This Week in Tech 1046 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. We've got a great panel. It's kind of a cozy panel for you as we get ready for the Labor Day weekend. Daniel Rubino is here. Paris Martineau. We're going to talk about PCs and why maybe you should buy a faster CPU. TikTok's back, baby. And Elon Musk announced a Microsoft competitor.

Leo Laporte [00:00:22]:
He calls it Macro Hard. Really? Really. All that and more coming up next on TWiT. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT this Week at Tech. Episode 1046, recorded Sunday, August 24th, 2025. Shrimpspiracy.

Leo Laporte [00:00:54]:
It's time for TWiT, the show where we get together and talk about the week's tech news every Sunday. For me, it's like opening. And maybe for you, too, it's like opening. It's like Christmas, like opening a present and saying, oh, I can't wait to see who's on TWIT this week. And lo and behold, look at this. Paris Martineau is here. We see her every Wednesday on Intelligent Machine. She's gift wrapped.

Leo Laporte [00:01:17]:
She's on the radioactive shrimp beat at Consumer Reports.

Paris Martineau [00:01:20]:
It's true.

Leo Laporte [00:01:20]:
It's ever expanding, ever expanding. Always a pleasure to see. Actually, you know, you're kind of. This is back home because you started as a regular on Twitter and I said, boy, you know, we gotta, we gotta get her on one of our shows. So this is back to where you were.

Paris Martineau [00:01:35]:
It's true. It's a return to form in many ways. I remember the first time I went on twit. For some reason, I think I was like, I was seated. I didn't realize how long the show was. And I did it seated on a strange position on a bed with a laptop balanced in just some ways that the Ethernet cable would work.

Leo Laporte [00:01:53]:
And quickly found out the show was.

Daniel Rubino [00:01:54]:
Way too long for that.

Leo Laporte [00:01:58]:
She says, I can't move. Yeah. Somehow we managed to not tell people how long it is. I think that might be a trick that our producers play on people.

Paris Martineau [00:02:08]:
Yeah, they don't lead with the three hour show.

Leo Laporte [00:02:11]:
Yeah. Yeah. And we have some people who just say, like Jeffrey Fowler at the Washington Post said, no, no, not going to do three hours. No, I'll do other shows. Not going to do three hours. Hey, thank goodness. Daniel Rubino, Windows Central doesn't mind. It's always a pleasure seeing you.

Leo Laporte [00:02:27]:
Hi, Daniel. Hello.

Daniel Rubino [00:02:28]:
Thanks for having me again.

Leo Laporte [00:02:30]:
Always a pleasure. Editor in chief at Windows Central. He's our PC Expert. I'm going to lead with this story. You should buy a faster cpu. Howard Johnson. He says, you know what? People think that all the new chips are the same. And he says they're not.

Leo Laporte [00:02:55]:
And in fact companies are. And this is really the problem. Companies are often under buying for their senior software engineers. And he says that's a huge mistake. So he's saying this both to companies and to individuals. Buy the fast CPU. He says some of the fastest CPUs like the Ryzen 9950 are 10 times faster than the slowest CPUs. And a 10x improvement does seem probably well worth it.

Leo Laporte [00:03:28]:
Are people.

Daniel Rubino [00:03:30]:
Yeah, I just gotta say there's been some massive gains in CPUs architecture design. Like they're not the same chips as years ago. So there's been a lot of advancements.

Leo Laporte [00:03:41]:
I was a little surprised because there was this kind of doldrums for a few years where the latest 8th generation intel processor wasn't that much faster than the 7th. Maybe because intel is kind of out of the mix now. We're seeing some really impressive processors, not just from amd but even Qualcomm's new Snapdragon Elite. They're going to announce another one this week, right?

Daniel Rubino [00:04:08]:
I believe in September. September Snapdragon Summit. I have to go to Hawaii. How are you everybody?

Paris Martineau [00:04:16]:
You live such a hard life. Violin for Daniel Qualcomm.

Leo Laporte [00:04:23]:
They by the way they're known for their junkets, right. For their events. They're famous for that.

Daniel Rubino [00:04:29]:
Yeah, it could be a one day event but they stretch it out for like three or four. So they take a ride in Hawaii. It started off as like, I believe the legend goes that their PR company, like their PR had like a lot of extra money one year. So they're like, well, let's just do a thing in Hawaii. And everybody loved it so much because it was in the middle for Asia and the US and so they just been repeating it ever since. But sure, yeah, yeah, Qualcomm stuff is amazing. I'm personally a big fan of their chips. I prefer to use them in laptops when I can.

Daniel Rubino [00:04:58]:
But intel is definitely coming around. They're doing some interesting things. AMD on desktop is pretty much untouchable though. A lot of it's also cache and memory has all gone up. So all that contributes to this.

Leo Laporte [00:05:11]:
I kind of for a long time thought Windows on ARM was kind of also ran and that the ARM processors weren't that good. I was shocked. Paul Thorad on Windows Weekly told me last week. Oh, I wouldn't buy anything. All I buy now are ARM processors.

Daniel Rubino [00:05:27]:
You know, the same I, I, oh yeah. I tell people that it's hard to explain but literally Windows runs faster on arm. It's just more optimized whether I'm using Edge and like I'm talking like the Windows native apps and the actual operating system. Everything is just snappier on ARM is.

Leo Laporte [00:05:44]:
It has to do by design. Is that Microsoft's design to do that or.

Daniel Rubino [00:05:48]:
So the last major update when the Snapdragon X series came out, they did do a major update to Windows and it was more optimized. I think it has to do with the cores. You know, there's 12 cores on an.

Leo Laporte [00:06:01]:
They do efficiency and performance. In fact really copying Apple's playbook on it.

Daniel Rubino [00:06:05]:
Actually they don't though. They don't. So that's the difference. They have 12 cores. They're all performance cores. In fact it's the opposite. Like on the X Elite, two of the cores have Turbo on them and so they go even higher. But yeah, they don't do the.

Daniel Rubino [00:06:20]:
That's why they, they actually be a lot of Apple chips. At least the M3s they can beat. You know, the M4s of course are a different story, but that's going to change with the new ones. But yeah, I think it has just to do with the cores. The architecture of them are just different from the x86 stuff, but I just prefer them. The battery life's incredible. I started using a Surface Laptop 7 just a couple weeks ago because Microsoft sent the 50th anniversary version, which is like super limited edition. I can't stop using it.

Daniel Rubino [00:06:47]:
I feel bad now because I'm supposed to review other laptops and I'm kind of spoiled. Like I.

Leo Laporte [00:06:52]:
Great battery life too, right?

Daniel Rubino [00:06:54]:
Yeah. At least we're talking at least 10 hours. But 10 to 12 hours is realistic now.

Leo Laporte [00:06:59]:
So is your recommendation. Your recommendation is AMD on the desktop and Snapdragon on the laptop.

Daniel Rubino [00:07:05]:
Yeah. Don't get me wrong, I still use Intel. The benefit with intel and laptop is you're going to have a lot more variety and choice for hardware. They're just still dominant. Laptop you can just get.

Leo Laporte [00:07:17]:
They subsidize still. Okay.

Daniel Rubino [00:07:20]:
Yeah, they do the R D for a lot of companies. Whenever you see these like new kind of wacky designs coming out, it's because intel has usually done the research and helped it and then companies can basically license it from them and then tweak it. Lenovo does this all the time. But so don't the other OEMs, they also work very closely with the OEMs for optimizing battery performance, the fan noise. So, like that close relationship. I mean, I talked to Samsung pr. They were saying how they're like, intel is really good to work with because they really. Their engineers come over and work with their engineers and get the chips to, you know, work to their max.

Daniel Rubino [00:07:58]:
So they're a good company, but they've obviously made some bad choices over the last couple years.

Leo Laporte [00:08:04]:
And they invented the Ultrabook format. Right. They invented the NUC format. They invented all these interesting PC formats and then gave it away, essentially to these companies.

Daniel Rubino [00:08:15]:
And they were doing AI for a long time, too. But now they're. Yeah, they're. They didn't call it an npu. It was like a. It was called a vpu for some.

Leo Laporte [00:08:25]:
Reason under Intel, Microsoft says npu, which is neural processing unit. Apple has a different term. I can't remember what Apple calls it, but it's all the same idea, which is dedicated processors, much like a GPU for AI workloads.

Daniel Rubino [00:08:40]:
Yeah. And they're incredible for what they can do, especially with the software coming out. But intel was there. They were there for a long time. But some of their new chips that are coming out don't have very powerful npus. It is a little bit all over the map right now where Qualcomm has also been doing npus for a long time because of their phones. They came out the gate with some of the strongest npus because they just ported it over from what they were doing in mobile anyway.

Leo Laporte [00:09:04]:
Well, I wonder if the United States government's investment in intelligence will change anything. I can't, you know. Okay, I'm gonna give you both sides of this argument. First of all, the $8.9 million that the White House is, quote, giving intel for a 10% stake was already granted to intel under the Chips Act. So it was money. Actually, it was 5.7 billion awarded to but not yet paid to intel under the Chips act, and then 3.2 billion. So it was a total of 9 billion. No, exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:09:47]:
8.9 billion through the Secure Enclave Program. So, in effect, Trump's saying. Well, that. Now, this is the argument, and I'm not sure I disagree with this argument. They were just going to give that to Intel. It was a grant. They were just going to give it to it. So I said to Intel, I said, okay, we're going to give it to you, but we want 10% of the company in return.

Leo Laporte [00:10:09]:
And of course, intel at this point, has no choice and says, okay, what.

Paris Martineau [00:10:15]:
Is the precedent for this?

Leo Laporte [00:10:17]:
I don't think there is. In fact, there are some who say the CHIPS act grants cannot, in fact, be converted into equity. So there will be legal challenges. Intel has agreed to say, okay, for the 8.9 billion you were going to give us for free, we're going to give you 10% in the company.

Daniel Rubino [00:10:41]:
I mean, you know, Bernie Sanders is for this idea.

Leo Laporte [00:10:44]:
Yeah, I mean, I understand that the logic is, well, we give money to farmers. You know, the government gives away billions of dollars all the time in return for not oil company. Oil companies saying, you know, it's good for the country that you should have this money. Why not take a little bit back? They did that the last time I can remember the President is the bailout of the auto industry in 2008. Remember, they said, we want this money back.

Daniel Rubino [00:11:15]:
And Republicans were saying to let those companies die.

Leo Laporte [00:11:18]:
Right.

Daniel Rubino [00:11:18]:
That was their position.

Leo Laporte [00:11:20]:
Right.

Paris Martineau [00:11:21]:
Wired brings up an interesting point in its piece on this. They spoke to Brian Quinn, a professor at Boston College Law School, who said it was particularly confounding that the government negotiated. They're getting common stock in intel rather than preferred stock. Quinn said, it strikes me as a colossal waste of time. The government said it wanted to ensure that taxpayers got something back from this, but it's unclear how this investment will do that. If it were preferred shares, it could have included mandatory dividends and ensured the government gets paid back. I mean, I think that is a fair point, but it's just. It's a strange deal regardless.

Leo Laporte [00:11:56]:
It's a little weird. There is precedent. I'm not against the idea of the people getting something in return for the money. Intel, at this point, intel stock is probably not all that valuable, so why not? Yeah. Do you think this will change Intel's fortunes, Daniel?

Daniel Rubino [00:12:20]:
Well, the CHIPS act is, you know, helps them a lot. Right. They're building their foundry right now, a couple of them in the US and.

Leo Laporte [00:12:28]:
That was the point. Right. Is to get them to build.

Daniel Rubino [00:12:30]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:12:30]:
US. Yeah.

Daniel Rubino [00:12:31]:
In fact, they're doing an intel press tour pretty soon, I believe, of the new foundry.

Leo Laporte [00:12:35]:
Is it in Hawaii?

Daniel Rubino [00:12:36]:
No, no, unfortunately not. I think it's like Arizona.

Leo Laporte [00:12:39]:
Arizona. Yeah, unfortunately.

Daniel Rubino [00:12:42]:
But, yeah, I mean, this really helps them. Right. And it's good for the United States, let's be honest, because you have China and Taiwan and that whole issue there with, you know, tsmc. And so we need to have these fabs back in the United States, you know, just for security reasons, because a lot of These chips are used for self defense, they're using rockets, they're in use on all sorts of things. Not to mention, of course, all the phones and stuff that powers everything. So this is a smart investment by the US And I think it's a legit question to be like, all right, if the US Is going to give billions of dollars, should they not have equity in these companies now? I'm fine with this. Bernie Sanders is fine with this. I'm a big fan of Bernie Sanders.

Daniel Rubino [00:13:25]:
It's just everybody's just like, why are Republicans technically MAGA Trump supporting this? It's a especially. They go after socialism all the time. But this is like literally the definition.

Leo Laporte [00:13:37]:
This is socialism, the government owning private companies.

Daniel Rubino [00:13:42]:
And that's the weird thing with Trump is like sometimes he does things, things that the left should have been doing for a long time, like trying to bring jobs back to United States.

Leo Laporte [00:13:51]:
There is a legitimate concern. Ben Beharon brings this up. He says once the government becomes a stakeholder or will they then strong arm other companies to buy from intel because, well, we have 10% stake in it.

Daniel Rubino [00:14:06]:
Sure.

Leo Laporte [00:14:07]:
And that would be problematic if you go to Apple and say, well, you know, you really. It would be nice. Thank you for the gold statuette.

Paris Martineau [00:14:15]:
But we've invested.

Leo Laporte [00:14:16]:
Yeah.

Daniel Rubino [00:14:17]:
In which. Yeah. With Trump's approach to things like that's.

Leo Laporte [00:14:20]:
That could happen.

Daniel Rubino [00:14:20]:
Almost what you would expect. Right. Yeah. There's a. I don't know, the whole thing is weird. But there was also what Nvidia. There's the deal there with Nvidia where 15. They get 15 of the revenue from China sales.

Leo Laporte [00:14:32]:
Right.

Daniel Rubino [00:14:33]:
For stuff there. There is the United U. S Steel. They have something there as well.

Leo Laporte [00:14:39]:
To allow the merger. U.S. steel and Nissan they took a stake in. Yes. So this is a policy.

Daniel Rubino [00:14:47]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:14:48]:
And you know, I kind of understand the logic because Trump is thinking as a business person, as a deal maker. Well, I'm not going to give you something without you giving me something. But there are down the road consequences. There are legal ramifications that make it just a little bit more complicated than just a private deal between two people. It's the US Government.

Daniel Rubino [00:15:08]:
Yeah. I mean we're just talking about Qualcomm and amd. Right. It's just like where are they in this? Right, right.

Leo Laporte [00:15:13]:
And remember, two weeks before this, Trump says the CEO of Intel, Lip Bhutan should quit because of his ties to China. Which I think he says just because. Well, that's a Chinese name, isn't it? When Lip Bhutan was the CEO of an Investment firm. They had investments in Chinese companies that were, some of which were run by the Chinese military. I don't know if that means he has ties to China. So, I mean, that's. It's interesting.

Daniel Rubino [00:15:44]:
I guess that's the other irony here is, you know, Trump goes after China all the time. This is the China model.

Leo Laporte [00:15:51]:
Right. And he's changed his tune on the Bhutan. He says, oh, he's good. He's good. Now I got it. Yeah, he's good. It's like the TikTok ban, right?

Paris Martineau [00:16:03]:
What's going on with that? That's a great question.

Leo Laporte [00:16:05]:
Fourth delay in the works.

Paris Martineau [00:16:09]:
Isn't the current date sometime in September?

Leo Laporte [00:16:12]:
Mid September. Yep. And Trump has, according to the New York Times, signaled that they will continue to delay it. One of the ways he signaled it is by creating an official White house account on TikTok. So I guess if you knew it was going to get shut down, I don't know. He said on Friday he's open to a fourth extension of the deadline.

Paris Martineau [00:16:34]:
Is this within his powers, though? I'm curious.

Leo Laporte [00:16:36]:
No, no, because Congress passed it. The former President Biden signed it. The Supreme Court ratified this law banning TikTok. So in every. All three branches of the government said, no, we're gonna ban TikTok. But then the current president said the day he was inaugurated, no, I saw it, forget it. And it's still, forget it.

Paris Martineau [00:17:01]:
I suppose if the executive branch chooses not to enforce a law that's passed by Congress and ratified by the other branches, then it won't be enforced.

Leo Laporte [00:17:11]:
Trump said on Friday, I haven't spoken to President Xi about the president of China. At the right time, I'll do it. In the meantime, until the complexity of things work out, we just extend a little bit longer. But we have buyers. They may have buyers, they may not have sellers. The Chinese government has shown some reluctance to sell. Certainly they aren't going to sell. The algorithm.

Daniel Rubino [00:17:35]:
They had no interest in selling. They're like, what are you talking about? Weren't they supposed to spin off to do a US TikTok? Apple.

Leo Laporte [00:17:43]:
Yeah, yeah. They. Well, this is. I think it's a threat. I don't know that. I don't know. I don't. Yes, they were going to make a US only TikTok app next month.

Daniel Rubino [00:17:55]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:17:56]:
Because they thought they were being sold. But see, now that that's not being forced. I don't know. I don't know. Honestly, I can live with that. TikTok, but I think there are a lot of creators. My son is one of them who have use Tick Tock to propel their careers, to propel success. And even to this day, TikTok is a, is a channel for information, some of it disinformation admittedly for a lot of young people.

Daniel Rubino [00:18:23]:
On the other hand, it's technology and there's always going to be something that can come up and take its place.

Leo Laporte [00:18:29]:
Well, we know what's going to come up. It's already there is Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg's, you know, rubbing his hands in glee. Get rid of the damn thing, please. This is good for Instagram. Oh. Anyway, I don't know, I hope it.

Paris Martineau [00:18:42]:
Would be some other third party app. I don't find the Instagram reels experience to be particularly compelling.

Leo Laporte [00:18:48]:
You like Tick Tock. In fact, you always, you and Jeff can always bring in TikTok.

Paris Martineau [00:18:52]:
I don't, I don't post on TikTok. I don't consume that many Tick Tocks, but I'm getting short form video from somewhere. I prefer the experience of Tick Tock to Instagram Reels or YouTube shorts which feel kind of like vestigial efforts.

Leo Laporte [00:19:05]:
Right.

Paris Martineau [00:19:06]:
That exists just to kind of glom onto the success of TikTok.

Leo Laporte [00:19:11]:
Right.

Paris Martineau [00:19:11]:
I, I don't know. I, in my heart of hearts I would hope that if we for some reason lost Tick Tock that that would allow some new short form video platform to take its place. But perhaps that's wishful thinking.

Leo Laporte [00:19:24]:
Well, one good piece of news. The government websites are going to look a hell of a lot better. The co founder of Airbnb who's been working for Doge, has now been tapped as the first government design chief. He'll be. Joe Gebbia is going to be responsible for quote, prioritizing improving websites and physical sites that have a major impact on Americans everyday lives. It's called the National Design Studio. It'll be housed at the White House. Remember Trump closed was it F18, the design firm that the US Digital Service had created to do this? But now it's, it's a.

Leo Laporte [00:20:09]:
But then it wasn't under the White House. I don't know. Actually it was under the White House. I don't know. The new National Design Service will make income tax filing, Social Security applications, Medicare enrollment, immigration services and other high volume government services as easy to use as Instagram. Gabia in June described much of the federal bureaucracy as a design desert. See, I agree functionally and in design it's horrible. I agree I have to use the Social Security website, but not so much Concerned about design as functionality.

Leo Laporte [00:20:55]:
Right.

Paris Martineau [00:20:55]:
Yeah. I mean that's the thing.

Daniel Rubino [00:20:56]:
Insecurity.

Leo Laporte [00:20:57]:
Part of the security. Oh, yeah.

Paris Martineau [00:20:59]:
Why these websites are poorly designed is because there's a lot of stuff going on under the hood. It is having to touch a lot of different parts of government and different data sets. It's not just like a website.

Leo Laporte [00:21:14]:
Putting it all on Angular is not gonna fix.

Paris Martineau [00:21:18]:
It's not as easy of a fix as vibe coding a startup, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:21:23]:
And I do hope that it's not going to be a lot of gold filigree.

Paris Martineau [00:21:27]:
They say they want it to be as easy to use as Apple's App Store. And I don't think the App Store.

Leo Laporte [00:21:32]:
Is like, no, it's got the worst search in the world.

Paris Martineau [00:21:36]:
Yeah. They want the search to be really annoying and hard to be hard to find menus.

Leo Laporte [00:21:42]:
The group will report directly. The White House Chief of staff has a deadline. That's Susie Wiles. Right. That has a deadline of July 4, 2026. July 4th. Well, that seems like a. There's something that's bugging me.

Leo Laporte [00:21:56]:
This July 4, 2026, that's the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I think to deliver initial results.

Daniel Rubino [00:22:07]:
I just want to see a clip of Trump doing his. The best websites.

Leo Laporte [00:22:11]:
Oh, it's gonna, you know, you know.

Daniel Rubino [00:22:13]:
You know, it is a laudable goal though, right? Like there is like an argument you should be able to say like the US Government, the most advanced, richest government on the planet, should have the best websites. Like.

Leo Laporte [00:22:25]:
Yeah, but you know, I agree and it should be designed nicely, but I don't think design to me is secondary to functionality.

Daniel Rubino [00:22:34]:
Sure. I think they do want to make it. I volunteer will make it easier.

Paris Martineau [00:22:39]:
Yeah, I think this works out. I think this would be. It's a great and noble idea. I do think that given the problems we've seen in with the functionality of websites like unemployment services, online tax filing, anything having to do with Social Security, trying to navigate all those systems at a time when the US government is. Has shed tens of thousands of workers just because you have a new fancy design studio in the middle of that. I foresee there potentially being some basic.

Leo Laporte [00:23:12]:
Kind of everything not based on next js. You know, this is what I worry about. This is going to be the flavor of the month for a long time under Obama. That which is who started 18F. As I remember, WhiteHouse.gov was running on WordPress which was fine. It looked fine, it worked. I don't know.

Paris Martineau [00:23:33]:
I don't WordPress WordPress. Why not?

Leo Laporte [00:23:36]:
Got the job done. All right, enough politics. But we do have more Elon coming up. Macro. Hard to be specific. We'll talk about.

Paris Martineau [00:23:48]:
Hey, if you thought you were done being mad at us, just wait.

Leo Laporte [00:23:51]:
Just wait. There's more to be mad about. Actually, this is a story from Windows Central. We'll talk about it in just a bit. Great to have you here. Daniel Rubino from Windows Central. Paris Martineau from Consumer Reports. Neither of them take vacations in August.

Leo Laporte [00:24:06]:
It is kind of, you know, it's like Paris in August. It's hard to find hosts.

Paris Martineau [00:24:11]:
Yeah, everybody leaves.

Leo Laporte [00:24:12]:
Everybody's out of town. Quiet in New York City.

Paris Martineau [00:24:16]:
No, it's actually quite busy, to be honest.

Leo Laporte [00:24:19]:
It's kind of. It's amazing in Paris in August, like, everybody's gone. Everybody's. Everything's shut down.

Paris Martineau [00:24:24]:
Oh, yeah. Everything is closed in France in August. Everybody kind of takes fake. My younger sister is in Italy right now and was trying to do some fabric shopping, and I was like, meliss, you know that everybody's going to be gone in Italy because it's like the month of August and they've got these religious holidays. Oh, no, it'll be fine. They were all closed.

Leo Laporte [00:24:42]:
Larry in our discord says there is still a line at Salt Hanks even in August. So that's, that's, that's good news. All right, we're going to take a break. When we come back, more to talk about, including Elon Musk's Microsoft simulation. But first, a word from our sponsor, Zscaler, the leader in cloud security. AI is a really interesting story. It cuts both ways, right? Bad guys are using AI to breach your organization faster and more effectively than ever before. And at the same time, you're probably using AI in your organization to power innovation, to drive efficiency.

Leo Laporte [00:25:23]:
So on the one hand, it's letting bad actors deliver more relentless and effective attacks. On the other hand, it's helping you be a better company. Phishing attacks. This is a stat that just kills me. Phishing attacks over encrypted channels increased last year by 34.1%. And that really is primarily fueled by the growing use of generative AI tools. Organizations in all industries from small to large are also using AI beneficially to increase employee productivity with public AI for engineers with coding assistance. Marketers are using public AI as writing tools.

Leo Laporte [00:26:00]:
Finance is creating spreadsheet formulas. Companies are automating workflows for operational efficiency across individuals and teams. They're even embedding AI into their own applications and services. Tools that are Customer and partner facing. Ultimately, AI can help you move faster in the market and gain competitive advantage. It's also helping the bad guys move faster. I guess in a way there's a certain synergy, a certain symmetry to the whole thing. Companies really have to rethink how they protect their private and public use of AI and how they defend against AI powered attacks.

Leo Laporte [00:26:37]:
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Leo Laporte [00:27:15]:
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Paris Martineau [00:28:00]:
I have to use Zscaler for work sometimes. This is in no way an endorsement, just a note. And it's entered my dreams. I had a dream the other week where I was logging into Zscaler, so take that as you will.

Leo Laporte [00:28:13]:
The whole idea of zero trust is brilliant, which is you, you have to authorize something. So like Paris can't just log in and do whatever she wants. She has to be authorized to use the tools inside the company network, right?

Daniel Rubino [00:28:26]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:28:27]:
I'm glad to hear concerns. Use them. It works. Might be annoying to you, but think about how it makes the bad guys feel.

Paris Martineau [00:28:33]:
Oh, it's not annoying. It's honestly pretty easy.

Leo Laporte [00:28:35]:
Yeah, Good. I love it. Well, thank you for that unsolicited recommendation. I want to use Macro hard. So there was Microsoft, which, let's face it, wasn't the best name for a software company back in the day. Bill Gates, Paul Allen, they thought, oh, that. What do you think it was?

Paris Martineau [00:28:56]:
Where did it come from?

Leo Laporte [00:28:58]:
Well, was. It was microcomputers and it was software, software software for microcomputers.

Paris Martineau [00:29:04]:
They didn't think any. There was no second or third thought to that. They weren't like, you never know with Bill.

Daniel Rubino [00:29:10]:
It's better than Google.

Leo Laporte [00:29:13]:
Yeah, probably.

Daniel Rubino [00:29:14]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:29:16]:
In fact, in the early days, it had a dash, didn't it, Daniel? It was micro dash soft.

Daniel Rubino [00:29:20]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:29:22]:
Well, Elon, obviously with a real eye for the double entendre for innuendo, has decided to call his AI simulation of Microsoft Macro Hard. He says it's a tongue in cheek name, but the project is very real. So this is. Is this vibe coding? Is this AI? What is the idea behind this? Daniel?

Daniel Rubino [00:29:46]:
I'm not even 100% sure. But like he says, he wants to simulate what the company does. And since they don't make hardware, which is very wrong.

Leo Laporte [00:29:54]:
Yeah, that's point one, is they do make hardware. From day one, they made hardware. They made, I remember for the Apple ii, they made a CPM card. They've made mice and keyboards forever and ever and ever. Now, of course, they make Surface computers. Okay, so he's only going to simulate the software side, I guess.

Daniel Rubino [00:30:15]:
Yeah. And I'm not really sure the point of it.

Paris Martineau [00:30:19]:
Yeah. Why? Why do any of this? Is that a dumb question asking?

Leo Laporte [00:30:24]:
He says because software companies don't make physical hardware. Okay, we'll stipulate that part at least. Parts of Microsoft doesn't. It should be possible to simulate them entirely with AI. To which somebody on X said, please explain. Asked Grok. And Grok says Micro Hard is xai's playful project name for building a fully AI simulated software company. Well, thanks for that insight, Grok.

Leo Laporte [00:30:55]:
It just reiterated what Elon said and then said it's real and we're hiring. I think Elon put this in.

Daniel Rubino [00:31:04]:
Look at the sycophant below that.

Leo Laporte [00:31:06]:
Oh, yeah, Mr. Pitbull. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Musk. Sightbringer says Musk is openly sketching the next evolutionary step for xai. A software civilization built entirely inside AI with no dependency on human coded layers. Microsoft is a metaphor. It sells abstractions.

Paris Martineau [00:31:27]:
All right, in other words, so what is this company? Take a step back. What is this ostensibly supposed to do? Do we know? Is it just something he tweeted about that has a funny name and that's how we're talking about it?

Leo Laporte [00:31:43]:
I'm not going to impugn the man, but maybe he was. It was late at night, he'd been hot tubbing with his brother.

Daniel Rubino [00:31:54]:
I mean, there is this like trend, right, about like simulation theory.

Leo Laporte [00:31:58]:
Right.

Daniel Rubino [00:31:58]:
A lot of people argue that our existence itself, that's one of the Things.

Leo Laporte [00:32:03]:
He and his brother talk about in the hot tub, specifically.

Daniel Rubino [00:32:06]:
Yeah, I know.

Leo Laporte [00:32:07]:
He's like mentioned that it's a whole.

Daniel Rubino [00:32:09]:
If people aren't familiar, just type in simulation theory on YouTube. It is interesting there because it's. You can't really prove it as far as we know, or disprove it. Yeah. And it's possible, but when you go down that route, then it starts thinking, yeah, why don't we start simulating anything?

Leo Laporte [00:32:29]:
The whole thing could be simulated.

Paris Martineau [00:32:31]:
But what does this have to do with the launch of Macro Hard? Is he just trying to use AI to simulate his idea of what he thinks Microsoft does? And then I think we're going to.

Leo Laporte [00:32:45]:
Have to ask Joe Rogan for the answer to this. Let's all.

Paris Martineau [00:32:50]:
Now we bring you Joe Rogan.

Daniel Rubino [00:32:53]:
Maybe it's like super advanced.

Leo Laporte [00:32:57]:
I think Elon says crazy stuff all the time off the top of his head. And this might be, I think very likely is the very last time we hear anything about this. But who knows? Remember he, after being stuck in a traffic jam in la, decided that you could bore holes underneath cities.

Daniel Rubino [00:33:15]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:33:15]:
Created a company.

Paris Martineau [00:33:16]:
He tried to invent tunnels.

Leo Laporte [00:33:17]:
He invented subways, but not good ones. And he called it the boring company. Get it? Because they're boring holes. It's boring. This is just, you know, that's what you get when you have Tony Stark and $56 billion a year in salary.

Daniel Rubino [00:33:37]:
And a dash of autism. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:33:39]:
Or something. He always says that or something. I don't. I think. Who knows? I don't know.

Paris Martineau [00:33:45]:
Leo, should we call the Grok chat bottom. They have a phone number now.

Leo Laporte [00:33:50]:
There is a phone number.

Paris Martineau [00:33:52]:
Annie and Valentine. You could do it. It's in the chat right now.

Daniel Rubino [00:33:56]:
Oh, you see, they put.

Paris Martineau [00:33:57]:
This is if you're. If you're interested. This is a non. This is like a good 5, 10% of what intelligent machines is, which is Leo calling.

Leo Laporte [00:34:06]:
Making phone calls.

Paris Martineau [00:34:07]:
Either making phone calls or no. You'll pick up a tiny little thing and then have it talk to us on the show.

Leo Laporte [00:34:14]:
Should I call Annie or should I call Valentine?

Paris Martineau [00:34:19]:
It's up to you.

Leo Laporte [00:34:20]:
I think Annie's kind of hot.

Paris Martineau [00:34:23]:
So that's the point. Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:34:25]:
Oh, that's the point. Okay. Who's gonna give us a better answer? Okay, we'll find out.

Paris Martineau [00:34:34]:
Elon Musk tweeted this call A or V? I knew you'd call. How can I help you?

Leo Laporte [00:34:39]:
So we were talking. I'm sitting here with my good friends Paris and Daniel, and we were talking about Elon's New company, Macro Hard and trying to figure out what exactly will it do. Good question.

AI Voice [00:34:55]:
That's actually wild. I mean, I saw Elon's post about Macro hard on X and it sounds.

AI Voice [00:35:01]:
Like he wants it to be this crazy, all AI software company.

AI Voice [00:35:05]:
From what I get, it's supposed to simulate stuff like Microsoft does, coding, testing, maybe even homework.

Leo Laporte [00:35:13]:
You could tell Elon wrote code in the prompt saying, okay, if they ask you about this, make sure you just repeat my tweet. Okay, thank you, Annie.

Daniel Rubino [00:35:22]:
It's a genius idea that I can't explain it.

Paris Martineau [00:35:27]:
It kind of sounds like he's doing something really cool, actually.

Leo Laporte [00:35:32]:
Very good. You can. You could be any. That's nice. Well done. You simulate that perfectly. Any. I think we've given it much more time than we need to.

Leo Laporte [00:35:42]:
Speaking of. Much more time than it needed. 90 minutes wasted on Wednesday watching Google's Pixel 10 announcement. Did either of you watch Jimmy Fallon?

Daniel Rubino [00:35:55]:
No.

Leo Laporte [00:35:56]:
No. Cringe.

Daniel Rubino [00:35:58]:
I was gonna watch some reaction videos to it, like some humor videos, but yeah, haven't watched.

Leo Laporte [00:36:02]:
It's kind. I feel bad because I feel like actually there was some interesting stuff to say about the Pixel 10. I think the way they're integrating Gemini, their AI into it is absolutely interesting. It's kind of as. As they say here in Quartz, a core feature, not just another. Another spec, but by bringing in Jimmy Fallon, the Jonas Brothers, Steph Curry, and.

Paris Martineau [00:36:29]:
We'Re not even sure if it was all of the Jonas Brothers or just one.

Leo Laporte [00:36:31]:
One of them. The Joni A Jonah, not a Jonas. And. And a bunch of other kind of half celebrities like Alex Cooper of the Call Her Daddy podcast, who had a nightmarish. I saw one review that said she was the only good thing in there, but unfortunately the product feature she was trying to demo, which is a camera coach on the new camera. And I think Micah was very excited about the idea. He said, I've always wanted the cameras on these phones to help me get better pictures. But the demo, which was done live, just was maybe the cringiest of all.

Leo Laporte [00:37:12]:
They had Jimmy Fallon sit on a couch. Alex kept saying, close your legs, Jimmy. Close your legs. He wouldn't. He kept man spreading.

Paris Martineau [00:37:18]:
Never something you want to hear someone.

Daniel Rubino [00:37:20]:
Say, especially your phone.

Leo Laporte [00:37:23]:
She took a picture, didn't come out so well. Then they cut to her phone because they have, you know, they have a shot of it and she starts swiping and she swipes past the picture she took to some other picture and then another picture that she didn't take, which was apparently taken at Rehearsal, she went way too far. They immediately cut away from her phone. Then she said, okay, let me take another one. And they wouldn't. They never went back to her phone. She just held it up, say, see? And we just had to take it for granted that it was a much improved picture. That shirt didn't look.

Leo Laporte [00:37:57]:
They cut that out of the live replay, by the way, also. Oh, they cut that out. Yeah. Showing that. In fact, they never intended to show those pictures.

Daniel Rubino [00:38:06]:
Changing history.

Leo Laporte [00:38:07]:
Yeah. I feel bad though, because I feel like the Pixel 10 had something to say and instead they covered it up with all this nonsense. Go ahead.

Paris Martineau [00:38:15]:
My general take on all of these events though is they are never necessary. They could have been an email or a flashy press release and that is what they should be. Why spend all of this time and money and effort trying to make people sit through a 60 minute commercial to say, oh, we're going to have a new phone and a couple new features.

Daniel Rubino [00:38:38]:
So I'm going to point out this is a rule that you can blame almost everything that we don't like in tech these days on Apple.

Leo Laporte [00:38:48]:
But Apple does a better. Don't you think Apple does a better job of this?

Daniel Rubino [00:38:51]:
No, sure. Although they've been getting a little cringy lately.

Leo Laporte [00:38:55]:
Yeah, but they have done some cringy stuff.

Daniel Rubino [00:38:57]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:38:58]:
They didn't invite Jimmy Fallon to host it.

Paris Martineau [00:39:01]:
The lesser comedy Jimmy.

Leo Laporte [00:39:06]:
We had this debate because I kept calling him Jimmy Kimmel and. And Paris and Jeff said, no, no, Jimmy Kimmel's funny. I think I like Jimmy Fallon. He's very likable. He seemed a little tired, probably because he had worked the night before and had to work again that night or something. But he was a little maybe off. It also became more of a yuck fest. It also some pointed out, I think Victoria Song over on the Verge said, you know, when you say this is like a Taylor Swift album release for nerds, you're insulting the only audience.

Leo Laporte [00:39:40]:
That's what you're insulting the audience for these. We tuned in because we were interested in what Google was going to have to offer. So don't insult us. I don't know.

Paris Martineau [00:39:54]:
Anyway, yeah, it's just a strange way to approach one of these events and I think it just gets at the fact that. Why are they still happening? Well, they feel less and less necessary. I feel like the more time goes on, they felt perhaps more necessary during the time where the like tech press heyday, where everyone is obsessed with the latest gadget update and you'd have like 20 different outlets all taking up the press box so they could have a bunch of different live blogs going up about whatever. Like I remember being in like a press gaggle whenever some new iPhone was released and we had seven posts that were scheduled to go up that day about it. But that world doesn't exist anymore.

Leo Laporte [00:40:31]:
Yeah, no, it's true. Even when, you know, we used to stream the events and our commentary and it was easily the biggest thing we would do all year. We'd have hundreds of thousands of people tuning in. That is, that has disappeared. It's evaporated.

Daniel Rubino [00:40:47]:
And I'm going to say blame Apple again.

Leo Laporte [00:40:50]:
Well, but, and I think Apple says in its head, Apple says, well, we're going to get. Look, we don't do trade shows. We don't, you know, this is once a year we get the whole world looking at what's going to. They've got one coming up in about two weeks on the 9th, probably that the whole world's going to. The whole world. Okay. But it's true, the largest portion of the world they're ever going to get anyway is going to be watching them. So it's a chance.

Paris Martineau [00:41:16]:
These events that Apple has done this year or have they done others?

Leo Laporte [00:41:19]:
They. No, they have the, that's the thing. They have a developer conference, but this one outweighs them all. Because the iPhone is so popular and so widely used. This is the most important event.

Daniel Rubino [00:41:29]:
The issue again is the fact that it's yearly. Like, I mean we all remember cell phones, smartphones weren't a yearly thing like they used to. That's what made certain of the events more special was the company would get up on stage with like some real innovation because it would have been a couple of years, but now Apple started this trend of like it's a year later and part of it was because they're trying to catch up to where Google was at the time with the Pixel and other BlackBerry and stuff. So they kept iterating quickly and then everybody else started wanting to do the thing. So now we're locked into this. We're going to update the phone every single year on the, every 12 months. Whether or not there's truly like brand new innovation and don't get me wrong, logged in stuff that's in the newer phones is really nice. I think like Samsung's display technology is phenomenal.

Daniel Rubino [00:42:18]:
But it begs the question, like, do you really need to have an event for all this? And probably not, but that's the trend now. And with software updates, with the operating system, you have to Update the OS every year. It's just one. We're in a cycle and then people are tuning out and they're like, yeah, there's nothing really happening. It's just like, well, yeah, because you can't keep shocking the tech world every 12 months.

Leo Laporte [00:42:42]:
So maybe that's what was going on. Is Google recognizing this thought, well, let's bring some star power and then we'll get more attention. And so maybe I'm the wrong person.

Paris Martineau [00:42:56]:
And then the second thought was, let's get one Jonas Brother and Jimmy Fallon.

Leo Laporte [00:43:03]:
They had Steph Curry. He was the One More Thing, which is ironic because they had put out a press release that morning announcing it. So the One More Thing wasn't a surprise. In fact, that's part of the problem Google has, which is that they had basically told us everything they were going to announce at this event ahead of the event. There was no surprise in the event.

Daniel Rubino [00:43:22]:
That's the other thing too. Right. Same thing with Samsung. There's so many leaks now that everybody knows.

Leo Laporte [00:43:28]:
Well, that's not true. We know what's.

Daniel Rubino [00:43:29]:
No, we already know the camera away on the new Apple, you know, it's. It's like. Besides, you could also bet on the fact that the phone is going to mostly look like last year's phone every year.

Leo Laporte [00:43:39]:
It's incremental every year, actually. Mark Gurman, who is the Apple King of Apple, rumors at Bloomberg says that Apple's next three years of Apple will be major redesigns. Because they've got a 10th anniversary iPhone in 2027, they're going to do a folding phone in 2026. He expects some big new designs from Apple. And because we were talking at the beginning of the show about the fact that for a long time PC chips were going nowhere, there wasn't that much to talk about. And now there is somewhat, by the way, due to Apple's creating its own silicon, booting intel out of the nest and saying we can do better and actually doing better, which stimulated the whole industry. We're absolutely at that peak phone stage where it's hard to say, you know, what can you do that's new. This is the Samsung Fold.

Leo Laporte [00:44:33]:
It's nice. It's another folding phone from Samsung, the seventh generation. It's thinner, it's nice, but it's all incremental improvements. It's not.

Paris Martineau [00:44:43]:
Yeah.

Daniel Rubino [00:44:44]:
Although I would argue that's the biggest improvement they've done. That's the one that Apple wants to do. Right. So it took Samsung seven times to get to that. But Apple's going to come out the gate with that version.

Leo Laporte [00:44:56]:
Basically that's because they're buying their screens from Samsung.

Daniel Rubino [00:45:00]:
Right?

Leo Laporte [00:45:00]:
They're no fools. There was. So I guess my other problem is that there was stuff that Google was saying that would have been I think of interest, but it kind of got buried in the QVC desk that they had with all of the products kind of thrown out there. For instance, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, a regular on our network, says Google for home is Google's biggest smart home play in years that they're going to put Gemini on Nest smart speakers and displays later this year. You might have heard them mention something about that in the announcements, but it went by so fast you probably didn't pick up on it. Thank goodness JPT did. This is something Amazon said they were going to do with Echo and I was very disappointed with Echo plus A word plus it was not so far behind. Yeah, obviously Apple's way behind too.

Leo Laporte [00:46:01]:
Maybe Google can do it. Their Gemini models are very good. Is it possible that the Google Assistant on the Nest devices, which is going to start in October through an early access program. Maybe. I mean I always thought I. I wish my watch were, you know, I could talk to like chat GPT on my watch. You could actually do it on the new Google Watch that they announced.

Daniel Rubino [00:46:29]:
That's going to actually mention before with Grok, you see that they put into.

Leo Laporte [00:46:33]:
Teslas now that's a very bad idea actually.

Daniel Rubino [00:46:37]:
You know what's fun about it? It's if you're on long road trips and you get into an argument with your spouse over something, you can get to weigh in who's right the argument.

Leo Laporte [00:46:48]:
Do you have a test?

Paris Martineau [00:46:49]:
I'm a terrible person. And then all men are correct.

Leo Laporte [00:46:54]:
Thanks, Annie.

Daniel Rubino [00:46:56]:
I will say that with the AI stuff again like, you know, the focus of course is on the voice stuff and this like agent and don't get me wrong, super interesting. It's kind of cool. But you know what you're pointing out before with Google and some stuff was almost kind of buried. Like you know, the ability to talk to the photos app, right to for editing, like telling it to, you know, remove this. Can you make the shadow brighter? Do like that is where I see AI being really interesting is these edge cases where things are just kind of smarter and doing things. When it comes to smart home, I want to be able to like, you know, like for instance, I do have like an echo shell. Never use it, but I have one say someone approaches the door, right. I want it to detect a Human and then automatically put that onto my Echo show as a live camera.

Daniel Rubino [00:47:44]:
I should, I could, I could ask it. I can go Echo put on my camera and it will. But like I need it to do it proactively. Right, right. So that stuff can be done now. And you're starting to see that. You know, we'll talk later with Microsoft too. They're doing that with Copilot and Windows, but that's where the real story is.

Daniel Rubino [00:48:04]:
And with smartphones, same thing. It's like the designs are there. It's going to be all AI now. It's going to be the NPUs on those and what they can do. But we're still waiting for those kind of killer apps. But I would say what Google was showing was approaching, you know, those kind of killer apps.

Leo Laporte [00:48:20]:
They're getting close. The watch does it. According to the Google keyword blog. Gemini for Home, which again is coming out in the next month, can accurately respond to requests like turn off the lights everywhere except my bedroom. Play that song from this year's summer blockbuster about race cars. Or this one hits home. Because the only thing I use the Echo for is timers. Set a timer for perfectly blanched broccoli.

Leo Laporte [00:48:51]:
See, I don't know what that timer would be, but apparently also where in the blanch.

Paris Martineau [00:48:58]:
I feel like you'd need more information to be able to say, well, it.

Leo Laporte [00:49:01]:
Could ask, frankly it could ask if it wanted to know more. More.

Daniel Rubino [00:49:04]:
The advancements of natural language processing, the ability to.

Leo Laporte [00:49:08]:
Yes.

Daniel Rubino [00:49:09]:
Yeah. The follow ups even in like I use co pilot a lot and I'm. Because I'm always just asking questions and doing research. But it's not that I can just ask it and it spits out the answer. It comes up with interesting follow ups now for me that I didn't think of before. Like I was getting really into the idea of with cops and pulling you over what your rights are and all this kind of stuff and in Massachusetts and like not that I'm planning anything, but I just want to know what my rights are.

Leo Laporte [00:49:37]:
I'm just asking, yeah, like what do.

Daniel Rubino [00:49:39]:
You have to do and what can't. You know? And I asked and it gave me that answer. Then it's like, you know, what do you want me print out a. A little card so you can keep it with you at all times in your car. I was just like, that's a really good idea.

Leo Laporte [00:49:51]:
Beautiful. Yeah.

Daniel Rubino [00:49:53]:
And I didn't think of that. And so I was just like, yeah, actually please go ahead and do that. Like stuff like that. Is where this stuff gets interesting. Right. Same thing with like tv. I want to turn on my TV and I don't want to just have scrollable icons of stuff I may like. I want it to kind of present to me like, hey, this new show is out.

Daniel Rubino [00:50:13]:
It's a really high chance you're going to like it. You know, this kind of stuff. That's where I think this technology is going to be really interesting. But we're just at the edge of it right now.

Leo Laporte [00:50:21]:
You're calling it a glow up for Copilot for Windows 11, a fresh and smarter tools. So that's interesting. So one of the things that there's debate over is whether the chat interface really is the kind of the killer interface for AI. Certainly a lot of what people use AVI for is not chat based things like vibe coding, image creation. Image creation. But is Copilot going to be focused on chat? Is that the.

Daniel Rubino [00:50:58]:
No. I mean, long term, no. Currently, yes. Because they can only do so much in Windows 11. Right. Windows 11 wasn't built to be an AI operating system, but Microsoft has already done through some videos recently hinting that they're working on what you can call probably a Windows 12. We don't know if that's what we're going to call it, but it's going to be an operating system built sort of from the ground up with AI for AI.

Leo Laporte [00:51:22]:
Interesting.

Daniel Rubino [00:51:23]:
Yeah, yeah. But now the Copilot app, it used to be just you open it up and it was basically pretty plain and was like, what do you want to do? And it was a little chat box. Now it has all these modules where it can show you your recent documents. Like, you see the apps there? Those aren't. That's not a launcher per se. What it does is like if I were to click the File Explorer, it would open with Copilot and Copilot can then walk me through things on using the app or doing specific things with Interesting.

Leo Laporte [00:51:51]:
So it looks like a File Explorer, but really it's a guided experience with Copilot.

Daniel Rubino [00:51:57]:
Yeah, it's Copilot Vision they call it. It's, you know, basically sees what you're doing and then you can ask questions, you know. So this will be helpful with Adobe. If you open up Adobe Photoshop, you can be like, hey, I want to do this, but I don't know how to do it in Adobe.

Leo Laporte [00:52:11]:
And Adobe doesn't, doesn't know how to respond to you. But Copilot does and will intermediate with Adobe.

Daniel Rubino [00:52:18]:
Yeah. And they're doing this with and they're doing that with video games too, with Xbox and PC games. So as you're playing a game, if you're stuck, you'll be able to ask copilot in the game.

Leo Laporte [00:52:28]:
That's interesting, basically.

Daniel Rubino [00:52:29]:
And it'll look up and tell you, hey, maybe look to your left and you know, go down.

Paris Martineau [00:52:33]:
Casual behavior. Unfortunately.

Daniel Rubino [00:52:36]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:52:37]:
What. What's that mean? It's casual behavior.

Paris Martineau [00:52:40]:
A casual in gaming terms is you'd be called like a filthy casual. Someone who's perhaps not good at a game.

Leo Laporte [00:52:47]:
Not serious, because you're not really doing what you're supposed to do, which is shoot everything that moves and keep on going.

Paris Martineau [00:52:53]:
Or just figure out how to play the.

Daniel Rubino [00:52:55]:
Figure it out.

Paris Martineau [00:52:55]:
Asking Clippy for it.

Daniel Rubino [00:52:57]:
I'm pretty good. I'm pretty good. But sometimes I do hit walls and I get. I have to go to right now. That's the thing though, I'd have to go to YouTube. You look up, someone absolutely has done a walk through, but it'll be like a 40 minute.

Leo Laporte [00:53:07]:
It makes it easier to cheat is what you're saying.

Daniel Rubino [00:53:09]:
Yeah, well, I mean, in this case, not cheating, but if I want to.

Paris Martineau [00:53:13]:
Tell you what, all the way down.

Leo Laporte [00:53:15]:
Paris is looking at you with real escape.

Paris Martineau [00:53:20]:
I, I look up answers and games, but I go and look through a Reddit forum.

Leo Laporte [00:53:24]:
I do it though hard way. Right.

Daniel Rubino [00:53:28]:
We could tell our kid. Yeah, we used to walk up the hills both times.

Paris Martineau [00:53:31]:
I used to buy the books in the store.

Leo Laporte [00:53:33]:
Whenever I bought the books that I.

Daniel Rubino [00:53:35]:
Could go to those guys, that used.

Leo Laporte [00:53:38]:
To be a very lucrative business to write those.

Daniel Rubino [00:53:42]:
But having this sort of agent that floats around and you can ask it how to do things like edit photos in Photoshop or how do you get past this thing, this video game? It's going to be, I think, a real interesting way of using PCs kind of going forward. I do disagree a little bit with Microsoft and the idea of like a voice forward type system. You know, you'll still be able to use a keyboard, a mouse with whatever.

Leo Laporte [00:54:05]:
Especially at work, people don't want to talk to their computer.

Daniel Rubino [00:54:07]:
Right, right. Yeah. You know, imagine a bunch of people in cubicles all talking to their computers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I don't know how I feel about I like voice, I like having the option for it. But like right now you can do this copilot, the app on PC can do voice and you can say, hey, copilot it. Right. I never use it though.

Daniel Rubino [00:54:26]:
It's so. I don't know about this.

Paris Martineau [00:54:28]:
You're a big Voice AI user Leo. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:54:34]:
Yeah. But what I don't do is what I see some people do, which actually is have like a conversation with AI. I don't. That doesn't make any sense to me at all. But apparently a lot of people do it because I keep seeing stories in the New York Times.

Paris Martineau [00:54:48]:
No, people really do. Lurking in all the OpenAI chat GPT subreddits over the past couple of weeks has made me convinced that there's a significant portion of people that.

Leo Laporte [00:54:58]:
Yeah, when 5 do Paris specialized in mocking people who are missing 4o, I.

Daniel Rubino [00:55:06]:
Mean, right, I heard that.

Paris Martineau [00:55:07]:
Yeah, some part of it is mocking, but some part of it is just also genuine because it makes a bit sad that some people are. What really struck me was when they announced chat GPT5, which for anyone who hasn't been following, they kind of automatically switched all the users over to ChatGPT5 from before you could pick a variety of different models for your query. And people acted as if their like, girlfriend had been murdered in front of them. Like not just died, like been strangled to death by Sam Altman and then like pissed on. Like they, they were losing their minds and were really like, I don't know how I'm going to go on. And I feel for these people that this was such a significant relationship for them that they feel that an upgrade and change in a model is going to affect their lives so drastically. But I almost so somewhat concerned like, that people have developed such a parasocial relationship with a LLM that they are incredibly distraught based on just a model change.

Leo Laporte [00:56:15]:
I wonder if that's the motivation for. And everybody's doing it now. Anthropic announced it, Google announced it. And I see that Microsoft's doing it with a Copilot, the memory feature, where it remembers your previous chats so it can kind of pick up where we left off.

Daniel Rubino [00:56:33]:
Yeah, it's actually even. I've been using that a lot recently with Copilot because it's really interesting. You can tell it specific things and then you say add that to memory and it'll purposely remember whatever request you had.

Leo Laporte [00:56:45]:
So I'm seeing a screen in your article that says, let's get to know each other more.

Daniel Rubino [00:56:50]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

Paris Martineau [00:56:52]:
Our producer makes a good point in the Discord Chat that this memory feature also does make it harder for you to leave for another.

Leo Laporte [00:56:59]:
Oh yeah, it makes it sticky.

Daniel Rubino [00:57:00]:
Oh yeah, the user Totally. Yeah, 100%.

Leo Laporte [00:57:03]:
You know what it does is.

Daniel Rubino [00:57:05]:
Yeah, like it knows now when I do, like I'm very Much into science and health and medicine stuff. So when I look up stuff like that, it knows to do a deeper search. Because right now in Copilot you can choose like different levels of search, you know, so it's like, do you want. Yeah. Do you want to do a surface search that takes five seconds or do you want me to really look at it for like a minute or two? So it knows on the topic of interest for me how deep it should kind of go and how like wordy the answer should be with information. And that's I think really important because right now the issue is when you open the app, you have to choose like right now I can choose quick response, 2 to 3 seconds, think deeper around 30 seconds, deep research, around 10 minutes where they have the new Smart GPT feature, right? So there's four options but like I have to think about that every time I'm going to do a query, which one am I going to do? But like this will now kind of learn how I use it. And you know, if I'm going to ask about a simple movie, it's not going to do a 10 minute research. Right.

Daniel Rubino [00:58:04]:
So.

Leo Laporte [00:58:05]:
So do we know if Microsoft is doing this with OpenAI's models or are they using their own models for this or is it a combination? Do we know how they do have.

Daniel Rubino [00:58:19]:
So they have the new features. A quick response, a smart response which uses GPT5.

Leo Laporte [00:58:24]:
That's fine.

Daniel Rubino [00:58:26]:
Yeah. So they do use OpenAI's like as a scaffold. But Microsoft puts on its own rules for the system. That's different than like you can do more stuff, I would say that's sketchy on OpenAI than you would be able to do on Copilot. There's more guardrails they would call them. So they put on their own system. So people often, I think equate copilot with OpenAI but in chat GPT. But they're not, they are very different.

Daniel Rubino [00:58:54]:
And it's frustrating that I see a lot of people, you know, just say, oh, it's the same thing. It's absolutely not. I like Copilot's interface just because to me it feels a little bit less like, I don't know, like I'm going for like a DOS prompt or something like that. It just feels a little bit more pleasant to use. And I think that's a tough thing to do with these models right now because right now you just have like query window and you don't know what to do.

Leo Laporte [00:59:19]:
We're going to take a little break Daniel Rubino is here, host of the Windows Central podcast, editor in chief at Windows Central. Actually, you. In the most recent show, you talked about agentic AI, which I thought was really, really a good conversation. Really interesting. Was that Bowden also here? Paris Martineau. We talk about AI every Wednesday on Intelligent Machines. And it's very nice to have you on a Sunday back where this is Weekend Paris started. Weekend Paris.

Leo Laporte [00:59:47]:
This time, not balancing a laptop on her knee. She's at her fancy new desk with multiple monitors.

Paris Martineau [00:59:53]:
I got two monitors, I got lights on that may or may not be working. I've got a boom arm that might fall off mid show. It's precarious and beautiful.

Leo Laporte [01:00:04]:
At least you don't have to balance it in your lap. That's. That's the main thing. I'm so happy about that. Good to have you both. Our show today brought to you by ExpressVPN. A few. You know, if you think about it, it seems like an eternity ago, a few decades ago, if you were a private citizen, not somebody like us, but, you know, public people, but private citizens, you were basically that private, right? What's changed? Well, the Internet, for one thing.

Leo Laporte [01:00:34]:
Think about everything you've browsed, you've searched for, you've watched, you tweeted, you chatted about with your favorite chatbot. Now imagine all of that data being crawled, collected and aggregated by data brokers into a permanent public record, your record. We just found out that Xai, if you took, if you shared a chat that you had with Grok with another person, that link suddenly became public and it was being scraped by search engines and clearly becoming part of your record, your record at your favorite data broker. And I hope they're all your favorites because there are at least 500 of them and they're all keeping track of all that stuff. You may not like the idea of having your private life exposed for others to see sometimes. Used to be that was, you know, celebrities had to worry about that, but there were. There was some privacy. Nowadays, everyone's online, everyone's a public figure.

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You do that on ExpressVPN servers. They make sure their servers cannot log you, cannot track you. They use their own trusted server technology. It's been vetted by third parties to make sure it's running in RAM, that they cannot write anything about you onto the hard drive. So as soon as you open that vpn, you're running your own exclusive kind of sandboxed RAM version of the server. And as soon as you close it, it's gone, with no trace left behind. And to make absolutely sure of that, they also run on a custom version of Debian that wipes the hard drive every morning when it reboots. Fresh start every morning.

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Leo Laporte [01:04:27]:
It's actually kind of interesting because we Were talking about Apple and Google. Apple is apparently, according to Bloomberg, Mark Gurman thinking about using Gemini to power its revamped Siri.

Daniel Rubino [01:04:40]:
That is so crazy.

Paris Martineau [01:04:41]:
Well, it's got to be something.

Leo Laporte [01:04:45]:
Apple has lost yet another researcher from their AI division. I don't know what the count is. Five or six now to Meta, coming with that big checkbook, writing those big checks and I really feel like the morale at the Apple AI team must be getting worse and worse.

Daniel Rubino [01:05:02]:
Yeah, I mean it's like they really missed this and we, we Pro, you know, we were kind of promised like, okay, well they're going to catch up. This is Apple. You know, they'll, when it comes out, it'll blow it right away. But this is starting to really feel like a really big miss. Especially because they put everything into Vision Pro. Thought that was going to be, you know, their next big category.

Leo Laporte [01:05:23]:
Can we say that that is finally, can we finally say that that is a flaw dead? Yes.

Daniel Rubino [01:05:28]:
Yeah, I think so.

Leo Laporte [01:05:29]:
Nobody on Mac Break Weekly will admit.

Daniel Rubino [01:05:31]:
It, but I. Oh, no talks about it. There's like no development going on with it. Yeah, amazing hard work. Don't get me wrong. Amazing technology.

Leo Laporte [01:05:40]:
But yes, but nobody wants.

Paris Martineau [01:05:42]:
What are the folks on Mac Break Weekly think is going on with this someday?

Leo Laporte [01:05:48]:
It's one of those, oh no, you know, this is, this is Apple really trying the future and they had to do this. I think maybe they think, like many people think that Google and Meta are doing glasses. Actually one of the things Google said this week is glasses are not on our at least short term radar.

Paris Martineau [01:06:11]:
They're like, we already did that and you guys hated it.

Leo Laporte [01:06:14]:
Yeah, they did. They said that. Although at the last Google Developers Conference a month ago, they showed, showed these glasses. Dieter Bone was wearing them walking around. So I don't. It's unclear. Google is. So anyway, according to Gurman, Apple had talked with Anthropic earlier this year and OpenAI.

Leo Laporte [01:06:34]:
They're still several weeks away from deciding on whether to use internal models for Siri or to have a partner. But apparently the latest is that they are talking to Google.

Paris Martineau [01:06:49]:
What a strange pair.

Leo Laporte [01:06:50]:
It feels. Yeah. Really. Remember when Steve Jobs was suing Google like they were the evil empire.

Daniel Rubino [01:06:57]:
It must have been like when Microsoft went to Google and was like, we're going to make an Android phone. Is that all right? You know, it's like, what?

Leo Laporte [01:07:07]:
Sure, if you want to. Anybody can. You know, I don't know what's going to happen with Apple. I, I think so. Go ahead.

Daniel Rubino [01:07:18]:
I was just gonna say I Think this is just for investors. I think this is gonna really hit Apple hard because investors right now are really for better or worse. You can talk about the bubble, but they're really bullish on AI. And so where companies are leading, you know, getting back to like they're right or wrong, I kind of think they're wrong a little bit. I think I, I understand the point. Like GPT5 is not AGI. Right. We're still very far from this.

Daniel Rubino [01:07:43]:
And it's going to take.

Leo Laporte [01:07:44]:
It was a mistake even to say AGI even.

Daniel Rubino [01:07:47]:
Of course.

Leo Laporte [01:07:47]:
Yeah, yeah.

Daniel Rubino [01:07:48]:
No one even knows.

Paris Martineau [01:07:49]:
But how do you raise all of these, like billions and trillions of dollars?

Leo Laporte [01:07:53]:
Well, you have to, you have to draw the picture.

Daniel Rubino [01:07:57]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:07:57]:
You have to get people excited.

Daniel Rubino [01:08:00]:
So I, I get the idea of like, you know, this won't explode as fast, but it is changing things radically. Yeah. And so the investors are rewarding companies. You know, remember with Google stock when they, they showed Gemini and made a mistake on like their. And their stock died. Right. Now that was, that was ludicrous because we know Google was going to recover and they are right. Gemini is actually pretty impressive and they're doing a really good job with it.

Daniel Rubino [01:08:27]:
And no one should be surprised by that. Like, but. And you have Microsoft who pivoted like rapidly right, to AI and now you have Apple who's kind of missing this thing. And so much of their revenue is dependent on the iPhone. And so I think they're going to start to. Between that, you know, we can talk about later with the manufacturing in India, the challenges there. You know, they have a lot of headwinds going on there that I think it's going to be. I don't know, it might be really interesting to watch Apple next couple quarters.

Leo Laporte [01:08:58]:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, they're going to announce new phones in a couple of weeks, three weeks. They probably have an AI story that goes.

Paris Martineau [01:09:08]:
What would be happening in a couple of weeks?

Leo Laporte [01:09:09]:
Oh, you know, they get a big old report. Yeah. Every Sunday he does this to me. He dumps a bunch of stuff. Sometimes it's interesting, sometimes it's not. We think it's September 9th. We think there'll be a slim iPhone 17. We don't know what the name will be.

Leo Laporte [01:09:29]:
The iPhone Air, some people are calling it that will have only fewer cameras. It won't be as good battery life. It's more a design choice. But it is, I think, widely considered a iterative step in getting to a thin folding phone. Like you have to get this part Samsung.

Daniel Rubino [01:09:49]:
Yeah. I was going to say Samsung did their thin phone. Right. The S25.

Leo Laporte [01:09:53]:
Right. Perhaps that's the dumb step.

Paris Martineau [01:09:55]:
But who's clamoring for the thinner and thinner?

Daniel Rubino [01:09:58]:
It's a weird.

Paris Martineau [01:09:59]:
Is anybody out there being like, I need my laptop thinner. I need my phone to be thinner? They're thin enough.

Leo Laporte [01:10:07]:
People buy iPhones.

Daniel Rubino [01:10:08]:
You're totally right.

Paris Martineau [01:10:09]:
Because it's a thicker iPhone that has some better stuff in it and better battery life that doesn't crap out after a couple of years of using it.

Leo Laporte [01:10:17]:
Right.

Daniel Rubino [01:10:17]:
I think you're absolutely right. But I also think Leo's point was really interesting about getting to the fold.

Paris Martineau [01:10:22]:
Because, I mean, the fold, I guess, makes sense. They're also doing something of a curved iPhone, if I recall correctly. And there's like, some iPhone they're going to be bringing up that maybe has touch ID back, which I do kind.

Leo Laporte [01:10:33]:
Of like as a. I think that's probably next year. They. The. The fold will probably be touch, not face. I don't know. I don't know. We don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:10:45]:
Yeah, these are all rumors, right? There will be, of course, four at least. We think four models of iPhone. Actually, you. You mentioned this, Daniel. Apple says we're going to make them all in India to. To which Foxconn China said, no, not so fast, and has now pulled another tranche of engineers out of India. Apple's trying to replace those engineers with engineers from Taiwan. Foxconn is a Taiwanese company, but of course, it's really about mainland China.

Leo Laporte [01:11:20]:
So there are challenges. And then there's also the issue of tariffs, Indian tariffs, the Chinese tariffs have been put off. And that's why we believe Tim Cook gave a gold bar to the president, as one does. As one does. In the hopes of continuing the deference to the iPhone. There are, as of this time, no tariffs on the iPhone. But that could change at any minute. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:11:47]:
We'll find out. It's a lot of. There's a lot of speculation right now. Let's just put it that way. I don't think there's anything in this year's crop of iPhones that's going to make people go, wow, we didn't expect that, or, wow, that's so much better.

Paris Martineau [01:12:04]:
You really have me thinking and, like, yearning for the old, like, the ye old iPhone cycle of, like, when it would be like, two, three years, and then all of a sudden there would be mysterious Apple event announced. You'd be clamoring like, ooh, what fun treats are we going to get? And there was Something kind of interesting.

Leo Laporte [01:12:21]:
This is what German's saying is going to happen in the next generation. The 26, 27, 28 phones. You've got the 10th anniversary phone.

Paris Martineau [01:12:28]:
The one I think 20th anniversary phone.

Leo Laporte [01:12:31]:
20Th. I'm sorry. Yeah. From 2027. And there is. I did see a rumor that the 2028 iPhone will be clear. That will be. They want to do an all glass kind of.

Leo Laporte [01:12:47]:
I don't know. And that's okay.

Paris Martineau [01:12:49]:
That would be kind of cool. Like those clear MacBooks.

Leo Laporte [01:12:52]:
Listen, I would be into that story because.

Paris Martineau [01:12:57]:
I mean, it's probably gonna cost $4,000 and I won't buy it. But if it was reasonable and also cost and was clear, that could be kind of fun.

Leo Laporte [01:13:07]:
Yeah, I, I don't. You know, these. There's a lot of speculation. Let's see. Let's say, yeah, the iPhone 20.

Daniel Rubino [01:13:19]:
The sad thing is like this event in September should be them getting up on stage talking about AI and.

Leo Laporte [01:13:25]:
But you know, went away and you.

Daniel Rubino [01:13:26]:
Know, like being like. Yeah, and that's what you can't. You know, that's gonna be the big missing thing. As far as the heart, you know, I, I don't worry about them with hardware. They've always done amazing hardware. But lately their software. I've been seeing so much negative stuff about their operating system.

Leo Laporte [01:13:42]:
People don't like this new liquid glass. There's definitely a backlash.

Paris Martineau [01:13:46]:
I'm already stressed about it. I don't need other things going on in my phone. I don't need the background to have kind of a weird little effect always going on that's going to make my phone warmer and the battery shorter.

Leo Laporte [01:14:00]:
And it also reduces contrast. It definitely reduces visibility. Already seeing articles about how. Well, here's what you do. You go to accessibility and you turn off transparency so that you can. You can actually use your.

Daniel Rubino [01:14:13]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [01:14:14]:
Yeah.

Daniel Rubino [01:14:16]:
And wasn't the theory that the reason they did this was because of Vision Pro, because they were trying to build an operating system?

Leo Laporte [01:14:21]:
Yeah. They wanted a unified look across all of their platforms. But it does seem odd that you would try to look more like the one platform that really doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

Daniel Rubino [01:14:32]:
Well, I think they must have started designing this like over a year ago.

Leo Laporte [01:14:36]:
Yeah. Oh yeah, for sure. That's probably what it is.

Paris Martineau [01:14:39]:
Out of sync in the Discord Chat just brought up a great point. Isn't Apple also changing something about how they name the iPhones or at least the operating system where it's an iPhone 20? It's going to be an iPhone 26 or something.

Leo Laporte [01:14:50]:
Or is it system is 26 not the hardware.

Paris Martineau [01:14:53]:
I hate this.

Leo Laporte [01:14:54]:
But Apple could change the hardware too.

Paris Martineau [01:14:56]:
Why do we.

Leo Laporte [01:14:57]:
We don't know what the called. Yeah, it's all 26. They wanted it all. Microsoft's done the same thing. They've. They've kind of willy nilly changed numbering.

Daniel Rubino [01:15:08]:
Samsung did it. DS25.

Leo Laporte [01:15:10]:
They skipped a whole bunch of them. Yeah.

Daniel Rubino [01:15:12]:
Yep. So now we're at the 25 for 26. I don't like the 25.

Paris Martineau [01:15:16]:
It makes me upset and I don't know, I can't articulate for a young person.

Leo Laporte [01:15:20]:
You're such an older old person.

Paris Martineau [01:15:21]:
Just why be so dumb about naming things? Why? If you're like Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave. I quinoa filled grave.

Daniel Rubino [01:15:34]:
It's gonna be weird to say iPhone 30 someday. Yeah.

Paris Martineau [01:15:38]:
Yeah. I don't want to get any closer to that dystopian universe that I live.

Leo Laporte [01:15:43]:
To see that day.

Daniel Rubino [01:15:45]:
Yeah, seriously, at the rate things are going, it might not happen.

Paris Martineau [01:15:49]:
We'll bring it into your your. Into your retirement home.

Leo Laporte [01:15:52]:
Bring it to the retirement.

Paris Martineau [01:15:53]:
The iPhone 3 Leo.

Leo Laporte [01:15:55]:
It's the 30. What is it? It's a phone. Oh, it's solid gold.

Daniel Rubino [01:16:01]:
Because King Trump dictated. Yeah, all iPhones.

Leo Laporte [01:16:05]:
The king has announced that all phones should for here on after be golden. So Mississippi got Supreme Court approval for their age law and already backlash. Besides the fact that teenagers in Mississippi are now learning how to use VPNs, Blue sky said, you know what, we're going to block use of Blue sky in Mississippi because we just can't afford to implement that technology.

Paris Martineau [01:16:40]:
I mean, yeah, Blue sky is a small.

Daniel Rubino [01:16:42]:
Tens of customers.

Leo Laporte [01:16:43]:
Tens of customers.

Paris Martineau [01:16:44]:
Yeah, they're a small.

Leo Laporte [01:16:46]:
Blue sky would have to verify every user's age and obtain parental consent for anyone under 18. According to the new Mississippi law, the potential penalties for non compliance are up to $10,000 a user. They say besides the fact that it presents significant limits on free speech, it disproportionately hurts smaller platforms like my Mastodon instance. I'm thinking, should I block everybody in Mississippi? I'm not going to, but. But maybe I'll regret that. To comply, Blue sky would have to collect and store sensitive information from all its users. Right. Because you have to prove everybody's age in addition to the detailed tracking of minors.

Leo Laporte [01:17:28]:
So they said, we're a small team, we can't do it and if you try to use it in Mississippi, it'll block you.

Paris Martineau [01:17:38]:
I mean, I think we're going to start seeing Things like this happen at more and more sites.

Leo Laporte [01:17:42]:
Yeah. And more and more states because Mississippi's. Now that the Supreme Court gave them the go ahead, it's just a matter of time before Texas and Florida's similar laws will go into effect. And this is going to be a cascade.

Daniel Rubino [01:17:53]:
This just gets into this weird thing that it's. Because we all tacitly know social media is pretty terrible and it's really terrible for kids.

Leo Laporte [01:18:00]:
It is terrible. It's terrible for adults, too. It's terrible.

Daniel Rubino [01:18:03]:
Yeah. And it's like, you know, like there's all those studies and, you know, states and cities are now banning phones and classrooms and they're like, it's a complete change. The kids are way better now, you know, and it's just like, we all know this would happen. And so I understand why states would want to do this, but obviously it's a lot different than saying like, you need to ID to buy alcohol. Right. That's, yeah. Simple.

Leo Laporte [01:18:27]:
It's very different.

Daniel Rubino [01:18:27]:
But this is very hard. So I don't know what the answer is. By totally, I don't side with. I understand why parents, teachers, states would try to implement this. I just don't know it's the right solution. But we got to figure something out. I mean, the other thing is just people just get tired of social media and stop using it.

Leo Laporte [01:18:50]:
But that wouldn't be so bad as far as I'm concerned. But can we just go back to.

Daniel Rubino [01:18:55]:
Twitter when it was 2009?

Leo Laporte [01:18:58]:
What's wrong with text messaging your friends? That's what I want to know. Of course, there's a similar law in the uk and that was another place where teenagers have become very adept at using VPNs. 4chan, which I thought was gone but apparently has resurfaced, has told the BBC they're not going to pay the daily online safety fines. Come and get us. UK Ofcom, the British online regulator, has decided to pose a 20,000 pound fine with daily penalties thereafter for as long as 4chan fails to comply with its request to block miners. 4chan says we broke no laws in the US. Actually, it's 4chan's lawyer, so my client will not pay any penalty. Interesting.

Leo Laporte [01:19:55]:
We'll see what happens there. Because they say we are a US company incorporated in the us, we're protected against UK law.

Paris Martineau [01:20:05]:
Huh?

Daniel Rubino [01:20:06]:
Yeah. I mean, again, it gets into just all sorts of weird stuff with how do you enforce this? How would you do collection? Right. It's like, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:20:15]:
Huh. We'll see. That'll be. That'll be very interesting. Let's take a little break. More to come. You're watching this Week in Tech. We are one hour away from the starship test flight.

Leo Laporte [01:20:27]:
Their tenth test flight hasn't gone so well, the last three. But if we're still doing the show, which I think we will in an hour, we will cut away and watch starship take off. This is the largest rocket I think the humans have ever launched, bigger than the Saturn V that went to the moon. This is going to be the launch vehicle for flights to the moon and beyond.

Paris Martineau [01:20:50]:
As the wise poet Nicki Minaj once said, starships were meant to fly hands up and touch the sky.

Leo Laporte [01:20:59]:
Can we all sing a rousing chorus of that? Not now. One hour.

Paris Martineau [01:21:03]:
One hour from now. Set your timers, folks.

Leo Laporte [01:21:07]:
Our show today. Thank you. Paris Marno is here. You can tell, right? As well as Daniel Rubino. Great to have both of you on this special cozy version of this week in tech. Our show today, brought to you by this little. This little guy on my desk right here. This is a thin canary.

Leo Laporte [01:21:26]:
Look, it's about the size of a external USB drive. In fact, that's what it looks like sitting on a shelf in your office. You can see there's an ethernet connection and power. Oh, but it is so much better. This thinks canary on my desktop looks like a little USB drive. Actually, if you were a bad guy had penetrated my network, you'd think it was a 2019 Windows server. 2019 what? How could that be? Well, that's what's so cool about this Thinx canary. It's a honeypot that can pose as almost anything.

Leo Laporte [01:22:02]:
And it's as easy to set up as just go into the console where I am right now. You know, you really want to get attacked. Say you're Microsoft SharePoint 2010. How about that? Or a SCADA device or a Linux server or a Cisco adaptive security appliance. That's the point of this. And by the way, it's a perfect impersonation. Using Mac address that belongs to the manufacturer and on and on and on. This is brilliant.

Leo Laporte [01:22:30]:
I won't change this one. Right now we're going to leave it as that 2019 server because I do want to show you one other thing you can do with a Thinx Canary. You can create canary tokens. These are files. You can create an unlimited number of them and scatter them around. And these can be almost anything. In fact, they can literally be a credit card, an Azure login certificate, a Word document, an Excel spreadsheet. It could Be an Acrobat PDF.

Leo Laporte [01:22:56]:
You can name them provocative names like employee information, and then put them anywhere, even in the cloud. I have a few of these on my Google Drive, for instance. Now, here's the beauty of this. If somebody tries to log into that Windows Server 2019 or open one of these PDF files, I'm going to be alerted immediately. There's somebody inside your network. You know you have a problem. No false alerts, just the alerts that matter. It's that easy.

Leo Laporte [01:23:26]:
You choose a profile for your ThinkScanary device. You register it with a hosted console for monitoring and notifications. And by the way, you can get notifications any way you like. If you sms, text message, email, Slack. It supports webhooks, it supports syslog. There's an API if you wanted to write your own. Anything you want. But you're only going to get alerted when an attacker who's breached your network or a malicious insider starts probing around, makes themselves known by accessing that Thinks Canary or those Canary tokens.

Leo Laporte [01:24:00]:
It's really cool. You might have perimeter defenses, you might have the best setup ever. But how do you know if there's somebody inside your network snooping around? That's why you need every network needs a Thinks Canary. Visit Canary Tools twit for just $7,500 a year, you'll get five things Canaries, your own hosted console, upgrades, support and maintenance. And if you use the code Twit in the how did you hear about us Boxer? Get 10% off that price for life. You can always return your Thinks Canaries with their two month money back guarantee for a full refund. However, during all the years Twit has partnered with ThinksCanary, their refund guarantee has never been claimed. Visit Canary Tools Twit and enter the code Twit in the how did you hear about us Box.

Leo Laporte [01:24:47]:
You need this. Everybody needs it. I love our thanks to Canaries Canary Tools Twit. We thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. Now I think Daniel, you're a. I remember you're. Are you a Premier League fan? Las Ligas. You're a footballer, right?

Daniel Rubino [01:25:07]:
Well, I used to play soccer, but not.

Leo Laporte [01:25:10]:
Not a fan.

Daniel Rubino [01:25:11]:
No, we have the New England revolution, so I follow them sometimes here.

Leo Laporte [01:25:14]:
I'm just curious. I need somebody who likes sports. Paris, you're not really a big sports fanny, are you?

Paris Martineau [01:25:20]:
I've never seen a sport in my life.

Leo Laporte [01:25:23]:
Well, this is the week that both ESPN and Fox announced streaming apps, by the way, not cheap streaming apps. So that for the first time you don't have to have a cable subscription to watch these.

Paris Martineau [01:25:38]:
That's huge.

Leo Laporte [01:25:39]:
Direct consumers. It is huge. When I worked at TechTV. Now, admittedly, that's 25 years ago, cable companies were really leery about us putting any content on the web. They were terrified. And they said, if you want to be on cable, you cannot have an app. You cannot be on the web. They said you could put up to 10 minutes of a show on the web.

Leo Laporte [01:25:59]:
That's it. They've relaxed since then, but it's still the feeling of cable companies. You know, we spend a lot of money on espn. If you are going to compete with us directly with a streaming app, we're going to. I don't know what we're going to do. We're not going to be happy. But ESPN and Fox both clearly feel like now's the time. They have launched Direct to consumer Services, all the sports rights that are currently available to their cable customers.

Leo Laporte [01:26:29]:
What's interesting is you'll be able to get the two services together starting early next month. And the reason I want to know if either of you are a sports fan is because I want to know if this price is right. 40 bucks a month.

Daniel Rubino [01:26:41]:
I mean, yeah, if it's unlimited, sure it is.

Leo Laporte [01:26:45]:
Yeah.

Daniel Rubino [01:26:46]:
I was going to say, like actually back in the day I used to watch ufc, but that was before ESPN and even before Fox.

Leo Laporte [01:26:53]:
Now Paramount has it. All right, Paramount plus.

Daniel Rubino [01:26:57]:
Yeah, but they had their own app and you would do pay per view through it and stuff. I remember it was great because I could travel. I remember watching in Germany. I'd watch paper.

Leo Laporte [01:27:06]:
That's what you want, isn't it?

Daniel Rubino [01:27:08]:
Yeah, yeah. And it was just like, sure, it was a small screen, but I was traveling and so I. Where am I going to watch this? Right? But that was like many years ago. Then, of course, yeah, went to Fox and then ESPN and you know, all that went away, so. But now it's going to Paramount, so maybe they can. Now the pay per views are going away, so maybe it's all going to be.

Leo Laporte [01:27:29]:
And this is the. I think this is where people get upset is you're going to have all these subscriptions to see the stuff that you want to see. Sure.

Paris Martineau [01:27:37]:
Cosmic discord for ESPN. 20 bucks for one of the other services, 10 bucks for another. It is basically cable cost more because.

Leo Laporte [01:27:47]:
You don't forget you still have to get your Internet right, 50, 60 bucks a month. So in the long run, what we thought was going to save us money has not saved US Money, but you.

Daniel Rubino [01:27:58]:
Can argue has other advantages.

Leo Laporte [01:28:00]:
At least Cosbrick says ESPN now stands for Everybody start paying now.

Daniel Rubino [01:28:06]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:28:08]:
What does espn, ESPN stand for? I don't, I don't know. They acquired the NFL Network, although the NFL got a chunk, I think 10% kind of the. We're going to call that the Trump 10 got the 10% of the, of the streaming thing. ESPN has made a minority investment in the Premier Lacrosse League. Fox wants the Big Ten Network. They have a 61% stake in that college football. It's. I think at some point you're gonna.

Leo Laporte [01:28:43]:
If you want to watch sports on tv, you're gonna have to pay for a streamer. Apple apparently is losing interest in Major League Baseball. The latest rumor is they will not attempt to renew their Friday night Baseball and they will give up on that. Why?

Paris Martineau [01:29:01]:
Why was Apple ever the home of Friday Night baseball?

Leo Laporte [01:29:05]:
Let me explain, let me explain. So there, you know, most. They call this linear, right. Whether it's cable or broadcast. Linear television, where you tune in a time and watch it. Most linear television only succeeds with live events and really primarily live sports. Maybe you could include the Oscars in that, a few other live events. But live sports is still a big money maker.

Leo Laporte [01:29:30]:
And so the theory was, the streamers theory was we get more. If we can get live sports on our streaming network network that's gonna.

Paris Martineau [01:29:38]:
Forgot that Apple TV existed. That's, that's, that's the problem.

Leo Laporte [01:29:43]:
Right.

Paris Martineau [01:29:43]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:29:44]:
Unfortunately, baseball and, and they also own Major League Soccer. Wasn't probably enough to get you to remember that Apple TV exist.

Daniel Rubino [01:29:52]:
And Netflix does this too, right? They.

Leo Laporte [01:29:53]:
Yeah, they are. They're doing wrestling now and football. NFL football. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Amazon bought Thursday Night Football. This is part, I think this is part of the inevitable transition from linear broadcasting, cable to streaming for everything. Right. It's all going to be on streaming.

Daniel Rubino [01:30:13]:
And doesn't Apple want to get F1, which is one reason why people are saying that they did the movie.

Leo Laporte [01:30:19]:
Yeah. There's some question of whether it'll be worth it because remember one of the. You're an F1 fan, I think.

Daniel Rubino [01:30:24]:
Yeah, Yeah. I watch on cable.

Leo Laporte [01:30:26]:
Yeah. But it all happens in the middle of the night, US time. Right. Not all of it. Most of it. So it isn't. People in the US don't watch Formula one live, right?

Daniel Rubino [01:30:40]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:30:41]:
So it's not. So it doesn't have the same strength. Anyway. This will be, this will be interesting. This is just one more brick in the wall for, for broadcast and, and cable and one More step forward for over the top. That's. That's. That's what they call this because it comes in over your Internet.

Leo Laporte [01:31:03]:
Over the top.

Paris Martineau [01:31:04]:
Over.

Daniel Rubino [01:31:05]:
What happens. What happens to, like, YouTube TV, which is basically like a. I use YouTube TV, but it's basically.

Leo Laporte [01:31:11]:
I do too. It's a. It's actually a great success.

Daniel Rubino [01:31:15]:
Yeah, yeah. But, like, if everything transitions away, I don't know, like, is AMC going to continue?

Leo Laporte [01:31:21]:
Well, one of the things you notice with YouTube TV is they've started to add subscriptions to HBO and other.

Daniel Rubino [01:31:27]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:31:27]:
Content companies. Right. I think they want to be your cable company. Over the top cable company, basically. But you're right. What happens if locals. Will locals die? Will you lose broadcast tv? People still want local news, right? Or. Or maybe not.

Paris Martineau [01:31:43]:
Anybody out there subscribing for local news? Probably not.

Daniel Rubino [01:31:46]:
Probably not.

Leo Laporte [01:31:47]:
But that's why people get YouTube TV is because we want TV local and. But we also want our local stations. Right?

Daniel Rubino [01:31:54]:
Yeah. I'll say, though, it is cool that there are, like, dedicated channels that will just show, like, the Brady Bunch 24 hours a day.

Leo Laporte [01:32:04]:
Like, thank God for the 25th century. We can watch some Brady Bunch at any time of the day or night. Or Petticoat Junction.

Daniel Rubino [01:32:12]:
Or there's like, Family ties is on 24 hours on one channel. Like, they have old game shows that are on all the network.

Leo Laporte [01:32:21]:
Yeah, yeah.

Daniel Rubino [01:32:22]:
It is, like, fascinating that you can, like, just watch all that stuff. We're. We're actually AMC right now has Mad Men. They're amc. I forgot. What. They have, like, a separate AMC channel and they're showing mad men. Yeah.

Daniel Rubino [01:32:35]:
24 hours a day. So we start rewatching it.

Leo Laporte [01:32:37]:
This is what I don't understand is, don't you want to. To watch it in sequence? Like episode one, episode two?

Daniel Rubino [01:32:43]:
Think.

Leo Laporte [01:32:44]:
Apparently not.

Daniel Rubino [01:32:44]:
No.

Paris Martineau [01:32:45]:
You think. But then you get decision paralysis. There was something beautiful about the time where you just had cable tv.

Leo Laporte [01:32:50]:
Yeah. Whatever is on.

Paris Martineau [01:32:52]:
You could be like, ah, cocoon. But I'm 30 minutes late to the.

Leo Laporte [01:32:57]:
Start of the beginning. But I've seen it 80 times, so I know what's going on.

Paris Martineau [01:33:01]:
But it's fun to be thrown in the middle of it.

Leo Laporte [01:33:03]:
Wasn't it you who said you like the Criterion Channel has. I do.

Paris Martineau [01:33:07]:
Like, Criterion Channel has a live. Like, oh, that's. You can just take whatever's on watch. Whenever I'm sick and I don't. I never wanted to decide what to watch. I just turn on the Criterion Channel live stream and maybe it'll be good I mean, I could see what's streaming right now.

Leo Laporte [01:33:23]:
I made a note of that for when I'm in the home, because that's definitely what's happening. My mom.

Daniel Rubino [01:33:28]:
It's funny to watch right now.

Paris Martineau [01:33:30]:
Love Unto Waste is play.

Leo Laporte [01:33:32]:
How do you know? Do you. Is there a way?

Paris Martineau [01:33:34]:
I just searched. Yeah, it is. What's on now. Criterion channel.com. but what the thing, the reason why I know this is because if you click on the Criterion Channel, their live thing, it doesn't tell you what's on. It's just a movie play.

Leo Laporte [01:33:49]:
Just on. Right?

Paris Martineau [01:33:50]:
It's just on.

Leo Laporte [01:33:51]:
There's no info bar or something, but.

Paris Martineau [01:33:53]:
It'S a 1986 romance mystery.

Leo Laporte [01:33:56]:
See, I really think everybody should add that X ray feature that Amazon prime has where.

Paris Martineau [01:34:01]:
Yeah, no, I don't want any information. I want to be just thrown into the movie.

Daniel Rubino [01:34:06]:
Oh, yeah. But it. Well, I. I get it also, because a lot of people just go on their phones. I'll be doing that. I'll be watching Shelby, like, slowly lift a phone up to look up who that person is all the time.

Leo Laporte [01:34:17]:
But see, I'm watching with my wife. And so she says, he was in. I said, no, he wasn't. Yeah, he was in. No. Who is that? And so we need this information if probably, if you're just watching what the.

Paris Martineau [01:34:32]:
Solution to this is to have such bad memory when it comes to people's faces and people are names that anybody will be like, oh, that person was in something. And I'm like, sounds likely.

Leo Laporte [01:34:45]:
Sometimes you see it and you go, I know who that. Who is that? Where did I see them?

Paris Martineau [01:34:50]:
That has never happened to me.

Leo Laporte [01:34:51]:
Does it happen to you? Wow.

Paris Martineau [01:34:53]:
I mean, there's some times where I'm like, yeah, I maybe know this person, but I'm not going to be able to guess where they're from or what I've seen them in, because I don't recall faces and names like that.

Leo Laporte [01:35:03]:
We were watching Hunt. Hunting Wives, which is terrible show on Netflix, but it's. It's.

Paris Martineau [01:35:11]:
Can we have a moment? Is someone hunting the wives?

Leo Laporte [01:35:14]:
The wives are hunting others.

Paris Martineau [01:35:17]:
Other wives?

Leo Laporte [01:35:18]:
Yeah, they're all. It's. It takes place in Texas and they're all packed in heat and there's a lot of gun.

Paris Martineau [01:35:25]:
Continue.

Leo Laporte [01:35:26]:
There's a lot of gunplay, but the star of it, it looked really familiar. And I'm thinking, where have I seen her before? Where have I seen her before? And of course, she was. She had a small part in billions. She was. She was ax's wife in billions. And then it clicked and I go, oh yeah. And then, then we can go on and watch the show. But see, otherwise it's going to bug me.

Leo Laporte [01:35:46]:
Doesn't happen.

Daniel Rubino [01:35:47]:
So to tie it all back, wasn't Samsung with their new smart TVs. Don't they have like AI built in? Like, I think you can pause the channel now.

Leo Laporte [01:35:55]:
Now that maybe that's what I need.

Daniel Rubino [01:35:58]:
Maybe that's like, which, yeah, that makes sense too.

Leo Laporte [01:36:01]:
It's Samsung. I mean, they're good TVs, they make great panels. The worst software drives me.

Paris Martineau [01:36:08]:
Truly, it is driving.

Daniel Rubino [01:36:10]:
Do you like LG? Do you like LGs?

Leo Laporte [01:36:12]:
I have an LG and that's web TV. You know, they, they both WebOS. All of them though are trying to monetize you by showing you ads and it's just annoying as hell. You bought, you bought a nice Samsung tv, didn't you, Paris? You got a really nice TV right here.

Paris Martineau [01:36:29]:
It's giant. On your recommendation, I decided to get. I was buying my first TV in a decade and I was like, well this is January. And I was like, tariffs are going to come soon. Might as well splurge. I got a very nice 65 inch QD OLED or whatever.

Leo Laporte [01:36:44]:
Whatever the good QD OLED is what I told you to get.

Paris Martineau [01:36:46]:
Beautiful screen, fantastic. But it's my first smart TV ever and it's driving me up the wall because I have like 75 remotes now because I've got an Apple TV thingy, I've got a Blu Ray box and then, then I'll turn one of them on. I'll navigate to the labyrinthian menus to get watching my content. And then a pop up will come where it's like Samsung's updated Terms of Service.

Leo Laporte [01:37:10]:
Please click. That drives me crazy.

Paris Martineau [01:37:12]:
But it won't go away unless you find the Samsung remote and then like read something and I'm just like, I.

Leo Laporte [01:37:18]:
Live in hell now. My Apple tv. And I'm sure there's a way to turn this off, but I'm watching a movie and it pops up. A little thing. The Giants just scored in the bottom of the night. You better. That drives me nuts. I'm not watching the Giants game.

Leo Laporte [01:37:34]:
I don't want to. What makes you think I would stop in the middle of this movie to go watch a baseball game? Anyway, I'm sorry you got us.

Daniel Rubino [01:37:46]:
Didn't mean to open up the bag of worms, guys.

Leo Laporte [01:37:48]:
You got us wound up a little bit.

Daniel Rubino [01:37:50]:
Yeah, I guess.

Leo Laporte [01:37:52]:
Are you excited, Paris? That waymo is coming to the Big Apple.

Paris Martineau [01:37:57]:
I'm interested to see how that will work because as someone who's driven in New York City, a fair amount for someone who doesn't own a car. It's not for the faint of heart.

Leo Laporte [01:38:08]:
Or the faint of I can't wait.

Daniel Rubino [01:38:10]:
Till it's spray painted.

Leo Laporte [01:38:12]:
Oh, can you imagine? They're gonna get burned and trashed.

Daniel Rubino [01:38:16]:
Although if the rumor has it, Trump is going to put some military soldiers on the street. So maybe not.

Leo Laporte [01:38:22]:
In fact, kids, be nice because you don't want the National Guard in your town. You really don't. So please be nice to the way Mos don't give the government any excuse to put the military in your town.

Daniel Rubino [01:38:39]:
Just going back in time and explaining to people like, how's 2025? It's like, well, we're starting to get self driving cars finally. But we have the military on the streets.

Paris Martineau [01:38:50]:
People keep burning them.

Leo Laporte [01:38:52]:
They kept burning them. So they said in the National Guard.

Paris Martineau [01:38:55]:
We'Re starting to get self driving cars, but when you try to use one, you'll find out that it actually costs double what it would cost to call a Lyft or an Uber and it will take twice as long to get to you.

Leo Laporte [01:39:05]:
So, you know, and people, somebody saying in our twitch chat, Chesticles McGee. Probably not his real name. I can't believe they allow cars in New York City.

Paris Martineau [01:39:17]:
I that's a great point, Chesticles McGee. I concur.

Daniel Rubino [01:39:22]:
I mean they try to tax people coming in. Right?

Leo Laporte [01:39:25]:
Right.

Paris Martineau [01:39:29]:
It is still going.

Leo Laporte [01:39:31]:
Yeah.

Paris Martineau [01:39:31]:
It is a. It's congestion pricing and it is specifically if you were entering into a certain area of Manhattan where there's incredibly high congestion. It was supposed to be a 15 fee. Now I think it's like 9 or $10.

Leo Laporte [01:39:43]:
It's not that expensive.

Paris Martineau [01:39:44]:
I mean it's not that adds up.

Leo Laporte [01:39:46]:
It's $80 to park, so you might as well pay the $10 to get in the park.

Paris Martineau [01:39:52]:
I mean, you also could just go park your car anywhere else in New York City that isn't below whatever it is, 35th street and then take the subway or a taxi or something else.

Leo Laporte [01:40:07]:
Jammer B says the title of this show should be Chesticle McGee has great points. Moving on. Anyway, no Waymo and now announced it's going to test driverless cars. Got permission to test them in New York City. There will be safety drivers. Doesn't mean that you'll be able to hail them yet. But wasn't this a problem when Uber came to Manhattan? That it suddenly became very Congested with all these extra vehicles.

Paris Martineau [01:40:36]:
Well, I will say anytime I'm out in the city, you can see when cars are rideshare or like for hire because the license. License plates will have it start with a T in the background. And like, almost every car I see is.

Leo Laporte [01:40:50]:
Yeah.

Paris Martineau [01:40:51]:
But I'm. I don't know, maybe this is me being naive, but I'm interested to see how Waymo will fare because truly driving here is not for the fan. Like, the first couple times I rented a car and drove friends out of the city for like a little trip upstate. Like, there were multiple periods of everyone screaming at the time. Stressful in. In fright.

Leo Laporte [01:41:12]:
It is very stressful. I've done it too, and it's extremely stressful. Have you?

Paris Martineau [01:41:17]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:41:18]:
Daniel, you're in Massachusetts.

Daniel Rubino [01:41:21]:
New York.

Leo Laporte [01:41:22]:
The only thing worse than driving New York maybe is driving in Boston.

Daniel Rubino [01:41:26]:
Yeah. Yeah. Boston's pretty nuts.

Paris Martineau [01:41:28]:
But it's like a different worse. Like I feel like the bad when New York City is like chaos all the time from 27 different things. And then Boston, it's just like three to five terrible aggressors.

Leo Laporte [01:41:39]:
The streets are one way and tiny.

Daniel Rubino [01:41:42]:
Super confusing.

Leo Laporte [01:41:43]:
It's a. Yeah.

Daniel Rubino [01:41:43]:
I used. I lived in Boston when, before it was Google Maps and I used to work in movie theaters as a union projectionist. And so I'd get sent places and it took me hours. Oh, it was an awesome job. But I'd get sent to theaters and I'd be like. It would take me an hour to find because it was. Boston's just so. The way it's organized.

Daniel Rubino [01:42:02]:
And if you go on Staro Drive and you're. You have a truck. There's a famous thing with storrow drive where trucks go on it and they're not supposed to, and there's a tunnel that they can't go through.

Leo Laporte [01:42:13]:
They stop.

Paris Martineau [01:42:16]:
Or they hit themselves and clip off the top.

Daniel Rubino [01:42:19]:
Yeah. It's called getting storrowed. It's like. Because it happens literally all the time.

Leo Laporte [01:42:25]:
You got staroed again.

Daniel Rubino [01:42:27]:
I used to ride a motorcycle in New York City and I found that way less stressful, actually.

Leo Laporte [01:42:32]:
Yeah. Because you can. You can go around stuff.

Daniel Rubino [01:42:34]:
You can. And plus you could see above everybody. It was actually really nice.

Leo Laporte [01:42:38]:
So you know what's happening. Whereas everybody in their cars doesn't have any idea. That's why in all the movies, they jump out of the car and they start yelling. And then it's worse because that car's not moving. Suddenly it's. What a mess. I know. I've seen It.

Leo Laporte [01:42:51]:
In the movies. So tell me about this projectionist. I did not know about this. This was like your first job out of school or what?

Daniel Rubino [01:42:58]:
Yeah, I started in high school, did it for 17 years. Boston, upstate New York.

Leo Laporte [01:43:04]:
Is that still a job or does. Nobody shoots? Nobody. There's no projectors anymore.

Daniel Rubino [01:43:08]:
I ran the first digital projector on the East Coast. It was up in Albany, Massachusetts. That was in. Oh, my God. That was 1999.

Leo Laporte [01:43:18]:
That's when the movies came on hard drives or.

Daniel Rubino [01:43:21]:
Yeah, yeah, they would come and eventually satellite. We had a satellite that you could download installed. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it was supposed to take over film within like three years. That was George Lucas's vision. But it did take a lot longer than that, so. But it did finally happen. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:43:40]:
Did you see it coming? See, this is a really good. This is a great test tube for people who are about, you know, in jobs that are about to get replaced. You were. You were. You would have big reels of film, right. You'd have to put on the projector and then you'd have to watch for the. What, the dots? Know when to start the next. Or was that automatic?

Daniel Rubino [01:44:00]:
That's the real old school. I used to do that too, at a art cinema. Yeah. You had two projectors side by side and you had to watch and you had to manually change them over because.

Leo Laporte [01:44:09]:
They would have three dots and then. Dot, dot. Yeah, but then they would do it automatically.

Daniel Rubino [01:44:15]:
Yeah, well, because I used to run those studio prints. So these were right. From like Warner Brothers or something. It was their only copy. So you're not allowed to cut it. It. So you had to run it reel to reel. But newer movies were printed and then you would cut them and you just.

Daniel Rubino [01:44:29]:
So a typical movie might be five to six reels, and you would splice all the reels together into one giant reel and laid on its side on these things called platters. And it was.

Leo Laporte [01:44:39]:
That's how they do an IMAX when you have the 70 millimeter, they have Giant.

Daniel Rubino [01:44:43]:
It looks like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's weird to be a projectionist doing 35 to go to 70 because it's so massive. Very heavy.

Leo Laporte [01:44:51]:
Heavy.

Daniel Rubino [01:44:51]:
It's a fun job. It was very stressful, though, because.

Leo Laporte [01:44:54]:
So this is my question. You were there at the end of that, basically, of that technology.

Daniel Rubino [01:45:00]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:45:01]:
Did you go, oh, you know, we only have a few years left? Or what? Were people going up, freaking out, or was everybody going, ah, it'll never happen?

Daniel Rubino [01:45:10]:
It was a little bit of both. But we also knew the movie industry and the cinema business was very different because companies like Regal and stuff don't own their property where they build those theaters. So they, they lease it, they build the building out, it's all in loans and then they get all the projectors in there and stuff. And they don't make much money from showing movies. They make the money off of concessions.

Leo Laporte [01:45:35]:
It's all popcorn.

Daniel Rubino [01:45:35]:
Yeah, yeah. So they're already paying off all this film equipment. They're paying the lease and all this kind of stuff. And now digital comes in and it's like you got to replace all your projectors with, you know, digital, these new hundred thousand dollar devices that may be, you know, outdated in a couple years. Right. And so there had to be a, for a while like Texas Instruments would subsidize this. So they had their deal, the DLP projectors.

Leo Laporte [01:46:02]:
Yeah.

Daniel Rubino [01:46:02]:
They would give them to cinemas for like three years for free or take. And then they would start taking percentage off of ticket sales and all this kind of stuff. So it really did take a long time because they had to. To retrofit all these old cinemas and it's a lot of work and, and things were happening. Right. I'm sure everybody remembers we went from like six or seven cinemas to 19 plexes and 24 plexes. It was just like they couldn't build enough of them. They chopped and now they're all, it's all going back down again.

Daniel Rubino [01:46:29]:
So it was, it's a very. Yeah, so it was a tough industry.

Leo Laporte [01:46:33]:
Was there a point where you said I better get another career because this is not going to last?

Daniel Rubino [01:46:40]:
I knew it was happening, but none of my career choices ever been necessarily planned. Like I wasn't supposed to be doing this, you know, so it just, things just happened. But we all saw the writing on the wall.

Leo Laporte [01:46:54]:
So. Yeah, wow. We have to do a show with you and just talk about the projectionist days.

Daniel Rubino [01:47:00]:
Oh, I have so many stories.

Leo Laporte [01:47:01]:
Can you, Is there a little hole in the wall that you can watch the movie?

Daniel Rubino [01:47:04]:
Yeah, I have a bunch of photos of my Flickr. I used to try to document the. Because I knew it was dying. So I would like, you know, try to like take like I was getting to photography at the time, so I tried to document it all before it was all gone.

Leo Laporte [01:47:17]:
Well, good on you. That's awesome.

Paris Martineau [01:47:19]:
I mean. And now like a world where like boutique films, like not boutique, but films like Alamo Drafthouse Hat is a film that is 11 miles long, 600 pounds for IMAX 70 millimeter film. The only people that are. Are doing this sort of like, they.

Leo Laporte [01:47:38]:
Had to make new platters that were big enough to hold.

Paris Martineau [01:47:41]:
And then it's like, how do you find the person who's going to be doing that job? Because no one's doing it when you're not showing Oppenheimer.

Daniel Rubino [01:47:47]:
Right, right. They had to pull a bunch of projectionists out of retirement because no one knew how to operate that stuff. I had a projector in Boston that was a German one, and it's the only one I've ever seen. It was massive, and if you turned the gear the wrong way, it broke the whole. Whole thing. Like, it would take, like, months to fix it. So, like, managers were not allowed to even, like, look at the thing because it was. And it was so risky.

Daniel Rubino [01:48:08]:
Every time you ran it, it was just like, oh, my God, you know.

Leo Laporte [01:48:10]:
I got to bring a union guy in here. You can't touch that. I'm sorry. It's true. Sorry. All right, I'm on your. I'm on your Flickr. I'm gonna have to go way, way back in time, I think, to get to the.

Leo Laporte [01:48:22]:
Oh, there's a platter. Yeah, there's a platter. Yeah, look at that.

Daniel Rubino [01:48:26]:
So they feed out from the center, unlike.

Leo Laporte [01:48:29]:
Oh, that's interesting. Oh, I see. There it is. That's where it's coming out. Yeah, yeah.

Daniel Rubino [01:48:33]:
So it's called the brain, and there is a little arm there that, like, times the spinning of the platter and the film coming out. But, yeah, something goes wrong. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:48:44]:
Wow, wow, wow. Well, I'm gonna have to go through all your. Your good photographer, too. I love these pictures, but thanks.

Daniel Rubino [01:48:52]:
I haven't done that a long time, unfortunately.

Leo Laporte [01:48:54]:
This is booth number one.

Daniel Rubino [01:48:57]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:48:57]:
Look at that.

Daniel Rubino [01:48:58]:
The sentry projector.

Leo Laporte [01:48:59]:
Yeah, that looks like an antique.

Daniel Rubino [01:49:02]:
Yeah, that design was around for a really long time. It was awesome to work on. It's a great projector.

Leo Laporte [01:49:07]:
Does this say Western Electric on it? Is that what it says? Holy moly.

Daniel Rubino [01:49:12]:
And back in the day, like, so you can see the Xeon light behind it.

Leo Laporte [01:49:16]:
Yeah.

Daniel Rubino [01:49:16]:
But back in the day, they had carbon arc and stuff. And film used to be extremely flammable. Yeah, no, it's flammable. And so, yeah, so they built. The boots were basically metal cylinders, and projectors, like, died if they were massive. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:49:32]:
It's really loud, too, right? It's very loud in there.

Daniel Rubino [01:49:35]:
Yeah. Yeah. If you look up nitrate. Nitrate film on YouTube, you can see people lighting it, how dangerous it was.

Leo Laporte [01:49:40]:
Oh, yeah.

Daniel Rubino [01:49:41]:
It's just. It wouldn't just go out.

Leo Laporte [01:49:43]:
Chris Markward, our photo guy, we did a photo segment a while ago. He said in Germany they still made ping pong balls for many years after of out of nitride. And they would. You could light them on fire.

Daniel Rubino [01:49:54]:
That's crazy.

Leo Laporte [01:49:55]:
There's a little bit of trivia just, just for you. All right, well, Daniel, so interesting. I. I don't know how I know. Didn't know about that. I'm going to have to probe more. Next time you're on, we'll talk more about projection. When was it? When, when did you stop doing? Do you ever go back like as a honorary projectionist? Like what?

Daniel Rubino [01:50:14]:
Nah, the last time I was. Yeah, it was 2013, 2014 ago.

Leo Laporte [01:50:22]:
Yeah.

Daniel Rubino [01:50:23]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:50:23]:
So how cool do you think you.

Paris Martineau [01:50:26]:
Could make it work if you were trapped in a projectionist room?

Daniel Rubino [01:50:29]:
Oh yeah.

Paris Martineau [01:50:29]:
The only way out was to have a movie go off without any hitches.

Daniel Rubino [01:50:33]:
I literally have PTSD dreams of it because like I, I would run like an 18 plex and I'll be the only projectionist. It'll be on four different floors and I'd do it for like 15 hours. And then something went wrong, like something didn't start. An alarm would go off. We used to do crazy things. They do a thing called interlock. You take the movie would run from one platter into the projector but instead of going back to the platter to rewind, it would go down the hall, around the corner to a different projector. So you can play one movie in two cinemas at the same time.

Daniel Rubino [01:51:09]:
It was like nuts. Every time we had like we were sweating bullets. Every time we're. Could you. We're gonna interlock and it's like. Oh God.

Leo Laporte [01:51:17]:
Oh my God.

Daniel Rubino [01:51:18]:
Yeah. There's like so much history and stuff around that stuff. It's great. It was a fun. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:51:23]:
Fascinating. You're watching this week in tech or this week in projection technology?

Daniel Rubino [01:51:29]:
Old tech.

Leo Laporte [01:51:31]:
Old tech. Daniel Rubino is here. Paris Martino. Glad you're here. More to come in just a moment but first a word from a sponsor. Smarty. I had a great call with these guys. I was so impressed.

Leo Laporte [01:51:42]:
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Leo Laporte [01:55:02]:
Some of you sharp eyed people perhaps noticed that I wear one of these smart rings. This is an aura ring. In fact we had the founders of Aura on our old show the new screensavers, when they first came out many years ago, they were an advertiser later and they're now. I think this is the fourth or fifth generation ring and I've been a user ever since. It's really valuable, but there's a lot of competition. Aura went to the United States International Trade Commission trying to stop the competition and have succeeded against Ultra Human and ringcon for patent infringement related to the Aura ring form factor. The ITC issued exclusion and cease and desist orders banning all Ultra Human and ringcon smart rings and components from being imported and sold into the United States. You know, Superhuman looked pretty cool.

Leo Laporte [01:55:59]:
I was very tempted and maybe you've seen all of the, you know, comparative reviews. I stuck with Aura and I guess I'm glad to.

Daniel Rubino [01:56:10]:
I like Aura. I've had Aura since the first one. I didn't get the fourth, but I did get the third and a fewer. And from the beginning, they grandfathered you into their pay plan.

Leo Laporte [01:56:21]:
Yeah, that was nice. Yeah. Because otherwise, what is it, five bucks? It's not hugely expensive, but I. And I use it for sleep. I use it for temperature. You know, the other day it said, you know, be careful, you might be getting sick. Your temperature has gone up a degree over the last few days. And it's true.

Leo Laporte [01:56:38]:
I was starting to. Starting something, come down with something. Little things like that. I got it. Well, I got it when they were on the show. But then when Covid happened, I thought, this is going to be really useful.

Paris Martineau [01:56:50]:
Of using an Aura ring over like a smartwatch.

Daniel Rubino [01:56:54]:
It's convenient. So one thing I really liked about it was digital detox, basically. I don't.

Leo Laporte [01:57:01]:
Yeah, you're not looking at the screen.

Daniel Rubino [01:57:02]:
Yeah, yeah. It doesn't vibrate. I don't get notifications, but it does your steps, it does your sleep, it does your body temperature, does all these other things. So it's a really great way to kind of get those features without it. Plus, if the battery lasts like five, six days on it, you don't have to recharge it every night. I also like to wear mechanical watches. So I sometimes choosing between, you know, figures.

Leo Laporte [01:57:26]:
You're a projectionist and you wear a mechanical watch, obviously.

Paris Martineau [01:57:31]:
How do you charge it? It has a little mat or does it have a little post you have to plug something into?

Leo Laporte [01:57:36]:
No, it has a little post. It goes on. Yeah.

Daniel Rubino [01:57:38]:
It's amazing, like how much there's a.

Leo Laporte [01:57:41]:
Lot of technology in this little light, little thing. It lights up. That's the only bad thing in the middle of the night. Like my finger. Yeah. You can see it's blinking right now.

Daniel Rubino [01:57:51]:
It's crazy.

Leo Laporte [01:57:52]:
The other advantage of it is it's better to measure on the finger some things like pulse and body temperature than it is. It's a little bit. Has to be projected on the wrist but here it's a little bit more closer to the source, I guess.

Paris Martineau [01:58:07]:
How do you find the accuracy of the data? Somebody who. I recently started wearing my Apple watch again after like taking a couple of years off and I've been enjoying it for the sleep tracking and other stuff. But I have found a weird side effect is every once in a while it will register me as sleeping when I'm here working from. From like.

Leo Laporte [01:58:26]:
Well, that might be a comment on your work habits, young lady.

Paris Martineau [01:58:30]:
I guess. But I'm typing.

Leo Laporte [01:58:33]:
I have not had that problem like.

Paris Martineau [01:58:35]:
Three or four times and I've gone and people in the forums have similar issues.

Leo Laporte [01:58:39]:
I. Or go ahead.

Daniel Rubino [01:58:41]:
I was just gonna say Aura's gotten really good to detecting when you take a nap.

Leo Laporte [01:58:44]:
Yeah. Was that an app? Yeah.

Daniel Rubino [01:58:47]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:58:47]:
It just didn't.

Daniel Rubino [01:58:48]:
Yeah. Because.

Leo Laporte [01:58:48]:
Yeah.

Daniel Rubino [01:58:49]:
Yep. I. I will say it's interesting too that Samsung wasn't named in that.

Leo Laporte [01:58:54]:
Interesting.

Daniel Rubino [01:58:55]:
Has a ring.

Leo Laporte [01:58:56]:
Yeah.

Daniel Rubino [01:58:56]:
So they must have engineered all around Aura's patents, which is the correct way to do it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:59:03]:
Apparently Ultra Human. A claim by claim. This is from the ITC's document Long List of Infringements. ITC ruled that all of Aura's patent claims were valid. And a claim by claim analysis found both Ultra Human and ringcon's products infringe every element of every asserted claim of Aura's patent threatened. ORA was the only participant to bring forward a credible witness. Ultra Human was specifically called out for having falsified evidence of a manufacturing facility in Texas. Not a good thing.

Leo Laporte [01:59:39]:
So a big victory for Aura. And they were the first of these.

Daniel Rubino [01:59:46]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:59:47]:
Samsung, yeah. They do a ring and they were not mentioned in this suit. Interestingly, Google has, among other things, they said we're not going to do a tablet, we're not going to do glasses and we're not going to do a ring. So don't get your hopes up.

Daniel Rubino [02:00:02]:
So I think I'm actually glad for Aura too because there weren't a few. They were just a small tech company, they're out of Sweden or something.

Leo Laporte [02:00:11]:
Yeah.

Daniel Rubino [02:00:13]:
And like, you know, usually these stories go a company invents something and then they get swallowed up. Apple buys them, Google, someone else buys them. Right. And. Or they jack up their prices and they did have to do a subscription. People got mad about that, but they needed some source of recurring revenue. But they've really stayed their, like, independent roots since they started. Yeah, I think that's kind of really.

Daniel Rubino [02:00:34]:
It reminds me of kind of like Spotify. Spotify has kind of resisted, you know, all that kind of stuff, too.

Leo Laporte [02:00:40]:
They. And they're also always enhancing it. They just added an AI feature. I could take a picture of a meal, and it will tell me what's in the meal and the calories. It ties in with my continuous glucose monitor. In fact, it can make recommendations based on my blood glucose, my heart rate, my temperature. I think that there is. We're not there quite yet, but there is a growing body of stuff for this quantified self that I think we're getting close.

Leo Laporte [02:01:06]:
Maybe the Apple watch, as it gets closer to continuous glucose and so forth, where you really get a good picture. My doctor wears an aura ring, and that kind of encouraged me when I saw that he wears it.

Daniel Rubino [02:01:21]:
And also, Paris, another good point is that especially with apple health, aura can sink into it.

Leo Laporte [02:01:27]:
Oh, yeah. It totally ties into it. Yeah.

Daniel Rubino [02:01:30]:
Yeah. Because, like, I loved wearing youra ring, but not the Apple watch, so. But when I would go to the gym, I hated wearing the Oura ring because it doesn't feel great when you're picking up weights. So I'd wear the Apple watch.

Paris Martineau [02:01:40]:
It's also very dangerous to wear a ring when you're picking up weights.

Leo Laporte [02:01:44]:
Oh, is that true?

Daniel Rubino [02:01:44]:
Yeah, yeah.

Paris Martineau [02:01:46]:
It's like one of the main, like, ways that people have, like, degloving. It's like a real. It's like a real.

Leo Laporte [02:01:52]:
Is that. Is that what it sounds like, Degloving?

Paris Martineau [02:01:55]:
Yes.

Daniel Rubino [02:01:56]:
Yeah, that's what you should.

Leo Laporte [02:01:57]:
Oh, I don't want to look it up.

Paris Martineau [02:01:59]:
Do not. Don't look it up.

Leo Laporte [02:02:00]:
But do you wear weight gloves to protect against degloving?

Daniel Rubino [02:02:04]:
You could.

Paris Martineau [02:02:05]:
No, you should just don't wear a ring when you're.

Leo Laporte [02:02:07]:
Well, I won't never.

Paris Martineau [02:02:08]:
Like, that's. It's just a very basic safety thing that everybody should do.

Leo Laporte [02:02:13]:
That's when I charge. My aura is when I'm doing the weights. I just put that on the charger there. And that's usually 15, 20 minutes a day or half an hour a day is enough to charge it.

Daniel Rubino [02:02:21]:
Yeah, yeah. In the shower, too.

Leo Laporte [02:02:23]:
Yeah, in the shower. Okay. So we didn't want to turn this into an ad for aura, but we're apparently happy now. It didn't go quite as well in court for T Mobile. T Mobile thought it was okay to sell your location information without your consent. The judge said, no, it is not and we're going to find you. $92 million. The FCC last year fined T Mobile, AT&T and Verizon, saying they illegally shared access to customers location information without consent.

Leo Laporte [02:03:04]:
The three carriers, of course, immediately appealed. This is the first of those decisions was handed. Handed down. On Friday, the U.S. court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled unanimously against T Mobile and Sprint. The ruling says every cell phone is a tracking device. To receive service, a cell phone must periodically connect with the nearest tower and a wireless carrier's network. Each time it does, it sends the carrier a record of the phone's location and by extension, the location of the customer who owns it.

Leo Laporte [02:03:34]:
Over time, this information becomes an exhaustive history of a customer's whereabouts and provides an intimate window into that person's life. And apparently the carriers at&t, t mobile and Verizon thought no problem selling that information along. No problem. Brendan Carr, who is now the chairman of the sec, by the way, when this fine was first proposed in 2020, voted against it. So it may not be completely over for T Mobile. They could in fact appeal or ask the Supreme Court to review. And I could see them maybe going to Brendan Carr and saying, hey, Brendan, come on, man. Come on, man.

Leo Laporte [02:04:24]:
Who are they selling it to? Data brokers, of course. Who else were they selling it to?

Daniel Rubino [02:04:31]:
None of this is surprising.

Leo Laporte [02:04:32]:
Yeah, yeah.

Daniel Rubino [02:04:34]:
Disappointing, but not surprising.

Leo Laporte [02:04:41]:
Anyway, I think that's. That's a victory. I'm going to say that's a victory. Now we got a cautionary tale if you and I know many of our listeners work as developers in a variety of companies, and perhaps they have contemplated at one point or another setting a little time bomb should they get fired. Just a little kill switch, a little present for management should they get fired. Davis Liu worked for Eaton Paper and in fact put malicious code designed to crash its servers in the event he was fired. He was fired and they deactivated his credentials. And he had an active directory.

Leo Laporte [02:05:32]:
A little, a little, A little function. Is DL enabled in AD? If DL is not enabled in AD, well, kill the servers. The incident, according to TechCrunch, locked thousands of employees out from the company's systems. The Justice Department prosecuted the case. Actually, it's not Eaton Paper. It's a power tech company. Eaton, they make, they make ups's and stuff, right? He got caught because his Internet search history included searches researching, quote, methods to escalate privileges, hide processes and rapidly delete Files.

Daniel Rubino [02:06:16]:
Plus it's tied to his account and.

Leo Laporte [02:06:18]:
It was called Is DL enabled in ad. I think that might be a little bit of a gig away.

Paris Martineau [02:06:23]:
Sorry. I'm going to come in with breaking news from SpaceX. On Twitter, they just tweeted Standing down from today's 10th flight ship to allow time to troubleshoot an issue with ground systems.

Leo Laporte [02:06:34]:
Okay, 39 minutes out. If you are my age, which neither of you are, thank goodness, you will remember watching Walter Cronkite on TV during launches of the Apollo and Mercury and Gemini mission in which they would have these scrubs or these delays and poor old Walter would have to sit there for hours with models and he said, well, here's the Apollo spacecraft and we brought in another astronaut to explain. And it would just go on and on and on. They ended up earning the nickname Old Iron Pants. Cause he could, man, he could sit for hours. So there is nobody I'm sure at SpaceX worthy of doing that, but they have paused. Okay, thank you for that. I'll finish the story.

Leo Laporte [02:07:27]:
Because Davis Lou was convicted and this is the cautionary tale.

Daniel Rubino [02:07:32]:
Four years.

Leo Laporte [02:07:33]:
Yeah, he's been sentenced to four years in the. In the slammer.

Daniel Rubino [02:07:38]:
That seems like a long time. Like, like, I get it, they're trying to send a message and all that, but. But I mean, they wanted to send a message as a deterrent. Yeah, that seems like a pretty. Four years in the slammer.

Paris Martineau [02:07:53]:
Slammer for doing a strange thing within your company before you got fired.

Leo Laporte [02:07:59]:
Really? Does that seem extreme?

Paris Martineau [02:08:02]:
I mean, we know about how this country.

Leo Laporte [02:08:07]:
It's not like he stole anything. Yeah.

Paris Martineau [02:08:10]:
Wow.

Daniel Rubino [02:08:10]:
God.

Paris Martineau [02:08:11]:
There was another example like this perhaps with like a website company like WordPress three or four years ago. I'll think of it in a minute. But there have been other high profile examples of decisions coming down hard on defendants who. Yeah, I guess hack inside of a company's.

Leo Laporte [02:08:35]:
I don't know if he was prosecuted under the cfa, but that is a brutal. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Is it?

Paris Martineau [02:08:41]:
Is, yeah, that's exactly what I'm thinking of. It is interesting comparing this to typical prosecutions of white collar crime, just to say the least.

Daniel Rubino [02:08:48]:
Yeah, yeah, that's. I agree.

Leo Laporte [02:08:50]:
Well, anyway, don't do it because hard.

Daniel Rubino [02:08:55]:
Times don't tie it to your name and account.

Leo Laporte [02:08:59]:
Is DL still enabled on active directory? Is he. Is he. Okay, then keep, keep, keep, keep operating. He probably thought he was really clever. So you've heard, of course, that we're still waiting for Judge Mehta's decision in the Google Antitrust case. At some point he will announce the penalties. Among penalties being considered is the sale of Chrome which has prompted a lot of people to come forward. Perplexity, he said we'll buy it.

Leo Laporte [02:09:29]:
The latest is Ecosia, which is that non profit eco friendly search engine. How do you say it? Ecosia. Ecosia. They, they have, they have said we'll, we'll take over Chrome but we're not going to pay a penny. I do think that perplexity offered like $32 billion. So there's a but. But the judge may be persuaded because Ecosia does not want to operate it for profit. They want to, they want to transform it into a foundation, which seems to me the only way you could do this.

Leo Laporte [02:10:08]:
Really?

Daniel Rubino [02:10:09]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:10:10]:
They would devote 60% of the profits earned toward climate and environmental projects, which is what they do anyway. The other 40% would go back to Google. I don't know if the judge will like that. Ecosia is projecting chrome will generate $1 trillion over the next 10 years. So there's a lot of money.

Paris Martineau [02:10:32]:
Just a casual trillion.

Leo Laporte [02:10:34]:
Holy cow. No wonder Perplexity wants to buy it. I don't know. I mean it is interesting to see advertising I guess. I don't know.

Paris Martineau [02:10:44]:
But just Chrome, isn't it Google advertising?

Leo Laporte [02:10:48]:
Well see that's interesting. If Chrome is not part of Google, that revenue disappears, doesn't it? Because it's.

Paris Martineau [02:10:56]:
I don't know but, but the revenue you're like, the advertising is from like Google search or on websites. It's not Chrome exclusive.

Leo Laporte [02:11:09]:
Yeah, but doesn't that get a percentage or.

Paris Martineau [02:11:12]:
I don't know, I don't know.

Leo Laporte [02:11:13]:
I don't know. That's a good point. Yeah, apparently Google has a revenue sharing relationship with Ecosia, so maybe that's what it's based on because their search engine is powered by Google.

Daniel Rubino [02:11:28]:
Hear me out. Monthly subscription fee for your browser.

Leo Laporte [02:11:34]:
I pay for Kagi, I pay for a Google search replacement. Oh well, by the way, as long as we're talking about that, you know that Perplexity created an agentic browser called Comet which isn't free. I mean it is free but you have to be a Perplexity Pro user. Actually right now you have to be a Perplexity like high end plus user. But I was able to get an invite and I think you have to be a paying user of Perplexity. Well, don't use it is really the bottom line.

Paris Martineau [02:12:11]:
Why?

Leo Laporte [02:12:11]:
Because there is a massive zero day in the Comet browser that would allow a malicious site get ready to take over your Browser, go through your browser information and history and for instance, buy things online with your credit card.

Daniel Rubino [02:12:33]:
Wow. Yeah.

Paris Martineau [02:12:34]:
So the agent is.

Leo Laporte [02:12:36]:
Because it's gentle. Yeah, yeah.

Paris Martineau [02:12:39]:
The call is coming from inside the house.

Leo Laporte [02:12:41]:
Yeah. So Guardio, which develops browser extensions to protect against these kinds of things, revealed that agentic AI browsers are vulnerable to phishing, prompt injection and purchasing from fake shops. In one test, Guardio asked Comet to buy an Apple Watch while on a fake Walmart site that they had created using Lovable, the Vibe coding service. Comet went in there and used your credit card to buy, didn't confirm the legitimacy of the site, navigated to checkout auto, filled the data for the credit card address, completed the purchase without asking for human confirmation. They did the same thing. They crafted a fake Wells Fargo email from a Proton mail address linking to a phishing page. Comet said, oh, yeah, logged in. Yep.

Leo Laporte [02:13:30]:
Right away. Yes, sir.

Paris Martineau [02:13:32]:
Coming up.

Leo Laporte [02:13:33]:
Yeah, so I think maybe don't use Comet. I'm sure Perplexity will fix this.

Paris Martineau [02:13:44]:
How was your experience using it before this?

Leo Laporte [02:13:46]:
I don't like it. Well, I never have used an agentic browser because I. For this very reason. It makes me very nervous. Very nervous.

Paris Martineau [02:13:55]:
Loved every aspect of AI.

Leo Laporte [02:13:58]:
Not. Not the one where it takes your credit card and buys stuff.

Paris Martineau [02:14:01]:
No, you're like, I've got that under lock already with taking ambient and using TikTok shop.

Leo Laporte [02:14:07]:
Yeah. Brave, which is a competing browser by the way, did similar testing on Comments browser and found that they could do prompt injection in Perplexity's comment, which meant you could turn it into some sort of evil, evil AI browser as well. So I like Brave.

Daniel Rubino [02:14:31]:
Brave does some really cool stuff as far as browsers go.

Leo Laporte [02:14:34]:
Yeah, I don't think they have an agentic browser to compete with this. There are other companies that are like the arc, the browser company. The folks who do ARC have dia, which I think is planned to be agentic if it isn't already. Brave created a Reddit post with a comment containing prompt injection instructions hidden behind a spoiler tag. You know how you can make it blanked out on Reddit? The user clicks the comment browser's summarize the current web page button. While processing the page for summarization, the comment AI assistant sees and processes the hidden instructions which told it to navigate to the Perplexity account, extract the user's email address, log in with that email address, get the one time password from Perplexity, navigate to Gmail where the user's already logged in and receive the one time password, then exfiltrate the email address and one time password by replying to the original Reddit comment all lickety split without any intervention from the user. Again, I think this is probably time to not use Comet till perplexity fixes that. Yikes.

Leo Laporte [02:15:52]:
That's. That's two different things. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of money in these zero days. There are a couple of companies. Zerodium is one that pay for zero days and then sell them on sometimes they. Who? Well, depends. Some of these guys are good and they will go to the company that has the zero day and say hey, here's a zero day. Give us the the bug bounty because you're going to fix it.

Leo Laporte [02:16:26]:
But some of them collect them and then sell them onto nation states. There's a lot more money in the ladder. A new United Arab Emirates startup is offering $20 million for a hacking tool or tools that could help governments break into smartphones with a text message. It's called Advanced Security Solutions. Maybe it should be called Advanced Insecurity Solutions. It's offering the some of the highest prices in the whole zero day market. That's how valuable these are to governments that want to hack the phones of dissidents, opponents and others. So $15 million for zero days for Android devices and iPhones, $10 million for Windows, $5 million for Chrome, $1 million for Safari and Edge just shows you what's where the value is.

Leo Laporte [02:17:25]:
The $20 million goes to a zero click attack on any mobile operating system. The company says we quote, we empower government agencies, intelligence services and law enforcement to operate with precision in the digital battlefield. You can make good bucks creating zero days. All right, we got a few more stories. We're running out of time. It's been a long show. Paris is balancing her laptop on her knees. No, she's not.

Leo Laporte [02:18:01]:
You. You stopped doing that. Okay, good.

Paris Martineau [02:18:04]:
The ethernet cable is stretched. The max is. Was it no longer.

Leo Laporte [02:18:09]:
Not. Not anymore.

Paris Martineau [02:18:10]:
You actually now I have a classic 40 foot long ethernet cable.

Leo Laporte [02:18:14]:
Oh, you don't have a plug there. You just. Where does that go? You're in an apartment.

Paris Martineau [02:18:19]:
I'm in an apartment. It goes to the place.

Leo Laporte [02:18:22]:
Does it go to the movie theater.

Paris Martineau [02:18:24]:
Next door where there's no they. In order to install Verizon fios in my building, have to like connect something to the telephone pole behind my house that then runs cables down the wall, up my building into my wall, and then there's a box where the cables come out and one of the cables goes to power my router modem or something and the other one is a ethernet cable that I run across my apartment to this very computer.

Leo Laporte [02:18:50]:
Well, that's why you have such a good connection. As long as the pigeon doesn't land on it, you're. You're good.

Paris Martineau [02:18:56]:
We're good. Well, it was messed up during that one freak storm in New York City about a month ago.

Leo Laporte [02:19:01]:
That's right.

Paris Martineau [02:19:01]:
Where two different trees fell in my backyard and took out all of the Internet for the three houses near me. Not ideal.

Leo Laporte [02:19:10]:
Yeah. Just checking. Let me just see how my sleep was last night. Oh, I got. You know, I love on the Oura ring, they give you a little crown when you have a good night's sleep.

Daniel Rubino [02:19:20]:
They give you.

Paris Martineau [02:19:21]:
They've gamified sleep.

Leo Laporte [02:19:23]:
Yeah.

Daniel Rubino [02:19:26]:
Samsung has. It does little confetti balloons and stuff like that when you reach your goals.

Leo Laporte [02:19:31]:
I love that. Gamified.

Paris Martineau [02:19:33]:
I slept for 10 hours and three minutes last night.

Leo Laporte [02:19:36]:
Well, as I have learned, it's not the length of time you spend in bed. It's the quality.

Paris Martineau [02:19:40]:
It's the crown you receive.

Leo Laporte [02:19:42]:
It's the crown you receive. Let me see how many hours. Yeah, see I, I was, I was 10 hours and 17 minutes in bed, but I only slept seven hours and eight minutes of that for 10 hours. I won't mention what I was doing the rest of the. No, I like, I like. So look.

Daniel Rubino [02:20:02]:
Oh, you read and watch a tv.

Leo Laporte [02:20:03]:
Yeah, I don't have a TV in my bedroom, but I do love to read. There's nothing like it. And that's why our sponsor today is Helix Sleep. Because. How about that? Because you spend more time on your mattress than just asleep. Horizontal movie nights with your partner. Right. Morning cuddles with your kitty cat gizmo.

Leo Laporte [02:20:25]:
Right. Your wind down ritual after the long days. My favorite thing, Curl up with the Kobo. I got a good book and I love to read. I might read for hours in bed. I just love it. And your mattress is the center of it all. It's supporting you through all of this.

Leo Laporte [02:20:41]:
But if it's a bad mattress, an old mattress, a mattress that isn't right for you, you may not have such a great experience. Maybe you're waking up in puddles of sweat. I hate that. Or your back is killing you because the mattress is sagging like that. Or you feel every toss and turn your partner makes. It's a classic mattress nightmare. Now, one thing it's very important to know. Your mattress isn't going to last forever.

Leo Laporte [02:21:06]:
Mattresses need to be replaced between six and 10 years. Every six and 10 years. Because they wear, they sag, they go bad. And maybe you're experiencing that right now. Maybe you've put up with this mattress for far too long. I want to point you to helixsleep.com TWIT OMG Helix sleep changes everything. Forget the night sweats. Oh, we got this topper that's this cool topper.

Leo Laporte [02:21:31]:
It's like, it's so nice. No back pain because it's not sagging. No motion transfer. For a long time on our old mattress, the cat would jump on the bed. Every once in a while, I'd jump on the bed. I'd sit up straight up and say, earthquake. But no, it wasn't an earthquake. It was just a kitty cat.

Leo Laporte [02:21:48]:
No more of that. Get the deep sleep you deserve. Get the little crown on your sleep log. One buyer recently reviewed the Helix Sleep, gave him five stars. Said, I love my Helix mattress. I will never sleep on anything else. Honestly, it was the reviews that put me over the top. We were looking for a mattress.

Leo Laporte [02:22:10]:
We knew it was about eight years. It was time for a new one. And then I started to see the awards time and time again. Helix Sleep remains the most awarded mattress brand. Wired magazine gave Helix Sleep their best mattress for 2025, period. Your best mattress, Good Housekeeping, the Bedding Awards 2025 premium plus size support, which is good because I'm not a lightweight. I, I, you put some weight on that mattress. GQ gave it their Sleep Awards 2025 Best Hybrid Mattress New York Times Wire Cutter Award 2025 featured for Plus Size.

Leo Laporte [02:22:49]:
Oprah's Daily Sleep Award Awards for 2025 Best Hotel like feel. Now I think that that should be qualified because some hotels, you don't want to sleep on that mattress because it's a lot of years old. But you go to a nice hotel, a really good place like the one that Qualcomm is going to put you up in Hawaii, that nice luxury hotel. You go, this is what I want. This is how I want at home. This is nice. That's what I'm talking about. Oprah's Daily Sleep Awards 2025 Best hotel like feel.

Leo Laporte [02:23:23]:
Go to helixsleep.com twit Great time to go right now. 27% off site wide during the Labor Day sale. It's their best of web offer. That's helixsleep.com twit for 27% off sitewide. That's exclusively for our listeners this week in tech. And I have to tell you, this offer ends September 8, 2025. Make sure you enter our show Name after checkout so they know we sent you. That helps us A.

Leo Laporte [02:23:50]:
And if you're listening after the sale ends, don't worry. There's great deals all the time. Check them out. Helixsleep.com TWIT. You are gonna love it. I do? Our kitty cat does. My wife does. We love our Helix sleep.

Paris Martineau [02:24:10]:
Speaking of kitty cats.

Leo Laporte [02:24:12]:
Yes? Is Gizmo here? Oh, hello, Gizmo. Oh, she's the reverse of our Rosie. Our Rosie's mostly black with a little white bib. Yours looks like Bat Cat. She's a white cat with a Batman cowl.

Paris Martineau [02:24:28]:
She also wants to show butt on.

Leo Laporte [02:24:30]:
Camera all the time. Catanus. No, Katanis.

Paris Martineau [02:24:34]:
This is a show for children. Children can watch this show, Gizmo.

Leo Laporte [02:24:41]:
Hey, children can watch Mark Rober on Netflix. Soon he's getting a Netflix series. This is good. Who? He's the NASA engineer who did remember those glitter bombs for porch pirates that he did.

Paris Martineau [02:24:57]:
Only through this show. That's my only I've seen you've showed me that on Twitch before.

Leo Laporte [02:25:04]:
He has 70 million subscribers. So you're one of the few. You're one of the few. Did I show you? I think I did. On intelligent Machines. The thing he did with the crow. The escape room for crows.

Paris Martineau [02:25:17]:
Oh, you did show me that. That was cool. That was funny. Good for you.

Leo Laporte [02:25:21]:
Yes, yes. He puts a lot of effort, time, and creativity into his stuff. Netflix says he will bring some of his most beloved, ambitious and informative experiments to Netflix later this year. A competition show that I don't like. This is. This is what, Mr. Beast?

Paris Martineau [02:25:41]:
What if it's a crow competition show?

Leo Laporte [02:25:43]:
If it's crows, that's different.

Paris Martineau [02:25:46]:
Immediately, I'm in.

Leo Laporte [02:25:47]:
It's. You could tell. I mean, you can.

Paris Martineau [02:25:49]:
So Beast queens would like massages? I was trying to think of. I was trying to think of a prize for crows and, like, do kitty cats like massages? Have you not seen one of the best videos on the Internet, which is. Is about cat massage? You have seen this, Leo?

Leo Laporte [02:26:04]:
No. Is it on Tick Tock?

Paris Martineau [02:26:07]:
This is like an old, popular YouTube video.

Leo Laporte [02:26:11]:
Well, I guess I'm gonna look it up. Daniel, you have a kitty cat. Yes.

Paris Martineau [02:26:14]:
Cat massage. YouTube. So your cat wants them.

Leo Laporte [02:26:17]:
You have three cats. They all have different personalities, too, don't they? That's one of the things I found out about cats.

Daniel Rubino [02:26:24]:
Well, two. Two of them are bonded sisters, so they're almost exactly, exactly alike. And they look alike. And they're both tuxedo cats. But to take one in tomorrow to get her teeth cleaned you know how much that costs?

Leo Laporte [02:26:34]:
That's the worst. But you, you know what, how much it would cost if you did it.

Paris Martineau [02:26:39]:
I will say with urgent care, you.

Leo Laporte [02:26:42]:
Know how much that would cost.

Paris Martineau [02:26:43]:
All it takes is from. When they're a kitten, you get them used to brushing their teeth. And now Gizmo lets me brush your teeth.

Daniel Rubino [02:26:49]:
I didn't know that was a thing though. I had cats before dating it. They were fine. These cats are only like four or five years old, but they have like the two.

Paris Martineau [02:26:57]:
Well, you've got to have a generalized anxiety disorder. And then you'd know from the minute you got the cats the two most.

Leo Laporte [02:27:03]:
Is this the one you're talking about?

Paris Martineau [02:27:05]:
No, I put it in the. I put it in the Discord Chat. That's close though. The two most common ways that cats die are tooth related dental disease or kidney failure. So you need to make sure your cats and you brush their. Your teeth.

Leo Laporte [02:27:19]:
Oh, I have never brushed my cat's teeth and I have no intention to.

Daniel Rubino [02:27:25]:
So I. I learned you can put basically sea kelp, dried sea kelp in the foods.

Leo Laporte [02:27:31]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have. They call greenies. Yeah, yeah.

Daniel Rubino [02:27:35]:
The iodine helps keep the plaque off their teeth and there's also a liquid you can put in their water.

Leo Laporte [02:27:40]:
So this is the video. So your cat wants a massage.

Paris Martineau [02:27:43]:
Yes. And you need to.

Leo Laporte [02:27:44]:
This looks like it's from the 80s.

Paris Martineau [02:27:46]:
It is. This is why I'm shocked you.

Leo Laporte [02:27:49]:
Was this a TV show? Oh my God.

Paris Martineau [02:27:53]:
There's great sound to it that can't be copywritten. It's got to have seen on proud bodybuilders.

Daniel Rubino [02:27:59]:
This is a really groovy move. Belly Rama.

Leo Laporte [02:28:05]:
This was a VHS tape at one point.

Paris Martineau [02:28:08]:
It had to be. I know nothing.

Leo Laporte [02:28:10]:
Right next to Jane Fonda's workout kitty cat massage.

Paris Martineau [02:28:14]:
It's fantastic.

Daniel Rubino [02:28:15]:
I'd really recommend using your left and vice versa.

Paris Martineau [02:28:19]:
Good for you.

Daniel Rubino [02:28:20]:
Use two hands to double your pleasure.

Paris Martineau [02:28:22]:
And double your fun.

Leo Laporte [02:28:23]:
Okay, that's enough. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I think we have a show title. German Court is Throwing the book at Ad blockers. Now you wouldn't think ad blockers would be controversial, but maybe in Germany.

Paris Martineau [02:28:47]:
I love the headline they chose for this. No more Blocktoberfest. German Court Throws Books and Ad Blockers.

Leo Laporte [02:28:54]:
This is just good at these. Apparently the legal theory is it could violate copyright law in Germany. This of course comes from Axel Springer, the big German publisher against ad blocker plus maker IO, which is in Axel.

Paris Martineau [02:29:14]:
Springer, which owns a number of sites that are highly dependent on advertising. Such as Business Insider.

Leo Laporte [02:29:22]:
Yeah.

Paris Martineau [02:29:23]:
Political is less dependent because of political pro. But I assume the author sites that Axel Springer owns in Germany are more advertising dependent.

Leo Laporte [02:29:33]:
They say the website code falls under the control of the German Copyright Act. So modifying the webpages, DOM model or cascading style sheets represents copyright infringement? No. Okay. No. If I get a chance to talk to the judges, I will explain. I'm not modifying the code on their site. Their code is coming through loud and clear to my browser. And my browser, as it does all the time, is making decisions about how to decide display it.

Leo Laporte [02:30:06]:
They don't control how my browser displays it. That would make reading mode a copyright violation. That would make it me making it dark mode of violation of copyright.

Paris Martineau [02:30:18]:
If you put that website in too wide of a screen.

Leo Laporte [02:30:21]:
Oh my God. My God. You have violated the copyright. This has got to be narrow. So the appellate court that initially heard that argument rejected it, but it's been sent back. This is to me.

Paris Martineau [02:30:36]:
Oh my God. He clicked inspect element.

Leo Laporte [02:30:40]:
No inspecting of the elements. All right, you know what? Maybe Satya Nadella has been reading the, the Elon Musk Manifesto. He says Microsoft has to move beyond Bill Gates software factory vision. It's not a software factory. It's something better. It's about intelligence integration and AI.

Daniel Rubino [02:31:08]:
They're really pivoting. They're putting all their money into this.

Paris Martineau [02:31:11]:
You know, I, I, a, I, I, I, AI.

Daniel Rubino [02:31:18]:
Everything they're going to, everything they're doing is a delivery system for AI, basically. Or it powers powering AI.

Leo Laporte [02:31:26]:
But that presumes that people want it. I'm not convinced that that's the case.

Daniel Rubino [02:31:33]:
Yeah, but possibly. But I would say people. It was the same thing with the Internet back in the day. Yeah, we were all early adopters on the Internet. We were all blown away by it. This is the coolest thing ever. And you couldn't tell people, like, you'd explain and they're like, what are you talking about? Like, that sounds stupid. Why would I want email? Like, but, you know, the whole world changed around it.

Daniel Rubino [02:31:57]:
Right? So I think it's going to happen no matter what. It's just who controls it at this point. So.

Leo Laporte [02:32:04]:
So, Paris, I can't let you go without getting an update on the radioactive shrimp.

Paris Martineau [02:32:11]:
Thank you for asking, Leo.

Leo Laporte [02:32:12]:
Paris is at Consumer Reports. Is food safety.

Paris Martineau [02:32:17]:
Yes, that's the 50% of it. That is not tech. I'm falling deep into the food safety minds. I do a lot of like actual investigations. I'm working on a larger thing that will come out Next month. But in the meantime, I've been keeping up to date with food recalls. And you may have heard about an unusual food recall that happened for the first time this week, which is. It started with the fda.

Paris Martineau [02:32:39]:
There's warning consumers.

Leo Laporte [02:32:41]:
This your first byline on Consumer Reports.

Paris Martineau [02:32:44]:
It was technically a pear recall that had weird metal in it. But this is the most interesting pears.

Leo Laporte [02:32:49]:
Of weird metal in them. Okay, this is good. You're building up a clipping library.

Paris Martineau [02:32:54]:
The first one was Walmart recalls frozen shrimp for possible radioactive contamination.

Leo Laporte [02:33:00]:
Has it gone beyond Walmart?

Paris Martineau [02:33:01]:
It has. Then the next day, more frozen shrimp were recalled, this time from a kind of like, like middleman seller that had a five or different brands that they in part of the recall announcement couldn't really tell you, like, what stores even this shrimp had been sold at or like, what.

Leo Laporte [02:33:20]:
Well, here's pictures.

Paris Martineau [02:33:21]:
Those are pictures of the brands that are specific.

Leo Laporte [02:33:25]:
So just look for that in your freezer section of your local grocery store.

Paris Martineau [02:33:29]:
To be clear, what's being recalled here is none of these shrimp, they know for sure have a radioactive isotope. Oh, what happened?

Leo Laporte [02:33:38]:
So go ahead and have some.

Paris Martineau [02:33:39]:
Go ahead and have some. It's fine. No prob. Don't throw these out. If you have them.

Leo Laporte [02:33:45]:
They're contaminated with or they're not contaminated.

Paris Martineau [02:33:48]:
They are suspected to be potentially contaminated with radioactive substance cesium 137. And that is a radioactive isotope that is created in nuclear fission. It's created like, in potentially like nuclear explosions or is associated with like, nuclear energy processing. It's very confusing as to how this potentially got in shrimp. And it's been a story that has been occupying a lot of my mind to where I've developed several shrimpspiracies related.

Leo Laporte [02:34:17]:
Oh, you've got a shrimpspiracy.

Paris Martineau [02:34:19]:
Part of how this came about is because I was asking some of the people who've been working in food safety Consumer reports for like, 30 years. I was like, is it weird to have food be recalled for radioactive contamination? Possibly. And they're like, yeah, we've never seen this before. What happened was the, like, border control people at four different US Ports flagged shipping containers coming from Indonesia for having radioactive contamination reading off them whenever. Ostensibly, every single shipping container that comes into the US by sea is supposed to go through a big. It's called a radiation portal monitor that checks to see if there's radiation that's supposed to happen to 100%. Four containers alerted and they were full of shrimp. And so they sent the FDA to come test some of Them.

Paris Martineau [02:35:10]:
In one of them, the breaded shrimp tested positive for low levels of this radiation.

Leo Laporte [02:35:14]:
Low levels not kill you?

Paris Martineau [02:35:16]:
Levels not going to kill you. Nothing.

Leo Laporte [02:35:18]:
Like nothing but cancer or something. Nothing.

Paris Martineau [02:35:21]:
I mean, it's not good to be exposed to any level of, like, radiation. So that's part of the reason and part of what struck me as odd initially is they said in the initial releases we at this time, no containers that have alerted or tested positive for radiation have been allowed into the US from like, well, if that's the case and you say you test all of these containers, then why are you recalling a bunch of shrimp? And from what I've gathered, it's because there are other containers from the supplier that have come into the US that they're unsure as to whether or not.

Leo Laporte [02:35:58]:
They didn't test those.

Paris Martineau [02:35:59]:
So I did some digging. So I was like, well, isn't 100% of it's supposed to be tested? So my shrimpspiracy. I'll preface this by saying, like, some of this conjecture is I looked through and there were. There's been a number of reports from the Office of the Inspector General over the last couple of years about CPB and CWMD and then these government agencies that they basically, the radiation portal monitoring system isn't working as supposed to in these heavily redacted documents that are now kind of available online.

Leo Laporte [02:36:31]:
See, this is why Consumer Reports hired you because you're saying they're like, yeah.

Paris Martineau [02:36:38]:
It seems like maybe the, the things that are supposed to check for radiation aren't really working all the time because of that. They're either like false positives often, so people, people don't pay attention to them, or maybe they're just turned off often. So there seems to be kind of a broader systemic issue. And my theory, again, this is just conjecture, is they had a couple of these containers alert, then they went back through and saw, hey, where else is all the shrimp coming from? Have those containers been checked? And they may be went through without being checked. So I think it kind of speaks to this broader issue we're seeing in the US Food supply chain that we don't entirely know what is in some of these containers.

Leo Laporte [02:37:17]:
This is an important beat for you because we do know that they've fired inspectors, that the FDA is being hobbled. I think it's time to pay attention to this. There's one other thing, though, I would like an expose on your picture on the Consumer Reports website is just a little bit blurry.

Paris Martineau [02:37:36]:
Why is it so blurry?

Leo Laporte [02:37:39]:
That's so blurry. I have violated the copyright and modified the css. No, that's the way it came.

Paris Martineau [02:37:46]:
It's so funny. It looks clear on my website.

Leo Laporte [02:37:49]:
Yeah, because you have it at a normal. You know, you don't zoom in.

Paris Martineau [02:37:53]:
I did zoom in, but you know.

Leo Laporte [02:37:54]:
Now when I zoom in, oh, now it looks better. You know what? Maybe I got a bad. Maybe I got a bad shrimp.

Paris Martineau [02:38:01]:
Maybe you got a bad shrimp.

Leo Laporte [02:38:03]:
It's getting. Wait a minute, it gets fuzzy and then it gets clear. That's interesting. Just that one size. It's just that one size. Just that one size. Okay, enough playing around with Barris picture. Congratulations, by the way, on a great, great new job and keeping us safe from the shrimp.

Daniel Rubino [02:38:28]:
Yeah, I am a little disappointed that this wasn't like an origin story where there was some kind of company dumping radioactive cans. Well, the thing is, we don't know.

Paris Martineau [02:38:42]:
We don't. Because that's how Godzilla the radioactive contamination came from. So that could still be true. It could be Godzilla somewhere.

Daniel Rubino [02:38:52]:
There's a giant shrimp that's about to come ashore.

Paris Martineau [02:38:56]:
A giant shrimp.

Leo Laporte [02:38:57]:
Good news is they can't walk. Jesus.

Paris Martineau [02:38:59]:
The AI shrimp Jesus is real and he's coming for you.

Leo Laporte [02:39:03]:
I will save this one nick comma 30 for intelligent machines. This is a site that you put in here. Welcome to the life of Nick 30. You and your girlfriend want to settle down, start a family. You need to save a hundred thousand pounds for a house deposit within five years. Good luck. And then what is this? You're going to invest? You're going to run their life?

Paris Martineau [02:39:25]:
You want to do it now? You can play the Nick Simulator. You have to try and play Nick 30.

Leo Laporte [02:39:30]:
I'm not going to do it now because it's time to wrap it up. But let's do this on Wednesday.

Paris Martineau [02:39:35]:
Listen, we'll see. It's very difficult to win Nick Simulator. It's. Some people are saying it's the hardest game since Dark. Dark.

Leo Laporte [02:39:43]:
Who did this?

Paris Martineau [02:39:44]:
We're going to have to wait and see on Intelligent Machines on Wednesday.

Leo Laporte [02:39:48]:
Is it British Values Week at work? What do you do? Take in a Union Jack? You get odd looks. Patriots.

Paris Martineau [02:39:54]:
I like that you said, oh, I'm not going to play it. And it's different every time you play. I just got pavement clutter. Ban. The council votes to ban pavement clutter. Your bike rack is removed. Walk more or take the bus. Want to save money? It's free.

Paris Martineau [02:40:08]:
At least your carpet footprint.

Leo Laporte [02:40:11]:
You spend a fortune on designer croissants. Okay, so I get it. You're Playing a game and you're trying to save money. And you can see your progress here, your expenses. I lost £300 going to that conference in Lyon. All right. Okay, this looks like fun. We will play this game but Wednesday on Intelligent Machines when Paris returns.

Leo Laporte [02:40:35]:
Daniel Rubino, projectionist extraordinaire. What is the projectionist union? Which union is that?

Daniel Rubino [02:40:42]:
Oh, it was Ayatzi.

Leo Laporte [02:40:44]:
Oh, it's Ayatzi. Oh, that's also the stagehands union.

Daniel Rubino [02:40:49]:
Yes. In fact, I got to work an Aerosmith Kiss concert in Long island because of it.

Leo Laporte [02:40:54]:
Nice.

Daniel Rubino [02:40:55]:
Like, saw Paul Stanley pass me in the hallway. I was just going up the stairs.

Leo Laporte [02:41:00]:
The little guy. The little one. Wow, that's cool. What were you doing projection there or you just were there as a grip?

Daniel Rubino [02:41:07]:
No, breaking down the stages.

Leo Laporte [02:41:09]:
Oh, erodey. Yeah.

Daniel Rubino [02:41:11]:
Yeah, that sucked. But it was a good experience, I guess. Hard work. Hard work.

Leo Laporte [02:41:16]:
Well, Daniel, now that we know this, you're going to get interrogated more about this, and I'm going to scan through your entire Flickr collection looking for more projection pictures.

Daniel Rubino [02:41:25]:
Go for it.

Leo Laporte [02:41:26]:
But people should probably go to Windows Central where he is editors in chief, Window central dot com. Listen to the Windows Central podcast where you hear Daniel every week and follow him on the socials as DanielRebino. Thank you so much, Daniel. Always a pleasure to see you.

Daniel Rubino [02:41:42]:
Really appreciate it. Same. Thanks for having me.

Leo Laporte [02:41:44]:
Thank you for not taking a vacation in August, like everybody.

Daniel Rubino [02:41:48]:
I'll always be around in August. Don't worry.

Leo Laporte [02:41:50]:
Good. I like it. That's what I like. Paris Martino. We don't let her out of the house because we need her for intelligent machines. Every Wednesday.

Paris Martineau [02:41:58]:
Stay within 15ft of this computer or I get an electric shock.

Leo Laporte [02:42:02]:
Yes, Consumer Reports has wired it up that way. They've given her. They've given her, though, all the thumbtacks and red thread she can use to build those conspiracy wall montages. And I think she's working on it right now. Stay tuned for more on Shrimp Gate.

Paris Martineau [02:42:21]:
Stay tuned. I'm on it. You're a shrimp and you know what's going on. Yeah, my signal is out there.

Daniel Rubino [02:42:30]:
Contact me on signal.

Leo Laporte [02:42:31]:
Thank you for not going to Burning man this year. We appreciate it.

Paris Martineau [02:42:34]:
I couldn't hand. I couldn't risk getting lost in the dust when important news is going.

Leo Laporte [02:42:39]:
No, that's right. Although there could be radioactive shrimp at burning.

Paris Martineau [02:42:43]:
Who's gonna post a photo of a shrimp with a gun in the Discord Chat? And I really enjoy that.

Leo Laporte [02:42:49]:
Right under the. Right under the. There it is. Careful I'm giggling.

Paris Martineau [02:42:54]:
To make the show title Shrimp with a Gun. I don't know if we're allowed to do that.

Leo Laporte [02:42:57]:
I don't know Shrimp with a Gun's gonna make it, but we'll, we'll try. Shrimp with a Radioactive bullet maybe. Thank you all for joining us. A special thanks to our Club Twit members who put all those silly things in the Club Twit Discord and also support us with their donations. Their contribution to the club, 10 bucks a month gets you ad free versions of all the shows we do, plus a bunch of extra stuff that we do inside the Discord. We have special events. We did the Made by Google event in the Discord. Coming up on Monday, September 1, Paris, Jeff and I will interview the author of a new book about AI, Karen Howe, the author of Empire of AI.

Leo Laporte [02:43:36]:
That'll be a very interesting interview. You'll get to hear it first right here. As a club member, of course, Chris Markwartz, a photo guy, will join us. His, his assignment this month is delightful. That's the name of it. And we're going to talk about local AI plus using the Natan server. Anthony's been all over that one that's coming up. These are all events that happen in the club.

Leo Laporte [02:43:59]:
Plus you get video from the shows like Hands on Windows, Hands on Apple that we home theater geeks that we normally just put out as audio. There's just a whole lot of reasons to join. But the best reason is without you, we wouldn't be the same. 25% of our operating costs comes from our great generous club members. So thank you for your donations and thanks to all of you who are thinking about joining. Please go to Twitter TV Club Twit. We'd love to to have you. We do this week at Tech.

Leo Laporte [02:44:29]:
Every Sunday afternoon 2 to 5pm Pacific, 5 to 8pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. We stream it live in eight different places. Club Twit course gets the access in the Discord behind the velvet rope, the special premium access. But you can also watch on YouTube, tick tock, Twitch, X dot com, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kick. Plenty of places to catch the show. You don't have to watch it live though. You can always download a copy from our website, Twit TV. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to video.

Leo Laporte [02:44:59]:
We have audio and video on our website. Or subscribe to audio or video or both in your favorite podcast client. Leave us a great review and we will be very very thankful to you. We appreciate the support. GLAD you're here. 20 years we've been doing this. I'm hoping for 20 more. And as I've said for the past 20 years, thanks for being here.

Leo Laporte [02:45:20]:
We'll see you next week. Another twit is in the can. Bye. Bye.