-gotten gains. Mexico is suing Google over the Gulf of America name. The president of Mexico said the name change should only apply to the US part of the Gulf. They want the Mexico part back. Are you taking up drinking now, stacey, because of this? Is this my fault? The president of Mexico, claudia Scheinbaum, said the lawsuit has already been filed. She argues the Trump administration's order for a name change only applies to the US portion of the Gulf and the government doesn't have the authority to rename the whole thing. Google's renamed, as you know, as I don't know if Apple's done it yet, but when you open maps going back to February, you looked at the Gulf of Mexico. It was renamed to the Gulf of America, as the president wanted. Do they still call it Denali and uh and are you gonna hike denali or are you gonna hike mount mckinley?
02:10:26 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I'm gonna hike, neither for myself, because I'm that's how I die, like that's 100 how I that would be the end, wouldn't it? I don't know my limits very well, but I know that's a limit that's a limit, okay, big mountain okay, I think most people call it Denali if you're in Alaska and up here Alaska.
02:10:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They still want to call it Denali. I think you're right.
02:10:47 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I mean, yeah, I I don't. I think last time I heard Mount McKinley was, I guess, when Trump was renaming it, then also when I was like a kid it does, does have an old fashioned ring to it.
02:11:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're watching this Week in Tech with our wonderful panelist, stacey Higginbotham, who's now at Consumer Reports as a policy fellow. It's wonderful. Congratulations on your success there. You're doing a great job. Thank you, we appreciate it. You get the wooden letters.
02:11:19 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Oh yes.
02:11:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
For a long time. You know we have another regular on the show from Consumer Reports and Nicholas DeLeon for the longest time didn't have the letters and I said where's your letters? And they finally sent him the letters. So now he has the letters. So there you go.
02:11:39 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah, I think it was a COVID thing. Everybody got letters.
02:11:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because we figure you're going to be operating out of the house.
02:11:45 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Yeah, it's nice to see you again, I had to hand craft mine in a 3d printer. But no, I'm just kidding, no, they sent you that, right they did. I did have to ask. Yeah, you had to ask where's my les. I was like, hey, I do a lot of interviews.
02:12:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Could I have some letters? Yeah, yeah, uh, no letters, although you could have a big r, I think shoshana behind you instead of a marmot would be good if you work for our street. I mean, it's the letter r you brought. We're brought to you by the letter r. That's perfect. Be simple it's it's more simple, it's it's pure it's pure, the marmot is pure and it's looking right at me. Is it one of those marmot pictures where the eyes follow you as you move?
02:12:27 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
around. Oh, I love that. I should get one of those for my apartment.
02:12:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is where my money goes, though, like the marmot is pure, pure of thought, pure of deed. Also. Wesley faulkner, great to have you. Oh, he was looking off to the side. Wesley 83. Hey, over here, over here, wesley there was a marmot next to me what's that doing over?
02:12:50
there. It's great to have all three of you our show today brought to you by shopify. I have a soft spot in my heart for shop because that is how Salt Hank, my son, sells his pickles and his salts. It really made it possible for him to be a small business with a web presence. Imagine you're lying in bed late at night You're scrolling through the new site. You found they do this all the time. You hit the add to cart button. Oh, I gotta get. I gotta get those 3d design shoes. Now you're ready to check out. But then you remember your wallet is in the living room downstairs just as you're getting ready to abandon the cart. That's when you see it the purple shop button and you go whoo, no trip downstairs for me.
02:13:40
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02:14:54
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02:16:01
Shopifycom slash twit yay oh, I just put a bunch of pickles. Oh well, I'll eat them. Thank you, salt hank. Thank you shopify. Um, uh, let's see what else. What else? Um, some, I was gonna say good news, but that's not good news. Uh, is it good news? Switzerland's gonna have a referendum on electronic id. It actually failed once. Um, I have. I think I are back in the day when estonia arranged a global, international electronic id. I got somewhere. I have an estonian id card. The swiss are set to vote on the introduction of eid. The petition uh, they were going to do it and there was a petition circulated saying no, 55,000 signatures that forced a referendum. What is the argument?
02:17:12 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
against EID. This is something I actually know a little bit about. I've gotten into this space from age verification. That's kind of where I started to dive into this, and I'm not even the best person. There's this guy who runs the Better Identity Coalition, who knows like all arguments on all sides of it, but like there is a real tracking problem, like how do you know for sure that the government isn't using their app to track you? Our DMV sells our data. They sell less of our data than they used to because someone got killed because of it, but they still sell our data. And less of our data than they used to because someone got killed because of it, but they still sell our data. And it's like just hoping that they're not gonna, hoping they're not gonna mess around when there's really not that much oversight, is a real concern the DMV should not be selling our data oh, I know, and of course Ron White and sonnet, because he's perfect and like always on this kind of stuff but,
02:17:56
uh, there's, there's some real issues here. The ACLU has this fantastic explainer on like, if you're going to do a virtual ID, here's everything that you should consider and everything you should know and everything you should take into account, and it's really really good stuff. This guy Jay over there is really fantastic and he's taught me a lot about the way to consider it and one of the principles is you should always allow physical id for people who don't feel comfortable having virtual I d I think that's a really good principle there, you know um, in fact, when I got my estonian eid, I did get a card it had.
02:18:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was a chipped card, though, so it had information in the chip, I guess. Or it was electronically confirmable, I guess, or it was electronically confirmable.
02:18:39 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Tips are good. They're more secure, so I like that overall.
02:18:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, in Switzerland it is also the problem the issue of personal data protection and private management of electronic identities. They actually tried to do this in 2021. It was swept away. The government now is back trying to establish an eid. I think you're right.
02:19:02 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I think in the united states it would be very controversial yeah, it's interesting too because it's uh far, not even far left, but but moderate, to like far further left. Liberals tend to be concerned about privacy, maga, people tend to be concerned about privacy, but they also want to check to make sure everyone's a citizen all the time.
02:19:20
But you can't really have both sides of that with the identification argument, but it's really interesting stuff because I think that there's some legitimate uses for this. But we also want to be careful and this is something that I'm concerned about Like every company saying we need your ID and that's something that I could see happening. That really does freak me out making sure they have access to it in every circumstance and we have a lot of policy from age verification for different sites pushing for this kind of stuff. Plus, louisiana's was hacked I mean, it wasn't hacked that bad.
02:19:52
Yeah, yeah, their ID had a breach through their vendor. So I'm like, how about we get our cybersecurity in order first and then we go that way, but we're not going to, so you know.
02:20:06 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
And I also had one of those Estonian IDs and if you did as well, you probably heard that there was a security flaw. The first card we got, and so those weren't perfect either. So there's always a flaw, and when everything links together, there is more exposure.
02:20:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Of course, right now we're in a little tizzy over Real ID, because you now have to have a Real ID as of May 7th to get on domestic flights to access federal facilities, and lots of people don't. So, uh, if your driver's license isn't real, I d you, you know, you may get challenged getting on an airplane, although, uh, the government has said, yeah, we'll let you, we'll let you slide because it's, it's again. It's one of those things where people are, uh, I don't have one, I have a ticket for this plane flight and, in theory, you shouldn't be able to get on. The flight was real, there is in theory, we shouldn't have tiktok yeah, in theory, we shouldn't have tiktok, that's right.
02:21:14
What was the point of real id? Shoshana is there, is there what? How is this different from the driver's license that I had?
02:21:23 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
more secure. I I keep forgetting. I keep learning about it and forgetting identity policy is a huge mess too it is, the government doesn't talk to itself when there's reasons to do so.
02:21:32
I know we I've talked about this on this show before, but like the IRS has, like I, I forgot how many I think it's over 100,000 cases annually of kids' identities being used for tax fraud.
02:21:45
And instead of telling the parents, they just tell no one, and I'm sure sometimes it's hard to verify the parents the parent, that's fine, but they don't even attempt to.
02:21:53
And they also stopped telling people when they're deceased loved ones who they know for sure they're deceased loved ones who they know for sure they're deceased loved ones because literally it says in the ig report from like 2020, because it made them sad. So the government refuses to like tell people about basic stuff. The ssa will not communicate with the irs to give them enough information so that they can like tell the relevant people too, like you know, to make sure, and I'm just it's such a mess. Our whole identity policy is a mess and the ssa is also like they don't want to be the guardians of identity, but they are. Like there's a real element there and I'm sure I agree with them. Number social security numbers shouldn't be used that way, but if they are, they should probably try to make it as uh safe and reasonable as they can, but instead they they're like not us man, not us hot potato.
02:22:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this was passed. The law was passed in 2005 in the wake of 9-11. And it's taken us 20 years to get. I mean, they put it off, they put it off, they put it off, but the deadline was Wednesday. The deadline was Wednesday and the Transportation Security Administration, the TSA, are, in theory, now enforcing a real ID. Your driver's license, if you have a real ID, will have a star or some other marking. In California, we have a golden bear. On our real ID, we have a tree. Oh, that's nice.
02:23:18 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Is it golden? We actually, technically, we have an american flag because we are a enhanced driver's license that gets you into canada, which is a completely late.
02:23:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's real id compliant, but it's right different I remember when I renewed my license, of course I wanted to get a real id because I travel and, by the way, you can use a passport. A global entry card will work as well, but the idea was that there is a higher standard of proof of identity. So you know, you really are who you say. It's kind of is kind of in a way, like a government identity program without all the benefits of electronic ID, and so I think I had to bring in my utility bill or something. It wasn't super stringent, oh I couldn't get one Really when I first moved to Washington State.
02:24:11 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Because the bills that we we didn't set up. Billing in my name for anything that we had on hand, yeah billing in my name for anything that we had on hand that matched my, so that we had my husband's name, but we didn't have our marriage certificate there it was, so I had to wait like a year in until I started receiving bills under my name. It was a pain.
02:24:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apparently, there weren't a lot of slowdowns at the airports. I thought maybe this would be like a nightmare week to fly, but apparently, uh, most people got real ID. Tsa says about 81 of travelers now have real ID and they're allowing people without it at this point, at least for a while to go through a higher security check to get onto the airplane. Um, but bring your passport if you don't have a real id. And if you don't have a passport, uh, I would go out and get a real id pretty quickly, um, because it's not going to be forever that they're not going to let you on the plane I wonder what the additional screening is like.
02:25:14 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
What are they? What are they doing? If it's about identity, they're they pat you down I don't know.
02:25:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know they call your mom.
02:25:24 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I don't know are they going through your phone?
02:25:27 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
well the law was passed because of september 11 hijackers, and it was about it's basically making sure that you are who you say you are which, as shosanna said, this is a big issue, yeah, and for businesses, I mean.
02:25:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A lot of what we talk about these days is authentication.
02:25:44 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
That's what the whole password thing is about proving yeah, yeah, but what additional verification of your identity are they doing at the airport?
02:25:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
if I, if I told you I'd have to kill you? I don't know.
02:26:00 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I wonder if you had to bring your birth certificate. Oh, like, for now, you probably just got an extra pat down and they just assume that if you're going to make trouble, okay, so security theater.
02:26:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but I don't know how long that'll last. Right, and there's got to be a little bit of a grace period.
02:26:15 - Benito Gonzalez (None)
I mean literally we still have to take our shoes off, leo. We still have to take our shoes off, leo. There's been a grace period.
02:26:21 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
We've known about this for over a decade 20 years this has been going on.
02:26:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's pretty amazing it actually happened. I was kind of stunned it had been put off for so long. Well, one thing we can't put off it's Mother's Day. So if the TSA isn't calling your mother, maybe you should, and it maybe it's too late to send her chocolates or a bagel. But do something nice for mom and of course Stacy's a mom. So we're gonna say have a wonderful evening and and some wonderful entertainment and I hope you get some lovely kisses and gifts. Stacey Higginbotham, so nice to have you Policy Fellow at. I see we got you out in plenty of time. Policy Fellow at Consumer Reports At Giga Stacey. No, you're not still at Giga Stacey. You changed that, didn't you.
02:27:11 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
Oh, I'm at Giga Stacey on Blue Sky.
02:27:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh.
02:27:14 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
I just kept everything.
02:27:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why not Back?
02:27:19 - Stacey Higginbotham (Guest)
from the Ga ohm days.
02:27:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's an homage to giga ohm yeah, so nice to see you, stacy. Thanks for being here. I appreciate it. Wesley faulkner, same to you, buddy. Always nice to talk to you. Uh, anything you want to plug?
02:27:32 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
yes, absolutely. Um, I just had a conversation um conversation earlier in the week with a guy named Jeff Atwood. He is one of the co-founders of Stack Overflow and, just similar to Bill Gates, he's interested in how to make the world a little bit better, and so I told him I would be on the show. And I asked him if he wanted me to plug anything and he said plug his handle on mastodon. So he's, uh, coding horror on the I follow him.
02:28:07
It's, uh, infosecexchange is his server, so like, yeah, follow him. He has something, by the way, that he's gonna now say it clearly horror, not order.
02:28:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because it sounded like something else okay not hoarder, not hoarder, he doesn't horror I do follow him. I follow him for a long time because I love his blog coding horror. Yeah, yeah, it is. If you don't say it right, it sounds like he's a slut for coding and, yes, while it's true, I don't think that's the intent of the handle.
02:28:38 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I thought that's what it was. I was like oh, I love that. That's great.
02:28:43 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
No, he's been talking about something like stay gold, and, if you are familiar with it, there's a big announcement coming up and I'm not going to spoil it, I'm not going to go ahead Stay gold. But it's about how we as a community can support each other, and he's um, he's building a coalition.
02:29:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll just say that from and for like-minded, community focused people, and everything he's done has been community focused like um stack overflow, um discourse like if he found a discourse which we use as our, as our forum, at twitcommunity and uh, yeah, and I follow him on twitsocial, our our mastodon. I think jeff's great. I've always, I've always liked him, so give him my regards, yeah yeah, and, and follow him.
02:29:27 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
And if you're listening to this and you don't follow him already, please follow him. And, um, and once there is news, please, uh, send a message saying that how you would like to get involved okay.
02:29:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So something's coming up, something good from jeff atwood. Uh, yeah, yeah, at coding h-o-r-r-o-r horror, like a horror movie. Okay, although he looks like it could be horrible, it's horrifying, terrifying. What a great, what a great image. I love it. Uh, nice to see you, jeff. Let him know we can be if you have him on the show. We'd love to have him on the show sometime. He's kind of a legend. Stay gold America. Oh, yeah, he's right there. Here it is. Here's his post announcing it. Okay.
02:30:17
This is all the stuff we've been talking about. That's great, that's great, that's great. Uh, thank you, wesley, so nice to see you have a wonderful evening. Thank you also to shoshana weissman rstreetorg. Uh, I've, I've. You know, we've referred to your uh age verification article many, many times. You wrote that a couple of years ago, but it's still up on our street, right?
02:30:43 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
yeah, thank you. I'm actually adding two more pieces to it in the future too, and then some more after I finish some more research. But lawmakers don't want to acknowledge that children don't have id cards, so I'm gonna have to yell at them for it, because somehow.
02:30:58
We gotta figure that out somehow it's stressful but it's fun I that, and I have a piece on encryption coming out somewhere at some time. But basically how? Uh, let's not keep creating back doors, because we should learn that lesson over and over again, you know the fundamental problems with social media air verification legislation.
02:31:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You should read it. What is the book you're holding, by the way? I've wanted to ask you this for years.
02:31:24 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
It's the Federalist Papers.
02:31:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my God, that's the first edition.
02:31:28 - Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Yeah, so at the Federalist Society conference I think it was 2019, one of their donors was like do you want to come hold the Federalist Papers? So everyone came and took pictures of the Federalist papers. And I had just met, uh, a friend who I knew through the internet and he took a picture of me and it's my favorite picture. So I should probably have something more recent up, but no, I love it go back to that donor and find them and be like can I hold the federalist papers for my new headshot?
02:31:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we were talking about Alexander Hamilton just a little while ago he wrote almost all of them yeah, yeah, very cool.
02:32:00
Thank you, shoshana. I really appreciate you being here. A special thanks to all our club twit members who make our shows possible. You guys pay for the shirts. No, you don't. I don't take any of the money, but it does support what we do here. In fact, 25 of our revenue comes from club twit. If you're not a member of Club Twit, I beg you consider it. I know money's tight right now, but it's only $7 a month. You get so many benefits, not only ad-free versions of all the shows, because I hate it when they charge you for something and then they still show you ads.
02:32:33
So no ads unless you want to but you also get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is a great hang really full of of smart, interesting people, not just during the shows but all the time talking about the things uh, we geeks care a lot about. Scooter x says he's waiting for the federalist papers to be made into a movie. By the way, uh, join us in the club seven bucks a a month, $84 a year. We have some special events coming up. One of the things we've done, because we keep getting takedowns from Apple when we stream their live events, we've decided to take them inside the Discord and make it only available to Club Twit members so that Apple can't complain. So, all of the big keynotes and there's quite a few coming up uh, microsoft builds keynote is May 19th. Uh, the Google I O keynote May 20th. We will be doing those in the club, as well as WWDC on June 9th and this Thursday I'm sorry, friday a little something called Stacy's book club very excited, by the way. Stacy loved this book. The word for world is forest. Ursula K Le Guin. I I'm ashamed to admit this I've never read anything else of hers and now I want to read it all. It was a wonderful book. We'll be talking about that on May 16th, that's this Friday, 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm eastern. But you got to be in the club, so join the club, join our book club, join our ai users group. We're going to have a hangout next week with dick t bartolo to celebrate his 2000th giz whiz. There's lots of stuff happening in the club. It's a club you want to join. Please do. Um uh twittv slash club twit, and thanks in advance and a special thanks to all our club twit members.
02:34:29
We do this week in tech every sunday afternoon, 2 to 5 pm pacific. That's uh. 5 to 8 pm eastern, 2100 utc. We stream it live on eight different platforms in the club, of course. Of course it's on the Discord, but also YouTube, twitch, tiktok, xcom, linkedin, facebook and Kik. Pick a channel, watch. I'm watching the chat from all of them. So we get our input from you and we appreciate that.
02:34:54
Of course, most people don't watch live. They watch after the fact and, if you can, you should go to our website, twittv, and download an audio or video of this show and all the other 1030 other shows that we've done over the last 20 years. You can also go to a youtube channel dedicated to this week in tech. All our shows have their own youtube channel great way to share uh with others things you see on the show, share the information about the show. It helps us, promotes it and, of course, you can subscribe in your favorite podcast player too. It is a podcast, after all. And if you do subscribe in apple podcasts or or uh pocket casts or overcast or whatever podcast app you use, do us a favor, leave us a good review, will you? Five stars, three stars, whatever it is. The maximum is uh. That helps us share uh, spread the word as well, and we appreciate that. Thanks for watching everybody, thanks for listening, and we will see you next time. And as I have said for 20 years, now, in our 21st year, another Twit is in the can.
02:35:58
Take care For quick tech insights. Dive into Twit's short form lineup. From hands-on Mac, you can get helpful tips, great apps and awesome accessories for your Mac, ipad and iPhone. Hands-on Windows offers essential advice and everything new in Windows. Hands-on Tech zooms in on a specific theme with easy-to-follow advice that turns tech troubles into triumphs. Home theater geeks with Scott Wilkinson supercharges all things. Home entertainment. And if you like watching the shows, join Club Twit and you'll get full video access too, plus ad-free versions and more. Get informed fast with all of Twittv's short-form shows. Download and subscribe today on your favorite podcast player.
