This Week in Tech 1059 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. Father Robert Balisar is here. Molly White is here. Wesley Faulkner's here. Oh, what a great panel. We're gonna have a lot of fun talking about, well, the deadline is approaching where kids are banned from social media in Australia. But how do you prove their age? Do you do what Roblox does and force 10 year olds to submit a video selfie? Meta wins in court. Google's penalty phase is coming and why more than a million million Windows users downloaded Linux last month.
Leo Laporte [00:00:35]:
All that more coming up next on Twit. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit. This is TWiT this Week in Tech. Episode 1059, recorded Sunday, November 23, 2025. I'm interested in your tool set. It's time for Twit this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the latest tech news.
Leo Laporte [00:01:06]:
We've been having a lot of fun. That's why we're starting 20 minutes late because we have such a great panel. Wesley Faulkner is here. It's great to see you, Wesley.
Wesley Faulkner [00:01:15]:
It's good to be here.
Leo Laporte [00:01:16]:
Founder of works-not-working.com. we'll ask him a little bit about that later in the show and he's working on some interesting projects. Always nice to see you, Wesley. Thanks for being here. Molly White is also here. Creator of Web3 is going just great@mollywhite.net for all of her substack and all of the things she does. She is. I hope your ears are burning.
Leo Laporte [00:01:43]:
We talked to Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia on Wednesday and I said, oh yeah, we talked to Molly White once in a while and he said, oh yeah, she's one of our best.
Molly White [00:01:51]:
Oh her.
Leo Laporte [00:01:52]:
Oh her.
Molly White [00:01:53]:
Can't get rid of her.
Leo Laporte [00:01:54]:
Oh, her. Citation needed is the newsletter and I'm so glad to get you on. As always.
Molly White [00:02:02]:
Thanks for having me back, dear friend.
Leo Laporte [00:02:05]:
Father Robert Balisair is also here, the digital Jesuit coming to us from the roof of Vatican City. There's more than one roof. But it's a roof.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:02:16]:
More than one roof. Ours is the best one though.
Leo Laporte [00:02:18]:
It really is high above. High above St. Peter's Square looking. It's mid. What time is it in?
Father Robert Ballecer [00:02:25]:
Uh, it's 11:30.
Leo Laporte [00:02:27]:
Okay. Yeah, let's stay up past your bedtime tonight.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:02:30]:
This is normal time for me and. And honestly, it's normal time for the Pope. He's from Chicago.
Leo Laporte [00:02:35]:
They stay up late, see, on east coast time. Still, he's only lived in Italy for most of his life. By now. Hey, is the Jubilee Gate still open? Because I think I have some people who need to go back through it.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:02:47]:
It is open until January 6th.
Leo Laporte [00:02:49]:
Okay, we have.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:02:51]:
And if they come, tell them to contact me. We'll hook them up.
Leo Laporte [00:02:55]:
Well, she did Christina Warren.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:02:57]:
Oh, okay.
Leo Laporte [00:02:58]:
She was on the show last week and I said, I hope you went through the Jubilee Gate. She said, I did, and then she swore and I said, well, you got to go back through it. So I'm glad to know she's got another shot.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:03:06]:
But did she get the indulgence?
Leo Laporte [00:03:09]:
She says she did.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:03:10]:
The certificate, there's a certificate that you can get.
Leo Laporte [00:03:14]:
It says you are. You are officially. You don't have any sins. You're washed clean. Is that what it says?
Father Robert Ballecer [00:03:20]:
Oh, you doing Guido Sarducci?
Leo Laporte [00:03:22]:
I am Father Guido Sarducci.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:03:25]:
Oh, my goodness.
Leo Laporte [00:03:25]:
With a cigarette, he would tell you he had a cigarette. Do. Do priests still wear those big broadband round hats?
Father Robert Ballecer [00:03:32]:
Some do. I've actually seen them. I've seen.
Leo Laporte [00:03:35]:
Get one and you could smoke.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:03:38]:
Look terrible.
Leo Laporte [00:03:38]:
I don't know what's going on.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:03:40]:
Actually, you'd like this, Leo. Those the certificates of the indulgence?
Wesley Faulkner [00:03:44]:
Yeah.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:03:45]:
You can ask to put any name on it. It's. It's your intention. Who is it for?
Leo Laporte [00:03:49]:
Oh, that's.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:03:49]:
And you would pay €3 and they'd print up this very nice thing, put it in a tub so you could, you know, carry it back.
Leo Laporte [00:03:54]:
Hey, look what I did for you, dad.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:03:57]:
But somebody. Somebody did one of those secret about the Vatican and they made a TikTok video about how you had to get this certificate. And so the first time I got it last December, nobody there. I walked right up, I paid my three. My three euros and I was in. I just tried to get one last week. And because of that TikTok video, the line goes around the.
Leo Laporte [00:04:15]:
Oh, no. Discovered it. Oh, they discovered it.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:04:19]:
Tick tock. Come on, man.
Leo Laporte [00:04:21]:
Is it somewhat tongue in cheek? Because I think indulgences were kind of. Didn't. Didn't. One of the Vatican.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:04:29]:
We had a whole thing. There was a whole thing.
Leo Laporte [00:04:31]:
There was a whole Vatican II or something. They got rid of those, right?
Father Robert Ballecer [00:04:34]:
They did. Martin Luther had. Well, no, no. See, indulgences still exist. That's the whole thing about the Holy Door selling indulgences.
Leo Laporte [00:04:44]:
You got to give them away. Okay, there you go.
Molly White [00:04:46]:
Have you considered putting them on the blockchain?
Father Robert Ballecer [00:04:50]:
Oh, my God. Okay, okay. I know you said that in jest.
Leo Laporte [00:04:54]:
He's good.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:04:55]:
That actually was in an early planning Meeting. If we. If we wanted to put it on the blockchain.
Molly White [00:04:59]:
It seems like a pretty obvious choice.
Leo Laporte [00:05:03]:
It's decentralized. Nobody's in charge of it. It lasts forever.
Molly White [00:05:07]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:05:08]:
And then every.
Molly White [00:05:09]:
You could sell it to other people and make a profit.
Wesley Faulkner [00:05:12]:
Sure.
Leo Laporte [00:05:13]:
Every single person who has a copy of the bitcoin will have.
Molly White [00:05:18]:
Just like Bitcoin hacks your wallet. They'll have a million indulgences.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:05:21]:
Exactly. Well, I mean, it's. It's infinitely divisible. Just like Bitcoin.
Molly White [00:05:25]:
A fractionalized indulgence.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:05:28]:
Boom.
Leo Laporte [00:05:30]:
We've got. I mean, there's something here. We got to work on this. This sounds good. This sounds really good.
Molly White [00:05:34]:
Stop the. Stop the show. We need to get to the point.
Leo Laporte [00:05:36]:
You have till January, Molly, to work on this. So they did an interesting thing on X the other day. They decided to put a new feature in that would tell people where an account comes from. Whoops.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:05:53]:
That would turn out really, really well, I think.
Leo Laporte [00:05:55]:
Top MAGA influencers accidentally unmasked as foreign trolls. There's one Maga influencer with 400,000 followers coming out of Eastern Europe. Some come out of Russia. I mean, I think this is a good thing. This is exactly what they should do.
Wesley Faulkner [00:06:12]:
But they rolled it back. But I didn't see any messages. Ye.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:06:16]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [00:06:17]:
It lasted for like a day and a half, and then they were like, oh, no. The question is like, can't have this.
Molly White [00:06:20]:
What do they expect to happen? That seems like a pretty obvious.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:06:24]:
They had the data.
Molly White [00:06:25]:
Yeah.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:06:25]:
They knew where their influences were coming from.
Leo Laporte [00:06:29]:
Oh, my goodness. So this is. This is one of them. The Ultra Maga Make America great. Ultra Maga Trump. This is the one that comes from Eastern Europe. And so it's too bad you can't see this anymore. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:06:45]:
So they turned it off. It's. He says he's in Washington, D.C. account based in Africa. I can't believe they turned it off.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:06:54]:
Oh, I can.
Leo Laporte [00:06:55]:
Come on.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:06:58]:
By the way, every time I hear Economy of Twitter, every time I hear.
Wesley Faulkner [00:07:02]:
Ultra Maga, I think of killer Instinct. If you've ever played that video game, those combos, Ultra Kill.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:07:09]:
Formers. Ultra Magnus was, you know, the second commander, Optimus Prime.
Leo Laporte [00:07:13]:
Come on, finish him.
Wesley Faulkner [00:07:15]:
But it's more like the people who. What is the saying? People won't know something unless if they're paid not to know it.
Leo Laporte [00:07:25]:
If it's in their interest that they not know it, they'll never know.
Wesley Faulkner [00:07:28]:
So the verified people are making money for being influencers, and if they lose all their influencers then they lose advertisers. And so it's in their interest not to let people know that they're being swindled.
Leo Laporte [00:07:43]:
A verified account posing as border czar Tom Homan. Verified, I might add, traced to Eastern Europe. Of course, if blue check doesn't mean what it used to, does it? America first zero from Bangladesh. An entire network of Trump supporting independent women claiming to be from America. Actually located in Thailand. But then of course immediately they started showing off left wing X users who also were. Were bogus accounts. I mean, I think it's fair to say that X.com is filled with bots.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:08:16]:
It's a den of trolls.
Leo Laporte [00:08:17]:
Yeah, Dennis, trolls. Yeah.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:08:21]:
I got off X, what, a year and a half now? And I'm so happy. Seriously, my days are so much happier. I had much less doom scrolling, much less rage baiting. I'm not angry all the time. It's a good move, I think.
Leo Laporte [00:08:35]:
Well, Molly's off of it, right?
Molly White [00:08:36]:
No, I'm on it still.
Leo Laporte [00:08:38]:
Oh, I thought you. I thought you said you don't. So you do. Why, why are you still there?
Molly White [00:08:43]:
So I mostly. Most of my social media these days I actually post my website and then it just syndicates out to Mastodon. Mastodon. Blue Sky.
Leo Laporte [00:08:52]:
You're possum.
Molly White [00:08:53]:
Yes, but I spend very, very little time like scrolling Twitter these days because there's just nothing useful there. I mostly stick around because a lot of crypto Twitter is still on Twitter.
Leo Laporte [00:09:05]:
You do it for research purposes?
Molly White [00:09:07]:
Yeah, but it's pretty much garbage, so I don't really spend much time reading it. A lot. A lot of spam.
Leo Laporte [00:09:15]:
Yeah, it just makes me angry and upset and I don't want to feel that way. Wesley, what about you? Are you still in the ex?
Wesley Faulkner [00:09:24]:
No, no, I think. What was it, November of 2023, 22, something like that, when I left.
Leo Laporte [00:09:33]:
Yeah, me too. Yeah, it's just I use Mastodon. We run our own Mastodon instance. So of course I spend time there. But honestly, I don't think in general social media is good for my mental well being. I did. I pretty much deleted all my. I still have the accounts because I have to show.
Leo Laporte [00:09:49]:
I have to show screens and stuff, but I rarely go there. It just makes me unhappy.
Wesley Faulkner [00:09:54]:
Yeah, I think it's a privilege to be able to walk away from. From.
Leo Laporte [00:09:57]:
Well, that's true. That's a good point. Yeah. Why would people. So I'm privileged, clearly. But why would people who aren't privileged need to stay there? What keeps them there?
Wesley Faulkner [00:10:10]:
The profession that I Am mostly associated is developer relations. Talking to developers and finding people who would be interested in your tool set, tool chain, technology, stack, whatever. There is still a good amount of people who are on X to reach those people. And the people who are in developer relations, sometimes part of their value or their paycheck is based on their following. And so you can't just jettison that portion because it actually will decrease your value to employers.
Leo Laporte [00:10:46]:
It's a communications medium and you still need to communicate with some people.
Wesley Faulkner [00:10:50]:
Yes, but in order to say that you're influential is not just saying that you know how to use these different networks. So even if like you're saying I could use a corporate account. No, it's being able to, when you hire someone for that role, to bring the follower with you. And so that is part of the worth of some people who are trying to make sure that the marketing department.
Leo Laporte [00:11:15]:
Hates it because I had half a million followers on Twitter and I refuse to use it. And they go, what are you crazy? You have such a, you have an opportunity here. Yeah, but I don't want to talk to those people.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:11:27]:
I get much better conversations on blue Sky. Much, much better conversations on blue sky. But if I was still doing this full time, the X, Twitter, whatever I want to call it, the monetizable metrics from Twitter are so much better than any other platform.
Leo Laporte [00:11:44]:
Oh really?
Father Robert Ballecer [00:11:45]:
Yeah, seriously.
Leo Laporte [00:11:47]:
And that's by the way, vanity metrics.
Wesley Faulkner [00:11:50]:
So one of vanity metrics.
Leo Laporte [00:11:52]:
Well, but there's also money. There's real money. That's, I mean one of the things you might say, well, all those MAGA influencers are attempts by foreign governments to destabilize the U.S. that's not necessarily true. Many of them are there because they can make money, right? I mean it may not be a lot on either side.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:12:08]:
And they don't care, they don't care which side they're shilling for. As long as you pay them, they're fine.
Leo Laporte [00:12:12]:
Right? So if you're in Australia right now and you are under 16, get ready because you're going to lose access to X, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat threads, Reddit, TikTok, and most importantly, I think for a lot of people, YouTube Kick and Twitch as well. December 10th is the cutoff. This is gonna happen.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:12:40]:
Darren Okey, our man in Australia says it's already happened.
Leo Laporte [00:12:44]:
Oh really? Oh, it was supposed to be December 10th, but that was, I guess, not a hard day. So that's gotta, if you're, that's got a lot of 15 year olds going what? I have to watch YouTube, kids. What the hell happened there? How am I supposed to. How am I supposed to play Call of Duty?
Father Robert Ballecer [00:13:04]:
Darren says, if this had been a story 10 years ago, I would have been incensed. Now I'm actually. I want to see what the results are going to be. I, I want to see if they can undo some of the damage. I want to see if they can lay down a possible actionable plan for, for other actors to use to protect their young. Because I think we're, we're now at that point where the consensus is, yeah, the way that social has been going is not good for the development of children.
Leo Laporte [00:13:30]:
You're not worried about unintended consequences?
Father Robert Ballecer [00:13:33]:
Absolutely. Worried about unintended consequences.
Leo Laporte [00:13:36]:
Cut off from support systems, from friends.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:13:40]:
They might have to go outside, they might have to touch grass.
Leo Laporte [00:13:42]:
A lot of people learn from YouTube. I learn a lot from YouTube. My son learned how to cook from YouTube.
Molly White [00:13:47]:
How is speech verification being done?
Leo Laporte [00:13:51]:
That's a good question. Never done well, but I haven't seen stats. But I'm thinking VPNs are probably selling pretty well right now in Australia. But that's speaking of privilege. Those are the kids who are sophisticated enough and have money enough to bypass.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:14:07]:
And VPNs are just whack a mole. It just becomes whack a mole. We know that here. We've tried to do age verification here. So if, if Australia wants to give us some real data about whether or not this will work, you'll run the program for a couple of years. I'm actually interested. I think they're doing a great service for the planet.
Leo Laporte [00:14:26]:
France is thinking of doing the same thing. Denmark has announced plans to ban social media for under 15s. Norway considering the same thing. Spain has sent to Parliament a draft law for under 16s require legal guardian approval. That's even. That is a little risky because if, if you're gay and your parents are pissed off that you're gay, they're not going to let you go online and that might be your only resource.
Wesley Faulkner [00:14:52]:
Is the Fediverse still not able to enforce this the way that it's run?
Leo Laporte [00:14:57]:
Yeah. This is something that Mastodon has said from day one. We don't have a way to do.
Wesley Faulkner [00:15:00]:
This that might push people to the Fediverse.
Leo Laporte [00:15:02]:
It actually scare. Well, maybe, but it scares me because here I am running a Mastodon instance. All I did, I changed my terms of service, said you must be 18 to use this service, and that's all. And then by signing up, you agree you are 18. I mean, that's all I can do. I don't want to do age verification.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:15:22]:
But what if California passes a law like Texas where no. It puts it on the company to establish some sort of age verification system. Did you have to shut it down?
Molly White [00:15:30]:
I was going to say, I wonder if people. If they'll start blocking services that don't or can't enforce it.
Leo Laporte [00:15:37]:
Who would do the blocking? The government. The ISPs.
Molly White [00:15:40]:
The ISPs. Probably. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:15:42]:
So the government would. Foresight. This is why I hate centralized anything. Because if you have, you know, one or two ISPs, as we do in the United States with Comcast and Cox, that. That have 80% of all the Internet connections, it's easy for the government to say Comcast. You know that merger you wanted to do with Warner Discovery? It would be too bad if anything should happen to your merger.
Wesley Faulkner [00:16:05]:
Wait, wait one second. Did you mention Discord? Was Discord on the list?
Leo Laporte [00:16:09]:
Discord is not on the list.
Wesley Faulkner [00:16:10]:
Interesting.
Leo Laporte [00:16:11]:
Not at least in Australia.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:16:13]:
So Darren posted. He got. From the. From the Australian government, if you want to see that it's on.
Leo Laporte [00:16:19]:
Oh, good. Yeah. Let me look in our. In our.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:16:21]:
And he says it's on the app. So it's like Apple, the App Store. You cannot download YouTube.
Leo Laporte [00:16:29]:
Ah.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:16:30]:
So there will be a renaissance in desktop computers and web browsers. Fantastic.
Leo Laporte [00:16:35]:
So, Darren, do you have a teenager? Darren? I guess you must safety settings enabled for your teen. Oh, yes. Little Alex. Okie. When Alex updated his device to iOS 26 one or later, two safety settings and screen time were enabled. If you would like to change or disable these, you can do so as a parent. Okay. So this is Apple doing it.
Molly White [00:16:58]:
I was going to say great time for the Android users.
Leo Laporte [00:17:01]:
Yeah. But at the same time, I don't think this is compliant with the law because this is. You could turn it off. Yeah. The law does not allow parents. Yeah. In Australia, the law does not allow parents.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:17:13]:
That note was from Apple, not the government.
Leo Laporte [00:17:16]:
Yeah, right. NetChoice is, which is of course the industry group representing Google and Meta and all the others is suing Virginia to block a law there. The state of Virginia limits kids under 16 to one hour a day unless parents approve more time.
Wesley Faulkner [00:17:34]:
What happens in.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:17:35]:
Okay, yeah, we're legislating parenthood now.
Leo Laporte [00:17:38]:
Yeah.
Molly White [00:17:39]:
When I was a kid, we had an egg timer on the computer table that we would use because we were only allowed to take so much time.
Leo Laporte [00:17:46]:
And it turned you into a hacker, didn't it, Molly?
Molly White [00:17:49]:
Well, got to the point where we would just start to move the timer back quietly.
Leo Laporte [00:17:56]:
Very long timer's been going on for a long time. Little Mo, little Molly.
Wesley Faulkner [00:18:02]:
Yeah, this needs to be done more programmatically to be able to. There needs to be some sort of way for companies to present either what state they're in or what toggles they have, or to be able to have some sort of negotiation. Having to rewrite your software, having to change your networking on the network level is just too much overhead. And there needs to be some sort of standard where the software can present its capabilities and present the way it can be restricted and then send it to the router, to the isp. And the ISP itself could help navigate some of the stuff. There's no common way that I know laws change, but there can be a way of presenting the law which would make this a lot easier for both parties.
Leo Laporte [00:18:51]:
Apple does not want to do this, but Meta and others say Apple should be the ones or Android. Apple now knows exactly what my age is because I put my passport in there. They support digital ID now for US Passports and in many states, driver's licenses. So that means Apple has my age. Apple could enforce laws like this. I think eventually they'll be forced to do so. That's where is that the best place to do it in the platform? Apple has an API that a application can query. It doesn't ask for specific age, it just says what age group is this user in? And by the way, in that case the parent chooses, which I think is appropriate.
Leo Laporte [00:19:35]:
The parent should be the one who says, well, my kid, little Mickey has The. Is chronologically 12, but he's got the mental capacity of a 40 year old. The parent should be able to say, well, he's 40 to Apple, right? But in that case, an app Meta could query Apple with this API that exists already and say, what age group is he in? Oh, little Mickey's all grown up. Okay, let him in.
Wesley Faulkner [00:20:02]:
But if you did it as an API level, this would be able to help companies or even instances like Mastodon to be able to say they're transmitting, that they want these restrictions, they're transmitting, that they're in this location, right? Or I can transmit these are the capabilities I have and then have it turned on on the client side to be able to toggle these settings. It's just a way of negotiating where it could be on either party. It's just like there needs to be some way of negotiating because even if in Apple, then it needs to be on websites and it needs to be on other.
Leo Laporte [00:20:39]:
Well, that's the problem.
Wesley Faulkner [00:20:41]:
If you're using an. Maybe you want to use it about filtering how you are able to interact with different entities like that. There just needs to be a language around what is restricted and what is available for both parties.
Leo Laporte [00:20:54]:
I just think it's a terrible idea all around. But I guess, I mean, the problem is all the little gaps and little issues. Roblox, which is under a lot of heat for having, you know, groomers in their chat, adult groomers in their chat, is now requiring kids to submit video selfies. Kids as young as 9 to submit video selfies for age verification. Is that a good idea?
Father Robert Ballecer [00:21:25]:
Fun fact. I actually used AI vibe coding and I coded a way around this in about three minutes.
Leo Laporte [00:21:31]:
No, you're a priest. You're not allowed to do that. You better go through that gate again.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:21:36]:
I just wanted to see how easy it would be to defeat those. Those.
Leo Laporte [00:21:39]:
So what did you. Just out of curiosity, what, what was the.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:21:42]:
It provides. It provides device layer access, so I can make it play anything. And it looks like it's the real video.
Leo Laporte [00:21:48]:
Wow.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:21:49]:
And I mean, that wasn't hard. It wasn't hard at all.
Leo Laporte [00:21:54]:
This new policy is being rolled out in three countries. According to Engadget, it will be rolled out globally soon.
Wesley Faulkner [00:22:04]:
Wow.
Leo Laporte [00:22:05]:
It feels like. So they're starting in Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands.
Molly White [00:22:11]:
This is one of those things though, where it's like, how accurately do we actually think whatever system they're using can distinguish between an 8 year old and a 9 year old? Like, I don't understand how that's supposed to be terribly useful. And like, how young do we expect a kid to be where they can actually upload a video? Like, I'm just curious about like the, the age at which they're old enough to be able to upload the video selfie, but they're younger than 9 years old. Like, that can't be that big of a gap, right?
Leo Laporte [00:22:41]:
Roblox's Chief Safety officer, Matt Kaufman said it's pretty accurate. What we find is the algorithms that between 5 and 25 are typically pretty accurate within one or two years of their age. They're using something called Persona. Persona's model is not good enough, right?
Father Robert Ballecer [00:23:01]:
Pretty accurate.
Leo Laporte [00:23:02]:
Pretty accurate.
Molly White [00:23:05]:
So if they're, if they can make sure it's like, okay, so maybe they're eight or seven. It's like, okay, so who are we actually restricting here? If they're like, that's two years.
Leo Laporte [00:23:13]:
Well, what they do is if you're eight, you can only Go in appropriate chats and only people in your age, it's a group instead of by year in your age group can go into those chats. The idea is they want to keep adults out of there. And look, admittedly Roblox got a problem. I understand why they might be aggressive in doing this.
Molly White [00:23:35]:
Oh yeah, for sure.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:23:36]:
But I 100% expect that there will be a story at some point in the near future that shows that the algorithm Roblox is using has different issues with certain ethnicities.
Molly White [00:23:47]:
That's all right. I've already read. Yeah, I've already read that where the age, especially when it comes to determining age, it's very inaccurate for. For people who aren't white, basically.
Wesley Faulkner [00:23:57]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:23:58]:
What a shock.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:24:00]:
Well, that's every single facial recognition software on the.
Leo Laporte [00:24:03]:
Because they're all trained on white people. Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [00:24:05]:
And how long is this lived for? Like how.
Leo Laporte [00:24:08]:
Since day one.
Wesley Faulkner [00:24:09]:
No, no, no, no meaning like let's say I'm an 8 year old, I train. Do I get a random pop up says okay, let's time to re verify to make sure probably when you're tuned.
Leo Laporte [00:24:18]:
9 Happy birthday.
Wesley Faulkner [00:24:22]:
Shrug turn. It should be like drug testing. It should be random and it should just show up and then you have like a certain time period to do it and then you get locked out just so you don't get your niece or nephew or someone off the street to be able to do the verification for you.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:24:35]:
Oh, this is why every child at birth needs to be put on the blockchain. Exactly how old they are.
Wesley Faulkner [00:24:41]:
World Coin.
Leo Laporte [00:24:43]:
It's finally time I was at Molly's site. Web3 is going great.com and I saw Balancer exploited for at least under 10 million. And for briefly I thought it was you father Robert Balaser.
Wesley Faulkner [00:24:55]:
But no.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:24:55]:
Yes.
Wesley Faulkner [00:24:56]:
No.
Molly White [00:24:57]:
Your millions and millions are all gone.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:24:59]:
They took all my dogecoin.
Leo Laporte [00:25:04]:
This is funny because you would think by now that this site wouldn't need it anymore. But no, it just continues and continues and continues. So the counter says 79.632 billion. Is that this year? Is that all time? What is that number?
Molly White [00:25:21]:
Since I started the site in 2021.
Leo Laporte [00:25:25]:
Four years.
Molly White [00:25:26]:
And that's a really. That's actually a much lower estimate than most analyses of crypto thefts.
Leo Laporte [00:25:34]:
You call it the grift counter. I love it. You're watching this week in Tech. We're looking at the tech news. Of course, this week, a bad week for Cloudflare. We'll talk about that in just a little bit with Molly White. Web3 is going great. And MollyWhite.net citation needed her fabulous newsletter.
Leo Laporte [00:25:53]:
Also the digital Jesuit himself, now $110 million poorer. I'm sorry, I don't want to start that rumor. Father Robert, just want you to know when, when, when you were on staff and we paid you, the checks did not go to you.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:26:09]:
They did not.
Leo Laporte [00:26:10]:
They went to Rome. And we've enriched Rome significantly over the years and happy to do it.
Wesley Faulkner [00:26:17]:
Robert.
Leo Laporte [00:26:18]:
We love you do. So you take a vow of poverty.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:26:22]:
I do, I do. Which is why our food here in the house is not great.
Leo Laporte [00:26:27]:
They, you know, they could decent food. They really could. Well, yeah. And you can't just go out to a restaurant every night.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:26:35]:
I can. As long as all those restaurants together don't equal more than €50amonth.
Leo Laporte [00:26:44]:
I.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:26:44]:
Save it up, Leo.
Wesley Faulkner [00:26:45]:
It's special occasions.
Leo Laporte [00:26:46]:
Yeah, you're not going to Da Fortunata for a little cacio e Pepe anytime soon.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:26:50]:
That is a nice place, by the way.
Leo Laporte [00:26:51]:
Ah, it's the first place we hit when we got to Rome because I wanted some carbonara. Also with us, Wesley Faulkner. So good to see you. Works Dash. Not dash. Working. What is that site all about?
Wesley Faulkner [00:27:06]:
So right now it's a newsletter. We were supposed to launch actually on the 15th. I missed that date. We pushed it to the 30th of this month. And it is going to be a site for a community for people who are in jobs, feel like they can't leave the job either because of the job market being very poor. Health care, yes, they need health care, but they have to endure non optimal work environments. So bad managers, bad treatment, disorganization, lack of planning, lack of work, life balance. And so it's a place where people can come together, share tips and tricks and also for them to feel less alone while they're trying to survive in this capitalist society.
Leo Laporte [00:27:54]:
I love your logo, which is a phoenix rising from a dumpster fire. It launches in one week, kids, one week from today. So Wesley's got his work cut out for him over the next seven days. Works not-working.com Great to have all three of you on the show, by the way. Robert, here's another great restaurant you can't afford in Rome. Love the pizza at Emma's. I highly recommend it. It's really.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:28:18]:
Oh no, I've been at Emma's.
Leo Laporte [00:28:20]:
It's really good.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:28:21]:
Yes, yes.
Leo Laporte [00:28:22]:
I wish I were in Rome right now, but I'm not. I'm here on Twit in the beautiful Twit Addict studio, which is Mere steps away from my bedroom. It's great. That's a five stair commute. Five step commute. Our show today, brought to you by Spaceship. Now, if you've been listening for a while, I think you've heard me talk about Spaceship. It's the new domain registrar that does everything right.
Leo Laporte [00:28:51]:
They are so good. In just a few months they've been around, they passed a major milestone. Over 5 million domains under management. That kind of growth does not happen by accident. It's because Spaceship delivers real quality and features that make sense. It's not just domains. I shouldn't really say domain registrar. They do everything from helping you build and run your own online presence via hosting to business email.
Leo Laporte [00:29:18]:
They have an excellent email solution, even tools for creating and managing web apps. Vpss. They have a messaging app I love called Thunderbolt. It's all in one, end to end. Encrypted. Yes, all in one straightforward platform. But there is a reason people are using it as a registrar. The pricing.
Leo Laporte [00:29:36]:
Essentially Black Friday and Cyber Monday level values all year round. So you don't have to wait till Friday to get a great deal. Right now, Twit listeners get exclusive offers that make it even better. Well, I wanted to use their Thunderbolt end to end encrypted messaging. It has a very clever idea. Instead of using a phone number or a handle to register, you get to use a domain. So if you're a business, your business domain could be how people message you in. Thunderbolt.
Leo Laporte [00:30:04]:
I didn't have one to, you know, to use, so I registered for 5 bucks a year. Leo's IM I mentioned this the other day and somebody said there's no website there. No, no, it's just my handle for Thunderbolt Messaging. Five bucks a year and the Thunderbolt's free. It's really, they're really smart, really clever. So whether you're planning a new online project or maybe you've got your hosting, you know, domain registrar or hosting elsewhere, it's very easy to move to Spaceship. Spaceship has everything you need to get launched, connected and running smoothly, much more affordably. And they make it really affordable by giving you a great deal when you switch over.
Leo Laporte [00:30:41]:
Find out more Spaceship.comTwit to see the exclusive offers to find out why millions have already made the move, including me. Spaceship.com Twitter we're big fans. They have some nice features too, like the ALF AI that will all do all those DNS chores that you don't want to do or don't know how to do. Things like that. It's really, really impressive spaceship.com TWIT we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. So it was two weeks ago it was Amazon, last week was Microsoft, this week it was Cloudflare. And you know what we learn each time these cloud services go down is how much big sites are dependent on them. Spotify was down, x was down, OpenAI was down.
Leo Laporte [00:31:33]:
I did my beat check using RSS feeds and my software couldn't get RSS feeds from so many sites that I use. Everybody uses Cloudflare. Somebody pointed out you probably don't need to use it if you're not worried about getting ddosed right. Maybe maybe rethink that dependency on a single point of failure.
Molly White [00:31:57]:
Molly Kind of nice though to have the when you accidentally screw up your web server, having it served from the last live is very nice, but there are non Cloudflare options for that.
Leo Laporte [00:32:08]:
Are you on Cloudflare just out of curiosity?
Molly White [00:32:10]:
No, I am on Fastly.
Wesley Faulkner [00:32:12]:
Ah.
Leo Laporte [00:32:12]:
I like Fastly. Yeah.
Molly White [00:32:14]:
And they have a very nice program where they support open source developers and other developers by providing free cloud services, which is very nice.
Leo Laporte [00:32:25]:
My posse site I do the same thing as you do is Microblog and I don't think that went down. I think he's on AWS and we do here at Twit we use DDoS production. But I won't tell you who it is, but you now know it's not Cloudflare.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:32:42]:
All of our services were Cloudflare and so we lost most of it.
Leo Laporte [00:32:45]:
Oh, the Vatican was down.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:32:48]:
Wow.
Wesley Faulkner [00:32:50]:
The company I work for that actually pays the bills they use Warp from Cloudflare. So even though they weren't served, that's how we as employees connected and so that went down. And as a home labber, I use Cloudflare tunnels to have access to my home lab outside.
Leo Laporte [00:33:09]:
In lieu of tailscale.
Wesley Faulkner [00:33:10]:
Yes, in lieu of tailscale.
Leo Laporte [00:33:12]:
Yeah. The thing is you could use Tailscale or AWS or some other service and they could be down. I mean all of these points of failure. Molly posted a revised XKCD cartoon Chad Loder I revised it the entire this is the old cartoon where the entire Internet is based on one little library written by some guy in Indiana. The entire Internet is based on these little tiny toothpicks holding up everything. AWS and Cloudflare.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:33:41]:
I don't know, aren't AWS and Cloudflare the two big ones at the bottom though? The two big flat ones at the bottom that should be AWS and Cloudflare Right.
Molly White [00:33:48]:
I guess it depends a little bit on if you're interpreting, like how much of the Internet they hold up or how good they are at doing it.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:33:56]:
Yes, well, there should be one.
Leo Laporte [00:33:58]:
Toothpicks are holding up the big flat one. So there should be one poll below.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:34:02]:
That that says bgp because Border Gateway protocol holds everything together and it always breaks. It always breaks.
Leo Laporte [00:34:10]:
It's so easy to misprogram bgp. Remember a couple of years ago somebody accidentally post put something on their BGP that routed all the traffic in the world to.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:34:22]:
They advertised all the routes, they said give it all to us and BGP.
Leo Laporte [00:34:27]:
Said pacific, why not? BGP says you, you got boss.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:34:35]:
But the, the cloud flare failure. Actually it was. They had a decent report on it.
Leo Laporte [00:34:40]:
That's what one thing we like about Cloudflare, they're very forthright. Right. They. So what, what did Matthew Prince say went wrong?
Father Robert Ballecer [00:34:48]:
They've got a thing called bot management which allows them to detect whether or not activity that's coming in is from actual users or from an automated system. Very important when you're trying to alleviate DDoS problems. The issue was there's a thing called the feature file. And the feature file is sort of instructions to the entire network of bot management servers that gives them sort of their marching orders. At some point someone made a change to that feature file and I guess fat fingered it. It doubled in size, doubled more than double the size that it was supposed to be. And unfortunately that was automatically propagated to all the machines that did bot management and it crashed. They all crashed.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:35:31]:
Because that, that file has a. It was a. Yeah, it has a limit on how large it can be. So it was double the file limit. All those machines shut down without the bot management. The entire network went down. That's just.
Leo Laporte [00:35:42]:
Yeah, yeah. Here's the graph they. Prince writes that initially they thought they were being ddosed. They pretty quickly realized they had. It was just a foot gun and they were the ones who fired.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:35:55]:
They kind of DDoS themselves. Yeah, it was a self dos.
Wesley Faulkner [00:36:00]:
Cloudflare has been like growing exponentially the last, I don't know, 12, 18 months to the point where they're adding services. They're becoming more of a provider, I think. What was it just. Is it last month or the month and a half ago that they said that they're going to basically make all of their services enterprise level services, self service for everyone. So you can just go in and just buy it yourself no matter what they offer to everyone. You don't need to talk to a salesperson. So they have been scaling so quickly that I think that they haven't built the automated systems for some of the new things that they are.
Leo Laporte [00:36:38]:
There's another reason for that, because if you automate it, then you're not as responsible. So when the Navy automate check, you can check.
Wesley Faulkner [00:36:46]:
You have automated checkers, not necessarily automated, doing everything, but you could have it in such a way where you could say, this doesn't look right. Are you sure you want to push this?
Leo Laporte [00:36:55]:
Yeah.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:36:56]:
You know, cloudflare did me a solid with the. The Minecraft server that, what, eight years ago, we started getting DDoS and they reached out and they have a thing called Project Galileo where they will help small entities that are suffering because they're being DDoS out of religious hate, political hate, etc. Etc. So they said, we will give you.
Leo Laporte [00:37:17]:
Wow.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:37:18]:
In perpetuity. Our entire enterprise package. It was like a $10,000 package, and it solved everything. Every single issue we had with the server just went away. So I have trouble saying anything bad about them.
Leo Laporte [00:37:30]:
I think in many ways they're really a boon. But it does point out that if. If there's a single point of failure, that's always risky. But this is how the cloud is. There's always a single point of failure somewhere. Right.
Wesley Faulkner [00:37:44]:
And they went down when GCP went down as well. And so this is one of those things where it's just like. Yeah, it's. It's. Any point of failure in. Any link in the chain that's broken could cause issues, and that's externally and internally.
Leo Laporte [00:37:58]:
Yikes.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:37:58]:
Do any of you use cloudflare for your domain registrations?
Wesley Faulkner [00:38:03]:
I do.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:38:04]:
I do all of ours. We have.
Leo Laporte [00:38:05]:
I didn't know they did domain registrations.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:38:07]:
Oh, yes, yes. I've got.
Leo Laporte [00:38:10]:
I did it with Google domains for a while because they seem simple and cheap and Google's going to be great. And then they killed it. I thought, you know what?
Father Robert Ballecer [00:38:20]:
How many times does Google have to fool us?
Leo Laporte [00:38:22]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:38:24]:
Every single service.
Leo Laporte [00:38:25]:
Yeah. Oh, no, I think I. Yeah, I think in the. For the most part, I've always been a fan of Cloud Player Cloud Flare. John Graham coming is a, of course, a friend of the network. I've known him for years. He was their cto. We actually just had him on intelligent machines recently.
Leo Laporte [00:38:41]:
He's now just on the board. He's retired as cto. So I always thought they were well run. I had a little bit of an issue with them when they went after Perplexity.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:38:52]:
Yeah, that was.
Leo Laporte [00:38:53]:
Yeah, okay. And this is the same issue I have with Google, which is when you, when you are the choke point for so much traffic and you decide to use your power to enforce something which Google's done with, for instance, HTTPs everywhere. You could say, well, that's a good thing. But it also gives them an awful lot of power. Google's also decided that they want domain certificates to expire, like, in 30 seconds. I don't know what it is now. It's like, fast. Right.
Leo Laporte [00:39:24]:
And I understand why they're doing that, but I think that's too much power for them to tell the Internet, the entire Internet, yeah, these certificates last too long. Or, yeah, you got to be HTTPs. I don't need to be HTTPs@twit. We don't. There's no logins, there's no accounts. I guess maybe somebody could use us as a man in the middle. I mean, we had to go out and we had to buy an expensive, at the time, very expensive certificate for that. And that was because Google said you had to.
Leo Laporte [00:39:53]:
So Cloudflare decided that, well, we don't think Perplexity should be allowed to search sites because they're AI and they're using it to train. Perplexity said, we're not using it to train. A user has said Perplexity, tell me about this site. So we go to the site and we load it. But now Cloudflare is saying, no, no, our bot protection says you can't do that because you're AI. And I think that there's legitimate causes on both sides. But what bothered me is it felt like Cloudflare had a little too much power in that conversation. You guys agree?
Father Robert Ballecer [00:40:29]:
So unilaterally be able to just shut them out.
Leo Laporte [00:40:31]:
Yeah.
Molly White [00:40:32]:
And it's interesting because Cloudflare has made arguments in the past about not taking actions based on that sort of exact same logic. Is that like, oh, we're just an infrastructure layer. We don't want to be making any decisions on who can and cannot use our services. And so they sort of pointed to that when it was convenient. But then when they decided that they don't want Perplexity doing something, suddenly they're fine with taking a decision.
Leo Laporte [00:40:59]:
Yeah, I just don't like the centralization of power. That. That worries me. By the way, El Duderino in our Discord Chat, is pointing out that Galileo, which is a service that Cloudflare has donated to the Vatican, is named after. You might remember him.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:41:18]:
I might have heard the name times.
Leo Laporte [00:41:21]:
Yeah. Didn't you. Didn't they burn him at the stick. I think they did. I think they did. I will point out they have apologized. Okay.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:41:31]:
The same office of the Inquisition that prosecuted Galileo also prosecuted the founder of my religious order, St. Ignatius of Loyola. So we're kind of kindred spirits there.
Wesley Faulkner [00:41:43]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:41:43]:
Their mistakes. Mistakes were made. And actually, I'm sorry. They did not burn him at the stake.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:41:48]:
No, we just said. We imprisoned him. We. House arrest. He was under house arrest.
Leo Laporte [00:41:56]:
That terrible food in your.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:41:59]:
No, no, no. They had good food back then. It's.
Wesley Faulkner [00:42:03]:
The issue with. I think, with Cloudflare is that they bring up really valid points, and I am a big fan of Cloudflare.
Leo Laporte [00:42:13]:
Yes.
Wesley Faulkner [00:42:14]:
The issue where it becomes really questionable is that they give an avenue where people can pay your way around.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:42:22]:
Correct.
Wesley Faulkner [00:42:22]:
The wall that they're building, which is always a little suspect where, like, you can't do this unless you have the right amount of money. And then. And now our morals and ethics, maybe they can be bought.
Leo Laporte [00:42:37]:
Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.
Wesley Faulkner [00:42:40]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:42:40]:
All right, well, so, I mean, there's nothing to see here. They had an outage. And the thing that Cloudflare is great about is they were very forthright, even to the point where they posted an internal slack message from Matthew Prince saying, we're being ddosed, which I thought was. You didn't have to be that honest, Matthew. It's okay. Hey, Good news or maybe bad news, depending on your point of view. Apparently Doge has kind of disappeared from the federal government. Elon Musk.
Leo Laporte [00:43:15]:
This is from the New Republic. Trump's Doge is dead. And we won't miss it. RIP the Department of Government Efficiency. You know, when Elon and the President had their falling out and Elon left Washington to go back home to be a private citizen, most of the Doge staff stayed. But apparently many of the Doge staff has since found jobs elsewhere. Acting Doge Administrator is now an official advisor to rfk, the Department of Health and Human Services. The after effects of Doge's dismantling are over.
Leo Laporte [00:43:54]:
But the. Perhaps this is good news. Doge is dead.
Wesley Faulkner [00:44:00]:
I have an unpopular opinion. I'm sad that it's dead. And I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why.
Leo Laporte [00:44:07]:
Why?
Wesley Faulkner [00:44:08]:
Because the thought of it is still good. The execution and who was in charge. Every little part of it was bad. And what's.
Leo Laporte [00:44:21]:
Oh, I'm not against government efficiency.
Wesley Faulkner [00:44:23]:
Exactly. Right.
Leo Laporte [00:44:24]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [00:44:24]:
So it's the same way when you hear about dei, they're like, oh, it's. And they use those acronyms or those initials to mean something that it has nothing at all to do with what it actually is. But then they say this is what it is, so we should kill it. I think there should be a department of Government efficiency. I don't agree at all with their execution and how they did things, or. Well, I do think we should focus on how can we have more long term investments in a way that doesn't, doesn't, doesn't stay with the status quo, but is continuously improving based on either technology, based on other types of policies, that sort of thing.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:45:08]:
Yes, I will. I do want to throw in a little bit of context though, which is much of the waste that people will see was actually previous attempts to increase efficiency. When you look at like the offices of the ig, when you look at oversight groups, when you look at third party oversight groups, those were all efforts to create something that could monitor the government and look for ways to improve efficiency. But what happens is you end up adding generations upon generations upon generations of Doge. We've had Doge in the past. It just wasn't called Doge. So, I mean, we don't need Doge. We had the IGs.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:45:48]:
Well, we used to have the IGs until Trump fired them all. We don't need Doge. We have the guest record for the offices of Congress and the White House. At least we had them before Trump got rid of those. So we had the tools to actually look behind the curtain and see what was going on in our government. It's just that most people didn't. And then the power to the hands of people who had ulterior motives for.
Leo Laporte [00:46:12]:
Well, that's the point is, wasn't really about government efficiency. It was about getting all the databases in one place so they could be easily accessed and used for a variety.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:46:22]:
Of reasons over Starlink, an unsecure network.
Leo Laporte [00:46:25]:
In the White House and Palantir could be used to, you know, get the data out of there and find whatever.
Molly White [00:46:33]:
If Doge is dead, who's maintaining the databases?
Leo Laporte [00:46:36]:
That's my concern. That's an interesting.
Molly White [00:46:38]:
And also, like, didn't Doge sort of usurp the US Digital service?
Leo Laporte [00:46:42]:
And so, I mean, that's, that's still dead.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:46:45]:
Yeah, yeah, that's double dead now.
Molly White [00:46:47]:
They were doing super good stuff.
Leo Laporte [00:46:49]:
I thought when Alex Stamos was on the show about a month ago, he said, we are in a very bad state. SISA has basically been dismantled. You know, USDS is gone. What was it? F18 is gone. 18, folks. All of these, I think good Initiatives have disappeared and now we are just sitting here, a sitting duck in effect for nation states that decide to go after us.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:47:18]:
And it's not just the initiatives. We I think the Trump administration really went after the people who had the talent to do those jobs.
Leo Laporte [00:47:26]:
They're gone.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:47:27]:
So even if they were to be re established, they're not going to want to rejoin government service, not after the way they were treated.
Molly White [00:47:32]:
Plus like hopefully they have new jobs by now.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:47:35]:
Yeah, exactly.
Leo Laporte [00:47:36]:
One hopes Meta has won a victory in court. Remember, the FTC was going after Instagram and WhatsApp with kind of the plan, I think, of forcing Meta to divest. Of course, Meta says, but wait a minute, wait a minute, your honor, you gave us permission to buy him in the first place. A key court has ruled that the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp does not violate US antitrust. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington said the FTC failed to prove the deals allowed the tech giant to illegally monopolize the social networking market. Actually an interesting opinion. This is interesting. We're seeing more and more of these judges.
Leo Laporte [00:48:19]:
Remember the Google judge in the Google search monopoly case saying, well, a year ago we ruled that Google was a monopoly, but a year later, AI seems to be taking over Internet search. So we really aren't going to punish them for this. Now the judge in this case, Judge Boasberg, says with apps surging and receding, chasing one craze and moving on from others and adding new features with each passing year, the FTC has understandably struggled to fix the boundaries of Meta's product market. Whether or not Meta enjoyed monopoly power in the past, though, the agency must show it continues to hold such power. Now we hold that the FTC has not done so.
Wesley Faulkner [00:49:05]:
It's hard to prove a negative. You can't choose an alternate timeline and examine it and say, like looking at this timeline, we can tell that this allows you to get here. That's a really, really hard barrier in terms of winning these cases. So it's is as expected. But I think this doesn't also bolster the case that things should be intervened earlier, which I think is the logical conclusion that you should take from this.
Leo Laporte [00:49:34]:
Right. It's unknown whether the FTC will appeal, but experts say unlikely. According to Bloomberg Law. On another front, Europe seems to be scaling back its landmark privacy and a LI laws. A lot of people are very happy that the cookie banner law is being modified. I wish they just get rid of it because it's based on the pretty much incorrect notion that cookies are somehow a horrible privacy invasion. That's why you see those pop ups everywhere you go. We even have to do it on some of our sites or all of our sites, because if European viewers come there, we're required by law to pop that up.
Leo Laporte [00:50:20]:
I stole from Mike Masnik at techdirt. His pop up says, yeah, we use cookies. What about it? What do you care? And then you have one choice, which is okay. The EU apparently is thinking about changing that so that it's a browser setting, a global browser setting. So you can, as a user said in your browser, please just. I don't ask me, I don't want cookies. Or I do want cookies, either one, but that's that.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:50:54]:
We've had to deal with that pretty consistently in my office because we're always rolling up new services and we have to put those banners and warnings on everything. And actually in recent years, we found this new sort of attack where people would file nuisance claims to delete themselves from our databases. And our databases don't really contain anything.
Leo Laporte [00:51:17]:
Yeah, we get that all the time.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:51:18]:
Yeah, it takes up our time, it.
Leo Laporte [00:51:20]:
Takes up our money. Yep. They know we got to defend it and we got to go after it.
Wesley Faulkner [00:51:26]:
I was just about to launch my startup where I was going to sell ads in the cookie banner space.
Leo Laporte [00:51:33]:
Damn.
Molly White [00:51:34]:
You just have to make sure that your cookies are still invasive enough that they still have to show the banner and then you can.
Leo Laporte [00:51:41]:
You got it.
Wesley Faulkner [00:51:42]:
Yep, yep.
Leo Laporte [00:51:43]:
So I just go to my UBlock origin and I use. There's an annoyance filter that you can turn on that you don't see cookies, those. Those cookie banners. So in a way, I do have a global browser setting. It's called UBlock origin. That's the problem with, with these kind of regulations is that they end up teaching people how to, you know, end around them.
Wesley Faulkner [00:52:05]:
Was. Or perplexity.
Leo Laporte [00:52:06]:
Clickadoos.
Wesley Faulkner [00:52:07]:
But banners.
Leo Laporte [00:52:09]:
I don't know. That's a good question. What does perplexity do when it goes to a site and looks at it? Yeah, I have. We'll have to ask. I have no idea.
Wesley Faulkner [00:52:18]:
Did it prove it was over 18?
Molly White [00:52:22]:
We need a selfie of perplexity.
Leo Laporte [00:52:25]:
Look left, look right, smile. Let's see. They're also going to relax or delay landmark AI rules. See, this is one thing somebody said to me. I don't know if this is true, but it was a credible source that said this is the difference in regulation in the US and in the eu. In the US we make a law, that law is on the books. That's it, we're done. It's perfect in every way.
Leo Laporte [00:52:50]:
We're never gonna modify it.
Wesley Faulkner [00:52:51]:
And that ban TikTok, right? Yeah, continue.
Leo Laporte [00:52:54]:
Yeah, well, except for that one. That one different. But in the EU they see it as an evolve. They see regulation as evolving and if something doesn't work, they're willing to back off or change it. I don't know if that's the case, but this is an example.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:53:08]:
It's a guideline. The European way is more guideline than hard and fast rule. You know, we want you to get to a certain end. We think this rule, this law, will help you get towards that end. If it doesn't help you get towards that end, we'll find something else.
Leo Laporte [00:53:23]:
In the US there was a story last week which I covered, and I wish I hadn't now, that the President was considering an executive order to ban state regulation of AI. Since then there's been stories saying, no, no, they decided not to do that because they think they can add it to the defense appropriations bill. They just put it in there, it's got to pass. Nobody's going to say no to defense of appropriations. And then it'll just be the law of the land. They won't have to do an executive order.
Molly White [00:53:57]:
Is this a good executive order? Isn't really lawmaking better to make it a law?
Leo Laporte [00:54:02]:
Why not? So my question, is that a good thing or not?
Molly White [00:54:11]:
Well, I feel like it's similar to a lot of Internet regulation where it's like a lot of the time it doesn't make sense for it to be done even at the country level. But then in the US doing it at the state level is just like, how are we possibly going to enforce that across state lines?
Leo Laporte [00:54:30]:
Yeah, I'm sure if I were Google or OpenAI, I would not be thrilled because then there's 50, potentially 50 different, a patchwork of 50 different laws.
Molly White [00:54:40]:
But also on the other hand, I have a little bit more confidence in the state's ability to regulate at this current moment.
Leo Laporte [00:54:49]:
I don't think the feds have any interest in regulating AI at all right now.
Molly White [00:54:53]:
Yeah, and honestly, we've seen some fairly good examples of states doing a good job on regulating some digital things. I mean, like, if you look at New York and their digital currency, see enforcement, it was actually pretty good that New York was taking a pretty strong stance against crypto fraud and that did, I think, improve some things, although some companies just stopped doing business in New York. But I think there are good examples of good state level digital regulations. So I don't think it's impossible for it to happen, but I think just from a practical standpoint, it's very challenging to implement.
Leo Laporte [00:55:32]:
One of the things California did is they made a law that said if you're an AI chatbot, you have to identify yourself as AI, which seems like a very minor but appropriate.
Molly White [00:55:42]:
If you're a policeman, you have to tell me or else it's entrapment.
Leo Laporte [00:55:45]:
Yeah, I don't know if that's the rule.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:55:49]:
I think actually the US can take a page from the European Parliament here because the recognition when they were meeting and talking about AI, and actually we've had the same discussions in, in places like Italy and in England, was that people generally understand that there is an oncoming threat from AI. They understand that it can be abused, that it is a very powerful tool. But they also recognize that at the moment the threat is so diffuse and vague that any legislation you make right now is going to land wrong. And so that's basically what the EU is doing. They're saying we need to wait to see where the problems are before we actually start legislating to fix the problems. Problems, which I think sounds like a good idea. The United States needs to do the same thing. Is there going to be disruption from AI? Absolutely.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:56:39]:
Is all that disruption going to be bad? Not necessarily. Is there going to be abuse? Absolutely. Do we know where that abuse is going to take place? No, we don't. So trying to legislate either through putting something into an appropriations bill or making a straight up law is probably not a great idea at the moment.
Molly White [00:56:57]:
I mean, I think the goal of the appropriations law would be to avoid states doing any sort of regulation rather than imposing some.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:57:06]:
But I mean, even then you're, you're taking a stand. You're saying, no, no, everything they're doing is great. And now it's, it's on the books. So if you want to, if you want to then address another issue.
Molly White [00:57:15]:
Right.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:57:15]:
You're going to have to repeal that law. So why do it in the first place? Because we know, we know that it's being abused. Is it actionable? Is it something that we can fix with the legislation? We don't know yet. It's really. Right now we are afraid of AI like we were afraid of radiation back in the 80s, where it's all around us and everyone's scared. And so we're going to panic. Well, that's not a good way to go into legislation.
Leo Laporte [00:57:43]:
AI is the new radioactive banana, is that what you're saying?
Wesley Faulkner [00:57:46]:
Yeah. Base ram.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:57:47]:
Oh, show title.
Leo Laporte [00:57:50]:
That's why I said it. Sometimes I throw in things just so I have a show ton. It's a. You could. Your choice. Radioactive banana, radioactive shrimp. You get to choose.
Wesley Faulkner [00:57:58]:
We're talking just really quickly, just like the first Trump term where they're talking about the healthcare and they're trying to do repeal and replace and they're trying really hard to do the repeal part and didn't have a plan for the replacement.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:58:16]:
The replace.
Wesley Faulkner [00:58:17]:
And so if they want us still to be safe, it's not. Let's get rid of all legislation and let's figure it out later. They should be focusing on the figuring out later now part if they're going to be removing these safeguards for some communities, some states.
Leo Laporte [00:58:33]:
I think people look at what happened with the Internet and particularly with social media, which was completely unregulated for the first decade, and say, oops, maybe we should have thought harder about that because now what we're trying to do isn't working so very well and we've got a whole generation perhaps of kids who are damaged by it. So they're saying, well, maybe we need to do something about AI. But I have to say with David Sacks in the White House and lots of money flowing in, you know, for a ballroom from AI companies, it seems unlikely that there'll be any support in the federal government for any regulation at all.
Molly White [00:59:11]:
There's also the AI super pacs which are springing up and very much styling lots of money in the image of the crypto super PACs which they thought were very successful. So that should be something to watch in the.
Leo Laporte [00:59:24]:
Do you think the crypto industry elected Donald Trump?
Molly White [00:59:27]:
No, no. But I do think that didn't hurt. It didn't hurt. Yeah. And there was certainly money in it.
Leo Laporte [00:59:33]:
But they're getting what they wanted.
Molly White [00:59:35]:
Well, to some extent. I mean, bitcoin's at an all time low right now, or I don't think.
Leo Laporte [00:59:40]:
The president has much local low impact on the value of bitcoin. I mean, he did everything, you know.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:59:45]:
It'S only has an impact when it goes up.
Leo Laporte [00:59:47]:
Leo?
Molly White [00:59:47]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:59:48]:
The Genius act might have been the problem with this, that supporting stablecoin might have undermined bitcoin a little bit. What do you think, Molly? Is that, that's.
Molly White [00:59:56]:
I don't think that's accurate. No.
Father Robert Ballecer [00:59:57]:
Well, I mean, look, bitcoin has always been a fantastically speculative financial instrument tying.
Leo Laporte [01:00:04]:
It to a stable nothing.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:00:06]:
Yeah, exactly that. I'm with Molly. I don't think it had a Huge effort. But I think the very idea of trying to say tie it to a currency that's a non starter, I mean.
Molly White [01:00:17]:
I think the stablecoin legislation legitimized stablecoins more, which brought more money into the crypto ecosystem, which is good for bitcoin prices. So I don't think that stablecoins undermine bitcoin.
Leo Laporte [01:00:28]:
It was a net positive.
Molly White [01:00:29]:
But you know, I mean, people were calling bitcoin, you know, bitcoin's run that we saw during the last year, the Trump pump, because, you know, he was responsible for the executive order on the digital assets stockpile, which people were very excited about because they thought the government was going to start buying bitcoin.
Leo Laporte [01:00:45]:
Yeah. What happened to that? Don't we have a strategic bitcoin reserve?
Molly White [01:00:49]:
Yes and no. We, we have it. No one knows how much is in it and there's most of it's way.
Leo Laporte [01:00:54]:
Confiscated to it, right?
Molly White [01:00:56]:
Yes, Yeah. I mean, right now pretty much the only assets that are in it are confiscated and like released crypto assets that are no longer involved in an active criminal investigation.
Leo Laporte [01:01:08]:
And I have to say that the, the Trump and Melania meme coin rug pull didn't help overall in the confidence people have in cryptocurrencies.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:01:18]:
I mean, just because it dropped 98.7% of value doesn't mean that it's a rug pull.
Leo Laporte [01:01:24]:
It could still go up. I'm, I'm holding diamond hands.
Molly White [01:01:28]:
I was actually just talking about this with a couple of journalists where I am really interested to see what happens if Trump basically loses some of his power or if he becomes less popular. If Trump, you know, the balance of power shifts in the midterms or of course after his presidency, what the ramifications are going to be for crypto. Because the crypto industry has so tightly tied themselves to Trump that if Trump goes down, you know, I'm sort of wondering what the effect is going to be for crypto, which is now seen as sort of one in the same.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:02:03]:
Well, they're going to lose their access to free pardons. I mean, that's going to be.
Molly White [01:02:07]:
And that will be devastating.
Leo Laporte [01:02:08]:
They've never been free. Robert, I'm sorry, I just have to correct you there. There's a set fee, there's a set price. You just have to know what it is. Is it offensive that he pardoned Coinbase?
Father Robert Ballecer [01:02:23]:
Yes.
Molly White [01:02:24]:
Binance.
Leo Laporte [01:02:25]:
Binance, not Coinbase. Binance.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:02:27]:
That wasn't any political persecution. That was a man admitting that he had committed crimes and not bitcoin crypto crimes. Actual financial crimes.
Leo Laporte [01:02:37]:
Yeah.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:02:38]:
So, I mean, if you're pardoning that just because you like the fact that he's in crypto, what are we doing? You want to undermine the trust in the government, do that.
Leo Laporte [01:02:47]:
That's the kind of thing that undermines the value of a cryptocurrency, not supports it.
Wesley Faulkner [01:02:53]:
The thing is people and institutions are moving forward. The bigger banks, like, I think Chase said that they're going to be releasing a stablecoin, right?
Leo Laporte [01:03:04]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [01:03:04]:
And so once these are cemented into institutional financial backing and transaction systems, you can't. If, if Trump went away, those aren't just going to be unwound. I think those are going to keep moving forward because they have, they have, they have now skin in the game, even the larger banks, to make sure that this works.
Molly White [01:03:26]:
Yeah, yeah. Although I would be hesitant about those announcements that like such and such bank is releasing whatever or they're, you know, piloting this, because there are a lot of, of announcements that are like, we're doing a research study on the possibility of releasing a stablecoin something and then you look at it like 10 months later and it's, it's totally tanked. Yeah. So I think.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:03:47]:
Are those just. Are that, are those just all pump and dumps? I mean, is that why they release those? Because I see those all the time.
Molly White [01:03:53]:
It's usually just pr, you know, just.
Leo Laporte [01:03:56]:
To reassure investors that we are on top of things and if this turns out to be the next big thing, we're there. And if not, we never really were going to do this.
Wesley Faulkner [01:04:07]:
I'm going to give like the positive side of this. Of stablecoins, one is being able to transfer money across borders without having to go through a separate entity which they take their chunk or their fees. That's part of why.
Molly White [01:04:23]:
Separate entity.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:04:25]:
They transfer the stablecoin.
Leo Laporte [01:04:27]:
Yeah, if at the list, but the commission's lower. Right.
Wesley Faulkner [01:04:30]:
Unless you have your own. If you have your own stablecoin.
Leo Laporte [01:04:34]:
Oh, I want wesleycoin.
Wesley Faulkner [01:04:36]:
So Chase.
Molly White [01:04:37]:
What do you mean if you have your own?
Leo Laporte [01:04:40]:
Chase doesn't pay anything.
Molly White [01:04:42]:
But then you have to. What happens when you want to actually convert that into money you can spend at an establishment? You're still having to cash it out.
Wesley Faulkner [01:04:50]:
If they're on both ends of the transaction of the transmission and they are able to use their own infrastructure to convert it back into fiat for the local currency. The other part is when the time that they're holding real fiat, that's converted into stablecoin, they're able to lend that out and so it actually makes them more liquid because they can use that money for loans, they can use that money for other capital intensive projects.
Molly White [01:05:22]:
And so those are able to lend it.
Leo Laporte [01:05:25]:
If you do that at scale pretty.
Molly White [01:05:27]:
Carefully, especially under genius, they're going to be fairly carefully.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:05:32]:
You would so quickly run afoul of money money laundering laws, I mean immediately if you're doing it that at scale.
Molly White [01:05:39]:
Well it's also just a liquidity issue which is like you need to be able to redeem your stable coins and if they're loaned out to some guy who's starting a business like you can't just be like hey we need those back because our stablecoin guy wants, wants them. So usually they're in like cash or very short term treasuries.
Wesley Faulkner [01:05:53]:
They have to be backed short term treasures. So like they could still. Yes, you're 100, right? I am not saying this exactly correct. I wish I had the vocabulary. But it's basically they're the more money that they're given they can make money off the money that they got for Stable coin is what it said.
Leo Laporte [01:06:10]:
But yes, the last time she was.
Wesley Faulkner [01:06:12]:
There needs to be a one to.
Leo Laporte [01:06:13]:
One plain stablecoin and now we're still trying to figure it out.
Molly White [01:06:18]:
It's what I do. Yeah, I mean I think that's true. But you could sort of say the same thing about banking just in general, which is that they take deposits, they make loans, it's kind of the same deal. But I mean I do agree that there are improvements to be made around the price of transferring currency. It should just be free, right? Or it should be much cheaper and faster which is you know what people say we need stablecoins to do. I'm not convinced we need stablecoins to just improve currency transfer.
Leo Laporte [01:06:50]:
Let's take a break because I need to go sell my entire stablecoin investment. But I have your Wesley coin, my west coin. It's good, it's going to be good. Wesley Faulkner is here. He's got his very own stablecoin. No he doesn't. He's the founder of works-not-working.com, which opens one week from today. Woohoo.
Leo Laporte [01:07:12]:
Molly.
Wesley Faulkner [01:07:13]:
I'd like to say for the record, I am, if you look at me, I should be considered unstable.
Leo Laporte [01:07:18]:
Unstable coin.
Wesley Faulkner [01:07:19]:
Oh.
Leo Laporte [01:07:22]:
That'S an idea. I want to start some unstable coin. Father Robert, you introduced us to dogecoin. Maybe. Yeah. There you go.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:07:29]:
This, this is my stablecoin. This lira, it's the Vatican euro.
Leo Laporte [01:07:35]:
The Vatican has Its own euro. I guess we have, we have a.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:07:38]:
Limited amount of euros.
Leo Laporte [01:07:39]:
Wow.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:07:40]:
And I have what this is. You, you can't see it. This is the one that has Pope Francis on it.
Leo Laporte [01:07:43]:
So this is never beautiful, it's never been touched. It's shiny. Wow. Of course, every state in the EU has to have its own version of the, of the euro. Right.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:07:56]:
They're so hard to get though, because I don't, I don't buy them from the gift store because I'm not paying €5 for 50 cent piece.
Leo Laporte [01:08:04]:
That's the main point of it, isn't it? That you could sell it at the gift store, I would imagine.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:08:08]:
But if you buy from the Vatican market like once every six months or so, your change will come and you might get one.
Leo Laporte [01:08:15]:
Nice.
Wesley Faulkner [01:08:15]:
Kind of nice.
Leo Laporte [01:08:17]:
Also here, Molly White, who will not explain Bitcoin or stablecoin again. This is it. I hope you got it the last.
Molly White [01:08:24]:
Time I've the last.
Leo Laporte [01:08:25]:
This is the last time I'm gonna ask you to do that. I had a lovely night's sleep last night thanks to our sponsor, Helix Sleep. I wanted to tell you about it. I Learned that every six to eight, maybe six to 10, if you really want to stretch it years, you should replace your mattress. Mattresses break in, they get saggy, they lose their resiliency. So a couple months ago, Lisa and I realized that our mattress was eight years old. It was maybe time to get a new one. And I went out and did some research and I have to say, after looking at all the reviews, I picked Helix Sleep and I could not be happier.
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Leo Laporte [01:12:17]:
I don't know if you've seen the ads from Microsoft Windows. Talk to your computer. It says talk to your computer. The computer has this little tinny voice.
Wesley Faulkner [01:12:28]:
Well.
Leo Laporte [01:12:30]:
According to the Verge, talking to Windows Copilot AI makes a computer feel incompetent. The Verge tested all of the queries in those ads and unlike the ad, they did not do very well. At all. They said multiple versions of the ad are posted online and even airing on NFL games. Surely, says the Verge, it must be easy to replicate the specific task Microsoft wants millions of people to see. Well, you know that microphone, the HyperX Quadcast 2S microphone, the one, the Rainbow microphone in the ad? If you've seen the ad, you know what I'm talking about. And the woman on the ad says, what mic is she using in this video? So independently, Antonio G. Di Benedetto, writing for the Verge, tried it what mic is she using? In my test, the assistant first gave me the basics about the benefits of a dynamic microphone.
Leo Laporte [01:13:31]:
I do agree with that. That's what we use. Then, unprompted, it started talking to me like I was the person in the video, not the person asking about the person in the video. It said, and I'll do this in the best copilot impression. I can see your setup right now, and I'm noticing you have a big setup there. Hey big boy, I like your setup. And then it told me the mic in question was actually the first generation HyperX Quadcast. To be fair, DiBenedetto writes, HyperX makes a lot of similar looking mics, although at one point it said without seeing.
Leo Laporte [01:14:08]:
I don't know why it sounds like Mickey Mouse. Without seeing the exact lighting pattern or any specific features, it's hard to say definitively what model it is, despite it being bathed in RGB lighting in the image on two other occasions, it identified the mic as a Shure SM7B. And when I asked, as they did in the ad, where can I get it? Nearby, it gave me a dead link to Amazon and then a correct link to the wrong mic at Best Buy. I'll go on. The ads also show a person asking, what sort of thrust does this thing have on it? No, get your mind out of the gutter. He's talking about a PowerPoint presentation about the Saturn V rocket. Unlike the ad, Copilot Vision could not identify the rocket from the image or from the words Saturn 5 visible on the screen. When I told copilot it's a Saturn V, it told me its thrust is generally measured in Newtons or kilonewtons, then gave me an estimated thrust of 7.5 million pounds.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:15:09]:
Huh?
Leo Laporte [01:15:10]:
Huh? I can go on. It's a moron. It's basically Siri or Amazon's Alexa. They're all morons. Telling copilot, oh, sorry, I didn't mean to wake you up. Go away. Telling copilot to quote, run some simulations on Burn Time, as the guy does in the ad, led to it telling me I can't, but maybe you want to try Matlab instead. It goes on.
Wesley Faulkner [01:15:39]:
Yeah, the ads who thought like an indeterminate system would make you have virtual like infinite.
Leo Laporte [01:15:47]:
But why does Microsoft do this? Didn't they try it?
Wesley Faulkner [01:15:51]:
They're selling the sizzle, they need to sell computers. Everyone who is not familiar with AI saying how do I get started? And this is the answer that they're looking for for people who don't know. And I have to say like, visual interpretation of what you see is not very easy. I'm not sure if we'll talk about it, but I've been testing out Anti.
Leo Laporte [01:16:12]:
Gravity, which is oh, Google's new idea.
Molly White [01:16:16]:
Phrase to say in general.
Leo Laporte [01:16:18]:
Oh, Google's invented anti gravity. That's fantastic. I've been waiting for that.
Wesley Faulkner [01:16:23]:
It does sound like it does jumping really high.
Leo Laporte [01:16:25]:
You know the theory on the name, by the way, I saw this on Reddit, is that Google wants to co opt the autocompletes for antitrust so that when you start typing anti instead of antitrust you type Google anti. It goes Google. Oh, anti gravity. Oh yeah, Nebius.
Wesley Faulkner [01:16:42]:
That's smart. Yeah. But there's several times where I've had it to use the browser for visual checking of any type of work that it's done. Like add a hero image to this using nanobanana and it'll go through and it'll put the layering and the image behind it and it'll say that it's still there even though it's not visually there. When it spins up the browser, it just looks at it, it's like, yeah, I see it. It lies all the time.
Leo Laporte [01:17:10]:
It's trying to please you, Wesley. It's trying to make you happy.
Wesley Faulkner [01:17:15]:
Yeah, everything worked. Yeah, no, visually. So being able to have it use to have a random image and it understanding what's going on and what you're talking about, it is not going to work every single time. And for the example that I posed, one of it was like text layout and one of the it was like a dark mode. So the text was white, except for a portion of it was black and then the rest of it was white where it was trying to emphasize a specific word. And I said tell me why, tell me what color you see when you read this phrase. And then it says, oh, now I can't see it. It's just like one of those things.
Leo Laporte [01:17:58]:
Where it's like I knew what color it was but I'm not telling you.
Wesley Faulkner [01:18:02]:
Yeah, this thing is so buggy that.
Leo Laporte [01:18:07]:
I have to say this is bad timing because Google's Gemini 3 is pretty impressive. I haven't tried any Gravity yet, but the Nano Banano Pro is really good. AI generator. That's just. Both of those came out this week. Microsoft might be a little bit in the Apple position of having kind of laggard capabilities.
Molly White [01:18:28]:
I feel like I've never seen the use. Maybe I'm just like old and stuck in my ways, but like I have never seen the use case of like 90% of the voice activated agents. Like I, I don't want to talk to my laptop. It has a keyboard.
Leo Laporte [01:18:46]:
Like people look so dopey in these ads.
Molly White [01:18:50]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:18:50]:
And even then, even in the ads the roommate's going, what are you doing?
Molly White [01:18:53]:
Yeah. Do these people never work in an office? Like, can you just imagine your, all of your co workers being like, computer, you know, tell me the.
Leo Laporte [01:19:03]:
But I have to say, Claude code is really amazing. What did you use to vibe code that Australian teenager workaround? Robert?
Father Robert Ballecer [01:19:12]:
Oh no, that was just OpenAI.
Leo Laporte [01:19:15]:
Okay, so you just did.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:19:17]:
I didn't even do anything special. I mean seriously. It was just from their, their GitHub training.
Leo Laporte [01:19:22]:
Huh. Interesting. I don't know, I'm pretty. So this is kind of where we are with AI now. It's simultaneously mind blowingly good and horrifically stupid.
Wesley Faulkner [01:19:33]:
It's marketing being told to sell this. That's why you have ads like this. They're like, hey, this is what we're selling and they throw it over the wall and marketing's like, okay, well this sounds pretty cool. This is the future we're living in now. Does it work?
Leo Laporte [01:19:47]:
I don't care.
Molly White [01:19:47]:
At least these were a little bit more realistic than those super bowl commercials where it was like, code me an entire open world video game or something like that. It was like, yeah, sure, I need.
Leo Laporte [01:19:59]:
Another copy of Flappy Bird. Can you get that done quick?
Father Robert Ballecer [01:20:03]:
I mean, the thing is these are all, all LLMs are just probability machines or probability generators. And it depends on the architecture, depends on the data that you're training it on. So the companies that have figured it out, they've realized, oh no, we can sell a video AI generator, but we have it trained on a very specific subset of data. Microsoft is still trying to do this sort of general LLM and it does not work. It's just, it's simply if you try to make it do too many things, voice recognition, image recognition, and at the same time include the generative conversational AI pieces, it doesn't work, it breaks. So I mean at some point they're going to figure out well no, you have to start combining different LLMs in order to make an outcome that isn't completely embarrassing.
Leo Laporte [01:20:51]:
Well, there might be a side negative to this because there is a distribution of Linux I haven't used it called Zorin that is aimed at Windows users. It looks like Windows, huh? Zorin Mamzani is now the mayor of New York. So there.
Molly White [01:21:08]:
How does that go with We've elected.
Leo Laporte [01:21:10]:
Our first AI Linux distro as a mayor. No Z O R I N O S In October they claimed they had 100,000 downloads in a little over two days following Microsoft's end of support. Remember October 15th for Windows 10. Now a month later they're saying 780,000 people using a Windows PC downloaded it in the last month. A million downloads since October 14th.
Molly White [01:21:41]:
When it's finally the year of Linux.
Leo Laporte [01:21:43]:
On the desk, Hallelujah, we're here. It happened. It actually Linux is now up TO I think 4% of desktops, which is kind of remarkable. At Apple was 4% for a long time. With the Mac.
Wesley Faulkner [01:21:57]:
That was.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:21:58]:
I mean I'd love to go.
Leo Laporte [01:22:01]:
I don't think Linux is for everybody but it's gotten to the point where it's a lot easier to use.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:22:09]:
Well, you've got Microsoft admitting that most of their features in Windows 11 are broken. So I mean at some point they're just gonna give up.
Wesley Faulkner [01:22:18]:
Games run better on Steam than they do on Windows.
Leo Laporte [01:22:21]:
Well that's the interesting thing. So of course Valve announced the Steam machine last week which is their next generation computer console designed for the. They did a Steam machine eight years ago that was not so hot. But this one now there's a lot of games that most games run on it because of the Proton layer. It's a Linux box but it's got the Proton compatibility layer which they didn't have eight years ago. There's still a number of big AAA titles that won't work on it because they have anti cheat code which doesn't run on Linux. But in a way Steam is pushing forward, at least for gamers, the idea that you can play some pretty, you know, a lot of really good games. Some of the games you play, Robert on not just the Steam machine but any Linux box now thanks to Proton.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:23:11]:
Really the only thing that's keeping me on Windows for my personal machines is that I have to. Do I have to use the Adobe editing suite. Yeah and that's, that's Windows or Mac.
Leo Laporte [01:23:21]:
Although David, Resolve is Linux now for free.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:23:24]:
Exactly. So actually we started playing with DaVinci Resolve. Half of the team is redoing our projects in Resolve. If we get to the point where we feel that we can do most of the work with Resolve, we're switching. And at that point I'm all 100% Linux shop.
Leo Laporte [01:23:40]:
I am. I bought the. I've mentioned this before, so I apologize if I'm boring you folks, but I bought the Framework Desktop for. I wanted to play with local AIs, and it's running Linux and it's. It's running on Linux. It's optimized for the AMD processor and the AMD's GPU. It's called Casheos. And it's so much faster than my Mac.
Leo Laporte [01:24:00]:
So much faster than any Windows machine ever. It's just. It's beautiful, it's elegant, it's responsive, it's reliable, it makes snapshots. Every time I install something or change configuration, it makes a snapshot. It makes it very easy to roll back things. That Windows System Restore never really did work. I just feel like. I don't know, I'm an advocate for Linux on the desktop.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:24:24]:
Wait, what LLM are you running on that? Leo?
Leo Laporte [01:24:26]:
So I run LM Studio so I can use almost anything, but because I got the highest end, it's a Strix Halo. So it's the AMD 395 AI plus with 128 gigs of RAM, so it has a lot of VRAM. I think it can go up to 96 gigs. So I'm able to run ChatGPT's OSS, GPT, OSS 120, the big one. But you know what's interesting? There are a lot of smaller models now from QN and others that are really quite.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:24:54]:
I'm still stuck on Mistral 7B.
Leo Laporte [01:24:56]:
I mean, Mistral's great. There's some really good. Now, I admit local AI is nowhere near what I'm getting from Gemini 3, for instance, which is.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:25:07]:
But that's the only option. My organization has the data, the information that we deal with is sensitive. It can in no way, shape or form touch the Internet.
Leo Laporte [01:25:16]:
Because you know all about my sins.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:25:18]:
Exactly. Well, we've got those indulgences.
Molly White [01:25:21]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:25:24]:
Tell me more.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:25:27]:
No, but, but I mean.
Leo Laporte [01:25:28]:
So you're not allowed to use SaaS AI applications.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:25:32]:
No. 100.
Leo Laporte [01:25:34]:
So you have to do it locally.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:25:36]:
It's either local and. For example, I am. I am building up an LLM right now that we will use in what we call our owla. It's the big meeting place where important things happen. Because we would like to use LLMs for all of our translations. The translators have always been the biggest problem because, you know, when we have one of these meetings, we could have 10 different languages, 12 different languages, and they're all what we call closed forms. They're. They.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:26:02]:
So they have to be priests or nuns or religious who can be sworn to secrecy.
Leo Laporte [01:26:06]:
Wow.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:26:07]:
And if I could replace Those all with LLMs, everyone would be very happy.
Leo Laporte [01:26:11]:
Now I see the headlines in newspapers all over the world. Vatican priests sworn to secrecy. But we won't. We won't mention that.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:26:19]:
I mean, 99 of the stuff is real.
Leo Laporte [01:26:21]:
Privacy is a better word than secrecy, right?
Wesley Faulkner [01:26:24]:
The.
Leo Laporte [01:26:25]:
The seal of the confession. Here's.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:26:28]:
Here's a little inside baseball story for you, Leo. There was, at one point, we were having one of these meetings, and there was. Was a participant, a member of the clergy who. He was going on and on and on and on. And the man who did the translation from Italian to English, I'm hearing nothing on the channel, so I'm like, is something. Something wrong? The guy's talking for like five minutes, and then he gets to the end and the translator just says, no. And it's like, yeah, okay, that's. That's human intelligence.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:26:59]:
Realizing, I know none of this matters. No. What he said was, no.
Molly White [01:27:03]:
No.
Leo Laporte [01:27:04]:
You'll never hear an AI just say no.
Wesley Faulkner [01:27:06]:
No.
Leo Laporte [01:27:08]:
That's a really great idea. You're super smart. But no. I'm sorry, Molly. I didn't mean to step on you.
Molly White [01:27:14]:
I was going to say I feel like AIs should maybe do that more just.
Leo Laporte [01:27:17]:
Yes.
Molly White [01:27:18]:
No.
Leo Laporte [01:27:18]:
Yeah. I told my AI, my chat. GPT5.1 to be concise, professional. Never say nice things about me.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:27:29]:
We'll call it the Hold My Beer LLM.
Leo Laporte [01:27:32]:
Yeah. Hold my beer.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:27:35]:
Hold my beer.
Leo Laporte [01:27:35]:
Hold my beer. Fortnite. This is an interesting gaming story. Then we'll move on. Fortnite is getting Unity Now. Fortnite comes from Epic Games, the creators of the real engine, which is the dominant gaming engine. But they've decided to also allow Unity.
Wesley Faulkner [01:27:56]:
That.
Leo Laporte [01:27:57]:
That's interesting. Right?
Father Robert Ballecer [01:27:58]:
So are they rewriting it in Unity?
Molly White [01:28:01]:
What?
Leo Laporte [01:28:01]:
No, they're just gonna have. So you can now write. I. I am not up on the. The latest with Fortnite because I. Every time I play, I get killed right away, so. But apparently you can pass the nine.
Molly White [01:28:12]:
Year old face recognition.
Leo Laporte [01:28:13]:
Exactly. They won't let me in. They say you're too young. Next Time I'm gonna come in as Sabrina Carpenter and I think I'll be able to get in anyway.
Wesley Faulkner [01:28:22]:
The.
Leo Laporte [01:28:24]:
Apparently you could do like Roblox, you can do like kind of standalone experiences in Fortnite. Creator made experiences. And I think this is actually what Epic is saying is we want to make Fortnite a platform like Roblox, but maybe more, I don't know.
Wesley Faulkner [01:28:41]:
Is this related to the Apple agreement about outside payment systems? And I know that.
Leo Laporte [01:28:49]:
Now that Epic thinks it's going to be able to have a store, they could do it. And Google. Google made a deal. Apple's going to be forced to make a deal. Interesting.
Wesley Faulkner [01:28:58]:
Yeah. So them releasing the Apple tax allows them to do more things where they can take some of that recapture.
Leo Laporte [01:29:06]:
I didn't know this. By the end of 2024, Fortnite had 70,000 total creators, according to the Verge publishing, nearly 200,000 islands, which is what. What they call these, you know, standalone experiences. But Unity.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:29:23]:
So is everything going to be a platform now?
Leo Laporte [01:29:25]:
Sorry?
Father Robert Ballecer [01:29:26]:
Is everything going to be a platform now? Yeah, it's going to have a platform.
Leo Laporte [01:29:29]:
Yeah, everybody's.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:29:30]:
Epic's going to have a platform. Minecraft will become a platform.
Leo Laporte [01:29:33]:
I'd like to announce the new Twit platform. That's right, build your own podcast platform. We'll provide you with an AI. You can make your own or you can have the AI do it for you.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:29:43]:
You know, Leo, you could actually pitch that at TechCrunch Disrupt. I totally could probably get. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:29:49]:
Investors. This is where I'm a failure in life. I just don't know how to make money.
Wesley Faulkner [01:29:59]:
Yeah, Launch your own Bitcoin or cryptocurrency.
Leo Laporte [01:30:02]:
And you can dollar sign. Leo.
Wesley Faulkner [01:30:05]:
Yeah.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:30:05]:
We've got an AI backed stablecoin that links into Bitcoin and provides age verification. Oh my gosh, you're hitting all the buzzwords, Leo.
Molly White [01:30:14]:
Something quantum.
Leo Laporte [01:30:15]:
Something quantum in there.
Molly White [01:30:18]:
Quantum resistance.
Leo Laporte [01:30:22]:
Quantum resistant. Twitcoin. See, Molly, you really missed your call.
Molly White [01:30:27]:
I did. I think that very often, actually.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:30:29]:
And Leo, stablecoin will be called Gold pressed latinum.
Leo Laporte [01:30:36]:
There we go.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:30:36]:
Now we get all the Trekkies.
Leo Laporte [01:30:38]:
Twitcoin looks a little too much like Twitcon, but okay. I think we're in the right ballpark. We'll have to. Well, let's run it up the flagpole and see who spits or whatever they say in business. You're watching this week at Tech. Wesley Faulkner, Molly White. Father Robert Balisare. So glad to have you here.
Leo Laporte [01:30:57]:
Have you here today. He Answers to a higher authority.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:31:03]:
Oh, there was that commercial. Was it the hot dog commercial?
Leo Laporte [01:31:07]:
Hebrew National.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:31:08]:
Yeah, Hebrew National. Thank you, thank you.
Leo Laporte [01:31:11]:
Because they were kosher. Our hot dogs are better because we answer to a higher power. Boy, that takes me back.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:31:20]:
I'm sorry I just disrupted your ad read.
Leo Laporte [01:31:21]:
I'm. I'm sorry. I wish it were an ad read for hot dogs, to be honest with you.
Molly White [01:31:26]:
It could be.
Leo Laporte [01:31:27]:
Yeah, it could be. No, it's actually an ad read aimed at all the nine year olds in Australia. Our show today, brought to you by ExpressVPN. This is the VPN I use the VPN I recommend if you have ever gone online. I mean, last time I used it, I think I was at the airport and it said free airport WI fi. And I was right about to join it. And then I thought, wait a minute, hold on there. Fortunately, I realized, oh, I have ExpressVPN on my tablet.
Leo Laporte [01:31:58]:
I'll just launch that and then use the free wi fi. See, ExpressVPN protects you. Protects your privacy. Protects your security. If you've ever. Privacy is really a big part of this. If you've ever browsed in incognito mode, I gotta tell you, it's not as incognito as you might think. Google just settled a $5 billion lawsuit.
Leo Laporte [01:32:19]:
It was accused of secretly tracking users in incognito mode. Google's defense. Well, your honor, incognito does not mean invisible. Actually said that. In fact, incognito definitely doesn't mean invisible. All your online activity is still 100% visible to Google and to third parties, unless you use ExpressVPN. This is the one I use, the only VPN I use, the only one I trust. When I go online.
Leo Laporte [01:32:46]:
Especially like I said, when I'm traveling in airports, coffee shops. When I'm out of the country, ExpressVPN is my go to. Actually, when I'm in the country, ExpressVPN is a great way to avoid geographic restrictions because ExpressVPN invests in their infrastructure and this is very, very important. You've probably seen ads for free VPNs. Ask any security expert, they'll say, no, no, no, no, no. Because if you're not paying for it, they need to pay for their infrastructure somehow. They're selling your information, not ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN goes the extra mile to make sure they don't know anything about you.
Leo Laporte [01:33:24]:
They, they, they created their own. And it's been verified by third party audits. Trusted server runs in ram. Cannot write to the hard drive. When you start the server, it spins it up in ram. When you close the server, it's gone and there is no trace of your visit. That would be enough for anybody else, but if ExpressVPN says, no, no, we got to do more. They're using a custom Debian Distro on all their servers that every morning they reboot, wipes, the drive starts fresh, so those hard drives are empty.
Leo Laporte [01:33:55]:
Even if it could write to the hard drive, there's no trace of your visit. This is why everyone needs ExpressVPN. Without ExpressVPN, third parties can still see every website you visit, even if you're using incognito mode. Your Internet service provider could see it, your mobile network provider, the admins of your wifi network. ExpressVPN routes 100% of your traffic through secure encrypted servers, so third parties cannot see you're browsing. But ExpressVPN is the best VPN because it not only does it hide your IP address, you know you're going to merge on the public Internet with an IP address they provide you. So that makes it really hard to track you because it's different every time. But they also invest again in rotating their IP addresses so they're not obviously from a vpn.
Leo Laporte [01:34:43]:
And they even have a new technology, which is really cool. Zero knowledge. This is an optional technology. Zero knowledge that even they don't know what IP address you're using. I don't. These guys could really rest on their laurels, but they don't. They keep making it better. And the beauty of ExpressVPN, it's easy to use.
Leo Laporte [01:35:03]:
You fire up the app, you click one button, you're protected. It works on every device you've got. Your phone, your laptop, your tablet. They even offer it for. For routers. In fact, they sell routers if you want, but you can also add it to your router or some models, and then your whole house is protected. You could stay private on the go. You could stay private when you're home.
Leo Laporte [01:35:23]:
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Leo Laporte [01:35:57]:
So the international association of Cryptologic Research. Iacr, that's one of the world's premier security organizations, had its annual leadership election, which they had to cancel because they lost the encryption key needed to unlock the results, they said Friday. The votes were submitted and tallied using Helios, which is an open source voting system that uses peer reviewed crypto to cast and count votes in a verifiable, confidential and privacy preserving way. I mean, this is good. This is better than locking you up in a conclave and burning the votes afterwards. This is even better than putting on the blockchain, unfortunately. And this is the way they do it. They're cryptographers.
Leo Laporte [01:36:52]:
They have three members of an election committee that act as independent trustees. To prevent two of them from colluding, each trustee holds a mere one third of the cryptographic key material. This is kind of like how ICANN rotates the keys, right? They've got like multiple holders, unfortunately. This is from the IACR's press release. One of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key. An honest but unfortunate human mistake. Cannot compute their decryption share. As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process.
Leo Laporte [01:37:33]:
It is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:37:41]:
Okay, yes, it's funny. And yeah, it's kind of a bonehead mistake. However, I give them props for not having a way around it. If they lost it, but they were still able to get the results, that would be okay. Now that. Now, now we've got a story. This is just people forgetting that. Yeah, humans are the worst part in that chain.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:38:00]:
So you have to account for that.
Leo Laporte [01:38:02]:
Hey, I lost my, my crypto key. I understand my password to my crypto wallet. So these things do happen. They are holding another election. It started Friday and it runs through December 20th. This time will not lose the keys.
Molly White [01:38:15]:
Well, that's why a lot of those crypto projects that use multi signature accounts use like a three out of five or something.
Leo Laporte [01:38:21]:
Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah, exactly.
Molly White [01:38:23]:
Yeah, it adds some fault tolerance.
Leo Laporte [01:38:24]:
I kind of feel bad. The trustee who lost the key has resigned. He was so ashamed.
Molly White [01:38:29]:
I wonder how he lost it. You know, like, wiped the hard drive, wrote it down on a piece of paper and it flew out the window.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:38:36]:
It was uninterested.
Molly White [01:38:37]:
Yeah, there's so many fun ways to lose keys. I want to know the details. I'm.
Leo Laporte [01:38:43]:
I'm looking at the three keys. I'm looking at his public key fingerprint, but yeah, you got to put it somewhere safe. Maybe the hard drive died or it's.
Molly White [01:38:52]:
In a landfill in Wales that he's trying to.
Leo Laporte [01:38:54]:
That's right.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:38:55]:
Have, have they tried password or password 1, 2, 3.
Leo Laporte [01:39:00]:
That would work.
Molly White [01:39:00]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:39:01]:
Or like the Louvre. Lou, Good password. No one's gonna forget that one anytime soon. Oh my. This is not such a Good story. The SEC has dismissed the case against Solar Winds and the SolarWinds CISO. This was I think, arguably one of the worst cyber attacks ever. Yes, yes, yes.
Wesley Faulkner [01:39:25]:
I was traveling when that happened.
Leo Laporte [01:39:28]:
So what happened?
Wesley Faulkner [01:39:31]:
Oh, just the system went down and it crashed so many other systems. I don't, I didn't look at the technical reason.
Leo Laporte [01:39:38]:
It was a Russian cyber attack.
Molly White [01:39:41]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:39:42]:
And the SEC said this is a failure on your, your part and we're going to hold you accountable. They sued Solar Winds and the, the CISO that was tied to the Russia linked cybersecurity attack. They had, the SEC said they had violated US security laws by concealing. Oh, this is the other thing. They knew that it happened and they concealed it. They delayed it, they delayed the result, which, correct me if I'm wrong, Father Robert, but Solar Winds was a security tool used by many, many companies. So the fact that it had been breached meant all of those companies were vulnerable. And so the, the follow on impact of this was devastating.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:40:24]:
Correct.
Leo Laporte [01:40:24]:
Yeah.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:40:25]:
These companies had been relying on SolarWinds to help support their, secure their networks. And so when the Solar Winds software itself was exploited, it essentially opened up all those networks to the attacker. Now SolarWinds should, have, should, should have immediately told their users there's something wrong, please shut down the software, please check your networks, please secure them. But they were, they immediately went into damage control mode. How much of this can we hide? Is this really as bad as it looks like what it is? And they, they, they hid under the, the veneer of well, we're trying to make sure we give you the correct information, but we have a really good protocol for this. It's been established for the last 10 years of when you have a breach that is actively being exploited, you do not wait to get the full information. You tell the people using that software, stop. So unfortunately, the reason why the lawsuit was controversial was they were trying to chain a bunch of different obligations under the law to charge him and it didn't really work.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:41:28]:
Honestly. We don't have laws for this. We don't have laws for people being criminally idiotic, which is what they were.
Leo Laporte [01:41:37]:
30,000 private and government and federal agencies used SolarWinds, Orion software, it was hacked. There was a backdoors hacked in September of 2019. SolarWinds started sending it out in March, unwittingly sent out updates with the hacked code. In March, more than 18,000 customers installed the malicious updates. Through the code, hackers access SolarWinds customer information technology system, which they could then use to install even more malware. So I mean, I think frankly the impact of the SolarWinds hack is still kind of unknown. Homeland Security used it, the State Department used it, Commerce and Treasury used it. There was evidence emails were missing from their systems.
Leo Laporte [01:42:29]:
FireEye, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco and Deloitte used it. They were also breached. And of course, SolarWinds probably could have. I mean, could have told people, but they didn't. And so these companies ended up breached. The. It wasn't publicly discovered or reported. Well, the question is discovered when reported.
Leo Laporte [01:42:59]:
When it wasn't reported until December 2020. Which means the attackers may have had as much as 14 months of unfettered access.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:43:10]:
Probably more, honestly is probably more. 14 months was the point at which they could start tracing large exfiltrations of data. But I mean, if ap. It was at APT, it was APT 29.
Leo Laporte [01:43:24]:
If.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:43:27]:
They would have spent many, many months just seeing how far they could take the exploit.
Leo Laporte [01:43:34]:
So Trump member said it was Chinese hackers because I don't know why at the time he was not happy about China, but it turned out it was Russians. Yeah, it was. I don't know if it's a GRU.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:43:45]:
Or, but I mean, we know that APT 29 is. Is Russia state sponsored?
Leo Laporte [01:43:51]:
Yeah, it's state sponsored for sure. Yeah.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:43:57]:
And just, I mean, it's almost unfathomable to think of the amount of information they had access to, immediate access to.
Leo Laporte [01:44:09]:
So SEC brought the case in 2023 at the. Toward the end of the year. A judge dismissed many of the charges, as you say, because they didn't really have a way to charge them. They charged him with a violation of U.S. securities law by concealing the vulnerabilities.
Molly White [01:44:28]:
Yeah, I was going to say it's kind of a weird thing to see coming out of the SEC.
Leo Laporte [01:44:32]:
Like all agencies, SolarWind says the firm is, quote, clearly delighted. I wouldn't take a victory lap at this point. You might. But we hope this resolution eases the concerns many CISOs have voiced about this case and the potential chilling effect it threatened to impose on their work. I guess if there's a threat that you could go to jail for not revealing that you'd been hacked. Yeah, that's a chilling Effect maybe not such a bad idea.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:45:03]:
I mean, if you're a cfo, you can go to jail if you sign off on a fraudulent return. So why can't there be something like that for a cto?
Leo Laporte [01:45:13]:
Get ready. Because, of course, one of the questions about AI is who's going to pay for it? Google has started testing ads in AI search results. Sponsored links at the bottom of AI generated responses. I'm less worried about that because we already see ads on Google search results. I'm much more worried about, you know, chatgpt saying, if you're looking for a hot dog, that Hebrew national is pretty darn good. Right? Yeah.
Molly White [01:45:41]:
I'm curious, like, how clearly delineated they'll be, you know, if it'll be like AI reply line break, clear advertisement, or if it's the type of thing that they'll start to sort of.
Leo Laporte [01:45:52]:
It will say sponsored. It will say sponsored links. So. But yeah, how big will they.
Molly White [01:45:57]:
But I mean, yeah, I was going to say there's some ads that Google has run that are very hard to distinguish as ads.
Wesley Faulkner [01:46:04]:
So.
Leo Laporte [01:46:04]:
Yeah, I mean, even if you look.
Molly White [01:46:05]:
At Google search ads or I feel like they're getting less and less clearly marked.
Leo Laporte [01:46:10]:
It's. It's at the bottom. This is Brody Clark on x dot com. This is the organic links. And then the ads are down here. See? Sponsored. Little thing that says sponsored. So if you're searching for emergency plumbers, you might get a little ad at the bottom.
Wesley Faulkner [01:46:32]:
I wonder if they'll like, make a YouTube influencer and just make a whole new video of.
Leo Laporte [01:46:37]:
Hey, hey, you know, I see you're searching for my plumber. I got this friend Joe down the street. He's fantastic. I mean, that's what worries me more, is that cryptic ads, if you ever label it sponsored. Okay. It's gotta be clear, though.
Father Robert Ballecer [01:46:56]:
But now there's sponsored ads, but there's AI generated sponsored ads that are trying to personalize it.
Leo Laporte [01:47:04]:
Yeah, that would worry me a little bit more. I'm just saying.
Molly White [01:47:08]:
And I wonder, like, as far as truth and advertising regulations go, what happens when the AI lies about your product? Like, who is held responsible for that?
Leo Laporte [01:47:17]:
Right.
Wesley Faulkner [01:47:20]:
That is a good call.
Leo Laporte [01:47:24]:
I'm running out of stories. Wait a minute. We never had this never happens. Molly, what's the. What's the biggest story in your world these days that you're most worried about?
Molly White [01:47:38]:
That's an interesting question.
Leo Laporte [01:47:40]:
I mean, I think, is it always crypto? I mean, or.
Molly White [01:47:46]:
Usually. Because that's what I write. Well, I would say if you're asking me what I'm most worried about. It's usually not crypto. But if you're asking me about the stories that I'm following.
Leo Laporte [01:47:54]:
Right.
Molly White [01:47:54]:
Usually crypto.
Leo Laporte [01:47:56]:
Right.
Molly White [01:47:57]:
I think right now one of the big things I'm focusing on is the market structure, regulation or legislation that's being drafted and that they're trying to push through the Senate by the end of the year. But question.
Leo Laporte [01:48:08]:
Tell me about that. I don't even know any. See, this is, this is why we got you on. You follow this stuff. What is this market structure legislation?
Molly White [01:48:16]:
Yeah. So they've been working on it all year. It's sort of, you know, the Genius act obviously passed earlier this year that was very specific to stablecoins. This is meant to be the overarching framework for how crypto will be regulated in the United States, including which agencies are responsible for it and things like that. Which has always been sort of the big burning question in crypto is, is it the SEC or the CFTC or some other agency? So they've been working on draft legislation for the better part of the year. There was a bill called the Clarity act that passed through the House. The Senate decided instead that they were going to draft their own market structure bill. Now there's actually two drafts.
Molly White [01:49:04]:
There's one of them in Senate Banking and one of them in Senate Ag. And, and so they have to sign off on the committee versions of the bills and then consolidate them somehow and then bring them to the Senate floor. And they're trying to get this all done before too much focus shifts over to the midterms because they're worried that that will just completely derail any progress on actual law. And then by the time the midterms are over, there might be a less crypto friendly Congress. You'll be less willing to pass legislation that's essentially written by the crypto industry. So I've been watching it very closely because it'll be interesting to see if and when and what they are able to pass into law.
Leo Laporte [01:49:47]:
Who's pushing this? Is this coming from the White House or crypto industry? Yeah. And they have tame Congress critters that they're.
Molly White [01:49:55]:
They've been, I mean, crypto industry executives have been living in Washington basically trying to influence this legislation. I mean, they've been meeting with senators constantly, Democrats and Republicans. They are constantly providing feedback on these drafts and rewriting sections of them. Essentially they just held this big dinner for a bunch of senators to try to push them on the crypto legislation. It's very Much the crypto lobby pushing this stuff.
Leo Laporte [01:50:25]:
It's interesting because we heard a lot about it after the election. We know that they put a lot of money in. There was a crypto ball at the, after the inauguration that Trump went to. But honestly, maybe our attention has turned to other things. There's been so much to talk about, but I haven't heard a lot about this, so that's interesting. The crypto industry is asking for its payback, basically.
Molly White [01:50:50]:
Right. I think part of the reason we haven't heard about it is because a lot of the crypto news that we get, especially in sort of mainstream media, has been focused on Trump's crypto corruption, which has frankly thrown a bit of a wrench into a lot of the legislation. It's making it harder for pro crypto Congresspeople to pass these bills because, you know, Democrats have been pushing to put in language about preventing office holders from selling crypto or promoting crypto or running crypto businesses. And it's like, as Trump does more and more egregious things in the crypto sector, it's, I think, becoming harder and harder for Republicans to sort of push off those requests.
Leo Laporte [01:51:35]:
Does the, the, the fall in value of bitcoin change any of the calculus here? Are people shifting their attention to stablecoin and away from Bitcoin, or is bitcoin still the dominant cryptocurrency?
Molly White [01:51:50]:
Bitcoin is still the dominant cryptocurrency, I would say. But I mean, a lot of these companies do issue stablecoins and so they're very interested in the stablecoin regulation. A lot of them are also interested in essentially becoming banks, which has been sort of an interesting trend. There's like a ton of companies that have open applications with the OCC about receiving national bank trust charters, you know, for the, for the purposes of custodying stablecoin reserves. So they're, they're certainly interested in stablecoins, but bitcoin is sort of the crypto and it always has been, and we'll see, I guess, if it always remains that way.
Leo Laporte [01:52:31]:
I think people are coming more aware of it because so many people have fallen for bitcoin investments, even in their, in their retirement accounts and so forth. I think the general populace is much more aware of the value of bitcoin than they were or.
Molly White [01:52:45]:
Oh, for sure. Yeah, absolutely.
Leo Laporte [01:52:48]:
And so when you have a flash crash. Was this a flash crash?
Molly White [01:52:51]:
There was a flash crash in October. This, the sort of.
Leo Laporte [01:52:56]:
By that, I mean, I can. Algorithmic.
Molly White [01:52:59]:
Yeah, yeah, right. That happened in October I think October 10th, there was a sudden flash crash, but there has been more of a prolonged downturn, I would say, since the beginning of October and going up until now.
Leo Laporte [01:53:13]:
That was triggered by Trump's hundred percent China tariffs.
Molly White [01:53:16]:
It's a mix of things, but that was certainly part of it. Just like general macroeconomic concerns. I think the flash crash contributed as well. I think that, you know, there were sort of losses that market makers and others absorbed during that time period that they're now having to recoup by selling bitcoin, probably.
Leo Laporte [01:53:35]:
And then that's the concern others have had, is that there's so much of that bitcoin investment is on margin and that the margin is support once the margin is called it. They're now selling bitcoin legitimate. I shouldn't use the word legitimate, but I will. Legitimate equities in the stock market. And it's going to cause. It's causing the drop in the stock market, right?
Molly White [01:53:56]:
Yeah. I mean, this is sort of the thing that a lot of critics have been warning about for a long time, which is that crypto and traditional finance are being much more tightly coupled and have been growing that way for a couple of years now. And so we see these incidents where it used to be that the stock market would. Would go down and people would sell off their bitcoin, so bitcoin would go down because people would sort of flee to less risky assets. Now we're seeing potentially bitcoin going down and the stock market following. There's, I think, a good question of whether or not bitcoin is a leading indicator or if it's actually a causative type of movement. But there's clearly a very strong link between bitcoin prices and equities, especially tech equities.
Leo Laporte [01:54:45]:
For a while, ether eth looked like a kind of a bitcoin competitor. You say Solana is also very popular.
Molly White [01:54:55]:
Yeah, I mean, there's a handful of sort of big altcoins. Eth is still big. Solana is big. Eth definitely was. You know, a couple years ago, people were talking about ETH essentially outpacing bitcoin.
Leo Laporte [01:55:09]:
Yeah, I thought that was gonna be the next layer. Yeah, yeah. They'd replaced proof of work with. What was it? Proof of?
Molly White [01:55:16]:
Stake.
Leo Laporte [01:55:17]:
Stake, yeah.
Molly White [01:55:18]:
Yeah. And I mean, it's certainly a very actively traded and used cryptocurrency, but I don't think it has quite lived up to the potential that a lot of people envisioned for it. At least, you know, a year or two ago, when people thought it would Sort of usurp bitcoin, huh.
Leo Laporte [01:55:33]:
And Samuel Bankman Fried wants to get out of jail.
Molly White [01:55:36]:
He sure does.
Leo Laporte [01:55:39]:
Is that news or is that.
Molly White [01:55:41]:
I mean, we knew he was going to appeal basically as soon as the conviction was handed down. So it's no surprise that he is appealing. But I don't think, I don't think.
Leo Laporte [01:55:52]:
This was two years ago. Why is it taking so long to appeal?
Molly White [01:55:56]:
Things move slowly in the court systems. I mean, the collapse of FTX was in November of 2022, and I don't think he was in court until a year later at least.
Leo Laporte [01:56:07]:
So do you think it's likely he'll get his appeal?
Molly White [01:56:09]:
No, not at all. I don't think it went very well, frankly for him. Yeah, the arguments that they were making were being very much questioned by the panel of judges. You know, he was arguing essentially we should have been allowed to bring up in court that I was acting on.
Leo Laporte [01:56:28]:
You know, with lawyers giving me advice of counsel defense.
Molly White [01:56:31]:
Yeah. And the appeal or the appellate judges basically said, well, you decided not to bring a formal advice of counsel defense. You could have decided to do that, but you didn't. And one of them basically pointed out that arguing that there were lawyers in the vicinity when you were committing crimes does not actually mean that they were signing off on those crimes or advising you to commit those crimes. And then he's been making all these arguments about how FTX was actually solvent and all of the victims have been paid back. And that also doesn't really hold up to scrutiny because it's. FTX was only still solvent at the time of its collapse if you use Sam Bankman Fried's innovative definition of solvency. So not true, basically.
Molly White [01:57:20]:
And then even the prosecutor pointed out that, you know, the victims have been repaid in the dollar value of bitcoins at the time of FTX's bankruptcy, which was like a very low point in bitcoin prices, partly because of Sam Bankman Fried, that bitcoin prices were so low.
Leo Laporte [01:57:40]:
It crashed the market. And that's.
Molly White [01:57:42]:
Yeah, exactly. It almost like benefited him. I mean, people are being repaid at I think around 16 or $17,000 per bitcoin. And even at bitcoin, bitcoin's recent low prices, it is above $80,000. Earlier in the year it was at 120. And so people, needless to say, don't feel like they've been repaid because they wanted to be repaid in kind. And obviously there's huge. You know, the victims still suffer even if they were repaid the full amount because they didn't have access to those assets for two plus years.
Molly White [01:58:16]:
So I don't think that appeal stands much chance, frankly.
Leo Laporte [01:58:20]:
What about a pardon? I mean, I know, yeah, I know Trump pardon Binance's founder, but that's got to be a bridge too far to pardon sp.
Molly White [01:58:28]:
Yeah. So my knee jerk reaction to that idea is like, of course Trump is not going to pardon Sam Bankman Fried because Changpeng Zhao is incredibly wealthy. He's one of the wealthiest people in the world. He is still highly influential in the crypto markets and just sort of the crypto industry. Whereas Sam Bankman Fried does not have much to his name at this point. He is despised by the vast majority of people in crypto. And so, you know, there's not really a monetary benefit to Trump to do it. He doesn't really get any influence or goodwill because of doing it.
Molly White [01:59:05]:
But then I was thinking, well, and then there's also the fact that Sandbank man Fried sort of has a reputation as being a Democratic mega donor because he was a huge Biden donor. He was also donating to Republicans, which he is now very quick to point out because he's trying to use the whole like I'm being persecuted argument that all of these guys try to use. But that certainly doesn't work in his favor as far as a pardon. But you know, I sort of think of that and then I look at the fact that Trump pardoned George Santos, who, who doesn't really have any money, who doesn't really have any influence, but.
Leo Laporte [01:59:40]:
He'S a nice dresser, he's, he dresses nicely.
Molly White [01:59:44]:
That's true. Sam Bankman Fried does not have that going for him.
Leo Laporte [01:59:47]:
No, he doesn't. No, you're right. Get a haircut, Sam.
Molly White [01:59:51]:
Yeah, so I mean, he did say, you know, George Santos is a good Republican or something like that. And so there was some partisan aspect to it. But like part of me is like, well, if he can pardon George Santos, maybe he'll pardon Sam Bankman Fried.
Leo Laporte [02:00:03]:
Like, you never know.
Molly White [02:00:04]:
Yeah. I mean, it just seems like kind of anyone and everyone is, is eligible at that at this stage.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:00:10]:
Well, I mean, also Zao already served a sentence, so it wasn't like Trump was getting him out of prison.
Leo Laporte [02:00:15]:
Santos, he got out of prison. He did, yeah.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:00:19]:
Actually he had only reported for like two weeks.
Leo Laporte [02:00:23]:
It was long.
Wesley Faulkner [02:00:24]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:00:25]:
He was still wearing the V neck, so I think, and he was still.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:00:27]:
Complaining about his, the, the conditions. He's like, oh, it's horrible, horrible. I, I have to Wear drab clothing or something.
Wesley Faulkner [02:00:35]:
Was Santos neckties. No, he was muted, commuted. Yes.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:00:41]:
Oh, that's right.
Leo Laporte [02:00:41]:
That's right. Yeah. Which means get out of jail. It doesn't. That's the most important thing. I mean, he immediately started making the rounds on the nightly news shows, which just. I found it.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:00:52]:
What was that line that he was using? I. I will. I will pay everything that the law requires me to pay.
Leo Laporte [02:00:58]:
Oh, that's always so noble. Yeah, so noble. All right, we're gonna take a little break. I will find some other news. But if you've got something on your mind, Father Robert Ballis here, Digital Jesuit, or on your mind, Wesley Faulkner, we could talk about it. There was an interesting Elon Musk post about the end of work that you might have something to say about, Wesley. We'll talk about that in just a little bit. You're watching this week in Tech.
Leo Laporte [02:01:24]:
Look at the weeks tech news brought to you this week by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. Zscaler solves a very interesting conundrum. You know, you just heard the Vatican. They're not allowed to use SAS AI because of the risk of exfiltrating confidential information. But so many businesses now are looking at, you know, what can we do with AI? The risks maybe are outweighing the rewards. I don't know. Then there's also the risk of the fact that we know who's using AI. The bad guys are using AI to attack you more effectively, more rapidly than ever before.
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Leo Laporte [02:02:33]:
They're indistinguishable from the real thing. Bad guys are. We've seen this happen. We've seen proof of concept. They're using AI to write malicious code. They're using AI to automate data extraction. There were, get this, 1.3 million instances of Social Security numbers accidentally leaked to AI. Applications, chat, GPT.
Leo Laporte [02:02:56]:
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Leo Laporte [02:04:33]:
Zscaler.com/security this happened. This just happened I think on a Friday both sides made their closing arguments. The Justice Department's lawsuit accusing Google of illegally monopolizing the ad tech market. Now we mentioned that Judge was it Ahmed Mehta or was Joe Azalsoph? I think it was throughout the even though he had ruled that Google was a monopoly a year later basically said well they're a monopoly but there's nothing really much we can do about it. So Google skated on that one a couple of months ago. This one may not go so well. Google really has a problem here. In fact, the judge wants to make a penalty ruling.
Leo Laporte [02:05:28]:
Judge Leonie Brinkema wants to do a penalty ruling before Google has a chance to appeal, according to Reuters. So the district judge held that Google has a monopoly in the online ad tech space. She asked the Justice Department how quickly and anti competitive measure could go into effect, saying time is of the essence. We want to get this done before Google can stall us with an appeal. Google's attorney Karen Dunn argued that forcing Google to sell its advertising tech subsidiary would be extreme, your honor and hurt customers in the process. Google is reportedly planning to appeal the latest decision, but the judge Brinkhama noted that any sort of remedy most likely would not be as easily enforceable while an appeal is pending. So hurry up, let's get this done.
Wesley Faulkner [02:06:31]:
That's cool.
Leo Laporte [02:06:32]:
I think. Yeah. If you're going to say that Google has a monopoly in any area, it's this ad tech because they're both the buyer, they're the seller, they make the market, they control the market. It really is a monopoly. The judge is considering whether they should be broken up, whether they should be forced to. To sell their advertising part.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:06:54]:
How do you break that up, though? Yeah, I mean, I understand why, but how do you break the. You break AdSense and AdWords apart from each other. You divorce the content that's the ads are being sold on. I just don't see how that happens without causing major disruption.
Leo Laporte [02:07:13]:
The DOJ and the states have asked the judge to make Google sell its ad exchange, Ad X. That's where online publishers. So like, citation needed. Let's say you had Google Ads on there. You would pay Google a 20% fee to sell ads in auctions that happen instantly when the website is loaded. I mean, it literally happens that quickly. The DOJ argued on Friday nothing short of a forced sale would bring a brighter, more competitive future for the open web. I mean, essentially this is Google's vig on all ad sales for almost every website that uses.
Leo Laporte [02:07:52]:
For every website that uses Google Ads. And almost every website uses Google Ads.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:07:56]:
I mean, so who could afford that? Apple, Microsoft, SoftBank?
Leo Laporte [02:08:00]:
Who would buy it? Well, it would be a good thing to buy. If I had the money, I'd be.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:08:03]:
A great thing to buy. But I mean that it's a major, major purchase. So acquisition. There's only a couple players. She said there's only a couple players who have that money. And those players would do something worse with it.
Molly White [02:08:16]:
Yeah, basically we would be going from a monopoly to a cartel.
Leo Laporte [02:08:21]:
That was the argument, frankly, with the search. Monopoly was. Oh, good. So you sell Chrome. Let's say that was one of the remedies they considered. Now you got two monopolies. You haven't solved the problem, but this.
Wesley Faulkner [02:08:35]:
Is why you go to inaugurations and why you go to these dinners and why you buy build ballrooms.
Molly White [02:08:40]:
True.
Wesley Faulkner [02:08:40]:
Is to have like an ace up your sleeve, a trump card, if you will, to make sure that even if it's the worst thing possible, you have someone who can step in on your behalf.
Leo Laporte [02:08:53]:
The DOJ still has cases against Amazon and Apple pending. But you have to feel like the Trump administration has kind of lost interest in some of these prosecutions, Right?
Molly White [02:09:04]:
Yeah. I mean, I think these, these companies, a big reason these companies have been so generous to Trump is that we've seen the DOJ pull back on a lot of these cases against tech companies and the SEC and other agencies that had previously been going a little bit harder on antitrust.
Leo Laporte [02:09:28]:
Here's the story I thought you might be interested in. Elon Musk's creepy utopian dream from Salon. This is Elon talking, it looks like, with Jensen Huang at the US Saudi Investment Forum this week. He said rapid advances in artificial intelligence and humanoid robots will make human Labor Optional within 10 to 20 years and that money will stop being relevant at some point in the future. That, for instance, Tesla's Optimus prototype will eventually. Their AI powered robots would eventually handle all the work that needs to be done. Yeah. Now, before the show, we were talking about Douglas Rushkoff's latest piece in Fast Company, which he said, this has been the goal all along of these tech giants.
Leo Laporte [02:10:25]:
They basically don't care if an entire class of workers is eliminated. They make noise about UBI and stuff. They don't care. There's not going to pay UBI if you all starve. They don't care because the robots will make them everything they need.
Wesley Faulkner [02:10:45]:
He just wants this trillion dollar bonus.
Leo Laporte [02:10:47]:
He wants, by the way, in order to get that, he has to sell a million optimus robots.
Wesley Faulkner [02:10:52]:
That's one of the ones.
Molly White [02:10:53]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [02:10:53]:
Keep in mind this is Tesla, one.
Leo Laporte [02:10:54]:
Of the benchmarks to himself.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:10:56]:
That's how it was work.
Wesley Faulkner [02:10:58]:
Yeah, yeah.
Molly White [02:10:59]:
I mean, this is one of those things where like we see AI companies like continually arguing that AGI is going to happen. We see robot companies saying that robots are going to take over the world. Like it's all just like it's in their financial interest to make these arguments regardless of whether or not they're plausible. And certainly if anyone makes implausible promises, it's Tesla.
Leo Laporte [02:11:20]:
True. Although don't you think it's interesting that this is his goal?
Wesley Faulkner [02:11:26]:
They haven't made the roadster.
Leo Laporte [02:11:28]:
That's true. We're still waiting for the roadster.
Molly White [02:11:31]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [02:11:32]:
Sam Altman say, I put down $20,000 for that roadster. I want my money back. And then Elon said, no, we gave you your money back. And Sam says, where? Show me the check. And then I don't know how that's resolved itself yet, but it's, it's billionaire finance.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:11:48]:
Billionaire finance works differently than our finance. I think essentially what, 11 AI companies that are transferring billions and billions of dollars in between themselves and calling it a trillion dollar economy. Yeah, all right, sure. Why not?
Molly White [02:12:03]:
I also, whenever I see articles like this, I am increasingly convinced that Elon and people in his echelon don't know what jobs are like or what people do for work. Because the idea of just, like, replacing all jobs, you know, it's like, have you ever met a plumber before?
Leo Laporte [02:12:20]:
You know?
Molly White [02:12:21]:
Or like a farm laborer, you know, like.
Leo Laporte [02:12:24]:
Well, that's why they're making these bipedal humanoid robots, so they can.
Molly White [02:12:28]:
Have you actually seen them?
Leo Laporte [02:12:30]:
Yeah, well, they're not really good at them yet.
Molly White [02:12:32]:
Turn a doorknob, much less shovel. Like a ditch or something like that.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:12:37]:
Yeah, like, do you know. Do you know exactly how many people are required to get you your super expensive sandwich every time for lunch? It's like, you don't. You don't you don't you just think, oh, robot, human, therefore, enough. It's this very strange intersection of. Of ignorance and ego.
Wesley Faulkner [02:12:55]:
Yeah. He also wanted to have a fully autonomous assembly line for Tesla. These are non humanoid robots that he went into production hell for because nothing worked the way he wanted to. And that has not informed his decision that this autonomous, repetitive work, even that is predictable in the power assembly is something that they can even get under control.
Leo Laporte [02:13:22]:
It's actually the COVID story of this month's Harper's Magazine. The Great Robot Con Game and the selling of a $5 trillion pipe dream. The article's called Kicking Robots. They say it's the tech industry hype machine that everybody's got these humanoid robots, but none of them really can do much. In fact, remember the. I forgot which company was doing it. The robot that they showed them unloading dishwashers and very slowly putting laundry into the dryer. Well, it turns out there was a human at the other end that was looking through the eyes and trying to manipulate the robot to do it.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:14:03]:
Also, a dishwasher is already a dishwashing robot.
Leo Laporte [02:14:06]:
Well, that's a good point. But you have to load it still. So we got to get another robot to load the robot.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:14:10]:
So one robot to put something into another robot.
Leo Laporte [02:14:13]:
What you need is just a door on the robot that you put dishes in and then it washes them.
Molly White [02:14:20]:
I think it's just like, if you look at even like some of the most sophisticated robots that we have in just, like, everyday consumer life, you know, like, if you think of like, robot vacuum cleaners and things like that, you know, like, that is a very. Those have been around for what, two decades now?
Leo Laporte [02:14:37]:
Probably.
Molly White [02:14:37]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:14:38]:
They're still not very good.
Molly White [02:14:39]:
Yeah. And I Mean, they do okay, but they are incredibly buggy. You know, they're still falling down stairs. And that is a very specialized robot. And now we want to have just a general robot that can do everything. I mean, it doesn't seem plausible, at least in this kind of time frame.
Wesley Faulkner [02:14:57]:
Also, the conversation with, with was with Jensen Huang, who is talking about doing this AI simulator for robotic practicing and, and, and, and how you can train a robot. So they're both kind of trying to promote this robotic future because they're both like investing or want people to invest in their companies because of it.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:15:21]:
So you need an AI simulator to train the AI on robots. So what, what trains the AI simulators?
Molly White [02:15:28]:
This is like when we're just train AI models on AI generated content. You know, you just get in this like, recursive loop.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:15:36]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:15:37]:
Get ready.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:15:37]:
Just go into, into hallucination hell.
Leo Laporte [02:15:40]:
Get ready for this. Remember the Boston Dynamic robot dogs that would dance?
Wesley Faulkner [02:15:44]:
Of course.
Leo Laporte [02:15:45]:
They were so cute.
Molly White [02:15:47]:
That's not the word I would use.
Leo Laporte [02:15:49]:
Well, they're a little scary. Yes. So apparently especially.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:15:52]:
Yeah. When you put a cannon on the back of one. Yeah, they're incredibly scary.
Leo Laporte [02:15:55]:
According to Bloomberg, they're being deployed in vast numbers in policing. More than 60 bomb squads and SWAT teams in the US and Canada are now using spot. According to Boston Dynamics, they've been finding a home among law enforcement agencies. ICE recently spent $78,000 on a robot that could perform similar tasks as Spot also deploy smoke bombs. In 2022, law enforcement used a robot to approach a man who had crashed a car trying to kidnap his son, checking to see if the man was armed. In Massachusetts last year, two different incidents, robots helped assess a chemical waste accident. I mean, that's a good thing. You don't want to send a person in there.
Leo Laporte [02:16:50]:
Intervened. When a suspect in Hyannis, Massachusetts, took his mother hostage at knifepoint and fired at offices, officers SPOT was deployed to corner him. Oh, that sounds scary. And police eventually followed with tear gas. It did its job, said Trooper John Rugosa of the Massachusetts State Police bomb squad.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:17:13]:
Do you think these robots will gain sentience? And remember all those engineers who practiced kicking them to check their balance?
Leo Laporte [02:17:21]:
Trooper Rugosa says the suspect was stunned, thinking, what is this dog? It's not cheap. It starts at $100,000.
Wesley Faulkner [02:17:33]:
This is how we get ED 209 for those RoboCop fans.
Leo Laporte [02:17:40]:
What's amazing? Go ahead.
Molly White [02:17:42]:
I always wonder with these dogs if someone could just like, throw a blanket over it and if it would get stuck, you know, like, it doesn't seem.
Leo Laporte [02:17:49]:
Like it's turning on its back.
Molly White [02:17:50]:
It doesn't have any hands like robot legs.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:17:53]:
We're gonna find out.
Leo Laporte [02:17:54]:
2000. Yeah, we're about to find out. 2000 spot units. 2000 are now in operation globally. The Dutch Ministry of Defense, Italian National Police, Massachusetts State Police Station.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:18:08]:
I have not seen them on the streets of Rome yet, but I'll be looking for them.
Leo Laporte [02:18:12]:
Keep your eye peeled. It is kind of terrifying if you.
Wesley Faulkner [02:18:16]:
Throw holy water on it though.
Leo Laporte [02:18:21]:
And this is of course the Chinese version. Unitree makes a whole variety of robots. They have the A2 Stellar Explorer, which is probably not going to make it to a star anytime soon, but can run, run down the street coming after you. It's autonomous. It's an industrial grade legged robot.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:18:43]:
It's a chicken walker.
Leo Laporte [02:18:47]:
See that coming for you.
Molly White [02:18:49]:
I just want to see more of these, like actually in the wild, getting stuck in funny places because I feel.
Leo Laporte [02:18:55]:
Like eventually I think these are carefully curated.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:18:58]:
Yeah.
Molly White [02:18:58]:
And like, like, you know, it reminds me of when people would like put a traffic cone in front of the Waymo, you know, and it's like, oops, we didn't think of that, you know?
Father Robert Ballecer [02:19:06]:
Yeah. That looks exactly like the robot from the movie with Velmer. Red Red Planet.
Leo Laporte [02:19:13]:
It can go on wheels too. Oh, the wheel leg option available will unleash greater performance.
Molly White [02:19:22]:
It's way sillier on wheels.
Leo Laporte [02:19:24]:
Oh, my God. Let's see. Destiny. This is called Destiny Awakening. Oh.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:19:29]:
Apparently I want to try that whole throwing the sheet over the robot thing. I, I actually that might be fun.
Molly White [02:19:35]:
I mean, this one has hands at least, so it could pick off a sheet. But I don't think the dog robot could.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:19:41]:
Wait, is this the one that they had to cut it open on stage to prove that it wasn't a person?
Leo Laporte [02:19:45]:
No, there is one that looks that, that sashays like a woman intentionally and has and has prosthetic breasts.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:19:53]:
And that seems like it's.
Leo Laporte [02:19:54]:
People thought, oh, there's somebody inside there. And so they had, they cut it open to show that it doesn't.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:20:01]:
Oh, look, the Billy. The Billy Bob robot.
Leo Laporte [02:20:06]:
You're gonna see one at the mall soon.
Molly White [02:20:08]:
Why is it wearing a hoodie?
Leo Laporte [02:20:10]:
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
Wesley Faulkner [02:20:13]:
Why?
Father Robert Ballecer [02:20:14]:
Because you're gonna want to accessorize. Your robot.
Molly White [02:20:18]:
Is my favorite.
Leo Laporte [02:20:21]:
Yeah. Creepy as heck.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:20:26]:
So bank of America, building Cylons, stop building silos.
Molly White [02:20:32]:
You know, it's like that's. Yeah, that's the one thing we really don't need.
Leo Laporte [02:20:34]:
We Want to do ballet?
Molly White [02:20:36]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:20:36]:
Bank of America says there'll be at least a million robot humanoid robots shipped every year by 2020, 2035, in the next 10 years. Morgan Stanley says a billion will be in use by 2050. I don't think I'm going to make it that far.
Molly White [02:20:49]:
Have credit cards. Like, why does bank of America care?
Leo Laporte [02:20:53]:
Why do they care? Yeah. It's more of the hype cycle, isn't it?
Molly White [02:20:56]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:20:56]:
Yeah.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:20:57]:
I mean, if we could get one at defcon, we could see how easy it is to exploit one of these.
Leo Laporte [02:21:02]:
You need to have. Just like you have the. What is it, the election machine pavilion.
Wesley Faulkner [02:21:07]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:21:08]:
Then you have the robot hacking pavilion. Yeah, yeah.
Molly White [02:21:12]:
I had a roommate in college who hacked a Furby one time, and it just seems like this is the next step for him. I should see how he's doing.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:21:20]:
Have you ever seen Project without its covering?
Molly White [02:21:23]:
Yes, unfortunately, because of that.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:21:25]:
They look demonic. They look. They look horribly demonic. Oh, my goodness.
Leo Laporte [02:21:29]:
Do not take clothes off the Furby.
Wesley Faulkner [02:21:32]:
Could you imagine this robot in your house recording everything and then someone's able to hack it? And to see robot.
Molly White [02:21:38]:
I mean, it brings me back to the Roomba thing. Like, that's what we've had with Roombas, which is what? You know, people see that they're phoning home with, like, detailed maps or photos of your house. And then there were some that were hacked not too long ago and they started, like, playing over the speakers like racial slurs in people's houses, you know, it seems like we have some precedent for what can go wrong with these things.
Wesley Faulkner [02:22:02]:
The good thing is, right now it's a rich person problem, so.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:22:05]:
Exactly.
Molly White [02:22:07]:
This is going to be another one of those things where, like, anyone who is involved in software at any, you know, to any level will never allow one of these things in their home, you know?
Leo Laporte [02:22:15]:
Oh, no. Well, already we know that many of them are operated by a human at the home office who happens to be able to look right through those cameras at whatever you're doing. Excuse me, sir, would you like a hand with that? Let's take a little. Let's take a little break. Just leave you, you know, use your imagination. Dr. Father. Dr.
Leo Laporte [02:22:40]:
Father, are you. You have many degrees? Do you have a doctorate?
Father Robert Ballecer [02:22:45]:
Yeah, well, one, but I don't consider it a doctorate.
Leo Laporte [02:22:48]:
Can I call you Dr. Father?
Father Robert Ballecer [02:22:49]:
You can, but I mean, it's theology. It's not really.
Leo Laporte [02:22:53]:
Doctor of Theology counts. You have some masters too in there, so don't you?
Father Robert Ballecer [02:22:58]:
Masters, bachelor's, everything.
Leo Laporte [02:23:00]:
You got all the Degrees.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:23:01]:
All those things. We do the whole collection through formation. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:23:04]:
That's nice. I'm impressed. Father Robert Balaser. Doctor Father Robert Balasir. The app, Jesuit pilgrimage app you helped create. Tell us about that.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:23:16]:
So we wanted to give people an experience of how our founder, St Ignatius of Loyola, how he ended up founding the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits. And so we kind of mapped his routes around Rome and through Spain.
Leo Laporte [02:23:29]:
Oh, that's fun. So when you go to Rome, you could do this, get this right, and you can actually.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:23:34]:
You can preload the app and it will actually, like, take you on a pilgrimage. This is how we walk from this.
Leo Laporte [02:23:38]:
Place to this place.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:23:40]:
This was the. It will give you VR tours of the churches that he was in. It will show you. We. We tell you the stories of what happened there. And I think we've got it up to, like, 20 languages now. We've just been slowly adding languages as. As we go, and it's been very well received.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:23:56]:
Way more than we thought it was going to be. We. We just created it as a sort of a thought experiment, and now it's an actual thing.
Leo Laporte [02:24:03]:
It's free.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:24:04]:
It's free? Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:24:05]:
ON Android and iOS. That's really neat. I like.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:24:10]:
And you can spot the ones where we didn't have someone to voice.
Leo Laporte [02:24:14]:
Because it's you.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:24:15]:
Because then you hear my voice.
Leo Laporte [02:24:17]:
Oh, well, why not? You have a lovely voice. Oh, but I didn't know.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:24:21]:
I mean, it's one. I don't want to be in my own app. Come on.
Leo Laporte [02:24:25]:
It's interesting how the church is really embracing modern technology. I know there's a. A virtual reality experience of St. Peter's right. You can go into the basilica and look around and look up and down and stuff. That's really cool.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:24:41]:
Although right now, I. I'm not a big fan of St Peter's at the moment, because for the jubilee year, what they did was they blocked off the middle of the church.
Leo Laporte [02:24:48]:
Oh.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:24:49]:
So you have to walk around the edges because they wanted to keep the flow. People coming in through the holy door and going out.
Leo Laporte [02:24:54]:
Right.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:24:55]:
But that means you can't just loiter. You can't just sort of sit in the church and look up at the artwork, which used to be my favorite thing. I would. I would love going over there, just spending hours, just relaxing.
Leo Laporte [02:25:06]:
I could spend literally weeks in the Vatican Museum. It is the most amazing collection of art.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:25:13]:
Well, I've got a special card for you then, Leo. You can use my employee card and go in after hours.
Leo Laporte [02:25:18]:
I think they'll probably Know that I'm not one of those of them.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:25:22]:
I'm just saying I'll give you a clerical collar. Just.
Leo Laporte [02:25:24]:
I won't wear the orange shirt though. I'll promise. Wear something simple. Thank you, Father, for being here. Molly White, also here, of course, citation needed. Is her newsletter where you can follow the latest news in crypto and all kinds of stuff. Molly White.net is her website. Do you still do the Wikipedia editing? Are you still.
Molly White [02:25:45]:
I sure do, yep.
Leo Laporte [02:25:47]:
Do you take like a special area that you focus on or is it just what should I edit today?
Molly White [02:25:55]:
Yeah, I edit whatever crosses my mind or sometimes I just patrol to see what people are editing and then I come up with that. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:26:04]:
Do you go to the discussion page? Where do you go?
Molly White [02:26:08]:
Sometimes. Sometimes there's actually automated tools that some of us use to basically, as new edits are coming in, we review them and see how they look and then we undo them or fix them or whatever needs to be done. So I do a fair bit of that too.
Leo Laporte [02:26:25]:
93 million articles in the English Wikipedia and there are 300 other languages as well. I thanked Jimmy. I said, you created perhaps the single most useful, important proof of concept that the Internet really can be a place for something very, very valuable. And you also showed that people can work together to create something.
Molly White [02:26:50]:
Yeah, I know it's an incredible project in terms of just like getting a bunch of people who don't necessarily agree with each other to collaborate on a single article about any given topic.
Leo Laporte [02:27:01]:
Yeah, I was, I, you know, we, you know, a lot of people get attention, you know, Albert Einstein, Franklin Roosevelt. But I think Jimmy deserves to be in that pantheon, somebody who created something truly amazing. He did it, he told us, and it's in his book because his daughter, when she was born, had an illness and the doctors were suggesting a fairly scary procedure. And he said, I went to the Internet to try to find out more and there was nothing there. And I thought at the time, maybe there needs to be somewhere you could go to get reliable information about something like this. And he created wikipedia. And now 20 years later, the illness she had, the treatment and all of that. You could read all you want on Wikipedia.
Leo Laporte [02:27:49]:
So he succeeded in that personal quest. Wesley is also here. Wesley Faulkner, founder of works-notworking.com and I will ask you when we come back what stories you're thinking are important. If there's anything we didn't.
Wesley Faulkner [02:28:06]:
Didn't cover this week, it might be politics related.
Leo Laporte [02:28:11]:
Yeah, that's okay. That's okay. I won't hold IT against you. Our show this week brought to you by Deal. D E E L. If you this has happened to us. It's really challenging to hire. We are completely remote and it's really challenging to hire people working in different states, let alone different countries.
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Leo Laporte [02:29:10]:
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Leo Laporte [02:29:59]:
Thank you Father.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:30:01]:
It's very nice. I enjoyed it. And we are actually going to be expanding it because we've now shown the our superiors that there's a demand for it, it's good for us and we have the confidence to create it.
Leo Laporte [02:30:15]:
So. So yeah. Do you. Are you still flying the quadcopters around around the Vatican?
Father Robert Ballecer [02:30:22]:
Funny you should ask that because we got another warning message from the Swiss Guard.
Leo Laporte [02:30:29]:
Oh, you don't want to mess with those guys. They may wear funny costumes, but they do carry those pointed things and machine guns.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:30:37]:
They also have some very nice RF jamming equipment that they.
Leo Laporte [02:30:41]:
Oh, they took you down?
Father Robert Ballecer [02:30:44]:
Yeah, they threatened.
Molly White [02:30:46]:
Really?
Father Robert Ballecer [02:30:47]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:30:47]:
What were you doing? You just looking around?
Father Robert Ballecer [02:30:50]:
I mean the problem is so we can fly in our garden and I. I thought it would be okay if we just fly in our garden. But our garden is right next to the Pope and.
Wesley Faulkner [02:30:59]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [02:31:01]:
And so I'm surprised you didn't get shot down right there.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:31:04]:
Well, I mean they, they asked me to not do that that eight years ago when I first got here and I thought maybe the policies had Changed. They had.
Leo Laporte [02:31:12]:
Do you do FPV or have you.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:31:14]:
I do fpv.
Leo Laporte [02:31:15]:
You do. So you put on the visor so you could see what the drone's seeing and steer it around.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:31:20]:
Well, I was doing a video where I was. I was navigating the caves behind our gardens here. And so I. I did this awesome straight shot and I was doing these shots where I was going up and then diving down in a.
Wesley Faulkner [02:31:33]:
That.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:31:33]:
That.
Leo Laporte [02:31:33]:
They like that. No, I don't blame them. It's a little scary, especially since we know drones are widely used now in the Ukraine, Russia, war.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:31:42]:
That's actually a point that one of them brought up.
Leo Laporte [02:31:45]:
Yeah, yeah.
Molly White [02:31:46]:
So.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:31:47]:
So I won't be doing that anymore, I think.
Leo Laporte [02:31:50]:
Well, so you could say that out loud. He said something in our private chat.
Wesley Faulkner [02:31:55]:
I said, the higher the drone, the closer to God.
Leo Laporte [02:31:57]:
That's right.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:31:58]:
There we go.
Leo Laporte [02:31:59]:
Have you tried the new DJI drone? Everybody's ready.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:32:03]:
Yeah, they're quite nice. And actually, do you remember that concert we had here a couple weeks ago, the Hope for the World?
Leo Laporte [02:32:09]:
Yes.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:32:10]:
In front of St. Peter.
Leo Laporte [02:32:10]:
Yes.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:32:11]:
With, you know, with all the stars.
Leo Laporte [02:32:12]:
Very cool.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:32:13]:
The production crew had two of those massive DJI drones with red cameras on them, and they would just.
Leo Laporte [02:32:19]:
Oh, my God.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:32:20]:
They would hover over the. The piazza and then they would go out to the river to get those long shots and. And so every 20 minutes or so, you'd see them come back in land, they'd change the batteries and then go back out.
Leo Laporte [02:32:30]:
Wow. They were allowed.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:32:33]:
They were allowed.
Wesley Faulkner [02:32:34]:
Yeah.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:32:34]:
That's.
Leo Laporte [02:32:35]:
So that was a big deal, that concert.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:32:38]:
It was beautiful. It was. Although I want to be the person who pitched that to Pope Francis, who said, like, yeah, we're going to get Andrea Bocelli. We're looking at Sarah Brightman. Jelly Roll.
Leo Laporte [02:32:50]:
Jelly Roll.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:32:50]:
It's like, wait, what?
Leo Laporte [02:32:51]:
Jelly Roll. In front of the St Peter's it was quite a song. Tight.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:32:56]:
It was. It was different.
Leo Laporte [02:32:57]:
Yeah.
Molly White [02:32:58]:
I wanted to ask you, actually, now that we're talking about concerts, what is the deal with the Pope with a. A rave? I saw something going around online.
Leo Laporte [02:33:08]:
Oh, it's got to be AI.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:33:10]:
No, no, no. It was not. It was not. The Pope wasn't there. So the Pope had sent a birthday greeting to the Archbishop of. I think it was in a Slovenia for his 75th birthday. And there is a famous priest there, a Catholic priest, who is also a dj, who was pretty good as actually running raves. So they were in front of St.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:33:32]:
Elizabeth's Cathedral and they played the Message from Pope Leo where he was saying, you know, congratulations, thank you for your service, so on, so forth. And the dj, the priest had actually set up his set so that as the message ended, that was the drop into music. It was very well done.
Leo Laporte [02:33:52]:
Wow.
Wesley Faulkner [02:33:54]:
Wow.
Molly White [02:33:54]:
I am learning that people at the Vatican have a lot more fun than.
Leo Laporte [02:33:59]:
I thought they did.
Wesley Faulkner [02:34:00]:
You see?
Leo Laporte [02:34:00]:
We do. See, we do.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:34:02]:
Especially with these last two popes have been, they, they've sort of said, okay, you know what, go make mistakes, make some mistakes and we'll see what works.
Leo Laporte [02:34:11]:
Also, they've got to be part of the modern world. I mean, the world is changing and if you want to be relevant and in today's world, you know, you gotta be with the, with the kids.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:34:23]:
The number of conferences that we've had in the Vatican on AI and every aspect of AI, AI in medicine, AI in industrial applications, AI in schooling, it's. I'm pretty sure it outpaces every other national effort to do the same. And we're bringing in experts from around the field, from around the world to give us different cultural perspectives on the issues. And the nice thing, what I love about every one of these conferences is they're not approaching it in panic. They're not approaching it as a problem. They're saying, okay, show us what you think are the positives of this technology and what it could, what it could do to affect culture in a positive way. And that makes the conferences so much better than let's do a laundry list of things we hate about AI.
Leo Laporte [02:35:12]:
Absolutely, Absolutely. I agree. Wesley, you had a story for us to wrap it up.
Wesley Faulkner [02:35:18]:
I. This is funny. It's not really a story. It's just I was a rant.
Leo Laporte [02:35:23]:
Hard drive, a rant.
Wesley Faulkner [02:35:25]:
I found a video of myself. I think it was in two in 2020, the end of 2020, talking about Amazon and they just finished, I think the pill pack acquisition.
Leo Laporte [02:35:41]:
One of our sponsors.
Wesley Faulkner [02:35:42]:
Yeah, or One Medical or something like that. And talking about the commercialization of, and the high tech in the health space. And as we are moving forward with the January, end of January deadline of talking about healthcare and the Affordable Care act extensions and credits. And then since I made that video, then there's been a lot of talk about reducing costs in GLP1s. Even Mark Cuban has talked about lowering drug costs.
Leo Laporte [02:36:17]:
He has his own drugstore that sells low cost medications for insulin.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:36:22]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [02:36:22]:
And with also the focus on lowering the barrier of entry with regulations and also how close the tech industry is to the administration, it made me wonder if we will See more of a privatization rather than a socialization of healthcare as part of the conversation as we move forward.
Leo Laporte [02:36:44]:
I hope not.
Wesley Faulkner [02:36:46]:
That's where my thought was because putting all these pieces together, it feels like if that was going to happen we're really close to the tipping point that will push us in that direction. Where?
Molly White [02:36:58]:
Well, isn't Trump trying to launch his own like good RX clone basically the Cuban thing? Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:37:05]:
Is he really?
Molly White [02:37:06]:
Yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:37:07]:
Because he's jealous that Mark Cuban did it.
Molly White [02:37:10]:
I don't know.
Leo Laporte [02:37:12]:
Should the President of the United States be selling drugs? Seems like.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:37:16]:
Well, I mean he did. Trump did launch. He did announce what he wants for his health care plan.
Leo Laporte [02:37:22]:
Oh yeah, what was that? We give you money and you buy. Negotiate.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:37:26]:
It was the 50 year mortgage. Because if you owe that much money to the bank, they're not going to let you die.
Leo Laporte [02:37:31]:
They've got to keep going. That's a good idea. Good thinking, good thinking. By the way, I just want to disabuse everyone of the idea that this is a true photo of Pope Leo on Whose Line Is It Anyway. He did not appear on that improv show show.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:37:47]:
No, but he was at a rave.
Leo Laporte [02:37:49]:
Or his was at a video. He came put a video appearance at a rave. It's amazing what you can do with Nano Banana these days. I gotta tell you, I like that.
Molly White [02:37:58]:
He is doing things like appearing at raves to just continually keep people guessing as to whether it's AI or not.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:38:05]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:38:06]:
Oh my God. Rx, this isn't you. This is not a joke. No.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:38:11]:
Is that what? No, no.
Leo Laporte [02:38:14]:
An official website of the United States government. Oh no.
Molly White [02:38:18]:
Yeah. So I think it's actually, I don't think it's supposed to be one of his private businesses. I think the idea is that it would be a drug website that the government operates but it would be branded after Trump because I don't know if he's like jealous that Obama got Obamacare and so he wants Trump Rx or something like that.
Leo Laporte [02:38:35]:
But yeah, well I'm all for it if he wants to do Cus it's really a, a little peeve of mine. I've lost about £30 because I'm on Ozempic and I'm on Medicare and the Medicare rules are you can get Ozempic if you're a type 2 diabetic. Now I could be 100 pounds overweight and not get Ozempic even though it would be a life saving intervention. But it wouldn't. It's not covered by Medicare and This is the case all over the country that a of lot of people who would benefit from some of these new weight. You know, I don't want to call them weight loss drugs, but these new GLP1 drugs can't get them because they're very, very expensive and they're not covered by insurance unless you have another condition. I often think that the comorbidity that I have has saved my life because I have type 2 diabetes. I was able to get a COVID vaccine, I was able to get Ozempic.
Leo Laporte [02:39:36]:
You know, it's just my advice to all of you, if you can type 2 diabetes, it's a lifesaver. Oh, my God. This is. This is where we are in this country with medical care. It's terrible.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:39:46]:
I don't like that. That makes sense.
Leo Laporte [02:39:48]:
It makes sense.
Molly White [02:39:49]:
Oh.
Wesley Faulkner [02:39:52]:
And when you think about. He said that something like, instead of giving it to the healthcare companies, we'll give it to you. Also rings a little bit about what he was saying about Trump accounts, where if a baby's born, they'll, oh, yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:40:07]:
We'Ll give you a little money when the baby's born.
Wesley Faulkner [02:40:10]:
Yes. There's going to be someone who's going to need to facilitate that. There's going to. Someone's going to need to hold that money to make sure that it's used appropriately. This is also another possible vehicle for privatized entities to control and monitor those accounts and modernize it. Where I see, like, definitely a company like Amazon who deals with a lot of finances, a lot of people's money, where they can say, like, well, you have a lot of experience in doing this.
Leo Laporte [02:40:37]:
It's an opportunity.
Wesley Faulkner [02:40:39]:
I just saying, like, all the parts are there. And I'm just saying if this is going to happen, it's probably going to happen.
Leo Laporte [02:40:47]:
That's the Republican plan.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:40:49]:
Leo, just as an aside, how many Twitch sponsors went on to get acquired by Amazon? Because there's almost all of them.
Leo Laporte [02:40:57]:
Pillpack. Audible ring. I think the. I think I robot. I think, I think you could.
Molly White [02:41:07]:
You could.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:41:07]:
You could now make the claim that.
Leo Laporte [02:41:09]:
If you want to get picked up by Amazon Network.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:41:11]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:41:12]:
Advertise on this show.
Molly White [02:41:13]:
Maybe you can get Amazon to acquire Twit the funny.
Leo Laporte [02:41:18]:
Oh, I, I'm open to it. I. I'm gonna. You know what? I'm on all in on big, big finance, Big capitalization. Let's, let's, let's. I'm ready. I'm ready to become a billionaire. Come on, Jeff.
Leo Laporte [02:41:31]:
Take me up. Take me up to space. I'm ready.
Molly White [02:41:34]:
So on the GLP, one thing. Did you see the press conference where Dr. Oz said that he believed Americans will lose 135 billion pounds by the midterms, which works out to like almost 400 pounds pounds per person.
Leo Laporte [02:41:49]:
We're a very fat country. A lot of Europeans said, yes, I think that's true.
Wesley Faulkner [02:41:54]:
A lot of people could die with the way that rfk.
Leo Laporte [02:41:59]:
I am not prescribing Ozempic to anybody. You ask your doctor. And I really think it's a very bad idea. There are lots of online places. This is what's sad about this. It creates this market where people can go online and kind of get prescriptions for kind of sketch, you know, versions of this, whether peptides from China or, you know, compounded versions.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:42:22]:
Yeah. Do not buy fake Ozempic.
Leo Laporte [02:42:24]:
Don't, don't buy fake obsempic. Go to your doctor, make a case. Say, you know what would be a life saving intervention for me to lose £40 or just get type 2 diabetes. I'm telling you, eat as much candy as you can as fast as you can.
Wesley Faulkner [02:42:39]:
Right.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:42:40]:
Soda.
Leo Laporte [02:42:41]:
Don't take medical advice or stock advice from Leo. That's a bad idea. Bad idea. Father Robert, so nice to see you. Father Robert Balaser, the Digital Jesuit. Are you coming back to the States for the holidays or are you gonna be busy in Rome?
Father Robert Ballecer [02:42:55]:
I will be coming back late December. I am doing a bunch of stuff in the Middle east starting this week.
Leo Laporte [02:43:04]:
Okay.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:43:05]:
Yeah, they gotta take care of some projects over there, but then I will be back in the United States for ces. So.
Leo Laporte [02:43:12]:
Yes, we're going to get our CES coverage again this year. We missed you last year.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:43:17]:
Absolutely. Well, last year I was recording and about halfway through I said this, there's nothing. This is, this is terrible.
Leo Laporte [02:43:24]:
It wasn't worth it.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:43:25]:
It really was worth it.
Leo Laporte [02:43:26]:
CES will be worth it this year.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:43:28]:
I think so, so, so what I've, from what I've been getting in the press releases, there's, there's going to be at least a few interesting things, especially of course in the AI sector, but also a couple of new categories for consumer electronics that I think might actually make it.
Leo Laporte [02:43:42]:
So we will have a long report from Father Robert from CES and we'll sprinkle some little reports as well. And we'll also get you on the week after ces, of course, Twitch, so that we can talk about all of the stuff that happened at ces. I expect you will see some, some bipedal robots walking the, the Hall.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:44:02]:
And I'm going to try the sheet trick. We'll see.
Leo Laporte [02:44:05]:
I'm going to bring it with me. Molly, please do a report back. I need Molly Wood said I should throw a blanket over you. Molly White. I'm somebody would mollywhite.net go bother her. She's the one who said I should kick you. It's all her fault. Bring one of those Batman nets.
Leo Laporte [02:44:21]:
You know that he has a net gun. Yeah, net gun. That's what you need. Mollywhite.net so great to have you on. Always a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for the work you do at Wikipedia and of course the newsletter Citation needed is a must read. Really appreciate your time. Thank you for explaining Stablecoin to me again.
Leo Laporte [02:44:40]:
I still don't get it, but thank you for trying.
Molly White [02:44:42]:
We'll get it next time for sure.
Leo Laporte [02:44:44]:
Next time. One more time. And Wesley Faulkner. You got one week to launch. Works-not-working.com. is it going to be a crazy week getting it all running?
Wesley Faulkner [02:44:56]:
Yes. And we have family probably arriving just now. I hear them.
Leo Laporte [02:45:00]:
Oh, Thanksgiving's coming. Yes.
Wesley Faulkner [02:45:01]:
Thanksgiving's gonna hear I'm off the whole week. So I'll be heads down trying to get to work when I'm not entertaining and having fun and spending time with.
Leo Laporte [02:45:09]:
Are you responsible for the turkey this year, Wesley?
Wesley Faulkner [02:45:13]:
That's. No.
Leo Laporte [02:45:15]:
You have a bunch of aunts and grandmas coming in. They're gonna take over the kitchen.
Wesley Faulkner [02:45:19]:
We're gonna figure it out. I think that's still. Our family has been very, very busy. I've been busy, my kids been busy, my wife has been busy. And it's more of like we're just surviving and trying to figure out the next thing. The next thing, Next thing. And so we will figure out dinner because we'll go shopping, we'll figure out what everyone else wants and then we'll have fun together.
Leo Laporte [02:45:43]:
I'm gonna be responsible this year. I always look forward.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:45:46]:
Deep fried turkey. Deep fried turkey.
Wesley Faulkner [02:45:49]:
No fire. No fires.
Leo Laporte [02:45:51]:
Paris.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:45:51]:
You know what?
Leo Laporte [02:45:52]:
Paris Martineau's father does that every year in Florida. And Paris always puts up a video of it. We're very interested to find out how it goes. This year I want down the house.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:46:02]:
I want a traditional Thanksgiving dinner.
Leo Laporte [02:46:05]:
So where do you go for that? Chinese. Yeah, Chinese food. That's where all the Catholics go on Thanksgiving. They go to Chinese restaurants. Molly, what are you doing for Thanksgiving?
Molly White [02:46:14]:
Anything Planned Thanksgiving with the family. But I am not cooking the turkey, thank goodness, because that is not my strong suit. I do all of the. I do all of the yeasted sides.
Leo Laporte [02:46:26]:
Oh, you're a baker.
Molly White [02:46:28]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [02:46:28]:
Yeah, I want to do. I found a recipe for Amish dinner rolls that have a cup of mashed potatoes in them to keep.
Molly White [02:46:37]:
Potato bread is really good. Yes.
Leo Laporte [02:46:39]:
Yeah. So I'm thinking, you know, maybe when I make the mashed potatoes, I'll set aside a cup. The problem is you don't want to make mashed. Mashed potatoes too far ahead. This is very tricky timing wise.
Molly White [02:46:48]:
Just mash one potato in advance.
Leo Laporte [02:46:51]:
One for the bread. Yeah, no, I like the baked goods. That's going to be. That's always a highlight.
Molly White [02:46:57]:
Yeah. I've recently my. I've been on a multi year quest to find the best stuffing recipe because I Stuffing is my favorite and I think I finally found it last year, which is a stuffing that instead of just, just plain bread, you use cornbread.
Leo Laporte [02:47:13]:
I've made cornbread stuffing. It's delicious.
Molly White [02:47:17]:
So I think we're going to repeat that this year.
Leo Laporte [02:47:19]:
I have the Cook's Illustrated cornbread and sausage stuffing recipe in my Paprika.
Molly White [02:47:25]:
There's an app, by the way, that I, I shill paprika like no other.
Leo Laporte [02:47:29]:
Isn't it awesome?
Molly White [02:47:30]:
It's so good.
Leo Laporte [02:47:31]:
It's so good.
Molly White [02:47:32]:
I have 800 recipes in my Paprika.
Leo Laporte [02:47:34]:
Yes.
Molly White [02:47:35]:
I love that thing.
Leo Laporte [02:47:35]:
I went to. So you go. Because Cooks Illustrated is the best. You go to Cooks Illustrated in the Paprika browser and it's got a button that says download. You don't have to read all of the pros that these days they put. Actually, Cooks Illustrated is pretty good. There's the recipe right there. You download it and you save it and it's in your recipe kit.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:47:54]:
Look at that.
Leo Laporte [02:47:55]:
Look at how it converts that.
Molly White [02:47:56]:
And I don't know if you sell this as a. I don't know if you sell this as a feature, but it does bypass a number of paywalls as well because it just scrapes the page out.
Leo Laporte [02:48:04]:
It just scrapes it.
Molly White [02:48:05]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:48:06]:
I pay for. I pay for America's test Test kitchen.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:48:10]:
Deep fried turkey because it's so moist, but you don't get stuffing with it. That, that is a drawback.
Leo Laporte [02:48:14]:
You're not supposed to put the stuffing in the turkey. Although Kenji Lopez Alt says in of course the. The king of cooking is serious eats dot com. If you heat the stuffing to 350 degrees in the microwave before you put it in the turkey, then you don't have to worry about it because it won't bring the temperature of the Turkey down. It will stay hot and the bacteria won't grow.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:48:37]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [02:48:37]:
So just keep that in mind. Heat the stuffing, then you can use it inside. I agree.
Molly White [02:48:41]:
I'm always a separate stuffing person.
Leo Laporte [02:48:43]:
Yeah, I.
Molly White [02:48:44]:
You're right that you don't get the turkey juices. Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [02:48:48]:
By the way, casserole kind of person.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:48:50]:
Do. Do all of you have cranberry juice? Do you like your. The cranberry jelly sauce in the can? You mean the sauce?
Leo Laporte [02:48:56]:
Yeah. With the ribs?
Wesley Faulkner [02:48:57]:
Yeah.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:48:58]:
It has to have the rings around it. Right.
Molly White [02:49:00]:
Shrunk. Then it doesn't count.
Leo Laporte [02:49:01]:
Right. It's gotta go.
Molly White [02:49:02]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:49:02]:
I actually. At the grocery store, I bought it and it says traditional, so they know. They know traditional cranberry jelly from Ocean Spray. They know I bought it because I thought, this is going to be gone when I come back to the store to get the turkey on Tuesday. So I'm buying it now. Unfortunately, I have my Italian grandma's sausage. Italian sausage stuffing recipe that uses orange juice. But my wife has declared because her son likes it, we will be using stovetop stuffing.
Leo Laporte [02:49:36]:
I do like stovetop stuffing.
Molly White [02:49:38]:
I will say it's not bad.
Leo Laporte [02:49:39]:
I know I don't.
Molly White [02:49:40]:
I don't do it for Thanksgiving, but I do eat it the rest of the year. It was quite a discovery for me when I realized that you can just have Thanksgiving food anytime. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:49:50]:
You don't have to have the turkey, or you can just get the turkey breast by itself, and then it cooks much more easily. Should I spatchcock? I'm thinking about it.
Wesley Faulkner [02:49:58]:
Yes. Yes.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:49:59]:
Wait, what. What is this?
Leo Laporte [02:50:00]:
You cut the spine out of the turkey. It's like. It's roadkill turkey. It's flat. But see, the problem with turkey is the breast and the dark meat don't cook at the same speed. So you're either going to have dried breast or raw dark meat. So you've got to kind of. And spatchcocking it solves it because it's all the same.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:50:21]:
They call it spatchcocking talking. Oh, I never knew that. Okay.
Leo Laporte [02:50:25]:
I've never done it. You need some very strong scissors.
Molly White [02:50:28]:
It's tough to do, even with the chicken.
Wesley Faulkner [02:50:31]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:50:31]:
So you've done it?
Molly White [02:50:32]:
I've done it with the chicken. Never with a turkey.
Leo Laporte [02:50:35]:
Can you do a turkey? You could.
Molly White [02:50:39]:
What if you could do a full turkey with. I mean, I'm sure you could, but.
Leo Laporte [02:50:42]:
You could want to. I'm gonna ask the butcher if he'll spatchcock it for me, because maybe he will. If he will, then they've Got the.
Molly White [02:50:50]:
Tools for it during COVID I did do. I was just doing a small Thanksgiving for me and one other person because I was self isolating and I did sous vide some turkey breasts, I think it was. And they came out really well. It was almost like coffee. It was really good.
Leo Laporte [02:51:04]:
It's much better to be honest with you. Yeah, it's. The problem is cooking the whole turkey. It's a no win proposition.
Wesley Faulkner [02:51:12]:
A day or so. Right. To do a whole sous vide turkey.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:51:15]:
At least I would think probably longer.
Leo Laporte [02:51:18]:
Yeah. The trick is how do you vacuum seal it? You're gonna. If you need a shot. Yeah.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:51:24]:
Spatchcock it, then vacuum seal it. Damn.
Leo Laporte [02:51:28]:
Maybe I. Maybe I'll try it. I don't know.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:51:30]:
Spatchcock it and then open it and seal the two halves into different bags.
Molly White [02:51:35]:
I mean at that point you could just butcher the turkey and do it in pieces.
Wesley Faulkner [02:51:40]:
Oh, just one little tip. If you are living on a budget buying turkeys the week after Thanksgiving, you can get some really good deals.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:51:48]:
This is true.
Wesley Faulkner [02:51:49]:
Just putting that out there.
Molly White [02:51:50]:
Those of you at the chest freezer, now is your time.
Wesley Faulkner [02:51:52]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [02:51:53]:
Stock up. We are in poultry countries. So I get a fresh turkey every year from the. I ordered it ahead of time.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:52:02]:
You are in the land of the chicken and eggs.
Leo Laporte [02:52:05]:
We are. Thank you everybody. If you live in the US have a wonderful Thanksgiving. If you live in Canada, I hope you had a good Thanksgiving last month. I hope you have. You'll be back here next Sunday. We do twit every Sunday 2 to 5 Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern, 2200 UTC. We stream it live in the club.
Leo Laporte [02:52:23]:
Of course, club members get special behind the velvet rope access in our club Twit Discord. We also stream it for everybody on YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com and Kick. So you can watch us live, but you don't have to. On demand versions of the show available at the website that is Twit TV. You can also go to a YouTube channel dedicated to this week at Tech and get the video. Great way to share little, you know, turkey cooking tips for instance with friends and family. Or subscribe on your favorite podcast player. You'll get it automatically the minute it is available.
Leo Laporte [02:52:59]:
But whatever you do, I do hope hope you will listen each and every week. A very special thanks to our club members who make this all possible. 25% of our operating expenses are paid by the club. It is a group effort and we would love to have you in the group. Twit TV Club Twit Now's a good time. We have a 10% off coupon for annual memberships. Great for giving, whether it's to yourself or to a geek in your life. There's also a two week free trial.
Leo Laporte [02:53:24]:
There's three family plans, there's corporate plans. You get ad free versions of all the shows and a lot of extra content. TWiT TV Club. TWiT. Please join the club. We'd love to have you. Thanks, everybody, for being here. Have a wonderful holiday.
Leo Laporte [02:53:39]:
We'll see you next Sunday. In the meanwhile, another twit is in the can.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:53:55]:
Happy Thanksgiving to y'.
Molly White [02:53:56]:
All.
Leo Laporte [02:53:57]:
Yeah. So, Robert, do they make any concessions to the Americans in the.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:54:03]:
There's a small group of us who invite any Americans.
Leo Laporte [02:54:06]:
Oh, you have a friendsgiving. Oh, good.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:54:09]:
We go to this very nice restaurant and the staff there knows us so well that they attempt to cook turkey. They don't, they don't know how to do turkey. The Pope's American now, though.
Leo Laporte [02:54:22]:
Can I send you a donation? Because I'm feeling bad about your €50amonth. No. Can I send you a turkey donation?
Father Robert Ballecer [02:54:30]:
This is, this is the way that we do it here. It's the point, Leo. That's the point.
Molly White [02:54:34]:
Are you allowed to save up your 50s? So you like, for. Put them all together and then you.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:54:38]:
Could go, I have to.
Leo Laporte [02:54:41]:
Get. For €50.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:54:43]:
So, like, I go, wow. You know, my, my shoes don't have soles on them, so I should probably save a little bit and buy when I get back to the States. Which is weird because even with the tariffs, it is still cheaper for me to buy stuff in the US and bring it back here.
Molly White [02:54:57]:
Huh?
Wesley Faulkner [02:55:00]:
Oh. Oh, yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:55:01]:
Why would that be?
Father Robert Ballecer [02:55:02]:
I don't know. But like, if I buy a MacBook, that makes sense. Here, it's like 3.
Leo Laporte [02:55:09]:
€3,000. Yeah. Because I buy it in the US is $1,500, but shoes should be cheap in Rome. I mean, this is. You're in a. A country of cobblers.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:55:17]:
But if you're buying Nikes or something, because they're importing that from the States. The States is importing it from somewhere else. So it's like a.
Leo Laporte [02:55:23]:
Do you need waris? Made in Oaxaca.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:55:28]:
I have steel toe clerical shoes.
Leo Laporte [02:55:30]:
Oh, yeah. I guess a priest really couldn't wear warachi.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:55:36]:
Although I, I, what, two, three weeks ago, we had a meeting with Pope Leo and one of the brothers who I very much love and I trust, his view is. He came up to me and said, hey, you know, Robert, the next time you have a Meeting with Pope Leo. If you could maybe look a little less homeless.
Leo Laporte [02:55:55]:
I'm like, oh, okay, I've taken a vow of poverty.
Molly White [02:55:59]:
I was like, I can't have you take a vow of poverty and then say you look too ragged.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:56:04]:
But, and then he showed me the photo.
Leo Laporte [02:56:05]:
Were you wearing Bermuda shorts?
Wesley Faulkner [02:56:07]:
What?
Leo Laporte [02:56:07]:
Were you.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:56:07]:
No, I had a clip circle shirt on. But I mean, compared to everyone else who was there, I did look.
Leo Laporte [02:56:13]:
You didn't have your finery. I, I.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:56:15]:
No, I had my finery. My finery was not fine. So that, that's what he was saying.
Leo Laporte [02:56:20]:
Yeah, well, they were probably all cardinals and stuff. They got the bright reds, beautiful clothing, and you got it.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:56:26]:
I mean, I know where they make the, that stuff. It's in the, the train station. When you come back, I'll take you to the train station. You can see where all those vestments are made. And man, it's, it's like a, a 200 year old Italian man, but man, can he tailor.
Leo Laporte [02:56:38]:
Oh, I'd like to. Can I get some. I guess I can't. That would be stolen valor.
Molly White [02:56:44]:
What?
Father Robert Ballecer [02:56:44]:
No, you just, they wouldn't make you cardinal vestments.
Molly White [02:56:49]:
Just get cardinal vestments and like wear it into the.
Leo Laporte [02:56:52]:
I'm tired of wearing the R. Papal.
Wesley Faulkner [02:56:57]:
Oh, did you serve? Where'd you serve?
Leo Laporte [02:56:58]:
Yeah, yeah, I was in 453rd.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:57:03]:
I've had Christina Warren here. I've had. Mike has been over here. Jason Howell has been over here. Brian Burnett has been over here. Leo. Leo.
Leo Laporte [02:57:13]:
I missed you. We crossed like ships to pass in the night. I was there the day I left. The day you were coming in, Lisa and I were in town. I love Rome. It's one of my favorite places in the world. I would move there if I could, to be honest. But I am stuck here in the attic.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:57:30]:
We can give you a studio. I mean, now that you don't work from, from the brick house.
Leo Laporte [02:57:35]:
Yeah. Thank you. Wonderful people. So nice to see you. Thank you, Wes. Thank you, Wes.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:57:41]:
Molly. Very nice to work with you again, Father. Dr. S. Wes again, Molly, for the first time.
Wesley Faulkner [02:57:46]:
Yes.
Father Robert Ballecer [02:57:46]:
Take care.
Leo Laporte [02:57:47]:
Have a wonderful evening and a great Thanksgiving.
Wesley Faulkner [02:57:49]:
Bye, all.
