Transcripts

This Week in Tech 1039 Transcript

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for TWIT this week in tech. Kathy Gellis, my attorney, is here. She's actually a Supreme Court expert, Also from Consumer Reports, Nicholas DeLeon. We will talk about a couple of very important Supreme Court decisions at the very last minute that will affect the Internet. We'll also talk about the strange case of the Indian engineer who took more than 40 jobs in silicon valley at the same time and why that one billion dollar fine against cox could cost you your internet access. All that more coming up next on twit podcasts you love from people you trust.

00:41 - Benito (Announcement)
This is Twit.

00:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is Twit this Week in Tech, episode 1039, recorded Sunday, july 6th 2025. Mmm ham shack, it's time for Twit this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news and what a week it has been. In the words of john oliver, I should be going like this what a week it's been. We say hello to kathy gellis from tech. Dirt long time contributor. It looks like she's sitting in the dark, but it's because it's such a beautiful day on the bay, the sun is shining in. Hi, kathy, hello you're. You know what? You're looking great. Your health is good, I think uh, maybe not oh yeah

01:32 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I'm sorry to hear that yeah, well, I've been swimming, though, so I look um hardly in pan.

01:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You swim in the bay or in a pool uh, I've been, I've, I've done the bay, but, um, but lately it's been a pool my son used to live it was your neighbor out there in the uh in the houseboat zone but he's moved to new york city where there is no water, so have you checked a map? Well, there's water. But you know it's funny when you're in the mid, when you're in midtown, actually he's in the, in the village the water seems far away. It's not. It's not far at all.

02:07 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I was just there and I walked along the whole town and I took the ferries.

02:11 - Benito (Announcement)
You can have a whole day just out on the water in New York. Amazing, it's an island. Yes, it's an island. Who knew?

02:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Also hello to Mr Nicholas DeLeon, senior electronics reporter at Consumer Reports.

02:25 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
He's in the desert, hello, I'm in the desert. There is no water whatsoever to speak of, although we are in monsoon season, so we do get uh pretty torrential uh downpours uh every now and then you told me you love that. It's really cool. I've gotten I just bought a fuji film camera a few months ago. I've gotten some really, really nice pictures, in my opinion. Where do you post?

02:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
them anywhere.

02:47 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Uh, just my instagram. I mostly use them for the apple tv screensaver. To be honest, on our tv set a very small audience for these photos yeah, what's your insta handle?

02:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I I probably follow you, but I maybe not for this one.

03:01 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
it's dayleonphoto, and Dayleon is spelled D-A-Y-L-A-Y-O-W-N.

03:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because you're trying to confuse the hell out of me.

03:12 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I'll email it to you guys later.

03:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I got it, dayleonphoto. It's like your own photos. Yes, dayleon, there it is I see you, I see you. Look at that.

03:27 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
You got the xt50. Huh, how do you like it? I like it a lot. I mean, I'm not a camera guy. You know, I haven't really messed with cameras in like 20 years, don't, don't get started.

03:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, these are beautiful. Look at that hummingbird, that's gorgeous yeah, I'm just messing around.

03:36 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
You know I'm not trying to do anything with it, but that's the best way.

03:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I've spent thousands on cameras and I'm just messing around well, it's like I only have expensive, hot pc gaming cameras.

03:49 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
You know, next will be cars, I'm sure. Uh, it's like yeah, don't I have like a more economical uh, yeah, no, I don't.

03:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wish I were into like salt, different kinds of salt yes, anything literally stamps.

04:01 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I'd like to collect bottle caps.

04:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, anything else, oh yeah I am deferring right now because, uh, I know one of the things people hate when we talk about politics on this show and I I understand that. I mean we would love to be a politics free zone back in the day when you did a tech show. You could just talk about cameras and phones, gizmos and gadgets.

04:25
In hindsight, that might be maybe was a little trivial, uh, but there is a lot going on in the world of uh politics, and particularly in the supreme court. That's when we have kathy on. Kathy volunteered, you raised your hand I raised my hand. I have something to say stuff happened.

04:43 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Would you like me to tell you what happened?

04:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yes, so kathy is an attorney, she practices a law, uh, but she specializes in a certain kind of kind of uh ip and the technical law and is admitted before the united states supreme court, which is a very rarefied stratum, uh. You've written many, I know, amicus briefs, uh, and maybe even in some of these cases. Let's start with uh. Paxton versus free speech Coalition. This is uh. Mike masnick wrote about this.

05:15
This is um the not good this is the Supreme Mike wrote in his lead. The Supreme Court this morning took a chainsaw to the First Amendment on the Internet. So Ken Paxton, the attorney general of the great state of Texas, well they, what was he trying to do? They passed a law, right.

05:40 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
They're trying to age gate the Internet, because if you can age gate the Internet, age gating is one way to censor the Internet and they wanted to do that.

05:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So he, the state, had passed, the state legislature had passed a age verification law for social media.

05:57 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
There was a number of laws that they've got out, and some other ones are still being challenged, but this one in particular landed pretty squarely on certain sites that are particularly adult in their content.

06:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And so this lawsuit was against that law from the Free Speech Coalition. Who is the Free Speech Coalition? Is that an industry organization?

06:21 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I believe it's an industry organization. Without Googling it, I believe it's an industry organization that is more for adult content as opposed to wider, broader content. You didn't necessarily see the general trade organizations do this.

06:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Instead of naming themselves like the porn purveyors of America, they decided to go for a free speech coalition.

06:46 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
OK, well, I think they've been around for a while as, as as an entity and as a trade group, they're against obscenity laws, censorship laws, that kind of thing.

06:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Adult film producers, adult, the Adult Film Association, ofica kind of spawned this group, um, and of course there's been a battle as long as I've been alive against pornography, uh, but in the last 20 years it's become not only more, uh, ubiquitous but, as far as I concern concerned, completely legal right.

07:25 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yes, no state bans pornography right?

07:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that because of the original Supreme Court decision that I don't know what pornography is, but I know I want to see it?

07:36 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I'm not a. There's a lot of cases that have held that speech is very protectable and there are some cases like there's a case called Miller that sort of talked about when obscenity could be regulated, but the idea and over time the court took the stance that you know, expression, even adult expression, even potentially prurient expression, is still protected expression.

08:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's kind of interesting because for a long time it was like well, if it's artistic merit, if there's some value outside of prurience, the desire to stimulate, then it's okay. But you're saying even now, it's accepted, even if it's really just to turn people on, it's okay.

08:17 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, let me not accidentally use the wrong words for it, because there sort of was a line, but the line, as you pointed out, was not a particularly clear line, but a lot of adult content was fully protected and that basically meant that if you had a law that interfered with speaking along these lines or reading communications along these lines, that law would have to pass strict scrutiny because it's First Amendment protected and people have the rights to access it. You're right about where we've been with this case and this decision. We are not there anymore, even though Justice Thomas in writing his decision was not particularly honest with himself or the readers of his decision that things have necessarily changed because now there is sort of this um, uh, occasionally protected, somewhat protected type of speech which is legal for adults but obscene for children, and this is not a type of speech that has ever been recognized, uh, under first amendment law at all.

09:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and the the problem is it means that there was never an age test in free speech.

09:28 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
There was never an age test, not in those terms. There were some cases that did sort of impinge on young people's ability to speak freely, like particularly speech in schools. But even so there was still a recognize that young people have First Amendment rights as well. I think it's also recognized.

09:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, by the way, nicholas, you can jump in with your opinion, you don't have to be. We will just add I-A-N-A-L to everything you say and everything I say. We are not lawyers. Kathy is everything I say, we are not lawyers, kathy is. But uh, it has been, I think, pretty widely recognized that adult content is not suitable for children um, I don't think they're that may not.

10:15 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, that's a normative question. That adult content is not suitable for children so.

10:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's the thing, that's the the what, what is kind of generally accepted norm, like, yeah, this is bad for kids, you know, to see all this content. And so there's a desire I don't think unreasonable to say, well, how can we age gate it so that adults can still see it, but kids can't? That doesn't seem to be a bad thing well.

10:42 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So let me bring back to something technical in this decision, because this technical distinction is actually really important. So the issue is not well, can we keep kids from accessing certain types of information? The issue is, if we're going to try, how do we judge whether this effort is constitutional or not? Because you could basically say, for instance, just to go you know absurdium is okay. Well, to keep kids safe from bad content on the internet, kids can't use the internet at all.

11:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that seems like a little overbroad, that's going too far.

11:21 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
But you need to have some basis to test for when does your law go too far? And if it goes too far where it's impinging on First Amendment protected rights, Now, sometimes you can overcome that with strict scrutiny. That is it narrowly tailored. I'm blanking on the. There's a full language from it. Narrow means now narrow tailored. So we've talked about this before.

11:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I forgive me for interrupting you uh so much, but I'm trying to uh help everybody who's not been listening to every conversation we've had with you over the years. So we've talked about this before. The idea of of there is a test called strict scrutiny which, in some cases, if you use strict scrutiny, you're very narrowly defining it. It's okay to constrain the First Amendment.

12:12 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, I don't know if I would sum it up that, but it tends to bless the law, because the law is doing its.

12:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thing.

12:18 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, if it can overcome it. So essentially the outcome is that it kind of pokes a very small hole in First Amendment protection and the reason we use strict scrutiny is because we want to make sure that that hole that it's poking is as narrow as possible, teeny, tiny, that we had such a compelling reason and we've done the narrowest tailored thing in law so that we're not upending and stepping on people's constitutional rights, no matter how well intentioned we want to be. So one of the issues is when this law got enjoined, the district court said strict scrutiny applies. When the law got appealed to the Fifth Circuit, the Fifth Circuit said rational basis, which is the lowest standard.

13:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That basically is the opposite of strict scrutiny a very opposite.

13:07 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's basically did the government have any sort of rational basis to do what it did? Okay, fine, it's good, you know. No more questions asked. That's not the right standard either. So the one bit of good good news that comes out of this decision is that even justice thomas said no, it's not rational basis.

13:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's this so again to to get people a little grounding if you had a scale between very narrow, strict scrutiny the complete opposite of the scale you'd have intermediate security. But the complete opposite would be rational basis right.

13:39
It's the least restrictive right, and then you have an intermediate setting called intermediate scrutiny which is also right in the middle right in the middle, um, and so this is the fifth circuit decided not to use that but in fact to say no, no, we want the most liberal interpretation. The reason this is important to tech is because, not so much to protect porn I don't think that's our job but the only way you can make this law work is by universal age verification online.

14:11 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, that was one of the upshots, or at least for this type of material. What the court then ended up doing is saying no, the correct standard. He decided that this was a content neutral law, which I think is a highly dubious proposition, and decided that this was a content neutral law, which I think is a highly dubious proposition. And then, because it was content neutral, we only need to use intermediate scrutiny and that standard is much, much less. And if we call our minds back, we've talked about this before because they used intermediate scrutiny for TikTok, for the TikTok ban, where they looked past how it was stamping on protected First Amendment right issues, saying it's content neutral for the national security thing. So we don't really have to look at how carefully tailored the means are that the law is using to fulfill its goal.

15:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Same problem with why that was bad in TikTok is also why it's bad here, because it's going to make a mess of protected speech and people's ability to speak and read and interact with protected speech and their other First Amendment rights, including the ability to read and write on the Internet anonymously so mike masnick, whose headline says the conservatives on the supreme court are so scared of nudity they'll throw out the first amendment, which is maybe a little strong, but he but he does explain here that he says the real danger isn't just texas's age verification law, it's that with this majority decision it was a 6-3 decision in favor of ken paxton is that Thomas has handed every state legislature a road map for circumventing the first amendment online.

15:52
His reasoning that the real, that the internet has changed and that intermediate scrutiny suffices for content-based restrictions. And Mike fears that that decision will be cited in countless future cases targeting not just pornography and this is why it's really important but online speech. Expect age verification, he writes, to be attempted for social media platforms, for news sites and for any online speech that makes moral authorities uncomfortable News sites to protect minors from disturbing imagery, for instance.

16:25 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, one of the things that's a bit of that's a big problem with this is this idea that there is something that can be this whole category of speech of something that is obscene for children but not unlawful for adults. We've never had that category of speech and it's also creating this idea that there's speech that is sort of partially protected, where it's usually. It's. It's a either or situation Either the speech is not protected, which only covers a very small amount of speech, or is protected and end of story, it's protected and you don't get to mess with protected speech unless you can overcome strict scrutiny.

17:03
And here he's like no, there's this other thing, it's kind of OK, kind of when we see it there. At the same time he's also sort of saying, no, we didn't really change any of the precedent that we already had. Ok, as a litigator, all the litigators are going to be ramming that down the Supreme Court's throats and all the other courts throats to say that all the other precedent, that that didn't do things this way, is still operative and in effect, and we're going to kind of ignore this and try to isolate it. And maybe this case can be isolated on the facts in terms of the specific language of this law and how it applied to something which was presumably not going to reach more general types of speech.

17:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But there will be states as a result of this that will, for instance, in fact, there are already states trying to do this past age verification for social networks.

17:55 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
And Texas has some more, and there's most of them have.

17:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they've been challenged, have actually been enjoined, both by district courts and also the appeals court unless you happen to be in the fifth circuit now there's a supreme court decision that says basically it's okay well, the litigators are going to try to narrow this here.

18:14
One is age verification itself. It doesn't really. It violates privacy, because it's not just kids that have to verify their ages, it's everybody, which means you and I. Uh to now I guess you could say, well, big deal pornhub. Okay, I won't go see pornhub, but if you wanted to use xcom or blue sky or facebook and you had to give them government id to prove that you're over 16, you might say, gosh, should those companies have that information about me? And the Supreme Court's basically giving them the ability to do that? Right A state to pass a law like that?

18:54 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Mike is, I think, right in that this is a roadmap for how other states are going to do it, but it isn't necessarily how other states have done it. So the laws that have been on the books are still potentially challengeable, and one of the other things about these other laws is they. This one was targeting certain types of speech a little more directly. It was more adult, and I think I don't know if this law necessarily would scale automatically to something like social media, where there's all sorts of speech, including stuff that is clearly not obscene. But I think the bigger danger here is states and localities tend to decide what's obscene or not, and we know that some states like to call LBGT type information including for kids, and they'll call it obscene.

19:42
So, yeah, this isn't. This isn't good. I don't want to excuse it as being good, I want to headline it as being bad. Thinking of it as a litigator, I'm going to think of ways that you know we can minimize the damage and keep going and keep having good precedent that we can still waive. But it was a bad decision.

19:58
The dissent from Justice Kagan is very apt. She calls it that this decision that's at war with itself, because he keeps trying to say I'm doing this but I'm not really doing this. So then what's left? It's not good and it shows, I mean, I remember from oral argument that justices were like maybe it's time to revisit you know how we protect the First Amendment for children online, that they wanted to revisit its former precedent because everyone's using it now and somehow, because everyone's using technology now, now the Constitution needs to give way. I mean, it's really sort of a frightening attitude, even if this decision might be something that we can kind of isolate out and not be too affected by, but we also may be very affected by it. So stay tuned.

20:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like so many things happening these days. The long-term impact is unknown, but can I ask a dumb question?

20:51 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Yes, I am not a lawyer. I am definitely not a lawyer, but something, kathy, you said earlier where you know the idea that creating laws for people under certain ages we've never done that before Speech laws. Why is that? Why is that so controversial? I guess I don't understand. If I'm a parent, I don't necessarily want my kid consuming certain content. Why is that so bad? I guess, is my question.

21:17 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
You can decide. As the parent, you have the ability. Section 230 talks about developing tools that even schools can decide Right. Schools can make ban certain T-shirts that that's bringing in some different First Amendment law with respect to kids.

21:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But kids don't have blanket First Amendment rights though.

21:40 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I mean I think they start out with blanket First Amendment rights. The issue is that it can be overcome with strict scrutiny in a number of situations, although I would look at some of the like the Hazelwood decision and the bong hits for Jesus decision as being aberrant and really harmful to to kids First, Amendment decision called bong hits for Jesus has got to be aberrant.

22:03
But, but Tinker Tinker versus Des Moines was a very pro. You know, kids have First Amendment rights and need to have First Amendment rights and they still exist. So that is basically the starting point. So, in terms of Daniel of Nicholas's question, the issue is a denormative one of should we say that kids should be able to see absolutely everything, but there's a huge problem in terms of who gets to decide what they get to see, because we're talking about how certain states are going to decide certain things that you know you may want your kids. We may agree that kids should be able to see. And also, in terms of this particular law, even if we say, fine, kids can't see anything, we totally have to protect them. Imposing this type of law where everybody needs to essentially identify themselves has a huge impact on all the grownups using the Internet as well, and grownups have an affirmative first amendment right to speak anonymously, including speaking anonymously online.

23:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That goes out the window if you have to identify anonymous speech. Right, and then the privacy. Can we come up with a third party escrow system that might work so that you don't have to give your information to the social network, but some third party, and they verify and vouch?

23:20 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
the third parties are keep trying to promote them and and postulate them, and I know that you've had like Shoshana Weinstein on your show. Let her tell you why all of that is garbage.

23:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's written an excellent piece at rstreetorg a couple of years ago, but it stands today. About why age verification? Yeah, and that is, by the way, a conservative think tank. Yeah, so you know, I mean we're we were already over time on this one story. We have many, but I guess the best we can do at this point is watch and wait and see what states do and see what social networks do.

24:00
Would you be against the idea which I have floated and others have, that maybe the best way to handle this is for companies like google and apple to allow parents to set a age on the phone of their children and let that be the gate to, uh, which social media has to pass through? In other words, yeah, my kid, and, by the way, you can, you can say my kid is. In other words, yeah, my kid, and by the way, you can say my kid is adult enough. I'm going to say my kid's 18, even if they're 12. Or my 18-year-old really doesn't have the mental capacity to deal with pornography, so I'm going to say he's 12. Shouldn't parents, in other words, be the ones to decide this? And couldn't Apple, in a privacy forward way, support this kind of thing with an API that then Blue Sky would say oh, the parents say this is inappropriate, so we're not going to let them install it.

24:54 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I mean let me break this down with your question is because I don't know which question you're asking Is there in a world where everybody is free under the First Amendment, to innovate freely and make whatever editorial decisions they want for their kids and for themselves, and this and the other thing Is there something where the gang could get together, we put bright minds to, you know, to the task and figure out if there's something that could be done? I don't know, I'm dubious, but I don't know. Maybe we could. We're basically, as long as it's voluntary, where Apple offers we're going to have this toggle and you can press this toggle, you can set the toggle and companies are voluntarily going to decide how they want to respond to that toggle. Maybe we could live in that world. I think there will be consequences, but maybe that wouldn't even themselves out.

25:38
But do we do that under the force of law? Because we have to, and that is an absolute non-starter. The force of law because we have to, and that is an absolute nonstarter. Because, let's say, the toggle is 18 and the kid is 12. Or who's going to decide what is appropriate to come down the pipe if the person is 18, even if they're really 18? And who's to say what's not appropriate if they're 17? Is that really such a different universe of material? You know people who are one year off of being able to register to vote now all of a sudden can't see things. And then the other part of it.

26:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nobody doubts the parents right to do that, though, right, I mean, that's the parents right and it's not. And, by the way, that's not protected by the first amendment, because the parent is not government. So if we give a mechanism for parents to make that decision, uh, I mean, of course kids can. Of course there's lots of loopholes. Kids can always get their own phone, but that seems to be to cover a lot of situations without in any way putting the First Amendment.

26:32 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, none of this is content neutral, which again was really key to this decision. When things are not content neutral, strict scrutiny applies, because that is really affecting the free speech, rights to speak and read and things like that. The question is, you know, if you want to, kind of and I think you're approaching this as an innovation and like here's a technical problem, here's a social problem, is there a technical solution for it? I'm still dubious of whether that could actually produce something effective. But fine, go ahead and try.

27:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's better than making a law. Well, better, absolutely than making a law.

27:05 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, better, absolutely better than the law. But the other thing I want to kind of highlight is you know, you said it's sort of the hypothetical with social media. Social media is an entire universe of you know, incredible breadth of information and communication that's passing through it. How are those content based decisions about what is appropriate to go for? The 18 toggle, the 17 toggle, the 16 toggle, because it's a parent?

27:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kathy and the parent gets to decide. Period anyway. And the point is look, this is far superior to what's going to happen, which is that laws will be made and it's not hypothetical, because both Apple and Google have both implemented similar systems and are considering exactly what I just described. Uh, and they have a in a way to enforce it, because, of course, they have closed app stores, at least for in the US, uh, so that they could say you can't be in the app store unless you adhere to our API and block kids of a, you know, block this from people, kids whose parents say they don't want them to see it. I think that's completely reasonable.

28:10 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
But still what is getting blocked?

28:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know, the parent decides what's getting blocked.

28:15 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
No, they can't. They can only send the toggle. The toggle says OK, the kid needs to be considered 17. So then the software recognizes that the user is 17.

28:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So then, the software recognizes that the user is 17. But how does?

28:27 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Facebook know which Facebook posts are okay for the 17 year old and not for this 16 year old. And you know the Facebook is still going to be making decisions, and maybe that now means no cat pictures for the 17 year olds, because it just can't tell. Somebody is still being forced to make content decisions, and it's not the parent at that. That point it's now going to be self-censorship as but which? I think it's not.

28:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not the perfect solution. I think it's better than the current situation well, certainly better than law. I mean, I wouldn't so, would you advocate, there should be no parental controls at all um, not the way they're being conceptualized.

29:05 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I think it's too problematic and I really do stand affirmatively for the First Amendment rights of particularly teenagers. I think they're young minds, they're sophisticated, they need access to information and they're capable of actually interfacing with information. They need to be able to understand the world around them if we're going to raise them to be, you know, civically engaged, competent people. So I mean oh, go ahead.

29:29 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I was just going to jump in and say that sounds like the exact opposite of the way that I was raised. My mother was basically to the right of Stalin. She, what she's and I respect now as an adult, I respect it immensely. She did not play games. She did not think that I had the right to understand the world. No, no, no. What she said was the law and I didn't. I never flattered it. So it's like there's different parenting styles and I get it. But just speaking me personally, I was raised in. It wasn't even necessarily religious, it wasn't religious, it was just like her way of the highway is the best way to describe it, and I think that's her right, it was her right.

30:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's her right. That's yeah. That's what a parent that's yeah called parenting, and I think that far better for a parent to do that than the state I understand what you're saying kathy, is that, in this case, you know you'd have a switch, that it would ultimately be the decision of the social network, uh, as opposed to the parent?

30:25 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
well, I also worry about it's not a perfect solution.

30:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's a better so, and I think the other option for your mom, nicholas, would be to say no phone at all for you, right?

30:35 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
that's basically what we. We did not. We were not allowed to play video games during the week because the computer was in the family room. There were rules that were very hard and you know they were codified. I thought I never and I never thought it was a big deal. As a kid, you know I wasn't.

30:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My parents said you can only watch half an hour of TV a night and it pissed the hell out of me.

30:57 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
My parents didn't allow a whole lot of TV but on the other hand and let me jump in with this when I but my my parents didn't object to well, we didn't really have the internet when I was in high school, but they didn't object to me having first amendment rights and in fact they supported me when I was the editor-in-chief of the high school paper, promised anonymity to a letter writer, had the school hand my name to the police because they wanted to investigate the, have me turn it over. And my parents supported me when we went and got an aclu cooperating attorney to defend my first amendment rights as a student of my 17 year old student journalist. Because that's a reason why first amendment rights need to apply to kids, because we're busy doing journalism and doing valuable things in terms of contributing to discourse.

31:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I'm very against like anything that would prevent any of that.

31:53
By the way, the bong hits for Jesus banner was hanging for a while at the museum in in Washington DC, but the museum closed a couple of years ago, so I don't know where the b Hits for Jesus banner has ended up. But that kid got kicked out of school for doing it, even though he didn't do it in school, he did it on a public street. Supreme Court said nope, school can do it because it's promoting illegal drug use. We're going to take a break. We'll come back in just a little bit. I'm glad that the I'm glad your parents defended you Did you. Were you able to keep that letter writer's identity a secret?

32:27 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yes, but we didn't end up getting to publish the letter, but ACLU cooperating attorney to the rescue.

32:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice. Is that why you became an attorney?

32:36 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
No, I've been cooking this way for my entire. Well, not because of that, but I picked that fight because this is what I believed, and I've just grown into exactly the same person that I always was.

32:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Your parents raised you well, thank you. And you know what, nicholas, you turned out. Okay, too, do you play video games during the week though.

32:56 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I will say it took me a very long time to do that, actually, like I felt guilty as an adult.

33:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I still feel guilty playing video games. No, I'm just old and tired.

33:05 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I'm like, yeah, I don't even have the energy anymore, but for it took a while for me to be like there's no one to tell me I can't.

33:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, your mom's head voices is still in your head, right? Oh, she definitely is go outside.

33:17 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
My dad brought a pet computer home when I was in kindergarten. He brought an atari 800 home when I was in first grade. He taught me how to play the video games, although then I think there were some rules about it.

33:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But nice, I, uh I. Everybody last week on the show said oh, you got to play this new game, expedition 33. So against my better, have you played it I have not.

33:40 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
It's on my wish list it's an rpg.

33:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a turn-based rpg, but it's french, so it's very arty and uh, and the music's beautiful and in french and you know it's an interesting. It's interesting. I played it a couple of hours because it's on game pass, so I don't have to buy it. And I died and that's it, the game's over. I said what? I can't go back to my lat. No game over. I said that's it, no more video games, I'm gonna. I'm not gonna waste my time playing video games. I'm gonna learn the piano instead something useful.

34:13 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So, nicholas, whatever, do whatever you want I played video games and had piano lessons.

34:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can multitask as a child I know, but I figure every hour I spend learning how to manipulate this controller could be an hour I spend learning how to yeah, there's other things you can do with your dexterity other than just blow something away this is bonito.

34:34 - Benito (Announcement)
That's a hand eye coordination you're getting though playing video games yeah, well, I'm also getting it playing the piano different. But yeah, right, and, and just one note, if you want to get over and at the end of the video game.

34:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What have I gained? I've solved Expedition 33. At the end of the five or 60 hours of playing the piano, I can actually play the entertainer.

34:54 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
And what about for children, where they're going to be taught to play the piano via an internet-based game?

35:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, interesting. In fact there are quite a few. There's some very good internet-based piano tools that I've used myself, yeah.

35:06 - Benito (Announcement)
I hope they don't age-gate those. If you want to not feel guilty about playing video games during the week or whatever it's like. You get a job in the video game industry and it all feels justified.

35:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What are you going to do? Make a living playing video games, Nicholas?

35:20 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Well, not anymore. They lay people every every 10 minutes yeah, the parents were right.

35:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The parents were right all right, you're watching this week in tech with kath firebrand. Kathy gellis ever since high school she's been a firebrand uh contributor at tech dirt. And of course, nicholas de leon, who is now senior electronics reporter at consumer reports. That's very nice and, uh, newly engaged congratulations. Can I say that on the show, or should I edit? Sure? That's play, that's that's let's say that's fine yeah, your uh fiance and my wife uh have a back channel they're besties.

35:56 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Yeah, they have a secret.

35:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's so cute and so lisa said okay, you, you don't know this, but ask nicholas how it's going said okay, you, you don't know this, but ask nicholas how it's going.

36:10 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Lisa was one of the first people she told. If I'm not, mistaken.

36:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, she sent a picture of a rock. It looks a nice light. Nice, nice looking rock. Good job. Well done, nicholas. She is a catch. Uh, we'll be back with more in just a bit.

36:20
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Oh, and if you're an agency, you'll love this. Storyblock offers multi-client workspaces, flexible permissions, seamless collaboration tools so you can manage multiple projects without disrupting development workflows. So whether you're a startup, an enterprise or an agency juggling multiple clients. Storyblock gives you the power and flexibility you need. Try it today at storyblockcom slash twittv-25 and use code twitt25. Twit listeners will get 20% off for three months on growth and growth plus plans. That's storyblockcom slash. Twit tv dash 25 and the code twit25 for 20 off the first three months on growth and growth plus plans. S-t-o-r-y-b-l-o-k dot com slash t-w-i-t-t-v dash 25, and the code is twit25 storyblock. I think you'll like it and we thank him so much for supporting our show. Oh gosh, there was a lot going on with the supreme court. That's because they were closing their session. Right, this was last friday was their last day.

39:59 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
They heard that in january and I was really worried when um other cases that were heard after it were getting decided and this one was just hanging back and hanging back, and hanging back.

40:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They did it at the last minute.

40:12 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, and I find it both disturbing in terms of the judgment, but also that it didn't remand back to the Fifth Circuit to say now that we've told you what standard to use, go apply it. It also presumed to apply the standard to the law, and I don't know where we stand right now. Except the whole thing was enjoined, so I don't know this. It's not good.

40:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was up in the air. Let's talk about DMCA, because that was also a decision. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Let's talk about dmca, because that was also a decision. The digital millennium copyright act. Just to put this in perspective, this story from a tech meme I'm sorry, the new york times this week youtube pirates are cashing in on hollywood summer blockbusters.

40:57
You would think, youtube, we get taken down or we get strikes or we get pinged every time I play a trailer for a movie coming up. But apparently it's no big deal to get lots of full-length, copyrighted current movies up on YouTube. Hundreds, let's see hundreds of films are at YouTube's request. Atalytics, which did this study, provided 200 videos for YouTube to review, most of them full-length films, probably pirated. The founder of Atalytics, who did this study, says he observed 9,000 examples of possible copyright violations, including full-length movies in theatrical release, tv shows like the family live, ncaa, college football games. The videos had more than 250 million views.

41:56
So all I I bring this up to show that enforcement is very haphazard in this stuff. Youtube has has content ID, which is supposed to work. It does work in our case way too well. It's created a huge chilling effect. We're doing a news show and I can't play clips and show stuff or play even sounds that some copyright holder has, even if it's in the coverage of the story, which is clearly protected by, uh, by a fair use, but without getting you know immediately dinged, and of course I can't afford to defend it. I don't, can't. Our stuff is like fish wrap it doesn't survive the day, so taking a week to get it justified and back up is not worth it, so we just don't do it. Meanwhile, uh, the supreme court has granted cert to a related story. This, I love this. You, you've used this phrase before on the show. Jawboning here is from our street. Uh, oh, you're writing for our street now well, I did that um last year.

43:02 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I'm not sure we ever talked about it on this show, but this was a big white paper that I wrote um are basically arguing that the digital millennium copyright act, at least section 512, as we know, and quote unquote love it has a jawboning problem, that it basically is jawboning what is jawboning?

43:20
jawboning is essentially where the government can't directly cause speech to be deterred, because that would be a First Amendment violation. It instead leans on a third party and says, if you know what's good for you, you'll get rid of that, and it's. It's this idea that it can, kind of like wash away the First Amendment violation. So you don't even go to court, you just threaten right, and so the whole point of the of the dmca is to keep people out of court.

43:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um see well it's a little bit weird how it works, right?

43:54 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
yeah, because content id has stopped us completely um well, so I think in terms of the tech meme article, just looking over it, one of the things is google's running a whole lot of automatic systems to try to detect things and it looks like the people who want to upload are finding ways to fool the automatic systems, whereas it's capable of finding your snippets, but it's less capable of finding.

44:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is always the case with piracy, that dedicated pirates will always get around any fort enforcement. Meanwhile, honest citizens who are not attempting to end around the enforcement get gets scooped up right the notice and takedown regime.

44:35 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So the paper that I linked to and the papers from uh, so conveniently, november of last year, so so many people paid attention to that in november of last year, so so many people paid attention to that in November of last year but basically it's arguing that notice and takedown and basically any of these laws where we're causing, any law where the government wants to affect what speech can exist online by creating liability for the intermediary, has a jawboning problem where it's.

45:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So what did this granting cert do? What is the case so?

45:10 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
the case is Cox versus Sony. I think it's Cox Communication versus Sony Entertainment, whatever they are, and this case has been going on for years and years and years, or at least actually this one too. But it also comes out of that other case, bmg versus Cox. So Cox in this case is a full service ISP that is providing broadband access to users, and they received a whole bunch of takedown notices and there's issues of did they take, did they disc? There's a thing under the DMCA that if you're going to be eligible for the safe harbor, you have to disable repeat infringers, and what Sony is alleging is that they didn't take down the repeat infringers and this ended up leading to an enormous liability decision against them. But this case has evolved a little bit for like that and this is sort of the last gasp of the case where it's really looking in terms of how secondary liability under copyright was decided to find Cox Communications liable at all, because what happened is when they lost their DMCA protection.

46:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now they're sitting there as just full defendants to a copyright infringement so, as an isp, they are now liable for what their customers are doing this was what the record labels did back in the day, in fact, we talked about this. Last week we had a great uh uh interview, uh, with steven witt, who wrote a book called how music got free, talking about this kind of misguided attempt to go after housewives and moms who were file sharing, suing their, their customers, basically music industry, which it backfired on them terribly case also points out.

47:06 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So in this case the termination provision of the DMCA isn't really on the table, but as a litigator I'm thinking it's going to be on the table because it hasn't really been fully tested, because a lot of what the DMCA was kind of conceiving is like OK, somebody's posting on YouTube too many pirated videos and so kick them off of that platform. They don't get to avail themselves of that platform anymore because they keep pirating stuff.

47:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, just as an example, I'm now I'm not going to play it because I don't want to get taken down, but I think you can show the index page of this. Black sabbath yesterday made their final performance in england. There is already a video up of this final performance, I'm sure complete violation of copyright 264,000 views in seven hours. And this isn't the only one. There are many Um and there's, of course, a lot of interest among black sabbath fans. It's their last performance.

47:57 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
they say um well, so the cops?

48:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this is not. This is not sanctioned by the music industry or by the band, and youtube doesn't apparently take it down. I guess maybe it's live no, there's an idea.

48:12 - Benito (Announcement)
Doesn't work. There's actually a way to do this. What you have to do is you have to slightly modify the video, like you have to. Actually, why didn't you have?

48:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
to do is you have to slightly modify the video, like you have to zoom in. Why didn't you tell us this?

48:19 - Benito (Announcement)
We could have been running these videos all this time Because it's still sketchy.

48:22 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I mean it's an arms race and you know you'll, I mean the pirates will zig and YouTube will zag.

48:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But that wasn't my point. The Black Sabbath concert was pay-per-view only.

48:38 - Benito (Announcement)
So it is is definitely a copyright. So a common, a common strategy is just to flip the video so it becomes a mirror.

48:41 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So now content id doesn't see it properly oh, that's if you play the music backwards

48:45 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I've seen. I've seen dead. I've seen the video flip. I've also seen someone take like a movie and put it like on a tv. So you're watching like a tv watching the movie.

48:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
For a long time we thought, if we didn't run it full screen, we wouldn't get caught. And then, of course, they updated it. And then they said, oh no, and I don't know, we stopped trying to get around it. I just don't play copyrighted material anymore, Even if it is in this case showing. This page is coverage of a news story.

49:15 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Fair use in some way, in every way.

49:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, let's talk about fair use, because that's actually also on the docket actually if I can just add to something, because I didn't mean to go down.

49:25 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Youtube was the one example, but cox communications is a full service isp, so consider what the implications are with you know these people were doing file sharing via bit torrent, or they're alleged to have done it and the idea that Cox had to kick people off their full service ISP so they get no broadband connection, not through Cox, and maybe, as we know, that may have been the only monopoly player in their town. If they're not on Cox, are they on anybody else? What happens if it's a coffee shop that's offering free Wi-Fi to its customers and a customer is file sharing?

49:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, was the irony kicked off way back when, in these music uh industry cases, the worst pirates got off because, when they realized they were being investigated by the fbi, they took the passwords off their wi-fi routers to give them plausible deniability, saying well, it may have been us, but anybody could use our internet and it worked well it's.

50:23 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's not even just a question off. It's not even a question of plausible deniability.

50:28
Let's say, there's people at home who've been file sharing, you know every day for weeks, these guys had passwords until they knew they were being investigated, and then they took them off but even even if that were true and they're sitting at home and they're file sharing stuff, the idea that they don't get to use the internet in this day and age at all like this is that is a sanction where the idea that cox has to keep has to kick people off their broadband connection and we're going to be like that's a perfectly fine policy thing to have baked into law. Again, if we go back to the free speech, the free speech coalition case, one of Thomas's issues is well, everybody's using the internet now. Exactly Everybody's using the internet now. So let's think about what a huge, enormous penalty it is that people would have to get cut off and now we're going to hold Cox liable for what their users are doing at all period, but especially because they didn't kick people off of their possibly only broadband connection to the Internet.

51:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't know how this case is going to go. I mean, maybe maybe the Supreme Court will say oh yeah, that's ridiculous.

51:33 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I hope so. I mean, I'm not that enthusiastic about this particular court, but I'm certainly going to join the you know the people writing amicus briefs to try to make that point.

51:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was a big decision. Well, actually there were two kind of conflicting decisions from the Northern California federal bench about AI and copyrighted works. We'll get to that in just a little bit. I know there's a lot of court stuff. This will be the last of the bunch, and then we'll have other things, uh, to talk about, including nicholas de leon's favorite video games to be played on a weekend only well, a lot of world of warcraft lately actually, oh yeah, really, uh yeah.

52:14 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I got back in about a week ago. I I've been playing this game I I don't know for 20 years. Has it changed? It's way different. I mean, this could be a whole show. They have multiple different versions that they offer now, so they offer a version. That was the way it was back in 2004, 2005. When I played, yeah, yeah, so it's like the closest thing to a time machine that a company has invented it's a mmr, mm oh, mmorpg massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

52:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you're going into this world with other people playing. Yes, we tell me about your character. Is it a level leveling up?

52:53 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I mean I, I just I, I've been messing around with alts. They'll call it like different carry I'm trying to find what sorcerer I'm doing uh, a draenei priest right now, which is kind of in all the years I've played, I've never really done a priest. Uh, I've never. I never got the idea of healing. Now I'm like, yeah, let me give that a shot it's fun casting spells.

53:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like ranged attacks. I don't like to get in there and tank. I don't want to, I want to.

53:17 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I want to stand back and throw spells I started you know everyone starts as dps initially because that's the easiest to understand, and then, right then I did tank and now I'm messing around with healing. So but it's like it's only. I feel like the game is almost only like 40 year olds. I can't imagine like an 18 year old playing world of warcraft today are you playing the war within or the new one, or are you?

53:40
uh, I'm I'm doing both and playing the war within and I'm going back and playing the old one as it existed back in the day it is fine, it's so much harder nostalgia the original one is so much. There's so less hand holding, like there's no arrows pointing which direction. It just says in the text it's like oh, my friend Steve down the hill, he's west of the lake, you have to figure out what down the hill is.

54:04
But the good part about that is it's just so much more immersive and so much more like it feels like a real world, as opposed to like playing a video game where you just follow the arrow and click the thing.

54:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is more it's way, harder it's way harder, but it's fun in a different way. The uh, a lot of uh experts in internet addiction point to world of warcraft as being this amazingly powerful kind of virtuous circle, because you, you change things, you watch how players, you know what, what, what the drops do, and you watch how players respond and eventually you get really good at addicting people. There were people back in the day who died. There was a guy, a player in South Korea, died because he didn't go to the bathroom for like 12 hours.

54:51 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I remember those stories I mean unironically from like 2006 until 2010,. World of warcraft was basically the only thing I cared about, like, without like, without exaggeration don't tell us four year. Oh, she knows okay she probably played. I think she finds it funny. She's like real, she literally she plays like she just started playing some like farm farmville ripoff on her phone. Oh my god. Yeah, it's really disgusting actually. But introduce.

55:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Introduce her at least to uh uh. Do you have a switch?

55:26 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
yeah, we have three switches. We have a switch. Oh, do they have?

55:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
a switch. Do you have the new switch?

55:32 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
no, I tried to buy the switch I could. I couldn't buy it when it was at launch, so I was like I'll check back later in the year.

55:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We will get it eventually Introduce her to Animal Crossing, because if you're going to play a farm game, that's what I said.

55:43 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
She's like no, I like this one. I was like okay, never mind.

55:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But they've got crops. Okay, that was a little amuse-bouche to break up the court cases.

55:54 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
This has been an actual conversation about video games.

56:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We will have more in just a bit with Kathy Gellis, this great attorney at law who is a proud believer in the First Amendment and free speech and an absolutist when it comes to the Constitution of the United States of America. What did you do for the Fourth of July? Did you celebrate? Did you set off fireworks in the houseboat?

56:20 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
oh god, don't do that on a wooden marina, that would be a really bad idea also in this county is completely illegal.

56:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, we uh some friends and I went down.

56:30 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I might add yeah, uh, some friends and I went down to watch the town's uh fireworks but they were canceled because the barge they were supposed to be launched from was sinking. Yeah, it sank.

56:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It wasn't the only bay area barge that sank, and then a lot of uh, a lot of fireworks displays in our area were canceled because the fireworks factory blew up. But yeah, tragically it.

56:52 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I I feel like this fourth of july may have been a metaphor in many ways, but um, yeah, but I did also feel like we had fireworks and no way to launch them. Other towns had places to launch them, but no fireworks.

57:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But no fireworks because they all blew up.

57:08 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, so this was.

57:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The barge in Incline Village, nevada, sank. Cancellation of Lake Tahoe's 4th of July fire. I don't remember these barges ever collapsing before. This is the first.

57:22 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I don't know if Sausalito sank, but they said taking on water, which I mean.

57:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, usually that's a precursor to sinking. That's usually the first step.

57:33 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
You certainly want to not load up and put everybody in your fireworks on the boat that is taking on water.

57:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, we had the petaluma fireworks 15, 15 minutes, right, lisa? I? Unfortunately I I was napping, so I missed. Uh, we will have more in just a bit. I do want to talk about this copyright uh issue, should this is something you've talked about for all. You taught me about the right to read and you've defended the right of ai the rights of ais to read books, just like we do ingest the contents of those books. Uh, now there are conflicting court decisions about that from the same district, which is funny, and we'll have that in just a little bit.

58:15
You're watching this week in tech. We will get to many other stories, don't worry, there's one more court case than it. Then. That's all. That's all our show today brought to you by zscaler, the leader in cloud security, talking about ai.

58:30
Ai is a double edged sword, isn't it? Hackers are using ai to breach your organization better than ever, more effectively than ever, and, at the same time, ai in your organization powers innovation, drives efficiency, so it helps bad actors deliver more relentless and effective attacks and helps you do better business. What do we do? How do we solve this? Phishing attacks over encrypted channels last year increased by 34.1%, fueled by the growing use of generative AI tools. They're much more effective, these phishing emails, than ever before. But there's also this thing called phishing as a service, these kits, which means any kid with no skills at all can launch a phishing attack. On the other hand, organizations in all industries, from small to larger, leveraging AI to increase employee productivity with public AI, engineers with coding assistants, marketers with writing tools, finances using AI to create spreadsheet formulas it's kind of amazing. People are automating workflows for operational efficiency, both across individuals and teams. They're embedding AI into their applications and services, both customer and partner facing. Ultimately, ai is helping so many companies including ours, I might add move faster in the market and gain a competitive advantage. So we have this interesting environment where AI is both good and bad, this interesting environment where AI is both good and bad.

01:00:00
There's no doubt companies have to really think about how they protect their private and public use of AI. You don't want to accidentally send proprietary information out into the world. They also have to really think about how they defend against AI powered attacks. This is nowhere more true than in school districts across the country. Chief Information Security Officer, the CISO from the New York City Department of Education biggest I think, the biggest school district in the country said with AI, I'm concerned about the usage of it, but I also love the innovation with it. How are our employees using AI? Which AIs are they using? He recommends Zscaler. He says Zscaler could be a good partner there to help us find the answers to those questions and help us move faster when it comes to incident response and finding the needle in the haystack proactively finding threats to our network and data.

01:00:57
Here's the problem with traditional security firewalls. You know perimeter security and then you have to have a VPN so people can get in through the firewall, and then that gives you public-facing IP addresses which expose you and your attack surface to the bad guys lurking out there, and you are no match for them in this AI era. That's why we need a modern approach. That's why you want Zscaler's comprehensive zero-trust architecture plus AI that ensures safe public AI productivity, protects the integrity of private AI and stops AI-powered attacks. It works on all levels. You can thrive in the AI era with Zscaler Zero Trust Plus AI to stay ahead of the competition and remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve. Learn more at zscalercom slash security. That's zscalercom slash security. We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech and supporting you in your ai journey.

01:02:00
Uh, all right, I was happy when I saw judge alsop's ruling. Uh, cassie, it was uh bart's versus anthropic. The issue was uh, anthropic had bought a bunch of books and ingested them into their ai models, but they also had a bunch of pirated books which they ingested into the ai models. After they were done with the books they purchased, they destroyed them. Um, judge alsop came down with two answers to that question. On the one hand, he found that train. This is important. There are four, as you. There are four tests for fair use, one of which is transformative, he said. Training an AI system on unlicensed copyright works is easily transformative fair use.

01:02:51 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I think he said spectacularly transformative.

01:02:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is because the book no longer exists, even in the ai's memory. It's tokens, it's not language. Uh, he said buying the physical books and scanning them was transformative, unlicensed works. Storing them long term as a library that was infringing. In fact he's they're going to go to trial on that. But he threw out the part uh of the case where uh they were being uh sued because of reading these books they purchased potentially infringing.

01:03:25 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I I don't think it's a settled issue, um, but he it wasn't passing the sniff test for him and I think that's basically where his decision leaves stops at this point, but the case will will, as you say, will go forward.

01:03:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When Jason Calacanis was on a couple of weeks ago he talked about, promoted the idea in fact I think it's one of his investments of licensing these works to AI, because AI is ingesting them for profit in many cases and there should be some sort of licensing micropayment regimes so that the authors get fairly compensated. The AI gets the content he said. The courts are all going to say it's not fair use. Well, almost immediately Judge Elsa proved him wrong. But that wasn't the only decision to come down from the uh Northern District of California. What was the other decision, kathy?

01:04:17 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
um, a couple days later was Cadre Mehta, and that one came from a different judge whose name I've never heard so I don't know how to pronounce it. These two cases were a little bit weird and I think Mike's TechDirt post kind of points out a weirdness that all subs decision was a better one for AI training in general because it basically did an analysis that found it largely to be fair use, but it was a worse outcome for the defendant company Anthropic because they're still going to go to trial over.

01:04:54
They're still going to go to trial on some other pieces and it may be very expensive for them. But the other case was meta one. But it kind of lost because the overall decision is said basically like it's probably not fair use and meta really only one because he for technicality for technical technicalities, that the way that the the litigation had been pled and the plaintiffs had had written up everything didn't have enough evidence to win their argument.

01:05:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's interesting because, judge, and I'm going to say it Chabria C-H-H-A-B-R-I-A. Judge Chabria invoked a different one of the four tests the impact on the market. You know, it's fair use if it's transformative. It's not fair use if it injures the financial prospects, if it, if it has an impact on the market. Judge jabria said this ai training does in fact affect the market.

01:05:54 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's market also didn't, also didn't buy it um I also said it didn't affect the market. It's hysterical so I the these. So what do we do?

01:06:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
now in the same district.

01:06:05 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
These two judges have essentially opposing points of view um, I I wonder if there's going to be appeal and the next thing we see? Is they both go. No, no, they'll go to the Ninth Circuit first, and in the Ninth Circuit there's also more of a predilection to do rehearing and banks. So this is, I would say this is nowhere near the Supreme Court, except the Supreme Court has been changing things. So who the hell knows? But more than likely this is not. This is years away from hitting the.

01:06:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Supreme Court. This is a fundamental question, though, and we've talked about it a number of times when you've been on our shows uh, do ai have this? Does ai have the same rights to ingest music, art and literature that humans do the right to read, which is apparently a first amendment right? I didn't know that until I talked to you um.

01:06:56 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So one of the things that I don't like about the second decision, kadri versus Meta, is that his view of the transformativeness seems to be connected very much to what the potential output of the AI is, and I think AllSubs was a little bit more disciplined in terms of that. The training is the training and it's only about the slurping in the first instance and not based on what it might spit out at the end. And at the moment, I think the AI, like most of these LLMs, don't really spit out. Well, I guess it's, I don't know. Actually it may vary. I was going to say they don't spit out complete works, but that may not be true, because some works are very big and some works are very small. So certainly for small ones they can spit out a complete work. But his analysis of what was transformative about it seemed to have been really colored by the fact that the LLM could spit out something that looked like a copy, whereas I think also just in terms of the training, was looking at. I think he split the issue in a way that I think needs to be split. You look at the slurping in the first instance and whether that is infringing on a copy of something that you're slurping into the AI in the first place, and I think he basically said no, his issues of where the liability would be were more based on, in this case, the separate acquisition of pirated materials, and but that's a completely different question. So I think I think William also, judge also was better in terms of breaking this down, and I don't like the Kadri decision because it tends to. I think it uses the output to color the analysis of the legality of the input.

01:08:38
The second thing and Mike pointed this out in his post is market harm and also said something that I think is really important that has been getting way too ignored by an awful lot of cases, including the Warhol case at the Supreme Court and the Internet Archive case which is just because the copyright holder could have potentially made money Like, if there's a licensing market for this, yeah, I guess the copyright holders would be able to get that money, but that doesn't mean that because they could get money it's not fair use. That's not the way market harm is supposed to be defined and also kind of said time out, everybody back this up be defined. And also kind of said time out, everybody back this up just because you know they'd be first in line to make the money doesn't mean they actually have a right to require the payment. That doesn't change whether it would be fair use or whether it's something that their actual copyrights would entitle them to be.

01:09:30
Whereas the Kadri decision seems more in line with what Warhol and the Internet Archive case went to, which was if there was money to be had, well it must have gone to the copyright holders and it doesn't really matter whether there was fair use or not, because they didn't get to make money that potentially they could have created a market for. And that is a very significant expansion of what a copyright can get somebody and it's a significant reduction of what fair use is supposed to protect. And I think it's a significant reduction of what fair use is supposed to protect. And I think it's a huge problem. And I appreciate that the um, that the uh uh also decisions, sort of tried to put the brakes on that whole dynamic but we but we're a long way off from this being resolved, years probably before this gets oh yeah, certainly, although there's one other thing having to do with ai and the courts uh.

01:10:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sydney stein, who's the district judge in uh reviewing uh the new york times versus chat gpt. You may remember, a few weeks ago we talked about the fact that the judge in that case had ordered chat gpts to save all conversations with its users. Uh, and that even includes conversations the users have requested be deleted, this so that the New York Times could go through them and find infringing content. Sidney Stein, the judge reviewing the request that OpenAI, said hey, judge, this is a problem for privacy. Stein immediately denied OpenAI's objections. He was, according to Ars Technica, ashley Belanger writing, seemingly unmoved by the company's claims that the order forced OpenAI to abandon longstanding privacy norms. Stein's suggested that OpenAI's user agreement said the data could be retained as part of a legal process. So that's exactly what's happening. Oh, there's some good news even if you say delete it, the new york times can go through it.

01:11:29
Open. Ai says they can't plan to keep fighting the order, but I don't know exactly how they would uh continue to fight, except maybe go to the second circuit uh and appeal it and ask for an emergency order. But I don't. I don't know what the likelihood of that is.

01:11:44 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It is a deeply troubling deeply troubling deeply troubling. Yeah, I haven't followed it since it first came out. Yeah, it's one of these in theory minor procedural things with enormous implications that I'm not entirely sure that the trial court judge necessarily was fully in tune with. So it may be something that ends up getting fully litigated, even though it's a minor collateral issue to the overall case.

01:12:11
Yeah, and I think you can make a strong case that it doesn't help the publisher's case to go through my logs and it certainly impacts my privacy and in ways that I think it was telling people it would be deleted and then it wasn't getting deleted and, um, now it's not making there is, I mean the judge pointed out look, this is you agreed to this as a as a customer?

01:12:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, that in a case of a legal matter, those logs might be retained. So, uh, I guess you know that legally they have the right, but I think this is pretty appalling and I guess you, if your privacy is a concern, maybe don't use chat GPT, which, of course, is what Sam Altman's most worried about. Uh, let's see Microsoft. Big layoffs. Here you go, a company that is consistently in the number one or two market cap in the world in history, a three trillion dollar company, record profits. The last quarter. They're laying off another 9 000 employees, 15 000 in total this year. Uh, more cuts. Uh coming to microsoft. In this case it's in the gaming division. Ironically, when microsoft uh was being sued over the acquisition of activision blizzard, they said well, don't worry, these are independent companies, there won't be any overlap, we won't have to lay anybody off. Uh, well, no, in fact, most of these layoffs are in that division, the gaming division they've shut down a ton of studios.

01:13:46 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
It is really not. If you're a gamer, if you're someone who cares about this, uh, from the consumption it's like it's been a really bad acquisition, like what good I was against it.

01:13:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, paul thorat was defending it. Defending it, I said this is not good. This is consolidating the market. Yeah, I mean, go ahead, go ahead. Microsoft's been a good steward of Minecraft. I guess you could say right, sure, yes, yes, 100% yes, okay, but like what about everything else?

01:14:18 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Arcane Studios, Perfect Dark they just shut down. John Romero was developing a new game. A lot of funding was pulled for games folks were looking forward to, and I guess it's all in service of Game Pass. One interesting thing that I've seen come out of this over the past couple days is people now and not just people, not just the peanut gallery, but developers publicly questioning whether or not Game Pass is sustainable, whether or not Game Pass is to blame for this. Because, for folks who don't know, game Pass is basically like the Netflix for games. You pay $20 a month for the highest tier thereabouts and you get access to a full catalog of brand new games, a library of older games, more games than you have time on Xbox and on PC, and that sounds great. If you're a consumer, hey, I have all these games and I pay $20 a month for my fee and I could play all day, every day, instead of having to pay $60 to play Doom, $60 to play Atlas Obscure instead of paying $60 a pop.

01:15:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why I subscribed. I don't play that many games, but I figured it pays for itself, right, if I play one or two games a year.

01:15:23 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Exactly so. The question now is that, okay, that's fine, but are these game studios structured in a way where they're going to get? You know, I don't believe Microsoft has ever really set explained how studios are paid or publishers are paid, how spotify has like a very complex like system. It's not just, oh, you get one stream and therefore you get a nickel. It's like your stream is thrown into like a bucket of streams and then we do some math to determine how many nickels you get this is what happened in the music industry, right?

01:15:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this is why artists get so little money now from streaming on spotify and so folks are saying is this sustainable?

01:15:59 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
if studios were structured, you know, 10, 15 years ago? Hey, we're gonna create video games, we're gonna hire 100 people, we're gonna sell this game for 60 after costs, we're gonna make, we're gonna make x okay, that's fine. But now if they're selling fewer copies at 60 a pop and they're banking on some sort of ethereal game pass kickback from Microsoft, to me it's becoming clear that the math isn't mathing, as the kids say. So we'll see what happens. But this is the first time that I've seen sustained conversation.

01:16:31
One of the co-founders of Arcane Studios the guys who made Dishonored back in the day, it was an excellent game he came out and said yeah, I don't know, the Game Pass is really working anymore. So it's interesting and we're beginning to see some criticism of Phil Spencer, who is the CEO of the Xbox division. I don't know how you're the CEO of a division in a company, but that's what his title is and like okay, this guy is supposed to be gamer friendly and yada, yada. What has happened over the past 10 years other than several studios shut down, games canceled. What good has come? The industry is in a really bad spot and it just seems to get worse and worse with every month.

01:17:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Perfect Dark you mentioned Everwild yeah, a first-person shooter from romero. Uh, this story from bloomberg about blackbird, which is a zenimax game that apparently wowed executives right when they saw it, microsoft executives were blown away by it. They just canceled it what like?

01:17:35 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
what is, what is the point of this? Why? What like? What's going on? I don't really. I really don't see people stepping back and saying, like, what is that? What are we actually doing here? Yeah, they're just canceling, canceling games, killing studios. Uh, for what like? For what?

01:17:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
zenimax was one of the companies acquired in the activision, or actually prior to the activision. Uh, blizzard, uh, acquisition. Um, they were the company behind the elder scrolls online, which was, by the way, my world of warcraft. Uh, uh, so I'm disappointed. Um, and you know, these are games that have been in development for years, literally, yeah, yeah, the games today, that's.

01:18:17 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
You know there's there, there's a lot. I know it's not a game show, but there's like a lot of discussions, like not only like the sustainability of like game path, but like just the game industry, the way games are made. Do we need, can we have 500 people working for 10 years? Like grand theft auto 6 is going to come out, you know, I guess next year yeah, that game would have been in development for 10 years, easy, hundreds of people.

01:18:37
That would have cost Take-Two Rockstar hundreds of millions of dollars. Like this is crazy. Like this is a lot of money for, like an entertainment product, you know. So I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen, but everyone is like really nervous and like, hey, what are we doing here? What's going on?

01:19:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a very confusing time for the industry. Yeah, somebody in our chat room is pointing out that expedition 33, the game we were to, pat's 010304, says expedition 33, the game we were talking about earlier, took 30 people to make starfield has 300 people listed in the final it's it's, it's an it's.

01:19:16 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I don't want to say an indictment, but like okay, if expedition 33, which is which will probably win game of the year, I'm sure they've sold 30 copies, yeah 30 people made that. Uh, I'm sure the budget was basically nothing compared to like call of duty or gta.

01:19:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like okay, my favorite, my favorite game in the last few years my, my, besides, uh, animal planet, my, uh, my covet game was valheim. Very small studio, um, you know and a little you know it was like under two dozen people who created it the thing is those, those are outliers like all the other game studios. That have 30, that have 30 employees 30 people yeah sure, of course well.

01:19:56 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Another thing I've seen, I've seen discussed, is like people are just not especially younger people are not buying new games at the rate they were like when I was 20 years old. Let's say, you know, between Fortnite, between you know, there's a couple of live service games, that why would I buy a new game when I could just play GT online with my friends every night, for free, you know, or you know for a very low? Why am I going to buy the new thing or the new thing? It's like I've already have Fortnite with my friends. So it's a weird, like these live service games as they stick around. Like World of Warcraft costs money I pay $15 a month, so they're making some money off of me, but a lot of these games are free to play and so it just there's only so many hours in the day. It's like if I'm going to play two hours of fortnite, then I probably don't need to buy, you know, the new madden or whatever right I don't want to give them more money when I own games that I bought 20 years ago and I can't play them anymore isn't that frustrating yeah, I mean some of them I can, because I I've used gog so I was just gonna say good old games baby

01:21:00 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
but they're limited in terms of what they can offer. So I, I would like to play age of empires. I have a fully licensed virgin. Why can't I play it? And this doesn't put the morality of anti-piracy on their side. This, I, I should give them more money now for another game that, like, will not be able to survive my equipment devolving so, kathy, you need to put on a Windows XP computer.

01:21:22 - Benito (Announcement)
Together is what you need to do right because there's certainly no consequences of that.

01:21:27 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, I'm not entirely sure it's the operating system. I think it has to do with something else. Like it just it's like it doesn't compile itself properly and it needs a different runtime.

01:21:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a really interesting thing because movies uh, you know a movie made in 1922 you can still watch today if it's been preserved and one hopes it has. They're considered a cultural treasure and we protect them.

01:21:50 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
And games, I think you could easily argue, are equivalent and should be preserved, and Kendra Albert and others have gone to the Copyright Office and the triennial rulemakings for Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and said we need an exemption so we can preserve video games, and they keep not getting it. They may have gotten it in small ways, but I think they keep getting turned down, which is ridiculous. They're absolutely right that this is a part of our culture and it should be archivable and they're not getting traction on that and this is just silly.

01:22:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My question is what's with the layoffs at Microsoft, which is arguably the most, one of the most profitable companies in the world, in history, I mean?

01:22:37 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
what's with the?

01:22:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
layoffs. Is this how you become more profitable? Is this?

01:22:41 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I mean over hire the. The reasons I've seen is that they've over. You know everyone hired. Well, that's one thing you hear all the time. Oh, we already over hire during okay, sure, whatever, fine, uh, I know, you know, let's get rid of layers of management. I feel like ai is the thing that's kind of looming in the background. It's like, well, do we really need a hundred minute managers to check on someone? Hey, did you finish that thing I asked you to do when co-pilot can do?

01:23:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this I don't mind firing middle managers. I think that's fine.

01:23:10
I have heard somewhere, and now I can't remember where I was, so for all I know, it was the last time I was on the show, but that there was a change in the tax code. Yeah, this was. We talked about this. So, um, this is something that was put in the trump tax bill last term, but because it wasn't revenue neutral, they put it off. But basically, companies uh used to be able to uh amortize the costs of their R&D to spread it out over five years, and that includes programmers, that includes people writing video games. That's R&D.

01:23:47
The tax code changed in 2022 to say you cannot write it off over five years, you have to do it in one year, which is a significant difference in the tax bill for these companies. They have thousands of programmers and suddenly their salaries uh are not, uh cannot be spread. So that's a that's a big deal, and so maybe that section 174 is the reason I I keep bringing that up to people like paul thorat on windows Weekly and they poo-poo it. So I don't know enough about this business to know.

01:24:21 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I don't know either, but the fact that ever since you put that in my brain and I've just been seeing this massive slashing of so many people.

01:24:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's something to explain it.

01:24:31 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
When the company is so profitable, it does feel very weird.

01:24:35 - Benito (Announcement)
I wonder what the CEO's pay and his bonus look like well that probably looks like a lot of people's salary there.

01:24:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, during the you know debate over the big beautiful whatever the hell it was, uh, that was one of the issues people were talking about. Could we extend that deadline? I don't think it did get extended. So in 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act removed the option to immediately deduct R&D expenses starting in 2022. So I reversed it. You could deduct it immediately, like the same year, which is better for you than saying, oh, we're gonna have to spread that cost out over five years. Uh, so I reversed it that it's better to deduct it in the year that you pay it than to spread it out. Uh, it now has to be spread out. And, uh, that is at least some people's explanation of why all of these tech layoffs in the last two years after that I think we're going to start also seeing criticism.

01:25:45 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I've seen some commentary online. I don't know that. I've seen a whole lot in mainstream press. Is the use of h1b visas like if you're a company or microsoft and you're laying off 9 000 people, should you really then also have like 5 000000 H-1B visa applications out this year, like that is, people are beginning to be like I don't know that. That makes a ton of sense.

01:26:07 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I'm not entirely sure. In theory, the H-1B visas, I think, also have to be recruited domestically as well. But I certainly don't want to throw more fuel on the immigration policy fires by complaining about that. You know the issues are far more complex in terms of exploitation and freedom and moving, and yeah, I guess we'll see.

01:26:29 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I have seen some commentary like hmm, this is, this is weird. Is anyone yeah?

01:26:36 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
And I say this also as somebody who was a tech employee immigrant out. I went to europe as a tech employee, so I had sort of the reverse um experience and it was nice to be able to have that experience uh, let's see all right.

01:26:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, enough, enough about microsoft. How about far? How about tiktok? You want to talk about tiktok? Let's take a right.

01:26:59 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well enough enough about.

01:26:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Microsoft. How about far? How about TikTok? You want to talk about TikTok? Let's take a break and we'll talk about TikTok next. Because TikTok lives on despite Congress making a law against it, despite the Supreme Court upholding that law. Tick, tock, lives on. Uh, it's a, it's a puzzlement.

01:27:20 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It really is oh, a puzzle, yes. What could possibly be doing this?

01:27:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
why? Why, that's what everyone wants to know why. But we'll get to that in just a moment. Kathy gellis is here, attorney at law. I guess you probably gathered that. Contributor at tector also, uh, our senior electronics reporter for consumer reports, the wonderful nicholas de leon. We visited nicholas and ashley in the tucson we were down there for the gem and mineral show.

01:27:47
So much fun. I want to do that again next year. Yeah, really really fun down there, really had a great time. Our show today, brought to you by Miro. We talked about Miro before.

01:27:58
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It's more than just you know a mood board, putting a bunch of ideas on a board. You can now rapidly iterate with your teammates to take what is essentially a mood board and bring it to life as a real working idea fast. You can quickly build on your ideas without needing the perfect question or prompt. You know that's always been a thing. I think that's gotten in the way. When you're using these chatbots, wouldn't you love to just be able to throw everything you've thought and all your ideas up there and work iteratively with an AI? You don't have to be an AI master, you don't have to toggle yet another tool. The work you're already doing on Miro's canvas becomes the prompt. Isn't that brilliant? Help your teams get great done with Miro. Check out Mirocom to find out how that's M-I-R-Ocom. In fact, chances are like us, many of you probably already have many Miro boards with lots of information in there. Now you can take that and turn it into in effect a prompt and build something amazing with Miro's innovation workspace. Give it a try at Mirocom. We thank Miro longtime sponsor. We appreciate it. It's good to have you back, miro, something we've loved for a long time. All right, tiktok.

01:30:51
Actually, there has been a very interesting revelation in the TikTok story. You remember that TikTok was banned by Congress. The deadline for TikTok to either be sold to a US company or banned in the United States was January 19th of this year, the day before inauguration. Tiktok actually went down for about a minute and then President Trump said no, no, no, no, no and extended the the time limit for 90 days and then again for 90 days. I are we on our second or third extension? We go, we're going to go through september now.

01:31:28
But in response to the law, companies like apple and google, reasonably concerned about their liability, pulled tiktok off their app stores. Well, it turns out they put it back thanks to letters they received from the Attorney General, pam Bondi, and now we know what the contents of those letters are. Letters were disclosed in a Freedom of Information Act request made by a guy who's a software engineer and a Google shareholder. He's suing Google for not complying with the tiktok ban, which is which is fascinating. Uh. So to you know the, you know, the attorney general is basically saying don't worry about law. Schmaw quote the president has determined that an abrupt shutdown of the tiktok platform would interfere this is key, by the way with the execution of the president's constitutional duties to take care of the national security and foreign affairs of the united states.

01:32:34 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Now, many would say it's the exact opposite, right, but he has a duty to take care to make sure that the laws of the united states are faithfully executed. And yeah, yeah, and here is a law, however dumbly put on the books and dumb you were.

01:32:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You argued against that law.

01:32:53 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
But against that law? Um, it is. It is a bad law. It is not constitutional, based on any understanding we ever had prior to january 2025. Um, nonetheless, the supreme court said, yeah, go ahead, but it's the law, it's on the books.

01:33:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It may be a bad, unconstitutional law, but he still has to uphold it, and nowhere does the law give him the ability to say, yeah, no, I don't think it's a good idea even if he happens to be right telling that she's saying it's part of his constitutional duties, because hasn't the supreme court essentially indemnified him for any act that he uh pursues in pursuit of his constitutional duties?

01:33:38 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I think there's a reason those words are in there. There may be I can't there. I think there's one good lawyer floating around the white house who, when they get a chance to actually lawyer something, starts to be kind of clever about things, but there's also a whole bunch of bad lawyers around there or people who are making decisions.

01:33:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I won't ask you what you think of the attorney general bondy, so the the. After the first extension, there was a second extension and a second letter after trump gave tiktok another 75 day reprieve, in which the attorney general said, quote the department of justice is also irrevocably, irrevocably relinquishing any claims the united states might have had against them. In other words, you can put it back in your app store. We pinky swear that we will not sue you.

01:34:28 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
This is the third pause, by the way I think there's a very big legal question of whether she can bind the united states to it's irrevocable.

01:34:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She said it's irrevocable yeah, because they?

01:34:41 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
she will not be. I mean, we've got bigger problems. If this is wrong, she will not be in power. He will not be. We've got bigger problems. If this is wrong, she will not be in power. He will not be in power. There will be another president and another attorney general who has the ability and the power and the obligation to enforce the laws and gets to do it under their own political judgment and prosecutorial discretion. And right now, in theory, they're violating the law that she just happens to bless. Now maybe the lawyers at these companies are like we've got, we'll have some serious reliance harms if somebody else tries to prosecute us for breaking this law right now. But, um, but they're breaking the law right now and it is not clear that she can exonerate themselves for any of this. You know wrongdoing, um, as isn't that at?

01:35:29
all just other than okay.

01:35:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess she kind of you should be celebrating. You didn't want the tiktok to be banned in the first place I can't celebrate.

01:35:38 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
No, I didn't, but I can't celebrate this because I don't want lawlessness, that there's. There's no port in the storm for the law is what the president says it is no, not in this country well, okay, if you say so two wrongs do not make a right I know, you, know you can't violate the constitution by violate. You can't unviolate the constitution by violating the constitution.

01:36:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There, therein lies madness the company uh tiktok is is actually going to is creating a new app for september 5th known as m2. According to the information, the current tiktok app is known as m, so m2 would be the next one. Uh, eventually, under the plan, tiktok users will have to download the new app to be able to continue using the service. At least until march of next year, you can use the old app. Why are they migrating them to a new app? Because, according to the information, the trump administration says it's getting close to the sale of tiktok to a us company. Under the deal, a consortium of non-Chinese investors, including Oracle, is expected to buy TikTok's US business, while ByteDance retains a minority stake. That's the Chinese company. We got to point out the Chinese government has kind of weighed in on this. They have to approve the deal.

01:37:05
I believe Trump is using this in the tariff negotiations, or maybe it's vice versa. He's using the tariff negotiations to force this sale. I don't know exactly what's going on. Um, it is, the information points out, highly unusual for an app of tiktok size to ask users to download a new app and then use it. It's risky. Yeah, uh, I know, yeah, I mean I, I can't think of a time that's happened before, where it's like, okay, don't use our app.

01:37:35 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Now we got to use this new app no, I remember I was at the daily which is the news corp uh ipad, oh the daily, oh my god and so we built this giant newsroom he did.

01:37:47
Oh, it was a very nice, it was a beautiful newsroom modern newsroom yeah, it was super, super nice and it lasted about, uh, a little under three years and that's all she wrote. Anyhow, uh, we had a gadget guide and it was a bespoke app that we made from scratch, kind of like. You would read like like a wired magazine or like a gq, like gift guide for the holidays oh, you should buy the iPhone, you should buy this, you should buy. It was its own dedicated app the second year. So we had the app one year. The second year we were like should we make a new app? Should we just update the old app? The number of hours that went into that decision. Eventually it was decided no, we'll just upgrade the old app because there's no way people are going to download a second app for

01:38:28 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
this yeah right so exactly to your point. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a universe where that could happen, but I don't think that tiktok lives in that universe.

01:38:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Given that people are already unhappy, with it and thinking that yeah that they're what they liked about it is already being messed with you know it's funny, um, first Amendment issues aside, the right of the US government to force a sale aside, jason calacanis said something very interesting and actually fairly convincing to me about the usefulness of Tick Tock to the Chinese Communist Party. He said do you think if we, uh americans, could force chinese users to use an app that we designed, uh, in the hundreds of millions or billions, that we wouldn't go ahead and do that? Yeah, it makes sense. It is, in a way, a trojan horse. Whether they're using it that way or not, it exists. It convinced me that perhaps uh tiktok doesn't have the best interests of the united states at heart, uh, despite the president's support for it I.

01:39:35 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I never would have presumed that they did. I just don't think that that's operative and certainly to the extent that it might be operative. Yeah, again now means testing matters, narrow tailoring of if you're going to have law collide with something that is otherwise you know nobody. And it just came up an oral argument that politico is owned by germans and they may not have the best, uh, interest of america at heart.

01:40:03
The new york times may not have the best interest of america at heart, like american media may not have the best interest of america at heart, and that is not operative in normal circumstances for whether you get to have a first amendment right to exist as a platform but we do have um.

01:40:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean there's cepheus. There is some mechanism in the in the government to prevent foreign ownership of of US companies Right?

01:40:29 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Very so. The stuff is either very, very narrowly tailored so it doesn't have collateral effects, or it may be unconstitutional as well, and we've just kind of let it slide. And but that's not a reason that we don let it, you know, have.

01:40:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If the constitution makes it possible for our enemies to uh, you know, use our freedoms against us, maybe we should amend that. Doesn't that seem like a dangerous thing, especially in this modern world?

01:40:59 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
no, I mean especially as we may or may not be happy with our current leadership and want to make sure that we can reach out and be spoken to by allies or former allies around the world. Like we couldn't get. It also came up an oral argument we couldn't get the BBC. If this is the rationale for just because it's a foreign ownership, again, I'm not necessarily saying that you can't do anything.

01:41:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
China is an adversary.

01:41:22 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
But you have to narrow tailoring. What is it about China doing that you're afraid of and you narrowly tailor the law to that? You can't just say, well, china doesn't like us and they were all using their app. That's not enough, because that's too broad, and look at all the collateral damage to American rights that has happened as a result of it. It has to be something much more specific in terms of what the law is supposed to do in order to, you know, prevent whatever harm that we're afraid of.

01:41:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This may end up being moot, as Marcus says in our YouTube chat, forcing the sale of TikTok to American company without killing. It is going to be very difficult. If you add on top of that oh, and, by the way, you got to download the new American TikTok app. I think that puts TikTok inok in jeopardy, especially with instagram hovering over the bones like a vulture. Uh, I don't know if tiktok could survive it anyway. Right, maybe that's. Maybe market, maybe market forces are the best way to put tiktok out of business well, it always was yeah is tiktok still as dumb?

01:42:21 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I feel like I've been here I'm not I have never used tiktok, to be clear, uh but I feel like I've been hearing it talked about like this new hot thing for almost 10 years now. Yeah, not anymore.

01:42:30 - Benito (Announcement)
No, you know, this is my.

01:42:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't have any numbers to back this up. My son is a TikTok star two and a half million followers, right. He quite wisely I strongly encouraged it too also has an account on Instagram. It's not quite as big, it's a million and a half followers and YouTube and YouTube shorts. I mean, he's try. I said don't be dependent on any platform, uh, and he doesn't. Tick tock never made him much money, even this, despite the size of his market. Really, uh, yeah, uh, you know he, he has sponsors, but nothing through tick tock. Tick tock had a creator's fund and stuff. I don't think he saw much out of that. So instagram is just from his point of view. Instagram's just as good without any of the problems. Now I notice he still posts on both platforms, right, but it's kind of my sense that, uh, the american public is more in love. It loves Instagram now.

01:43:26 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Yeah, cause I mean I've been hearing about Tik TOK is like these kids but for like almost 10 years. I remember where I was sitting at like the vice office talking about Tik TOK. I was like that was a long time ago.

01:43:37 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Apps are usually not like hip and cool for forever, yeah, no it doesn't have to be at the level of hip and cool to still be, enormous, with a large influence I was just curious, like that's still a thing.

01:43:53 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I sound like an old man now. Is that still a thing? The kids like the tiktok used to download.

01:43:58 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
We couldn't upload more than four seconds at a time. It was a vine and we liked it remember vines whatever happened at all good old.

01:44:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, that's right. Instagram, I mean twitter killed it, didn't they yeah, um, okay, all right, uh, let's. I guess that's all there is to be said about that. We'll watch with interest and see how many more times the president can extend it, because I really honestly I don't think the Chinese government's going to say yes to this. I mean it's certainly, it is a pawn in the tariff battle back and forth.

01:44:38 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's a pawn, but at this point there's no leverage.

01:44:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like a pawn. It has very little value in the game. Somebody said just rename it USA. Usa talk and it'll be. It'll be big. That's what they'll do, of course. Usa talk, or is it tick USA? No, that's not good.

01:44:57 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
USA talk. I like Howard by Oracle. Yeah, yeah.

01:45:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oracle's running oracle. This is project texas. Oracle's been running the servers for tick tock in the us, for us citizens, for a couple of years now. That was done. The question really, though, was well, with chinese ownership, how do you prevent the chinese government from at some point tapping on the shoulders and saying, hey, um, we want to see that, let's see that. Or maybe you should promote this story or not provide. There's no tnmns Square content on Tick Tock, that's for sure. So there's definitely some influence being exerted. All right, let's pause. Uh, for station identification. You're watching. Uh, this week in Tech, nicholas de Leon, have you set a date?

01:45:44
uh, yes, december, uh, yeah, soon soon when the snow is falling in tucson we're not kids leo's, we're just gonna get this over with get it over no, come on, you guys are kids. Are you kidding? You're young, young, uh, you. You you thinking about a family, or no, uh I I we're still discussing.

01:46:07 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I know we want a small uh wedding. We don't really want to like a million people there, yeah well, lisa and I, uh, we'll, we'll bring cake.

01:46:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How about that? We'll bring cake, that's fine by me, okay. Or a pie or something. I'll bring bagels. I'm very good at that. Also, kathy gallus uh, great to have you. Kathy tech dirtcom and, of course, cg council, c-o-u-n-s-e-lcom, and she's on blue sky. Are you a blue sky or, uh, still, do you still do a lot of blue skying? Oh, yeah, yeah, um, I mean I I don't do you buy into the narrative that blue sky is dying no no, that was nonsense, yeah no, it's.

01:46:47 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's usually um articulated by people who um have things to say that a lot of people really don't want to hear and have tuned out and they're kind of, but I'm in an echo chamber, nobody can hear me, so therefore it's dying go back to twitter.

01:47:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's okay that you'll be welcome there. I haven't. It's funny I I it wasn't as hard as I thought there to break the twitter habit. There definitely was a twitter habit and for a while I was struggling with it but you just take it off your phones and you forget about it.

01:47:17 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
And every time I go there, I go oh it took blue sky a while until it could be big enough that it replaced my twitter habit. Um, there's certain things that I miss, like I like that twitter was ubiquitous enough that when something happened like if I heard sirens, I could google where I heard the siren, or I could I could search on twitter for where I heard the sirens and probably find out what was going on. That's amazing. Blue sky closer, but it's not there yet and it's real deficit because I don't know where to go for that kind of you know.

01:47:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we don't have that internet dial tone. That's what Twitter was. It was kind of so I miss that.

01:47:59 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
But in terms of, you know, I have a thought and I want to put it in the world. Um, you know, it mostly scratches the itch, maybe not exactly the way it did before, but it's getting there I no longer have any thoughts, so maybe that's why I don't miss well, you have podcasts, so you don't I?

01:48:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
talk all day.

01:48:15 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I'm so sick of myself I have enough enough, stop talking I remember years ago I used to listen to the ron and fez radio show ron and Fez, oh yeah. Ron would be like why would I want a Twitter? I'm on the air four hours a day. All I do is talk. I don't want to communicate anymore.

01:48:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you ever listen to Art Bell?

01:48:35 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
A couple of times, a couple of times, crazy late night guy from Nevada.

01:48:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He was nationally syndicated, talked about UFOs and Sasquatch and stuff. He would get off the air after broadcasting all night and go into his ham shack and get on the radio and talk to hams for four or five hours. That's dedication.

01:48:53 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I needed that sentence to continue because I just got ham shack and I needed more details, because it's a place you hang your hands, exactly I mean they have some really nice. Like you know, they do this in Europe with the jambon de Paris and you know.

01:49:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hamshack. That would be a country ham if you've been hanging that in your hamshack.

01:49:14 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Sorry, I'm glad you finished your sentence. The rest of it made sense.

01:49:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And suddenly that image changed and turned into something else.

01:49:21
Amateur radio enthusiast. Actually we just had the else. Amateur radio enthusiast. Actually we just had. Uh, the big amateur radio day was was it last week or the week before? All the amateurs go out and they, they field day and they set up because, you know, you may not think it's important, but when there's a national disaster and the phone networks are down, electricity's out, the hams are there I was told the that, like just a couple weeks ago, that I should go get my license because I did.

01:49:47 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I did a community emergency response drill and I and I took the position of being the radio operator and I really enjoyed it. I was really good. I'm a good project manager. I'm really good at being linear. I'm really good at like this is coming in and this is going out and I'm going to keep pinging you until I get what I need. And I enjoyed it and the person who was training me up was like so you like this? You should go do more, so we'll see.

01:50:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Get the tech. Go to ARRLorg, the amateur radio relay leagueorg. You can find out where they're giving the test in your area. The technician license is very easy to get. You don't need any Morse code. I have a general license. There's lots of study materials online. It's easy to do and yeah, that's for CERT, for being emergency response. It's so important and you can actually. With a technician license, you can get a handy talkie that you have in your house and you can be of great value to your community in the case of emergency. Highly recommend it. There are lots of classes. You can go here and find a class, take practice exams and you know what, kathy, with your brains, it's going to be a snap. You'd be ready to take the exam in a few days. I think it's worth it.

01:51:07 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's fun I think I have some friends who are doing it, so I should run this idea past them if you do it together.

01:51:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have well, I have a lot of. I have a gordon west's audio cd and his books and stuff. He's got great teaching material. He used to be one of the hosts of our ham nation show, which you're right now that I mentioned. It should really have been about jamoni barrico, not about amateur radio. But okay, the ham shack was really like the thing that popped into my brain was did not involve.

01:51:36 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I want to hang some hams in my ham shack man, I know in february there's a big ham you the yuma ham fest in yuma, oh yeah, which is not too far from, I guess, the three of us.

01:51:49 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Uh, I might go to that I still need more information about what kind of ham we're talking about for that uh, you know what?

01:51:56 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
that's a mystery for the, for the funny that we call amateur radios hams.

01:52:01 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I'm not sure amateur radio I'm sure there's a etymology for it that would explain that. I'm sure, and I am sure I used to know it andms I'm not sure amateur radio. I'm sure there's a etymology for it that would explain that I'm sure, and I am sure I used to know it and now I'm feeling kind of embarrassed.

01:52:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't currently know it well, when you take your test, they might ask that, so I would, I would figure that out, yeah I I don't like when I don't know something, especially if it's something I once did know well, you know what? That's why we got AI.

01:52:24 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Let me just ask I do need to point out that I um my team won first place of the EFF um pub trivia for cyber law last month.

01:52:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I'm not surprised, you were a ringer.

01:52:38 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I mean, my team was I think we were six women and another guy we knew and we just cleaned up Were you all attorneys. Yes, I think yes.

01:52:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel bad for the other teams. No, they were mostly attorneys too. The term ham for amateur radio operators originated as a pejorative slang used by professional and commercial telegraph and radio operators in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It referred to an operator who was unskilled or ham fisted. Ah yeah, ah they're. I was hoping for a cool acronym no, I don't know if I like that it's bad, but a lot of.

01:53:19 - Benito (Announcement)
English words used to be.

01:53:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is yeah, yeah that's true over time, amateur radio enthusiasts embraced the term ham, transforming it from a insult into a badge of honor that's like blogger back in the day oh blogger blogger, blogger thank you, podcaster. Podcaster is still a pejorative.

01:53:40
You podcaster mom's basement is jammies talking to himself. I love it. We're going to take a break. Come back with more. Kathy Gellis.

01:53:50
Nicholas, great to have you listening to this Week in Tech, the week's tech news. All right, I got a question for all of you. This episode of this Week in Tech is brought to you by Oracle. In business, they say you can have better, cheaper or faster, but you only get to pick two. What if you could have all three at the same time? That's exactly what Cohere, thomson Reuters and Specialized Bikes have since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud.

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01:55:30 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
dare I call them hams in our I've got a question then for you, leo. Um, yes, when you're out and about in the wider world and you describe yourself as a podcaster, do people always understand? What you mean yeah, they do.

01:55:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now everybody knows what a podcast is, uh, and. But then they say like joe rogan, and I say no, not like, no, he's successful, uh, you know right that that is the sole delineating uh feature between you and uh, yeah, no, it used to be a little bit pejorative but you know, after shows like serial with mass success, and I think probably now about half I think it's 43 percent of americans listen to at least one podcast every month, so it's pretty widespread. Uh, now, it didn't.

01:56:19 - Benito (Announcement)
In the early days nobody knew what I was I was actually, I was actually the fourth of july with my family and a lot of them a lot of those people aren't tech savvy like most of them. Don't you know? Don't know much about what's going on in the tech world. A lot of them get their news from podcasts now and that's something I found interesting. It's like, well, you all listen to podcasts now huh, okay, that's funny.

01:56:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Media has changed dramatically. I think more people than ever before maybe even more than networks watch YouTube on their TV. That's where they get information and entertainment. Uh, it's really, it's really quite a dramatic shift and I don't. I don't know what it means, but I have to say that as I get older this is one of the things you know when I was young, old people would always say in my day Well, now I kind of understand. Things are really. Things really do change. I get the. I get the sense that they change faster now than ever before. But maybe maybe that's just me. What do you youngsters think?

01:57:17 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I mean, I'm not sure that that's necessarily true, and I'm thinking of something that just was kicked about on blue sky the other day, which was Leah Thompson from Back to the Future that's her last name was saying how the difference, the whole movie of going back 30 years, from 85 to 55, was so striking. And she said that if we went back 30 years from now it wouldn't be as striking. And some people ended up sort of debating that, and I think what they ended up saying is that visually we might not be strikingly different, but in terms of the addition of digital things and the post 9-11 fallout on culture, we're still. You know, there's still a giant gap.

01:57:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, think about it. In 1995, 30 years ago, the Internet was just getting started, right, so it wasn't widespread at all. And even if it was, you had to access it with a thing you put on the phone.

01:58:10 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
he went not by then, by 95 actually. That is almost actually kind of the key level up. That was when it turned.

01:58:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I agree that's when it turned yeah, I agree, I remember, uh, you know, 95, I was working for msnbc doing a show called the site, and I remember I'll give you a really good example uh, I did one of the first national media coverage of the mp3 phenomenon. A friend of mine who was a I had worked with him since he was a teenager said, hey, I'm in college now, glenn rubinstein. He said I'm in college now and you know, everybody, nobody's buying music anymore. We're all doing these things called mp3s and their servers, and everybody puts all their you know digitizes their cds, puts it on there. You don't have to buy music anymore. And I remember doing I'm sure it was the first time this had ever been covered on network television a story about mp3. Now, that's a.

01:59:04
Since then, people and this is what we were talking about on that music thing that we did a couple of weeks ago with steven witt since then the music industry has changed 180 degrees. It's all digital. Nobody buys music anymore, they rent it. Uh, that's a huge change. And I gotta tell you ai is means that the next 30 years, well, even the next five years, are going to be very, I think, very, very different, not to mention climate change. Uh, I don't know. I think things are changing faster than ever before. I really do. If you know, a hundred years ago, 30 years back, didn't change anything really none of us have the ability to really gauge this, though, because when we're younger, time takes longer, and now that we're older time is faster.

01:59:56 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So but now we're older, so we're looking back oh, everything is so fast now, but oh, it was so slow.

02:00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
95 somebody pat. In 95, monitors were this big and weighed 50 pounds when the thin screen, flat screen monitors changed everything. Look at your TV today compared to your TV in 1995. That's a big change. When's the last time you went into a bank?

02:00:19 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I go to the bank all the time.

02:00:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you're a weirdo.

02:00:22 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Most people, I haven't been in a bank in years that's true too, but I still think that we should go to the bank I mean atms changed everything.

02:00:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Atms were around in 95.

02:00:35 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Actually they were already pretty widespread in 2000 I had, uh, my first cell phone, and the first one I bought was a nokia.

02:00:43
The little chocolate bar was like the 8100 or something like that, everything and and I went and I visited my grandmother, who was born in 1910, and I was showing it to her and I'm like, can you believe that this is my phone? And I was like having her tell me what she remembered about phones and like she was growing up in like a tenement in the lower east side where the phone was down the street right, so um, I was just sort of thinking that within her lifetime.

02:01:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look what happened yeah well, and I mean look at, the first iPhone was 2007. So we are coming up on the 20th almost 20 years. That's gonna be interesting yeah that has been a massive change.

02:01:21 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
You now have the world's information in your pocket but think about also things like um air, like flight, like flight, is barely over 100 years old. Jet travel is 1960s in terms of being common, so maybe we've got 60 years of that space travel. You know, in time is, you know, we're adding on the decades, but it's still. It's a flip of an eye. I think it's. What's actually interesting for sort of gaining this is to talk to older people who are still rolling along with technology, like a 90 year old who's using email and a smartphone.

02:02:02
I count, I'm a senior, even, even older than than that, and just to ask, like you know somebody for whom, I appreciate that, even older than that um, like 90 year olds who I know who use email and facebook and and um and smartphones, and sometimes it's actually really difficult because when you're that age, the de, dexterity, mobility and the vision is a huge deterrent for a lot of people using it. But for people who have been able to sort of keep up and keep putting the technology in their lives, I think it's really important to sort of talk to them and figure out what was easy about it, what was hard about it, how they were able to sort of stay current on it. Like, I think that's really instructive, especially for understanding where we came from and where we're going.

02:02:46 - Benito (Announcement)
That's all about need. My mom is no tech savvy at all, but she has a smartphone. She watches all her medias from YouTube, listens to podcasts, has email that stuff and I think it's just neat she needed that stuff?

02:03:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Does she still go into the?

02:03:00 - Benito (Announcement)
bank, or does she? No, she doesn't go to the bank.

02:03:02 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, my sister does all of her banking for bank. When's the last time you wrote a check? I just wrote a check.

02:03:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Again. Kathy, you're an outlier, You're a weirdo.

02:03:10 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, so one of the reasons I do this stuff manually is I really want the accountability. I don't think the way digital processes have evolved, I don't think there's enough accountability and I want to make sure that everything is working exactly the way I thought and this check is written and it's getting deposited and it's a human and I think that's actually unfortunate, because it is unfortunate it turns into bits.

02:03:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
as soon as the bank possibly can turn that into bits.

02:03:37 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I don't have any quarrel with that, necessarily, you're only at the first mile.

02:03:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That that's a handwritten.

02:03:45 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
If something goes wrong and I need to debug this. I want to make sure that there's humans in this process and that there's paper trails.

02:03:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Your checks back.

02:03:53 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
They send scans with my statements which I get by mail because I want the, I also want the physical thing, so I reconcile and then I may store and I just don't want it to be all electronic. It just feels too ephemeral and not accountable enough and I think some of that accountability is, you know, failures of FTC and regulation, because I think just too much can go too wrong. I was hoping that the technical revolution would actually bring more control and more accountability and instead I feel like we've gone in the other direction.

02:04:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's blockchain right there.

02:04:26 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I don't need a full blockchain for this. I need sort of like contracts and consumer protection law.

02:04:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what blockchain is. Everybody can see the contract, it's all public and everybody's got a copy of it.

02:04:36 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
No, I mean it doesn't need to be a technical solution. It's a human problem. Where there's not the accountability, Humans are the problem.

02:04:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Humans are not the accountability and humans are the problem. Humans are often the problem. Are you kidding me? Humans are the problem yeah, and I want.

02:04:50 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Humans are a problem and I want a human situation to the humans you know being scammed to talk to them.

02:04:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Pretty soon you won't be talking to humans. In fact, this has become a problem for customer service reps. There was a story this week about customer service reps saying people don't think we're human anymore.

02:05:09 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Everybody assumes we're ai um, I couldn't get comcast to answer a question because their stupid chat app wouldn't let me ask the question. It kept sending me in a loop, sending me in a loop, sending me in a loop. And you want to know, I go to the bank because I'm not in a loop. I know how to walk in the door and talk to a teller I had the same problem with audible uh.

02:05:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got an email which went to spam. This is the problem with digital uh in uh, late uh may actually it's middle of the middle of the month in may saying we're gonna your audible account, your audible uh membership, is no longer available. The one you use, the light listener, is no longer available. I've had it for 25 years. We're not going to do it anymore, so we're going to cancel it. But just because we like you, we're going to offer you a free year of the new account that you know you could have. I missed it. The first email I saw from Audible was a month later, when they said we've canceled your account. I said I remember for 25 years, this is it. You canceled my account.

02:06:11
So I went to the audible page and it said hey, good news, uh, we're going to give you a free year. So I, I I went into the chat interface. Talk about a loop. They give you a choice of things you can say. And it wasn't in there. And every time it said no, you can't, no, no, so I finally I was able to get ahold of somebody and he said no, no, that ran out May 31st. I said well. I didn't even know about it until June 16th when I got the cancellation. He said sorry, you're out of luck. Another valued customer, another 25 years. We did ads for audible for a decade I'm probably responsible for hundreds of thousands of me over the years.

02:06:54 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
For sure, I definitely subscribed using your code there you see a couple times no respect, I get no respect.

02:07:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's fine, you know I I've been thinking, I've been trying to get out of the amazon has now become. There's an example of something's changed a lot. Amazon has become this terrifying monopoly and it's very hard to get out of. They own audible. Of course it's very hard to get out of the amazon ecosystem. Audible cory doctor has been telling me this for years has something like 90 percent market share of audiobooks, so much so that many of the books that I want to listen to are only available in audible. There are other companies, like downpour and librofm, which sell audiobooks, but uh, they don't have them all because audible does these exclusives very often the books I want. So they really got you locked in. And it's the same with amazon. I'm I'm trying to wean myself off of this.

02:07:46 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
So when I say week is this week sorry, prime week amazon prime no, I'm not gonna buy anything I don't care I really, I still, I still.

02:07:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's some things I can't get in town that I have to get on amazon. I wish that weren't the case.

02:08:02
But I just save it for the few things that I definitely need Amazon for, and if I can do it, I'm buying as little as possible and I'm not going to do anything and buy and I'm not going to use Audible anymore because they apparently didn't want my business. So, libra, the nice thing about Libro is 10% of my subscription goes to my local bookstore and you choose your local bookstore. But the day after I signed up, in the newspaper the little local newspaper it said copperfields, our local bookstore, is going to close its used book department and and get rid of 60 of its office space and fire a bunch of people because nobody's buying books anymore oh, that's unfortunate.

02:08:40
I've been to them I've been to the bookstore, yeah but I think I to them.

02:08:45 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I wanted to buy magazines and they're really hard to find anymore and I was hoping that I would find one Magazines.

02:08:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You really are old fashioned.

02:08:54 - Benito (Announcement)
The Copperfields in San Rafael has a magazine section.

02:08:57 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
They do, oh, maybe that's where I ended up going eventually, but I think I tried the one in Novato. Actually, if you're down in san rafael, book passage is the place to go. That's the best I I go there. I've bought books there.

02:09:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I bought a book that I heard about on blue sky and I ended up convincing my local library to order it started to read, it didn't finish it and then went to book passage to order it or good, yeah I think it's nice to buy the books, but that's the other thing to do is get a libby account or one of the other library accounts because you can get audio books. My, my local library has 42 000 audio books.

02:09:32 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
None of none of the audible exclusives don't really interest me I'm not really a process of book via listening, so I like, I like having that full book in my hand yeah, everybody's different.

02:09:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, martin's right, he's uh. He says you can't get away from aws. Who who was? It was a cashmere hill. Somebody in the new york times a couple years ago tried to d big tech her life and it was a disaster, just couldn't do it pewdiepie just did a video a week ago on he's.

02:10:00 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
He's linuxing. Yeah, he's like de-googling his. He got rid of gmail. He's getting rid of his androphone. He's really going all in. I think this is going to be the next thing?

02:10:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think this is going to be the next thing is people are going to say, just like, they're going to be more like kathy gellis, they're going to start writing checks, they're going to I uh, I had this crazy thought and we'll see how this works out. I just bought from framework, which is, I think, a really good company. They make repairable laptops.

02:10:27 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
They are making a desktop, an ai desktop.

02:10:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now I just ordered an ai desktop from them very high end. It's got 96 gigs of vram, 128 gigs of uh, of regular ram, probably shared, but it's an amd processor. I bought eight terabytes of storage, ssd storage, and so it's a kind of a beast of us. It's only as big as a banana but it's a beast of machine. So I'm going to make that my home server, my home ai. I'm going to see if I can do local ai on it, my home server, and then I'm going to turn all of these computers into thin clients. I'm not going to use commercial operating systems anymore, I'm just going to have one Linux system that I log into from all of my machines. We'll see how long that lasts.

02:11:14 - Benito (Announcement)
Like one failure is going to be pretty bad already. Like the first failure is going to be pretty bad.

02:11:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It takes everything everything's backed up and everything I'd like. Well, the first things I did when I left audible get all, download all my books, ddrm them, which you can do, and then, uh, put them on my nas so that I have them available everywhere. Um, you know, I think there, I think there. I think this might be the next thing.

02:11:39 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
We'll see, we'll see I think the issue is um usability and how, um where you can get help to pull off these projects, because it does take I am the tech guy, remember, yeah, so I will be the guinea pig, the canary in the coal mine.

02:11:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I will lead the charge over the hill and if and then, yeah, I'll start helping people do that, because I think it's an interesting thing to attempt.

02:12:08 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I mean it's something it's something we've discussed internally, like some reports, kind of like the public's almost exhaustion of like tech. And yes, you know, it used to be cool, used to be fun. The iphone, I remember when it came out, remember that day everyone, jobs, announced it, of course. Now it's like it's, it is the shine is off, I guess you could say. And big tech has has failed us, have they not? They've kind of sucked the fun out of this. I would even shitified it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's like that's yeah I in the department of lameness.

02:12:36 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I'm sitting here looking at two laptops. I'm using my new laptop for the zoom because it has the fewest things running on it, and the reason it has the fewest things running on it and the reason that has the fewest things running on it is I've never gotten around to migrating from the old computer so I can start using the new one. It's supposed to be the one machine to rule them all, and instead I'm like two fisting.

02:12:56 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
That's how it always is. That's literally. I have a NAS. I was like, oh, I'm going to move everything over to the NAS.

02:13:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, now I just have to install stuff. I am going to be the guy who makes this happen. Now there is a phone that I really want, the fair phone, uh, that I cannot buy in the us. This is a repairable phone. Uh runs android. Uh runs the open source version of android. It's good. You could de-google it if you want. Uh, it's completely repairable. You can't. I tried to buy it. You can't get it in the us. Why not?

02:13:30 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I don't know they don't offer in the us I mean, will it have the right antenna where it can get on a us carrier? That's probably why in which case, if you acquire it, you may not be able to do anything, but I'm not sure that that's true, because everything's not gsme can you get one for me and and I'll pay you back martin's in germany.

02:13:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Martin, get one, get me a fair phone and uh, and I'll pay you back. It's 599 euros. It's not cheap, but it's. It's not um. It's not apple and it's not google well, it's kind of good you can get de-googled android. You can get aso aosp android and then and also, you can replace the battery. So how?

02:14:12 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
big is it?

02:14:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's a little clunky. Martin's gonna get me one. Thank you, martin. Martin's gonna get me one. Thank you, martin, I appreciate it. I'll pay you back.

02:14:25
Um, let's see what else is in the news. Oh, this is hysterical. Identities of no, well, this part's not hysterical. The next story after it, that's related.

02:14:36
Identities of more than 80 americans were stolen for north korean it workers scams. This has become a big problem in enterprise, which is North Korean tech workers posing as Americans secretly applying for remote tech jobs in the West. Initially we thought it was for the currency you know, for US dollars, but now there there seems to be some concern that they are doing it to spy and even to, uh, cause havoc. On monday, the department of justice announced a sweeping operation to crack down on the us based elements of the north korean remote it workers scheme. Two americans were indicted.

02:15:23
Government says they were involved in the operations. There were also and you have to do this 29 laptop Farms in 16 states. So these North Koreans log in via VPN to these laptop Farms in the US and then it looks like they're working out of the United States. The FBI sees 200 of the computers, 21 web domains, 29 financial accounts that received the revenue from the operation. The North Koreans didn't merely create fake IDs, they actually stole the identities of real Americans to impersonate them at jobs in more than 100 US companies, then funneling the hard dollars to the kim regime okay, hold on.

02:16:06 - Benito (Announcement)
Hold on the people whose identities they stole from. They should get the money.

02:16:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're the ones who should get the money back so they're not doing the work that's the funny thing is the north koreans are doing they're doing the right, they should actually get paid. But like they should get paid the stolen identities.

02:16:20
The doj has identified six americans they believe were involved in a scheme to enable the North Korean tech worker impersonators. Only one of them has been arrested. They're doing the identity theft and then they create shell companies and shell bank accounts. So that ties into this story about somebody called soham parekh. Well, this this is from techcrunch amanda silverling, our good friend, writing everyone in tech has an opinion about soham parekh. Apparently dick techcrunch is calling him the anna delvey of silicon valley.

02:17:06
Apparently he's been interviewing and getting jobs at dozens of uh startups, mostly y combinator companies. He doesn't usually keep the job very long, but long enough to get, I guess, a paycheck. Uh, there's a guy named saum parekh. He's in india, works three to four startups at the same time. Well, once, once a ceo tweeted about this this week. Uh, he, uh. Mixed panel ceo suhail doshi said psa. There's a guy named soham parekh who works at three to four startups at the same time. Beware, he got started getting responses on twitter. I fired this guy the first week and told him to stop lying and scamming people. He hasn't stopped. A year later, the post has over 20 million views, founders and investors from across the tech industry weighing in apparently how is he getting his resume reviewed?

02:18:04
he's apparently very very good at uh interview questions yeah, but it's not just that.

02:18:11 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Like everybody's getting really frustrated looking for jobs because, like no humans read the resumes, they just have ai process them and a lot of people are getting completely locked out I actually know somebody it's.

02:18:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really a scam. Uh, there's a whole subreddit dedicated this, called over r slash, over employed people who take 40 hour, multiple 40 hour a week jobs. They're not really putting in 40 hours a week but they're remote so nobody knows. Maybe they're working 10 hours, five hours a week and getting paid for 40, so they, you know, it's, it's.

02:18:49 - Benito (Announcement)
I mean, it's sketch question is are they getting the work done? That are they getting?

02:18:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the work, getting the job done right.

02:18:55 - Benito (Announcement)
So so what's the problem?

02:18:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, at some point there's going to be burnout. You're going to miss.

02:19:01 - Benito (Announcement)
Start missing meetings anyway it's like trying to be a musician on the side. That's.

02:19:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's enough of their full-time job it's a hustle, they're hustlers, benito, anything you want to share with the, with the class?

02:19:12 - Benito (Announcement)
I try to make music, I'm trying to make money on music on the side is that, is that not allowed? Like that's the same thing, right? Like that's a full-time thing too no, he was.

02:19:19 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
He was more worried that you were, like you know, producing this american life, or something like that, in your off time you're not working for joe rogan, are you?

02:19:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh, no, no, sorry, no oh okay, whoa, that was a long pause. Okay, no, I'm just kidding. I love brenito, he's fine. Um, anyway, this guy apparently is very good at answering interview questions.

02:19:45 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Apparently, one of the things that he did he was just like cold email startups and was using very flattery language, like I saw one of the I just want to build you guys are he used all like the buzzwords? That's catnip to these guys. I just want to build, I just want to build 24 seven. Your vision is just so compelling.

02:20:03
And these startups it's, it's I mean to me. I read that I was like that's like those, all the hot singles in your area want to meet you and, like you, fall for that. Uh, but flattery will get you very far, I guess, in silicon it's like the dude who got hired by zuckerberg.

02:20:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's just really good at talking to rich people oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the uh x scale guy who apparently is getting hundreds of millions of dollars but who doesn't really have much to offer as far as AI engineering. Anyway, it's. Yeah, you know, it's an interesting question. Really, as long as the job gets done, what's wrong with it?

02:20:43 - Benito (Announcement)
That's how I feel. I mean, if you have two jobs and you're doing them, some people have to have two jobs. You know what I mean. Like, yeah, a lot of people do.

02:20:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, let's take one last, uh, one last break. Um, you're watching this week in tech with a great panel. Kathy Gellis, uh, is here. It's so good to have somebody who really knows the law to explain this stuff to us, because, you know, most of us were I-N-A-L and you know we do our best, but hearing the actual laws is always important and interesting. Nicholas DeLeon is here. What are you working on right now, nicholas? For Consumer Reports?

02:21:24 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Well, honestly, we had a lot of prime week stuff for this week, but I just published a thing. Uh, it may have gotten published today. Actually, I don't check the site on the weekends usually something about laptops and tariffs and like whether or not you know to what degree may they impact. It's, the tariff stuff has been kind of non-stop for a few weeks now, but a big tariff story and they redesigned the sites. Now you got to go to like, uh oh, it's different, isn't it?

02:21:49
look at this uh, you click more and then you click news okay.

02:21:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Articles okay, more and news. That's where. That's where you live. How to change a car tire. Did you write that one?

02:22:03 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
three best room fans oh, I'm on page two, okay.

02:22:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oscar Mayer turkey bacon recall. The best stand mixers of 2025. Best toilet bowl clean I love. By the way, let me just go to my account because I've been a member of Consumer Reports. Let me see if it says I think it says somewhere how long I've been a member forever I love consumer reports. Used to say, uh, maybe personal information don't show this because it's got my old home address, so that's yeah, I know they redid the site recently.

02:22:37 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
They did I can't.

02:22:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a membership overview.

02:22:40 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Maybe that's uh, no gosh as opposed to audible was membership over membership over.

02:22:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, audible. You know, that's the thing. Uh, I understand, audible I was. I was grand, I can't say grandfather anymore I was, uh, legacied in at a lower rate. I got two books a month for 15 bucks and I maybe they were losing money, I don't know, but it was. It felt pretty abrupt after 25 years.

02:23:08 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Consumer reports would never do that to me I'm pretty sure we're not going to just cancel your account I don't think so.

02:23:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've been a member forever, since I, I think oh, there it is said right at the top member since 2010, I think even longer than that. But I'm very happy online stuff, yeah, because I I've been subscribing to the magazine since I got out of college I mean, it's almost 100 years old the magazine I know there's a.

02:23:34 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
There's a big timeline in the office. I was just in the office about a month ago and there's a big timeline like oh, 1936, first issue, and they never took ads right. They've never taken it, ever never never this.

02:23:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I honestly, I emulate them, I mean when we take ads. But what I do like consumer reports is I buy the things that we review. I don't. I don't take loaners.

02:23:54 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
You, you guys buy the cars you buy the tv, cars, refrigerators, the whole, the whole shebang.

02:24:00 - Benito (Announcement)
So it's amazing is it an endowment Like how? How does CR?

02:24:04 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
work. There. There is some foundation.

02:24:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like a nonprofit, so it's that nonprofit world of like a lot of subscribers and they ask subscribers to donate, you know, so you can support them and I, I absolutely would happy to do it. It's, it's always been worth it. It's really good and, yes, there are people like craig newmark who support it. Philanthropy, yeah, it's a, it's a good organization.

02:24:27 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
anyway, we're very proud of you and well, I, I think you know, in a world of like ai, slop and like all this, like low quality, like I look at youtube and it's just like this I mean there's a lot of stuff on youtube just generally speaking, but there's like a lot of there's a lot of slop out there.

02:24:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a lot which you know.

02:24:45 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Maybe people like it who's?

02:24:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, they don't who am I and that's I think that's the secret to our success. We've been doing this for 20 years. I really do think that's the secret to our success. Um and I I know it's the secret to see our success is trustworthy.

02:24:58 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
You guys have integrity I mean that's, that's a lot to be said for that yeah, that's the. That's the point of the organization is like we're, we're not engaged in any shenanigans, uh you know we're a little old shenanigans, yeah you know, you know we don't have, we don't the crazy cool tiktok kids, whatever. But but uh, you know, for information, you know, I I think we do a pretty good job they're actually it's interesting.

02:25:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, this site redesign is a big deal. They've got a lot of new, like bill negotiator, repair or replace Is it worth repairing or replacing the appliance? You've got ask CR expert advice that you guys are getting digital, you're getting hip, you're getting with it. The ultimate guide to streaming.

02:25:35 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Yeah, we're not entirely ignoring the wider world, but yeah, we're not exactly, you know. I don't know, Bravo whatever.

02:25:45 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So sometimes you actually scan your checks instead of going to the bank.

02:25:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Five million members know why we're there. One last break, as I mentioned. I want to show you. This is actually something. I didn't buy this. They sent it to me because they're a sponsor, but we've been using it for, I think, eight years now. Let me show you. This is my Thinkst Canary, this thing. Look at that. It looks like a little USB external drive, right, but you could tell it's not, because it's got an Ethernet connection and power. What is that? Well, it's anything. I want it to be. That's a Thinkst Canary. I want it to be. That's a Thinkst Canary. It's a honeypot that can impersonate pretty much anything from a Windows server, a Linux server, a NAS. This is, I think, a Windows server. Right now. I can actually change it. That's one of the cool things. Let me log into my account at canarytools and I'll show you, because it's so easy to make this be anything.

02:26:46
You want to be Now a bad guy who breaks into your network. The point of this is it's a honeypot in your network. You might have all the perimeter protections you could possibly imagine, but how do you know if somebody's inside your network? These bad guys are very good at covering their tracks. They weasel their way in and then they wander around. On average, companies don't know they've been breached for 91 days. That's three months. A bad guy could be in your network and you don't know it, exfiltrating company proprietary information, looking up customer records and, of course, looking for places that they could set off time bombs for ransomware. So that's why you need Thinkst Canaries Two things I can do.

02:27:30
This is my Thinkst Canary. I'll show you this right now. It yeah, it's a Windows server, windows 2019 Office File Share, but it could be a lot of different things. Just look at the dropdowns here. I can be IIS, some Windows 10, windows Linux, proxy file share from Mac OS X, a Citrix gateway, a Dell switch. It can even be a skater device like a. I could be right now a Rockwell automation PLC or a Siemens SIMatic 300 PLC. By the way, when it impersonates those, it changes the MAC address to match the company so that you know a bad guy looking at this doesn't see a honeypot. They see something that looks absolutely real. You could set this up. I'm going to throw that change out.

02:28:22
I will show you the other thing you can do with it, which is to create files, or canary tokens as they call this. These can be files. It could be almost anything. You can even have it be a credit card number, an Excel document. You can have it be a VPN, configure file, almost anything, a QR code but the minute somebody accesses it if somebody uses this credit card, for instance it won't work.

02:28:52
But I will get an alert. And that's the beauty of the Thinks Canary you get only the alerts that matter. If there's a bad guy in your network, if somebody is accessing those Canary tokens, those lure files or trying to brute force your fake internal SSsh server, your thinks canary will immediately tell you you've got a problem. No false alerts, just the alerts that matter. And, by the way, any way you want them email text, uh, syslog. They support web hooks. You could have it coming through slack, you could have it. There's an api, any way you want, or all of them. But when you get that alert, you know there's somebody in my network and that's the time you want to know of them. But when you get that alert, you know there's somebody in my network and that's the time you wanna know that. The minute they get there and start accessing stuff. Choose a profile for your devices. I showed you. Very easy to do, literally takes seconds Register with the hosted console for monitoring and notifications. Then you sit back and relax.

02:29:42
Attackers who breached your network or malicious insiders and other adversaries cannot help but make themselves known by accessing your ThinkScanary. Visit canarytools slash twit. For 7,500 bucks a year, you get five ThinkScanaries, your own hosted console, upgrades, support and maintenance. If you use the code twit in the how did you hear about us box? 10% off for life. You can always return your ThinkScanary. You've got a two-month money-back guarantee for a full refund. During all the years we've partnered with ThinkScanary, that refund has never been claimed. Visit canarytools slash TWIT. Enter the code TWIT in the how did you hear about us box.

02:30:23
The nice thing about the ThinkScanary is it just sits there quietly until you need to pay attention. Then you can sit up and take notice. I love this thing. Canarytoolstwit, don't forget that offer. Go to it for 10% off for life. Thank you, thinkscanary Love this thing. I guess Elon is looking at other ways to make money.

02:30:52
The tesla tesla empire is starting to look a little ragged, so start now. We use starlink here as a failback. I have starlink running, so if comcast fails which it does all the time, by the way uh, it'll fail over the ubiquity router. It'll say oh, and it'll fail over. The ubiquity router will say oh, and it'll fail over and we're not down for more than a few seconds. But if you were to sign up for starlink in certain areas, get ready.

02:31:15
In some states, like washington, if you sign up for starlink, you're going to have a 750 congestion charge in addition to the regular startup costs. It's expensive to start up because you got to buy the equipment. I think we have business class services, maybe $100 a month. It's not hugely expensive. But if you're a new Starlink user there's a big congestion charge and I wonder why this is. It isn't a good solution. I have to say it's not. I was hopeful when Starlink was announced they're going to put 10,000 low earth orbit satellites up, that it was going to give the entire globe access to the internet, no matter where you are, for cheap. It ain't cheap and I think we're learning that. It is also very limited how many people can serve?

02:32:13 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
and polluting wait because of the whole rocket launches uh, well, not just the failures, but um uh, it's hard to do astronomy now.

02:32:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a lot of right light pollution yeah, right yeah, um, anyway, that's a little disappointing we've got starlink here.

02:32:33 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I'm a little bit. I saw there's no other internet options. You have to, but it's been working great for you.

02:32:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look at that you had. You have a better connection than I do.

02:32:41 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
It maxes out around like 260 megabits a second, which is which is fine. I mean that it could be fast.

02:32:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know I've had faster connections, but you get all your tv over the top. Everything uh on the yeah uh, what?

02:32:54 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
uh, hbo max, you know the whole, all the mlb app, but the f1 this morning was in 4k, flawless, uh. So we've got a bunch of neighbors, they've got you know the rvs and they're currently traveling the country, going to all the national parks. They all have Starlink, the portable Starlink.

02:33:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not the cheap solution, but it does work. And it does work everywhere, Pretty much everywhere.

02:33:13 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
But to get back to that case that we were talking about, Cox v Sony, let's say that somebody sent a bunch of bogus takedown notices to Starlink and said that Nicholas DeLeon is totally infringing without those, without those claims ever being tested in court. All of a sudden you look like a repeat infringer to Starlink and Starlink has to have a policy to turn you off, even though, as you just said, you have no other place to go.

02:33:41
So that's that's an issue that's basically now queued up for the supreme without internet access, you wouldn't be able to work uh, no, I would not.

02:33:51
Yeah, I would have to figure something out to go into town or something, I mean it's a problem, even if you were legitimately pirating something, that a couple of takedown notices would do it. But the fact that accusation only and they never need to be tested can take you down because it's putting pressure on the intermediary where they're going to end up potentially liable for the copyright claims if they don't kick you off. So they're going to kick you off. So this is bad. This is the DMCA has big problems and we've just been turning a blind eye to it for a quarter of a century or more. I mean, I remember when the DMCA has big problems and we've just been turning a blind eye to it for quarter of a century or more.

02:34:26 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I mean, I remember when the DMCA was first I used to read 2600 magazine. Like these guys were like against the DMC, like for my whole, my whole adult life, longer than that. And it's still funny that we're still dealing with this bad law. It's, it's very, very American, I guess.

02:34:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's very American, I guess. So you know it's not American. Uh, an interesting development in India. Uh, foxconn has been building a plant, actually has a plan in operation now to build iPhones in India. Uh, apple, of course, very much interested in getting iphones built outside of china due to tariffs. Um, well, china may be getting involved in the indian plant.

02:35:10
More than 300 chinese iphone engineers and technicians have been recalled from the foxconn plant, suspicion falling on the chinese government, which may, in fact it has in the past. There's a great book called apple in china which documents this has in the past messed with apple. Uh, apple declined to comment. Foxconn didn't respond to a request for comment, but it does fit, according to nine to five mac, a pattern of chinese interference with apple's plan to diversify outside of the country. Actually, if you think about it, that makes perfect sense, right? The number of made in India iPhones was expected to more than double this year, apple moving a lot of production to India. In fact, it's been widely reported they have a goal of making 25% of iPhones worldwide in India by next year or the year after, maybe not.

02:36:14
We can't forget China has pretty much an iron grip on its companies. I don't know what to say about that. We talk about, uh, the new iphone rumors lots of them. New iphone is probably already in production right now in china, and on tuesday, mac break weekly, we'll talk about all the rumors about the iphone 17 and the new ios 26. That's what we cover on mac break weekly. Uh, mr nicholas de le Leon, congratulations again. I hope that Starlink never cuts off and that you're very inconvenient yes, improves forever.

02:36:54
And give uh give my best to Ashley. I'm very happy for both of you. That's exciting. Lisa and I will be there in December. Even if you don't invite us, we're just going to come down. I'm just going to stand outside the door, that's fine holding cake thank you Nicholas great to see you, senior electronics reporter at the legendary consumer reports. Also, of course, the wonderful kathy gellis contributor at techdirt cgcouncilcom. Did we say everything we needed to say about, uh, all of these scotus decisions?

02:37:24 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
is there anything?

02:37:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
was there anything on the docket we should be watching for? How about that?

02:37:29 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
um, the. So all those, all those cases will have a part two to it, but the one that will be interesting actually, uh, the coxby sony, because that isn't a decision, that is just um them cert. So they're going to hear the case.

02:37:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that will be till when, so in theory.

02:37:50 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
The briefs will be at the moment.

02:37:53
The briefs are due in August, although I wonder if there might be an extent, an extension, in which case? But they'll be due sometime this term, probably this year, and then they probably have oral argument over the winter and then there would be a decision by next spring. So that is definitely watchable. And actually one other thing to highlight and I had not called attention to it before because I was sort of afraid that if I did, the Supreme Court wouldn't grant cert in this case but one of the reasons that they did grant the cert was that they looked at the petitions from Cox and Sony and then asked the solicitor general to file an amicus brief.

02:38:34
And this happened during the Biden administration, where they asked for it, and then it was pretty clear that it was going to get written by the copyright office. But the brief eventually got written and submitted and it is a great brief. It is the single most First Amendment forward thing that I could ever imagine this Trump administration producing, and I really think they probably have no idea that they've actually just done this and it's an absolutely fantastic brief. Is that that one lawyer in the White House who's a pretty good lawyer? No, I mean, I think.

02:39:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it was correct that fantastic brief Is that one lawyer in the White House is a pretty good lawyer.

02:39:06 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
No, I mean, I think I think it was correct that this brief was probably written by the copyright office. Who knows the material? But even though he fired the librarian of Congress what was interesting is that brief seems to have been written and then, irrespective of that firing, then the solicitor general who's now D John Sauer, I guess his name is and he put his name and his team's name to it and they filed it.

02:39:30
It's a really good brief didn't they fire her they fired pearl mother, um, but or, and she's suing to try to get her job back, but somehow in the chaos.

02:39:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She had anything to do with it and it was it anything to do with her firing. It's a great brief.

02:39:44 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I'm sure that in her tenure the brief was largely written and drafted and then it just managed to escape and get out the door and get and get without being stopped by anybody. It didn't get stopped in the copyright office, it didn't get stopped by the Trump administration. They put the solicitor general, put his name on it and sent it into the court. But it was. I need to maybe read it more closely and write about it. It was a really good brief and it influenced the court to take the case. It was basically Cox take Cox's case up and oh, sony also had a cert petition and it was basically saying don't give Sony's cert but do give Cox's. And that's exactly what the court did. So something good happened, but I have no idea how it happened.

02:40:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But that amicus brief is was already found liable by a jury in 2019 and it's a billion dollars in damages. This is the appeal of that um yeah, part of it yeah, so this will be very interesting to watch. Is an isp liable for the actions, uh, of its users?

02:40:42 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
but it's a lot of stuff to really get some eyes on secondary liability. Even though the dmca issues aren't really on the table, I think they can get squeezed in. I think it's got a first amendment component to it. I really think that this is all hands on deck for the internet uh industry, um, and not just the copyright players yeah, first monday in october do they.

02:41:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Will they do shadow docket stuff between now and them?

02:41:07 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
oh, I in the way, should they? No, are they absolutely, given the way they've proceeded?

02:41:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, thank you, kathy, great to have you. Uh, I can guarantee you we'll have you back at least when, when that case gets argued, if not sooner. Thank you, kathy gallus. Thanks to all of you who watch, a special thanks to our club twit members, who make all of our shows possible. You now subsidize 25 of our operating costs and without you we would not be able to do what we do, uh. But we try to reward you and we're so glad you're members of the club club to it.

02:41:39
Members pay 10 bucks a month, 120 bucks a year. There are family plans, there are corporate plans. There's also a I think a two-week free trial if you want to just see what it's like. You get for that ad free versions of all the shows because you're paying us, we don't need to play ads for you. Tracker free too. There's no, absolutely, absolutely private feeds. Each, each member gets their own private feed, uh. You also get access to the wonderful Club Twit Discord, which is a great place to hang out, and all the special events we do in the Club Twit Discord. I mentioned that music event. That was fantastic. If you are a member of the club, you'll find that on the Twit Plus feed.

02:42:16
We also have our AI users group coming up Friday. That's going to be right after Chris Marquardt's monthly photo visit. Our assignment this month is quirky. Get out and take a quirky photo, nicholas, and submit it to Flickr so that we can review all those photos on July 11th that's at 1 pm, and then the AI user group following immediately at 2 pm. Of course, we do all of the keynotes now in the club to avoid being taken down on YouTube.

02:42:43
Oh, stacy's Book Club has been booked August 8th. Very interesting book. This is how you lose the time war. Not too late to join that. Read it and join the book club in August. So there's lots of programming dedicated We'll do. Yes, we're going to do another coffee one. Somebody said well, you do more coffee stuff. Mark Prince, our coffee guru, will absolutely come back and do some more coffee. We'll talk more about music. I think that was a lot of fun. We've got Micah's Crafting Corner where he does crafts. There's lots of stuff in the club. We try to make it as interesting, as compelling as possible, because it's so important, frankly, to our survival. We really appreciate it. Thank you, club members for your support. Thank you, club members for your support.

02:43:26
Because of the club members were able to stream. Uh, when we do this show every sunday, two to five pm pacific, five to eight pm eastern 2100, utc, on eight different platforms, the club twit discord. Of course that's the behind the velvet rope access, but there's also for the public at large. You can watch it youtube, twitch, tick tock, facebook linkedin, xcom and Kik and all of those. If you got chat there, we'll see the chat. I'm watching a unified chat that everybody's in there Hi, arnold and Ken, and terrible username in our YouTube chat Martin. Of course in Germany they're in our YouTube chat. We appreciate that Watch live, but you don't have to. After the fact, on-demand versions of the show available at twittv. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to this Week in Tech Great place to go to share little clips.

02:44:12
If you want to do that, help spread the word. Of course, the best way to get any of our shows is to subscribe in your favorite podcast player. Every show has an audio or video feed or you can get both if you want, but do subscribe that way. You can get both if you want, but do subscribe that way. You'll get them automatically as soon as the show's ready for you and if your podcast client has reviews. Please leave us a five-star review. Spread the word. That makes a big difference, too, in audience and listenership. It's a little hard when we, you know, we've been doing this show for 20 years. We're not the flavor of the month, we're not the hot new thing, we're not Joe Rogan, but we have a wonderful community and I'm really grateful to each and every one of you. Thank you for all your support and, as I've said for 20 years, and I hope to say, continue to say for the next 20 years, thanks for being here, we'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can Bye-bye.


 

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