This Week in Tech 1107 Transcript

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

Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on This Week in Tech, I'm Micah Sargent, I'm subbing in for Leo Laporte. Glenn Fleischmann is here, Sam at Wolfs Salmon is here, and so is Allison Johnson of The Verge. We kick off the show by talking about the iPhone Duo and some hacks you might want if you've got one in hand. Then, of course, with our car guy here, we talk about how, well, AVs, those automated vehicles, may very well get a special cyan light to let you know they're operating independently. Plus, how could we change the infrastructure of our roads to make self-driving vehicles operate even better. We of course have to cover the PHP issues and dig deep into that. And then we round things out by talking about how it turns out the iTunes Store is still around and pop stars are taking advantage of it. All that and more coming up on This Week in Tech.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:54]:
Podcasts you love.

TWiT.tv [00:00:56]:
From people you trust. This is TWiT.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:06]:
This is TWiT, This Week in Tech, episode 1107, recorded Sunday, October 25th, 2026. Spicy hinges. Hello and welcome to This Week in Tech, the podcast where we talk about the week's tech news at the end or the beginning of the week, depending on what you consider Sunday to be. I am Micah Sargent, subbing in today for Leo Laporte, and I am joined by a cast of wonderful characters. Sam Ebboulsamid, hello.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:01:39]:
Hey, Micah, it's good to be with you again.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:41]:
Good to have you here. We're also joined by Alison Johnson. Hello, Alison.

Allison Johnson [00:01:47]:
Hello, good to be here.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:48]:
Good to have you. And last but certainly not least, the hilarious Glenn Fleischman.

Glenn Fleishman [00:01:55]:
Oh no, I have something to live up to now. Thank you. So I'll work on it. I'll work on it. I promise. Thanks for having me.

Mikah Sargent [00:02:03]:
Absolutely. Yeah, I am, uh, very pleased to get to bring you all together today to chat about the week's tech news. And well, frankly, I think we need to start by talking about something that has been unfolding this week, uh, in the Apple world. And that's part of why I'm very excited to have Allison here, because, uh, the Duo shipped this week for some people. Not me. Mine doesn't come until November, like, 13th or something. Um, but what's great is that my younger brother somehow got his on day one. And so he's been sending me lots of photos and thoughts about it, uh, which has been fun.

Mikah Sargent [00:02:43]:
But Allison, you actually got to go hands-on and, uh, do a review over at The Verge. Uh, tell us about your kind of first thoughts, first takes, surprises, delights, et cetera.

Allison Johnson [00:02:55]:
Yeah, it was, it was a real fun one. Like I have to admit, you know, there's a, There's a sameness to phones these days, you know, for better and worse. And this was just exciting to kind of like learn how to use an iPhone again. Like you open it up and you turn it and all of a sudden the buttons are in weird places. It's just like the tech reviewer urge to be like, oh my gosh, something new to like figure out here. It's been fun. Yeah. And I've let— broad takeaway, I think anybody who's read our review or caught it on YouTube, is like, if you are into that kind of thing, if you're excited by the idea of the iPhone buttons, like volume buttons suddenly being somewhere else, then this is the phone for you.

Allison Johnson [00:03:46]:
If not, wait. Let's wait for the second gen Duo.

Glenn Fleishman [00:03:51]:
I've been waiting to see how much of a replacement it could be. I did not leap. I'm not in any queue for it yet. And I just got an iPhone 15. iPhone 18 Pro and I've got an iPad Mini, but I like to take the iPad Mini with me when I go on the road for shorter trips. If I know I don't need to do a lot of or any writing and I'm like, you know, maybe my next phone is I sell both those things and upgrade to a Duo, but maybe it's the Duo 2 or the Trio or whatever they're going to call it.

Allison Johnson [00:04:17]:
Yeah. And I would say like the, especially if the camera was part of the package for you on the 18 Pro, you're very, you're in very good hands. The 18 Pro camera, especially having that telephoto, which not on the Duo. Um, it would— I, I missed it a lot when I've— and I'm still using the Duo as my day-to-day, but, um, yeah, you don't get that on the, on the $2,000 phone, unfortunately.

Mikah Sargent [00:04:43]:
Did either of you, um— well, I guess you just shared, Glenn. Uh, Sam, are you considering it? Do you use an iPhone regularly, or are you an Android?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:04:53]:
I'm, I'm in the Android camp. I, I am still rocking my, uh, Pixel 10 Pro XL. Um, and so I, uh, I don't have any pla— I, I I keep an iPhone around, an older iPhone around just for testing, testing CarPlay updates and things like that in the vehicles I'm driving. But I don't typically drive or I don't typically use an iPhone. So, and I haven't felt any really compelling reason to spend $2,000 on a phone. You know, I've played around with a few of the Samsung Folds, you know, that I've tried them, you know, from other people I know who have them and, you know, they're fine. But like I said, I'm fine with, you know, 6.7 inches or whatever this one is and good cameras.

Mikah Sargent [00:05:41]:
Well, that's the thing too, right? That was one of— that's been one of the early kind of fears that people have had about this is that because of the lack of space, then the camera isn't going to be as high quality, isn't going to take pictures that are as good. And it was interesting the way that it's already, at least anecdotally, seems to be primed in people because as my brother was kind of sharing his thoughts on everything, I think one of the first things he said to me was, oh, and I'm not worried about the photos. It's fine.

Allison Johnson [00:06:12]:
No.

Mikah Sargent [00:06:12]:
I didn't say anything yet. I just was asking. And so I wanted to ask you, Allison, because we talked a little bit about this on Tech News Weekly, where things were, and you took some photos. Like, do you think for someone moving from, let's say, 2 generations ago, they're going to notice that this is not, up to snuff? Or is it just a matter of people who are upgrading every single year where obviously the loss of the telephoto, but the other cameras, do they kind of, do they match what you'd expect?

Allison Johnson [00:06:50]:
Yeah, it's sort of a story of like the duo gets an iPhone camera from a couple generations ago, it feels like, which is the good news and the bad news. You know, it's fine. iPhone cameras have been fine for a long time, I think. I do I do see a difference when I go side by side with the 18 Pro, which had sort of an all-new imaging pipeline. You know, obviously the moving aperture was a whole thing, but putting the photos side by side, the Duo main camera, the 18 Pro main camera, the Duo is definitely doing like some oversharpening, which I think is a look in phone photos that people have really developed a distaste for. Mm-hmm. You know, I agree. I don't love it.

Allison Johnson [00:07:41]:
So you do get a little more of that telltale kind of, oh yeah, this is a phone camera. But you know, you just got night mode, you have great video recording, you have the ultra-wide, which is just fine. Portrait mode, it does the trick for me. So it kind of checks all the boxes of like, this is a fine baseline iPhone camera. You can certainly do better and fancier in the 18 Pro, but it's like a minimum viable product, I think, on the Duo.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:08:17]:
How do you feel about the lack of telephoto? 'Cause personally, I find myself using telephoto a lot more than I use ultra-wide.

Allison Johnson [00:08:25]:
Yeah, it was a tough one to give up. And every time I would switch back to the 18 Pro and use the camera, I was like, oh, the telephoto's here again. I love this. I would personally have, a much harder time, yeah, giving up that telephoto. And I think it's something that someone moving from a Pro iPhone to the Duo will feel, and you just kind of have to decide if you're going to be cool with that or not. The digital zoom on the Duo is no great shakes, I will say. Yeah, so that was a tough, tough loss. When I was using it.

Mikah Sargent [00:09:06]:
The other thing that I think is still going to kind of bear out over time, right, is something that obviously you've got the sites that always will bend the phones and will throw the phones and do all of these things with the phones. What I, what I would, what I'm curious about is how these phones are going to feel over time. And if, there, because I think it was iFixit who put together, you know, their first initial impressions and were sharing on Instagram. And I saw them using a special kind of dust that lights up under UV light, and they were kind of moving the hinge and they're like, oh yeah, it's getting crunchy in there. And again, with my brother, because that's the person that I have to bother at any time to say, hey, how's it going today? He was talking about how he's kind of And I asked— now I remember, I actually asked you about this. How much preciousness do you feel sort of subconsciously about closing and opening the device? And for him, he felt a lot of preciousness. Could you tell us what you had felt about that and whether you thought, like, oh, this is something I'm not bringing with me to the beach, for example?

Allison Johnson [00:10:20]:
Yeah, I think it's been a long time since I've felt nervous about using a slab phone in any kind of weird circumstances. Like, I am so rough on those things. A foldable, I think even, you know, generations of foldables that other companies have been working on like Samsung, you are, I think, a little more cautious about like, okay, I am not gonna bring it to the beach or that kind of thing. I will say the Duo feels, it feels very solid, you know, apart from just being like kind of heavy. It gives you a reassuring, you know, sense of like this This thing is pretty well put together. I will share one thing that happened this morning. I was making this like slow cooker chili recipe and my child, my 5-year-old, wanted to help out. I was like, sure, come on over here.

Allison Johnson [00:11:15]:
And we're measuring out the chili powder and he grabs the thing and just sneezes. And like I had the phones propped up to do, to have the recipe and everything. I was like, we're gonna find out how much chili powder ends up in that hinge, but wow. So far so good,

Mikah Sargent [00:11:34]:
you know?

Glenn Fleishman [00:11:35]:
Yeah. IP68 rating, right? I was just looking that up. So hopefully this is— I don't know if 8 means that it's, uh, can prevent trials.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:11:43]:
How finely ground is that chili powder?

Allison Johnson [00:11:44]:
Yeah, right.

Glenn Fleishman [00:11:45]:
That's actually an incredible accidental test, isn't it?

Allison Johnson [00:11:50]:
Right.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:51]:
Yeah. We didn't mean to, but

Glenn Fleishman [00:11:52]:
I saw a lot of reviewers mentioning the Touch ID issue as being irritating or requiring retraining. I've got an iPad Mini. I don't have a Pro, so I'm constantly doing Touch ID with it. And so I'm in the routine. Uh, did you find that problematic? Do you think users will really see that as— I mean, I felt like that was, it was hard to find certain pain points and the camera was one and the Touch ID I felt got referenced a lot because I think a lot of reviewers are using only Face ID on all their devices or except for their Mac.

Allison Johnson [00:12:22]:
Yeah. It does feel kind of like taking a step backwards where you're like, I, I, shared this with Micah, but I kept just staring at the phone, forgetting that it didn't have Face ID. And then nothing happens. I'm like, oh, okay. It's, it's a— I got in the habit over the week and it was less painful. The thing that's really helped is, and it's not a solution for everybody by any means, but using the Apple Watch to unlock it, which you can enable, has— Oh, okay. has just been a game changer. So I think people will adjust to it.

Allison Johnson [00:12:59]:
There is an adjustment period where you're just staring at your phone or you're looking for the sensor because you moved it. It's, yeah, it's a different iPhone experience for sure.

Glenn Fleishman [00:13:13]:
So I hadn't thought about the fact that obviously they have to put, it's a cost thing, right? If they put Face ID and it has to be on both sides because otherwise what are you doing, right? And so Touch ID is a way around that. And that these, all the things you're talking about is fascinating. It's like, Well, here's the wishlist for Duo 2, the 2027, late 2027 model. It's like, well, it's going to have 3 cameras and, well, it's going to do this and it's got Face ID, or maybe that's 2028, but it does sound like a, like a working wishlist that I imagine.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:13:39]:
All of a sudden you're looking at a $3,000 starting price,

Glenn Fleishman [00:13:42]:
right? That's going to be between inflation and components and all that. I'm like, yes. Are they going to be able to hold the price at $2,000 for future models? Will they retire a Touch ID model and only sell a newer one?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:13:53]:
Given how thin it is when it's opened up, do you think it's possible to potentially do an under-screen fingerprint sensor as opposed to the one on the side? Because I mean, again, you know, as a Pixel user, it works great for me, the under-screen fingerprint sensor.

Allison Johnson [00:14:12]:
Yeah, I don't know. That would be intriguing. I think that just feels more obvious, like, where it is and you can see it working. There's a little bit of mysteriousness when I'm putting my finger on the Touch ID sensor. I do think it's like, it's kind of maxed out at how thick it can be. 'Cause we used it quite a bit side by side with the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8, which is, you know, kind of the same size and shape, but it is that bit thinner and it's a lot more comfortable to use one-handed and just scroll, put in your pocket. So I would personally vote for anything that's gonna make the phone thicker. Like, don't, don't do it, Apple.

Allison Johnson [00:14:59]:
Let's go the other direction. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:15:03]:
One of the, one of, 'cause there've also been a lot of these little tips and tricks that I've seen a lot of folks getting into early, early days. And quickly, a lot of people are now setting shortcuts because the phone gives you the ability to use whether it's open or closed as an input. And so people are saying, when I close my phone, if there's not an app open on the screen, then lock it automatically. Mm-hmm. And then I also saw, and I again sent to my brother, I said, some people have been enrolling this part of their finger into Touch ID. And for people who are listening, it's sort of the segment closest to the palm. and are using that as a means of setting Touch ID. I said, I don't know if it's possible, but maybe you could try it.

Mikah Sargent [00:15:57]:
And he said, it is, it is possible. And so now he's got squeeze grip as one of his Touch ID enroll fingerprints. Wow. And he's using that to get into the phone now too. So I'm kind of loving these little hacks that people are figuring out as time goes on. And you had mentioned too that, you know, Apple had said to journalists, And roll multiple fingers. Were there other kind of guidelines that they provided that, uh, because to me that read as, we know, we know.

Allison Johnson [00:16:31]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:16:32]:
And then there's now they're talking about Safari having a whole bunch of blank space on the side. And that's another, we know, we know. Are those cropping up as time goes on or were you kind of warned about that ahead of time? As much as you can tell us, of course.

Allison Johnson [00:16:47]:
Yeah. As far as like things we were sort of looking out for, there was a lot of back and forth where we were kind of like, you know, is there a right way and a wrong way to turn the thing? And it feels to us like there's a right way, but, you know, they wouldn't comment on it or anything like that. There's a lot of trial and error, it feels like, which again is so wild for an iPhone. Like, an iPhone has just been an iPhone forever. So I think it's fascinating to see people develop these, like, little tricks that they're doing. Enrolling multiple fingers was one that I was like, there's just not a thing I would have thought, but it does help you when you're using the phone. So, and as apps are developed, updating to like fully support iOS 27 and 27.1, I think we're going to see a little more settling down. You know, it's sort of a Wild West right now of like some apps are in this bucket and they open up in the middle of the screen and it looks awful.

Allison Johnson [00:18:02]:
Some apps look great and they have all the controls in the place where you're you're being taught to look for them, which is on the side. So I think there is a bit of roughness right now, which is either exciting or annoying. So by the time you get yours, Micah, it's gonna be smooth sailing, I think.

Mikah Sargent [00:18:24]:
Yay! It'll be all ironed out by the time I get it. It's odd that my Home View has a delivery date before—

Allison Johnson [00:18:31]:
Oh my gosh.

Mikah Sargent [00:18:32]:
Yeah, like 3 days before. And I'm just— I don't know where it is now because I've tried to put it out of line of sight so I don't have to get sad. I've got the case for for it, uh, for the, for the one that you said reminded you of like, uh, dollar store, uh, shoes or something like that.

Allison Johnson [00:18:48]:
Uh-oh, guilty. Yeah, yeah, I have it right here. I have the case and not the Duo right now, but this is, um, yeah, it's called the Folio case. It's Apple's, um—

Glenn Fleishman [00:19:00]:
Dollar store shoes? I don't know the reference.

Mikah Sargent [00:19:02]:
I can't remember exactly what you had called them, but it's— is it the Is it the texture of it that gave you that?

Allison Johnson [00:19:06]:
It isn't a texture. It's a color thing. That's

Glenn Fleishman [00:19:11]:
so funny.

Allison Johnson [00:19:12]:
Yeah. It just looks like—

Sam Abuelsamid [00:19:13]:
Is that the one that's got the kickstand?

Allison Johnson [00:19:14]:
It does have the kickstand, which I appreciate. I had it up on the kickstand when we were making chili this morning. So I've been using it for that because I like having the kickstand kind of built in. But it does, it covers the front of the screen. So you have to kind of get used to like opening the phone and then using the phone. And then, yeah, I don't know. I don't love it.

Mikah Sargent [00:19:39]:
Yeah, no, that's fair. Especially the fact that it's hiding some of the device that you would otherwise be using.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:19:45]:
I'm curious what the— because the kickstand is only on one side. How stable is it with when it's on the kickstand?

Allison Johnson [00:19:52]:
It's fine in landscape. It's actually pretty, it's pretty, Solid. You know, it looks, it sort of looks and feels a little flimsy, but it, it does a good job when you're in that landscape orientation. There is, it doesn't do anything for a portrait. If you want to flip it and use it that way, you're just out of luck. So.

Glenn Fleishman [00:20:12]:
I'm a bit interested in how Apple has, I mean, you have the Apple Vision Pro, we have the Home View, and we have the iPhone Duo. And like, it's talk about 3 different, like, what is this for kind of scenarios? It's like Apple Vision Pro, I felt like they introduced without answering that question. And I don't know if they've still answered But that was sort of the Apple Watch. They didn't know what it was for precisely. They just knew they could make one, and now it's evolved into a thing that makes a lot of sense. I bought a Series 12. I was like, yeah, I've got a Series 8. It's time to upgrade.

Glenn Fleishman [00:20:42]:
I want the newer features. And I know what I'm using it for, for exercise and fitness tracking, tracking heart and things like that. But the Home View, I'm kind of like, eh. The iPhone Duo feels like it's got a very sharp focus. It's got several different purposes, people who know they want it. Have a reason to do it. And they're releasing something that, from your description and all the others out there, the hardware sounds like it is right snapped into place. It's more an issue of hardware choices.

Glenn Fleishman [00:21:09]:
What can they put in this device at this price point and manufacture at this point? And then, third-party software, but also the system software and the Apple apps, it sounds like they were ready to go also. I felt reading your review and and many others, that there's a polish to this that a lot of Apple's new categories of devices haven't necessarily come with.

Allison Johnson [00:21:34]:
Yeah, I think the, like, the tablet-ness of it, when you open it up, you immediately are like, oh, okay, this is great. I can watch shows. I can do XYZ. I had our, like, Amazon grocery order on one side of the screen and my my recipe, my shopping list on the other side. And you're like, this is just genuinely nice and helpful. And it's sort of like, how many of those things do you have where you're like, oh, I read a lot of PDFs on my phone in a car. Like, I would love that. So those things are, yeah, sort of baked in.

Allison Johnson [00:22:16]:
And then there's, it has been fun watching all the kind of novelty apps come up too. It was like developers got real excited and it's like, it makes grilled cheese, or you can play Battleship on it. It's like those— it's a fun moment to have those things pop up. And I think it's going to settle down to like ordering your groceries and reading PDFs.

Mikah Sargent [00:22:39]:
When one of the things that I saw people, well, again, reviewers kind of complaining about, and this is where it's an odd moment Because part of what has always sold the iPhone, at least that's what Apple has always leaned into, is the fact that there is a developer community that's making apps for it. And the App Store is part of the appeal of the device. Most of the apps that I use are third-party apps. And so with that, reviewers not having access to Duo-supported apps, I think has led to some Complaints, not even some many complaints about the the lack of apps that have been updated, and I wanted to get your take on that in particular. But also, were there any apps that stood out to you as you kind of wishing that that it was updated? And the last thing that I'll say before I take it over to you is again for me with my brother who's not I mean he's obviously an enthusiast enough to want to buy one of these, but he's not like super steeped in tech every day, and so for him and I was surprised by. I didn't realize that this app wasn't updated. He said, I opened up Snapchat and it looks so stupid. And I said, oh, I said, they didn't up— like, I was shocked that Snapchat didn't have an update day one.

Mikah Sargent [00:24:02]:
And he's like, and I just feel like the design that they did for the apps that don't have support, it just looks bad. Like somebody should have designed that better. And I said, you know, now I'm starting to feel like maybe it, if, if it looks bad, what if that's not just a little bit of a way to pressure the developers into hopping on board as quick as they can?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:24:22]:
Apple would never do something like that. Right.

Allison Johnson [00:24:25]:
Yeah. Yeah. It was fascinating over the week that we had the phone and we were working on the review to see app updates come in, you know, stuff we had, we had sort of formed an opinion on and had some video shot about it. It was like, well, we got to throw that all away and reshoot it now. So just for anyone who's not not paying attention to iPhone Duo 24 hours a day like I am, there's like 3 categories that apps fit into right now. There's apps that are updated to iOS 26, and those are the ugly ones. They open up on the inner screen just with giant black bars on either side. When an app is updated to iOS 27, it'll have the support for the dynamic resizing.

Allison Johnson [00:25:14]:
So it'll take up the whole inner screen and stretch out, but it doesn't have controls that are specific to the Duo. So when an app is updated to 27.1, that's when you get, you know, on the COVID screen, it'll have controls along the side. You open it up and you'll have some of those controls on the side and a more thoughtful layout, you know, quote unquote. In a lot of cases, it was a good thing. We saw Slack. We do everything in Slack. And that went from a, iOS 27 stretched out app that was like, okay, this is, this is just really big and not very helpful to, um, you know, it gives you like columns now and the controls and that just felt like, oh, okay, this feels so much more functional. I'm actually seeing more information on this screen, not just what I was seeing before, but bigger.

Allison Johnson [00:26:12]:
Hmm. Um, the one I am desperate for is Google Docs. Oh yeah. Not surprising that Google has not been in a giant hurry to update its iOS apps, but I am just like, the day that that comes, 'cause it's a 26 app right now, so it's so tiny on the screen. I have a habit, I like to get a foldable keyboard, like a little Bluetooth portable keyboard, prop up the folding phone, you know, the Duo, and then just kind of write my blogs at the coffee shop. It's like a fun, fun little hack, I guess. Um, just, it's just not really possible on the Duo right now. So just Google if you can hear me.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:26:59]:
Didn't it take Google like 4 or 5 years before they finally made, um, Google Docs, uh, work properly on iPads?

Glenn Fleishman [00:27:08]:
I think that's—

Allison Johnson [00:27:09]:
and

Mikah Sargent [00:27:09]:
some would argue it still has some issues, but it's odd because at the same time, I think they're designing team and their UX team work at different paces because they were quick to get onto Liquid Glass. But yeah, I, I just— the way that I'm surviving through all of this is just by each day going into the App Store and looking at my updates and seeing, oh, that one's been updated for the Duo, that's got a Duo update, and thinking about the apps that are getting updates that that are still not saying updated for Duo. And then I'm just kind of going, okay, now I've got a note for that.

Glenn Fleishman [00:27:47]:
Micah vigil day. What are we in now? It's the, uh, keep lighting virtual candles for you until Duo arrives.

Mikah Sargent [00:27:57]:
Um, I wanted to also ask the other thing. Um, I just saw Apple really— I was surprised. I didn't think that the Duo was going to get Apple's, um, What is the word I'm looking for? You can fix it treatment so quick.

Allison Johnson [00:28:13]:
Oh.

Mikah Sargent [00:28:14]:
And yeah, you saw the DIY fixing documentation, and I just watched a video from the documentation that shows someone peeling off as part of the process and reinstalling the nano coating cover on top of the display. And first and foremost, I thought that was interesting that it's a, it is literally Literally a coating or a film, and it's not just the screen itself etched, but also unless this was a deepfake, I should be clear. I don't know. But yeah, the sort of repairability of this duo that caught me off guard. Have you all as the verge kind of looked into the costs of you know if you break it? What needs to be done and also then just repairability overall?

Allison Johnson [00:29:12]:
Yeah, it's something I keep an eye on and really in the past like 2 years specifically has kind of come more to the forefront for me. Earlier this summer, I reviewed the Fairphone 6, 6 Plus, I think, which is just like highly repairable. you can buy components for it. You can swap out the back panel just for fun, honestly, to put like a different attachment on it. And that was a real like, oh, this rules, you know? Like you think about the cost of a phone and if you're owning it for like 3 or 4 years, you know, are you gonna drop it and pay for that repair? Are you paying for that just by having the AppleCare or whatever it is. Those costs are sort of hidden in a way where a phone like the Fairphone is like, no, you can just buy a new battery from us and put it in yourself. Obviously, something like the iPhone Duo is going to be much, much more locked down. But it's great to see that, you know, the guide is there if you have the the wherewithal to pry the nano-texture film off of there.

Allison Johnson [00:30:34]:
Like, Godspeed. That sounds terrifying.

Mikah Sargent [00:30:37]:
It looked terrifying. Yeah. It looked terrifying.

Allison Johnson [00:30:42]:
Yeah. I only—

Sam Abuelsamid [00:30:43]:
I think if I had one, I would just pay the $49, even if I didn't have AppleCare, to have somebody else do it. Oh,

Allison Johnson [00:30:49]:
100%. Yeah. I don't have the guts to do anything to a folding phone. But yeah, that's my go-to is Like, get AppleCare with this phone. It's going to cost so much to repair. Just do it.

Glenn Fleishman [00:31:01]:
I thought that, I mean, Apple has to factor in repair costs into the price of a device because of its first-year warranty, even without buying extended AppleCare. And I thought, you know, is $1,999, it's not really the price of the device. It's the price of the, they need 30% of that to cover the repairs that are inevitably needed for this first-generation model. I mean, they, you know, they've got modeling for everything. So God knows how they work out the matrix or are they willing to like absorb, you know, $50 million of repair overages from their budget if that's what it takes, because they need to get this out. Again, with the quality of the hardware aspect of this, I haven't heard reports. I know it's been out a very, very little period of time, but I remember with every previous folding phone or the first generations, there was always like, I got it, I opened it up, and immediately there's missing pixels or this or that. Haven't seen that.

Glenn Fleishman [00:31:50]:
I expect people would love to get some viral attention or whatever, they'd shoot a video. I figure, if it were happening, we would would know about it. So whatever's happening must be happening on either a very low scale or, you know, I mean, it can't be zero, but it's got to be doing something.

Allison Johnson [00:32:05]:
Yeah, it actually—

Sam Abuelsamid [00:32:07]:
Just in the last couple of days, I've seen a whole bunch of reports of people having a problem, and it's the same, pretty much consistently the same problem, where the— it's the screen, uh, the, uh, right-hand side of the screen, uh, is getting white lines through it. It's basically breaking the

Glenn Fleishman [00:32:27]:
Okay.

Allison Johnson [00:32:27]:
Oh, that's not good.

Glenn Fleishman [00:32:28]:
There we go. Yeah. This may also be, they've, you know, how many units do they make? What are they fixing in manufacturing processes? Will Micah's unit be delayed if they find something they have to fix before they ship it? No, it's already packaged. It's already somewhere. Never mind. Don't even listen to me. But are the January units, will they be upgraded hardware-wise?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:32:46]:
I just put a link in the Discord to 9to5Mac. It shows you, and I've seen a bunch of reports. There's, there's a whole, a bunch of people have posted pictures showing the same problem on their screens.

Mikah Sargent [00:32:58]:
Interesting.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:33:00]:
There you go.

Glenn Fleishman [00:33:00]:
Oh, wow. Okay.

Mikah Sargent [00:33:03]:
Wow. That could be an issue. They all seem to break in the same way. The screen cracks down the center line of the hinge and a horizontal block of pixels on the screen is then stuck glowing white. We don't know the scale of the issue yet. Uh, and the amount of time it takes for the cracking to happen varies. Um, Yeah. It's, of course, they always hold some back, you know, to replace, and they always love to capture those.

Mikah Sargent [00:33:28]:
So for testing. So if you, that's one of the things I remember Rene Ritchie teaching me. If you have, if you buy a new iPhone and anything even seems the slightest bit off to you, reach out to Apple support because they want those and want to get one into your hands. that does work so that they can see if it's a process that is an overall issue that would end up being something that they need to fix in the pipeline.

Glenn Fleishman [00:34:00]:
Back years ago when Apple used to let us talk to people inside the company a little further, I talked to a fellow who was in charge of— what did they call it? It was ICE or something? Oh no, I shouldn't even say that. I think that's what the initial acronym was, initialism. It was like their continuing engineering group inside the company for products that were continuing to sell, because components would change, things would change, they would get feedback, they'd have to do minor re-engineering tasks and keep the product functionally identical. I've always thought that would be a fascinating group to look at at any company. It's like, how do you keep something— I mean, Apple doesn't keep things on sale for that many years anymore. 3, 4, 5 years is a lot for some of the Mac models, maybe. But it's still It's still a thing. Like, how do you get that feedback both for like the first stage engineering? We need to get these cycled immediately back in the product line to ensure we're delivering our bulk of our initial product correctly.

Glenn Fleishman [00:34:55]:
And then how do you keep stuff working? What feedback do you get and examine to improve things over the life of an existing product?

Mikah Sargent [00:35:03]:
Yeah, that would be exhilarating and terrifying and also having to, you know, reach out and say, hey, so this is the thing that's happening. And when you grab the phone just this way, the signal drops. Can someone tell Steve?

Glenn Fleishman [00:35:18]:
Sorry, you're rotating it wrong, Micah.

Allison Johnson [00:35:20]:
Yeah, right.

Mikah Sargent [00:35:23]:
Allison, anything else that's come up since your initial review or anything that you're kind of looking at now as you go into this next week with the device?

Allison Johnson [00:35:36]:
I am. So for the very few period I was traveling, I went to New York and that's where the team is. I'm out here in Seattle. Nice. So now that I'm kind of back in my native environment, I'm sort of like trying out all the things. Like I forgot the phone in the other room because I was using that like tent mode where you have the clock on the outside.

Mikah Sargent [00:36:01]:
Yeah.

Allison Johnson [00:36:02]:
And it gives you just a little, like, yeah, a couple of widgets. And I'm like, how is that gonna work? Am I gonna like that? Is it gonna drain the battery super fast? So I'm looking out for little things like that. And so far, it's just been really nice. I prop the thing up while I'm folding laundry. My kid will do some kind of torture test on it, you know, which will yield interesting results. But yeah, I'm kind of excited to just get it into my daily life and see what things pop up. But so far it's nice. It's been good.

Mikah Sargent [00:36:41]:
Awesome. Well, we will continue on with a few more Apple tidbits and a lot more to come here on this week's episode of This Week in Tech. But we do need to take a little break to hear from our dearly departed from this continent, @LeoLaPorte. Thanks so much, Leo. And we are back with This Week in Tech. We are joined by a wonderful crew today, Glenn Fleischman, Sam Apple-Samed, and Allison Johnson here with us. And I wanted to round out the Apple chat today with the upcoming Pro Intel event. That is, we're hearing More hardware from the company.

Mikah Sargent [00:37:28]:
Of course, we have another event that seems to be for kind of a smaller cast than you— than we've had with the bigger Apple events. Is this— are we feeling like this is something we can plan on going forward with Apple? And And do you think it's a positive way of doing things, or is it a— like, I guess in terms of something that's small, like a press release and a video, to this middle ground where you have certain people going to the larger events like WWDC and the iPhone event, where a very big group of people go and it's also streamed online. Why do we think they do these middle-ground options?

Glenn Fleishman [00:38:22]:
Because they can. I think it's great for Apple. It feels like they've been testing this idea in a lot of different ways. I would say the media coverage— Apple has gone from— we all remember the Apple is doomed era. It took a long time for Apple to shake that, even when they were on their way to becoming a multi-hundred-billion-dollar-a-year company. Now, it's not like they're blessed, but they get some credit for not having invested early in AI. Maybe there were so many critiques about that. I think, in the end, they may have taken the right position in investing late and perhaps well.

Glenn Fleishman [00:39:00]:
Based on my experience, perhaps alone, with Siri AI and Apple Intelligence, I feel like they have found an interesting medium that may satisfy more people. I'm sorry, but as a result of that, it feels like they get a lot of praise for what they do. As they introduce many different pieces of hardware at different times, or different operating systems and so forth, I think it's a great strategy for them to get the maximum amount of coverage without seemingly wearing out their welcome. Maybe they are going to wear out their welcome and they'll go back to bigger, fewer events. But so far, I just see wave after wave of reporting about it and people's interest. I'm sure it sells more products, too.

Mikah Sargent [00:39:39]:
Well put! What are we expecting to see at this Pro Intel event? Obviously, Pro hardware. And, uh, Mr. Mark Bloomberg, uh, aka Mark Gurman, uh, has, has given us, um, you know, some understanding of what we can expect. Is it finally time for the, the, the wrist that, that Steve Jobs used to always say we didn't want? Zombie arms. Yeah, part of the thing. Are we going to be touching our screens now?

Glenn Fleishman [00:40:09]:
I don't know. I just had rotator cuff surgery, so I don't like the idea of this. Out thing for a while, but no, sorry.

Mikah Sargent [00:40:15]:
A touchscreen Mac.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:40:17]:
I think when Jobs talked about that, it was more in the context of something like a touchscreen iMac, a big screen, which is typically a little bit further away from you. And with a laptop, I mean, I've had Windows laptops with touchscreens and they're fine. You know, I mean, most of the time you're not really using the touchscreen very much anyway, uh, you know, mostly just for scrolling, maybe a little zooming, uh, from time to time. But, you know, with a laptop, you know, it's not like you're stretching your arms out because your, your hands are on the keyboard and the screen is literally right there. Yeah. So it's not really any different from being— unless you're using the laptop with an external keyboard, I guess. But, uh, you know, it's— I don't, I don't think it's really going to be an issue. And frankly, I don't don't think most people are actually going to use the touchscreen component of it all that much.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:41:16]:
Um, you know, if, if my own experience is anything to go by, and that, that and other people I've seen with touchscreen laptops, you know, most of the time people aren't actually using the touch very frequently. Um, it's mostly just for, for some scrolling and zooming. So I think the bigger thing is going to be the potential for an OLED And having that and the potential improvement in the display quality from the OLED.

Mikah Sargent [00:41:43]:
Yeah, I'm excited about the OLED screen for sure. I, I, I don't see this as much anymore, but I liked back when these touchscreen laptops first came out and they were the sort of thing where you could fold it back and then it was more of like a tablet and then you'd fold it back over and then it was back in its sort of standard thing. And then And then I got a Microsoft Surface laptop a million years ago now. And when I would use that, 'cause I would sometimes be on Windows Weekly at the time. And so for that podcast, I would always bring that laptop on. And I did find myself occasionally, as you were saying, Sam, reach for the screen for specific instances, for specific use cases. But what was funny was how being on that laptop and then moving back to what was my typical mobile device, which was my MacBook Air, or my typical mobile PC was my MacBook Air, then I'd find myself booping the screen thinking that I could touch it. And Allison, it reminded me of you with Face ID on the Duo.

Mikah Sargent [00:42:58]:
Have you, for those of you who use a laptop right now that doesn't have touch. Tell me about where you think your use would be improved by having touch on that device.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:43:15]:
I mean, my main work computer now is a MacBook Pro, a 14-inch MacBook Pro, and I frankly don't miss the fact that I can't, I can't touch it. It, it's, it's not, you know, I, there's nothing that I do with it where I have a compelling reason to want to touch it, especially if you've got a good touchpad, you know, scrolling with that, you know, is just, you know, it's just as good or better than actually scrolling it on the screen.

Glenn Fleishman [00:43:48]:
I've tried to figure out where I could put the laptop the way I use it now, because I use it mostly on the road. And when I've kind of got a downstairs office and, and like the rest of the, you know, house with the rest of the family. So I'll pull up the laptop sometimes there, put it on my lap, literal lap, or sit at a table. And like none of those positions is reaching out. So I gotta figure out, can I reach out and point at the camera for those watching video? Can I reach out and touch? It's like just getting to the screen, uh, in that position feels awkward. Um, because I want that fold-over capability you're talking about, Micah. Yeah. If it did that.

Glenn Fleishman [00:44:22]:
So I, you know, this is, Is it a— feels like a feature in search of an audience? And the question is, is this just a way for them to introduce it, get people used to the concept, get developers behind it with low stakes? And then there's a future model that is more oriented towards that. Um, and it becomes the baseline for the pro models is that they're going to have touchscreen moving forward. So it's a modality that people who are developers can count on and users can count on. But I don't, I don't see how I'm going to— like, I can see Zooming. The one thing I always do though. I swear I will actually look at the television set and reach my fingers out and pinch at it as if that would do something when I'm watching something. Like, oh no, that doesn't work. I mean, I feel like they've trained me so well.

Glenn Fleishman [00:44:59]:
So I think I say I wouldn't do that. And then I'd be looking at a photo and I would grab the screen and I'd pinch it. And they would train me within like a day of just pinching and zooming and dragging and rotating with my fingers. Some of the most common, you know, tablet-y sort of things you do or iPhone things. So they probably would get me even though I don't think I

Allison Johnson [00:45:16]:
think Apple's in a weird moment of trying to converge things. Liquid Glass feels like an experiment of like, what if all this stuff looked the same? Shouldn't it look the same? That would be nice. And I don't know, there's little aspects of the inner screen of the Duo, like, is it an iPhone? Is it an iPad? It runs iPhone apps. So you have one product over here and another one over here with 2 different operating systems. It feels like that could be a moment of convergence. Maybe they're trying to prep us for like, well, what if everything was a touchscreen and it all ran some kind of one beautiful unified operating system? I don't know.

Glenn Fleishman [00:46:05]:
What if an iPad was a Mac? Ah!

Allison Johnson [00:46:07]:
Yeah. Can you imagine?

Glenn Fleishman [00:46:09]:
It's almost Halloween. It could happen.

Allison Johnson [00:46:11]:
Yeah, right.

Mikah Sargent [00:46:13]:
I, again, there are times where it makes sense, but those times are so few and far between that my bigger concern is what happens to my beautiful macOS, because that's my favorite of all of the platforms that Apple makes. macOS is my favorite. And what happens to my beautiful macOS when even more than they've already done now, it gets the touch target treatment, the TTT as it were. I am going to be really sad by the UI getting more messed up in order to support that way of interaction. And so, yeah, I don't know. Again, there are ways that Apple could convince me having touch as an option is a good thing. And certainly one of those would be a convertible-style laptop, but just a little screen I can touch, reach out and touch. If that means that then my, my bars at the top have been that and the stoplight icons have to be, you know, 1.2, 1.4 times bigger than they already are, that's not a sacrifice that I want to make just so you can you being Apple play around with some new sort of paradigm whenever it comes to your, your hardware.

Mikah Sargent [00:47:42]:
And then, yeah, is it— is there some world in which it's a solution looking for a problem, or is it also a matter of a generation of people who are growing up right now where touch interfaces are their first interfaces and a disconnect between, uh, your screen and your interactions don't quite gel. And so this is preparation for the future. I don't know.

Glenn Fleishman [00:48:19]:
I like— I like— oh, sorry, go ahead.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:48:21]:
I, I just— I think that that concern is maybe a little bit overblown. I think, I think people are adaptable enough to go back and forth between physical keyboards and touchscreens and, you know, You know, mice and trackpads and whatever else we put in front of them. You know, so I don't— just because, you know, maybe a lot of kids have grown up with phones and iPads or other tablets in their life, I don't think it's that big a deal for them to go to, you know, a laptop or even a desktop with a separate— with a keyboard and not be using the screen to actually manipulate the material that's on the screen. Fair

Mikah Sargent [00:49:03]:
enough. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. I mean, as we were just talking about earlier, I sometimes after using the Surface laptop then would reach out and touch a different screen. And so yeah, our brains definitely can adapt to, to other things. All right, I think it's time for us to move along to some more stories. And the next category I want to cover is— Oh, I love this one. cover? It's cars and transportation. And there happens to be someone here who knows a thing or two about cars and transportation.

Mikah Sargent [00:49:36]:
It's our car guy. So I wanted to ask you first and foremost, Sam, what have you kind of been looking at this week? As I know, we've got earnings from Tesla, plans for maybe— well, yeah, future plans for Tesla. And And I also wanted to get your take because this is something that's been not part of the news recently, but I haven't had an opportunity to talk to you about. And that is sort of the state of the infotainment center or system in cars and in electric vehicles in particular, and how that's like kind of a war zone right now.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:50:19]:
Yeah. So, I mean, for me personally, the big thing to This week, I was in New York for a couple of days. GM had an event on Wednesday called GM Forward, which is a tech preview event. This is the second year they've done it in New York for reasons— not sure why in New York, other than to maybe— I think they also did a separate event for Wall Street analysts. But they were showing off some of their new technology and where they're going in the next several years. And so they gave us a preview of what they're doing with their next generation EVs, some stuff that they're doing with HMI, human machine interface, like you were talking about with screens and so on. Also their personal autonomy efforts, bringing automated driving to personally owned vehicles as opposed to robo taxis. So we saw a lot of interesting stuff there.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:51:16]:
And one of the big things on the EV side was last year at the event, they had announced their next-generation batteries, their lithium manganese-rich chemistries. And at last year's event, the plan was still they were going to use 3 different types of lithium-ion batteries going forward. Lithium iron phosphate for entry-level vehicles, Nickel-rich chemistries for the high-end, higher-performance vehicles, and then these LMR batteries for kind of the in-between stuff. And now they've pivoted and they've said, you know what, we're getting good enough performance with these new batteries and the cost is low enough, we're just going to use these across the board. And so they showed off, you know, they told us what they're doing with that and gave us a preview of their next-generation EV. EV platform, but also talked a lot about the new computing architecture in there. So there, you know, today, you know, most of the vehicles on the road today, you know, built over the last 40, 50 years, have lots of computers in them, but they're distributed. They're, you know, little tiny microcontroller systems that are scattered all over the vehicle.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:52:33]:
And a typical modern vehicle has anywhere from 50 to 100 electronic control units scattered around the car. And they're consolidating that down into one big computer that is going to be powered by, at least in the higher-end vehicles, an Nvidia Thor chip, which is based on their Blackwell architecture, which is what you find in most of the AI data centers in the last couple of years. Nvidia's now starting to transition the data center stuff to their next generation, their Vera Ruben architecture. But Blackwell, this is a really powerful chip. And these are starting to show up in cars. And that's coming to GM vehicles in 2028. And they're going to have highway autonomous driving. So completely hands-off, eyes-off driving, unsupervised, unlike a certain other brand that has something they call full self-driving, But you actually have to supervise it and pay attention and be ready to take over at any second.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:53:35]:
The GM system is designed to be unsupervised. And if the driver doesn't take control when it asks you to, then it will just safely carry on and bring the vehicle over to a safe stop when it reaches the limits of what it can do.

Mikah Sargent [00:53:49]:
Now, when you talk about those features, these are presumably tested alongside NHTSA? They get some sort of stamp of approval? Who says, hey, so it's totally okay if you do unsupervised?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:54:07]:
So the funny thing about NHTSA, which is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, you know, they write the federal motor vehicle safety standards. As of today, October 2026, there are no federal motor vehicle safety standards that govern any of the assisted or automated driving technology. I was wondering if you were going to say

Mikah Sargent [00:54:25]:
that.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:54:26]:
Yeah. So as far as the feds are concerned, they've been investigating some of the stuff that Tesla and others are doing, but there are no actual rules that govern this. So at a state level, it's a little bit different because the way regulations are set up in the US is the federal government's responsible for setting the safety standards for the vehicles themselves. So, you know, here's the standards for lighting. Here's the standards for braking. Here's the standards for occupant protection in a crash. You know, so if the vehicle crashes, you have to have seatbelts and airbags and all this other stuff. But they have nothing for assisted and automated driving.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:55:10]:
And then the states are responsible for licensing drivers and registration. And so, you know, what we're— you know, what we are— what we do have in a bunch of states, you know, there's a bunch of states now over the last 10 years that have passed new rules for licensing to govern automated vehicles, you know, primarily targeting things like robotaxis, but also covers personally owned vehicles. And so, like Michigan, for example, where I live, is one of the states that has done that. And I was actually just reading through the regulations again the other day. And the regulations in Michigan and a bunch of other states, if it's a vehicle that's got an automated driving system, when the system is active, they consider that system the driver. And then if anything happens, if there's a crash or anything else, the manufacturer of that system is liable for that. So with a human driver, when you're driving in manual mode, if you crash, if you do something that causes a crash, you're personally liable or your insurance is. With an automated system, now the manufacturer becomes liable, which is an interesting shift.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:56:34]:
Wow. shift. And so I think for the near term, I think especially for personally owned vehicles, that's the thing that automakers are trying to figure out is, okay, where can I make this available where the rules will allow it? And so there's that. The other thing, The one thing at a federal level that they do have is some of the robotaxis that are out there, like the Zoox robotaxis. I don't know if you've seen those around San Francisco, Micah.

Mikah Sargent [00:57:13]:
Now, I live in Portland now, but I saw—

Sam Abuelsamid [00:57:15]:
Oh, that's right. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent [00:57:16]:
I did see— I saw some robotaxis back when I was there. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:57:20]:
Yeah. So the Zoox robotaxis—

Glenn Fleishman [00:57:22]:
Our city's been fighting it, as I recall. I don't know.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:57:26]:
Robotaxis are these little pods, these little 4-seat pods. Oh, right. Okay.

Mikah Sargent [00:57:30]:
Yes.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:57:31]:
Carriage seating. So, you know, 2 people on each side facing the center of the vehicle, and it's open in the middle, and there's no human controls in there. And this is also what Tesla is trying to do with the CyberCab. You know, so there's no steering wheel, no pedals. And even though federal regulations don't govern the automated driving system itself, They do require human controls. You have to have a steering wheel, you have to have pedals, you have to have certain other control devices. And so this has been, you know, they have a process that allows manufacturers to apply for a waiver from some of these rules if they don't apply to that vehicle. Obviously, for a fully automated robotaxi, you don't really need the human controls or things like mirrors.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:58:20]:
Right. external mirrors. And so Zoox was the first company— Nuro was actually the first company to get one of these waivers. Hmm. But that was for their little robot delivery vehicle, which doesn't carry any people. Zoox was the first one to get a waiver for a vehicle that carries passengers. But the thing is, for what GM is doing, they are selling— they're planning to sell a vehicle that has all the controls. So it be driven fully manually.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:58:55]:
And it won't need any of these waivers. So they don't have that problem to worry about. They just have to figure out what states are they allowed to have this system be able to activate in for fully autonomous driving without the human supervising.

Mikah Sargent [00:59:13]:
This is kind of wild to me because it just sounds like passing— like, Can I pass the buck? And if I can't pass the buck, then I have to figure out like, oh God, it feels so cynical to me. No, no, you're

Glenn Fleishman [00:59:30]:
right. You're right. Whatever it is you're about to say is correct.

Mikah Sargent [00:59:33]:
But that's just that in and of itself, I feel, is a cynical take. Not me, but the companies that they're saying, you know, if trying to release this technology But if it can't be the fault of the person that's driving, then we're going to be even more cautious about it. We're going to do more safety checks.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:59:54]:
I mean, that's the right thing to do. If the person sitting behind the steering wheel is not actively driving and they're not required to supervise, if you're giving them an automated driving system that they don't have to supervise, then yeah, the liability should be on the manufacturer. Yeah. Whoever built that automated driving system, whether it's— whether GM's doing it in-house, some companies are working with third-party partners like Stellantis is working with a company called Wave, a British company. Others are working with companies like Mobileye. Whoever is building that system, they have to be responsible for it. And that puts the onus on them to make sure that the system is in fact safe.

Mikah Sargent [01:00:41]:
Yes.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:00:42]:
And this is part of the reason why Tesla specifically has, you know, when you look, you see Full Self-Driving, parentheses, supervised. They will not— they have not said they are not taking responsibility for their system for consumer vehicles. So if you are driving a Tesla and you put it into Full Self-Driving mode, you engage Full Self-Driving, if something happens, if there's a crash, You are responsible, not Tesla.

Mikah Sargent [01:01:12]:
See, okay, so yeah, I think what I was saying was— I, it's, it's, it's silly of me because why would I think in this world this is the case? I'm saying I wish that I— now I have to believe that they would not be as motivated to do it right if they weren't liable. But I would want, in a perfect world, for them to be as motivated even if it wasn't them being responsible for crashes in the end. That was more my concern.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:01:40]:
Yeah, no, and you're right. I mean, ideally, that would be the case. And I think for most companies, they prefer for their customers not to get killed. It makes it hard to have repeat customers when they keep dying on you. So although that didn't work out so well for the tobacco industry, that didn't seem to matter. But automakers certainly prefer to have their customers come back and buy another vehicle in a few years. And so, you know, between product liability laws and regulations, you know, there is an incentive for them to try to do this as safely as possible.

Glenn Fleishman [01:02:22]:
Yeah, there is an analogy to this, which was in the— strangely, in the aircraft industry, which is that for a long time, airline manufacturers had essentially unlimited eternal liability for issues with planes and this came up in many, many lawsuits and it also didn't matter if the plane often had been modified in certain ways or parts replaced. It was a whole thing and I had to look this up. It was 1994, the law was changed to limit that liability to 17 years in like a lot of circumstances, but they thought the entire US-based aircraft industry was going to implode besides the big— besides Boeing and a couple of big makers. Because of this liability issue where the manufacturer retains so much liability. So I hope they're learning a lesson from that in terms of the regulatory infrastructure. It's also unclear even after fixing that airplane law or revising it if it did revitalize the industry, but it seems like a cautionary tale of—

Sam Abuelsamid [01:03:20]:
Boeing's had a few challenges.

Glenn Fleishman [01:03:23]:
Yeah. Boeing aside, I don't know. Yeah. I wish that they had a— speaking of the Seattle area, I wish they had a few more people in the administration or the management there who actually thought, well, what if we save people's lives?

Allison Johnson [01:03:34]:
Yeah. Something that occurs to me, and sorry, this is a little bit of a tangent, but kind of going on the cars made for humans being driven by robots moment is, I think there's a weird parallel in, I've been testing some of the AI agents, like your Muse. and all those. And it's just interesting to see a robot in a human-made world. And if it's like a robot that's like clicking around on a website looking for information for me, you just see so quickly, you're like, this is not how you would design any of this if we just had robots using them. And, you know, it's funny, I hadn't really thought too much about that. I saw those Zoox vehicles in San Francisco, you're just like, that is a goofy-looking car. But why would you have a steering wheel and pedals and mirrors and all that if the system doesn't need it? And it'll be interesting to see how much of, like, our physical world and the internet and all the things that we interact with get remade in a more robot-friendly way.

Allison Johnson [01:04:45]:
I don't know.

Mikah Sargent [01:04:46]:
Yeah, that's funny.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:04:48]:
Yeah, well, I mean, that's certainly a challenge for automated vehicles, especially for robotaxis, because one of the challenges that robotaxi operators have is figuring out, okay, where can I actually pull over to drop off a passenger or pick up a passenger? Getting curb access is difficult in a lot of places. And so, you know, sometimes, you know, if you've used a Waymo or Zoox or, you know, a Tesla robotaxi, if you're in Austin or a couple other places, they, you know, sometimes, you know, you will summon a vehicle. You know, if you're summoning a regular Uber or Lyft, you know, it will come up, you know, and it'll pull up, you know, right by where you're standing and, you know, it might double park momentarily while you, you know, go hop in the vehicle. Mm-hmm. But the robotaxis aren't necessarily allowed to do that. And so they have limits on where they can do pickups and drop-offs. Actually, Las Vegas is a really interesting example. Zoox is operating their robotaxis in Las Vegas.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:05:57]:
And along the Las Vegas Strip, vehicle, you know, whether it's taxis or ride-hail vehicles they are not allowed to pick up passengers on Las Vegas Boulevard. Hmm. So if you are walking along, if you're on the sidewalk standing in front of a hotel on Las Vegas Boulevard and you summon an Uber, they cannot pick you up on the street there because, you know, it's, it's a local regulation in Las Vegas. They have to go around to one of the, you know, wherever the, the pickup spot is at that particular hotel, and then you have to go find that, you know, And if you spend any time in Las Vegas, especially around CES, trying to figure out, okay, where's the pickup, the ride-hail pickup spot at this massive hotel?

Allison Johnson [01:06:44]:
I've never been more lost in my life than trying to get an Uber at a hotel in Vegas.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:06:51]:
Yeah. So there's all kinds of these quirks that they have to deal with, that these vehicles have to deal with. But it's going to be interesting. 2028 is going to be an interesting year because there's going to be a bunch of companies bringing out these unsupervised, partially automated systems like what GM is doing. GM's system is going to be designed to work on highways first and then gradually expand to city streets and other roads. But Ford is planning to bring one out. Rivian, Lucid, a whole bunch of other companies are planning to launch similar systems in that timeframe and around around about 2028. So it's going to have to keep an eye on things.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:07:37]:
One interesting thing that did just come up the other day from NHTSA though, is they put out a notice of proposed rulemaking. So for vehicles that are operating in an automated driving mode like this, Mm-hmm. they are going to use these cyan lights. So you'll have cyan signal markers. So I mean, right now, you know, for brake lights, We have red headlights, are white, turn signals are amber typically. And so they'll have extra cyan lights that, that's an indication that that vehicle is operating autonomously.

Mikah Sargent [01:08:15]:
Cool.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:08:16]:
So if you see a car with cyan lights turned on, keep, you know, stay away. You know, there might not be anybody paying attention.

Mikah Sargent [01:08:28]:
Is there— actually, I think we need to take a quick break. But when we come back, I want to ask you, because Allison, you've just now like blew my brain on thinking about shifting the world to something that's more robo-friendly or how that might start to happen. I want to ask you, Sam, when we come back, how would highways and roads be improved in order to better give autonomous vehicles the ability to see what they need to see and do what they need to do. But let's hear from Leo Laporte for our next ad break. All right. Thank you, Leo. Thank you, Doppel. Yeah, I am now thinking about the way that we've kind of had these new systems, as Allison was pointing to, adapt to our environment.

Mikah Sargent [01:09:21]:
But it's possible that we might start to see some adapt— I can barely take my own self seriously with this turtleneck on. Anyway, adapt back the other way around with changing our environment. And so I was asking before the break, and I'm curious to hear, Sam. A, is there any push for changes to our infrastructure that would better support autonomous vehicles? And if not any push for it, what are people saying, you know, the folks that are working on this stuff, and from what you know, that would help autonomous vehicles operate better in our existing infrastructure, but with, you know, slight changes?

Sam Abuelsamid [01:10:08]:
Yeah. So, you know, for the most part, you know, these vehicles are designed to operate within the existing infrastructure. So, you know, looking at things like traffic signals and road markings, lane markings, and so on. And in most cases, you know, using mapping to give it a preview of what's coming up. But there are some things that can be done and that have been tested in a variety of cities, a variety of locations over the last decade that would definitely help. help. So, you know, if you think about, you know, when you're driving, you know, one of the things we do when we drive is we often use nonverbal communications to communicate with other drivers, to communicate our intent. You know, you're sitting in traffic and there's an exit from a parking lot and, you know, you're stopped at a red light and, you know, you could move forward 10 feet and be right up on the bumper of the car in front of you, but there's somebody waiting to get out.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:11:10]:
And so you wave to them and say, okay, come on, you know, you can come out of there and, you know, take that spot. Mm-hmm. Or, you know, when you're at a 4-way stop, you can, you know, you have that nonverbal communication to negotiate who's going to go first at the 4-way stop if 2 cars arrive at the same time. So there's ways that we can do that technologically that would help improve the performance of these vehicles, make them safer to operate by using things like vehicle-to-vehicle communications. So having the vehicle send messages to each other and share what their intent is. So if a vehicle is gonna be slowing down or pulling over to stop, communicating that, or if it's gonna change lanes, obviously they've got turn signals, signals, but also sending that message, radio messages back and forth. That's something that's been tested. And there was a proposal back in 2016 to actually mandate that for all new vehicles.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:12:15]:
But then the administration that came into power in 2017 did nothing with that, and it was eventually dropped. But there's also things like vehicle-to-infrastructure communications. Because one of the things, you know, we've got these sensors on the vehicles, we've got cameras and radars and lidars, but they're all limited to line of sight. So they can't see around corners just like we can't see around corners. So if there's a— if you're especially in an urban environment, oftentimes you'll have large buildings at an intersection. And so your line of sight is limited to what's coming on the cross street. One of the things that they've been experimenting with is putting up sensors at intersections. So you have radar or camera or LiDARs at the intersections, and then they're broadcasting out information about if there's a vehicle approaching.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:13:09]:
So you're extending the situational awareness of the automated driving system beyond what its sensors can see directly. And things like that can make the operation of those vehicles much, much safer.

Mikah Sargent [01:13:22]:
Wow. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. I've kind of always wanted to I would love to have my back window— this is for human-in-vehicle to human-in-vehicle communication. Wouldn't it be so cool if your back window just was like an LED sign and you could write a message? I know that some people would abuse it. I would genuinely just want to be like, hey, your headlights are off, or oops, sorry about that.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:13:49]:
Oh, I mean, that's another example that we do sometimes. If you're driving at night on a rural road and you may have your high beams on and you forget. And so sometimes you'll flash your high beams to let somebody know, hey, or sometimes people will flash their high beams to signal other things, signal the presence of members of the local constabulary. Certain people.

Mikah Sargent [01:14:16]:
Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:14:17]:
So there's all kinds of ways that we communicate with each other, even with what we have in our vehicles today.

Glenn Fleishman [01:14:24]:
Yeah, I'm just gonna say there's a reason AirDrop was turned off from the everyone setting. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent [01:14:31]:
and it was only half because China wanted it to be shut off for some cases.

Glenn Fleishman [01:14:37]:
There's some plane flights in which the pilot said, I'm gonna turn this plane around, if you recall.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:14:44]:
Before we go on, there is one— there's an interesting bit of technology that's out there now that's in some vehicles already. There's a company called Haas Alerts that has been equipping emergency vehicles with transponders. So ambulances, fire trucks, police vehicles, but also construction vehicles at road construction sites with transponders. And they brought— the vehicles broadcast their location and their direction and speed to Haas Alerts Cloud. And then Stellantis was actually the first one to adopt that. But the Haas Alerts messages also come through Waze. And so you, as you're driving along, you may get an alert that there's an emergency vehicle approaching, maybe coming up behind you and you might not be able to see it yet, or coming up, coming in your direction, or there's a construction zone. I was just recently driving a Jeep, a new Jeep Cherokee, and driving past Detroit Airport.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:15:48]:
There was a bunch of construction going on there on I-94. And every time I went through there, I would get— as I was approaching it, I would get the messages about upcoming construction zone. And again, that's another example where those messages could be used to alert alert vehicles of potential hazards, things they need to watch out for. Same thing goes for road surface condition. If it's icy, if you've got a vehicle that is driving along and hits a piece of black ice, and it can alert other vehicles around it that, hey, the road is icy here, and provide an alert in the instrument cluster.

Glenn Fleishman [01:16:30]:
All I want is a little button I can press that says the driver around me is an idiot. And then when that driver gets enough reports enough people. This is— I'm stealing a Gallagher comedian idea. Years ago, he said everyone should drive in bumper cars, and we'd all have big rubber darts we could fire at other cars. And so if a car had enough rubber darts on it, the police would pull it over. And I'm like, let's just do that electronically and anonymously. Police are like, we got 700 reports. You are a jerk.

Glenn Fleishman [01:16:55]:
We're going to review the footage.

Allison Johnson [01:16:56]:
Like upvoting and downvoting.

Glenn Fleishman [01:16:58]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure Reddit voting on cars would be That was my best idea ever.

Mikah Sargent [01:17:07]:
All right, we should move along to— oh, actually, I did want to briefly touch on, because there was a story in the automotive this week about— it was kind of a small one about Spotify launching its native in-car app. And it made me think about Right now, and you were just talking about how you keep an iPhone around so that you can test CarPlay stuff, but it made me think about CarPlay and Android Auto and the companies, the car manufacturers who are still making their own independent infotainment systems that lock out the competition there. Where do you see kind Where do you see kind of the future going? Is it going to continue to lean into your smartphone being the system that serves your car, or do you think we're going to start to see that disappear for built-in systems? And then I'd love to hear, like, for you personally, have there been any manufacturers whose infotainment systems you felt like you could have been convinced or could be convinced to use in place of Android Auto or CarPlay?

Sam Abuelsamid [01:18:23]:
So, you know, automakers would like, would prefer to not have people use a smartphone projection system. You know, when GM announced a couple years ago that they were going to not have smartphone projection supported in their EVs, a lot of people got really upset about it and said, oh, it's just because GM wants all that information. Well, GM already has all They already have all the information about what you're doing, where you are. They've got GPS sensors in the car. They already know what you're doing in the car. They don't need to lock out Apple CarPlay or Android Auto to do that. But what they would like to do is have you running some more apps natively in the vehicle so that there's potential for them to do deals for for example, with Starbucks or, you know, some other, you know, some dealers, you know, to when you need service or when you want to get a cup of coffee or, you know, get a Domino's pizza to maybe get a cut of that transaction every time you do that through the app that they've got in the vehicle. The other thing that they want to do though is when they have control of the system system that you're using in the car, they can provide some features that the smartphone projection system can't.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:19:50]:
So for example, one of the things that GM has done, they have Android Automotive, the Google built-in stuff. So they're using Google Maps in their vehicles and on their vehicles that have Super Cruise, which is their hands-free but eyes-on assisted driving system. They made some modifications. They worked with Google to make some modifications to the Google Maps that's running natively in the vehicle so that, you know, how when you put it— when you navigate with Google Maps, you get that thick blue line showing your route, which, you know, where you're supposed to go. When you're on a road that supports Super Cruise, Mm-hmm. then there's a thin white line down the middle of that. So you You know, when there's a location where you can go hands-free. They also added functionality in there that uses the Google Maps lane guidance.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:20:51]:
So when you're using Google Maps for navigation and you're coming up on your exit, it'll show you, here's the lanes and it'll tell you which lane you should be in for your upcoming exit. Well, now Super Cruise Cruise can read that and it will automatically change lanes for you to get you in the correct lane for your exit as you're approaching your exit. So, and then they're also using it for improved guidance for charging for their EVs. So it'll tell you, you know, if you set a route that is beyond the current range of your car, you know, it'll say, here's where you should probably stop and how long you should, you know, what your— That's right. estimated charge is going to be when you get there and how long you should sit there and charge. And so it can guide you for the most economical route or the fastest route, depending on what the charging capability of that car is. So there's all kinds of things that they can potentially do when they control it. I think most of the Android automotive systems, the Google built-in systems, generally work pretty well.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:21:56]:
There Yeah, there are some other apps I would like to see them supporting, um, you know, because they have the Google Play Store in there, but they don't have support right now for any messaging apps, for example, um, which, you know, I'd like to see them add that, uh, so messages, uh, can, can pop up on the screen, uh, or, you know, I can send a, send a text message by voice, uh, you know, to let somebody know I'm running late or whatever it is. Um, but, you know, some of the other There are other native systems like Rivian's system. Rivian's software is generally pretty good and it's pretty stable. The latest software from Toyota is actually surprisingly good. Their latest generation system that they just launched this year is actually quite good. So there's some good systems out there.

Mikah Sargent [01:22:46]:
Nice. Well, I'm happy to hear that That, I don't know, that they're— it seems like over time it's gone from a place of just, hey, we've got this basic stuff that we can do to, oh, people actually do care about this and we've got competition. So maybe let's focus some internal teams on making infotainment experiences that are valuable and would draw people in for sure.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:23:16]:
Yeah. Well, you know, there's one other issue, which with the projection systems is they're, they're not— I mean, you know, people like to use them, but my experience, you know, I drive pretty much everything out there. I drive a lot of different— I drive different vehicles every week, and most of the projection systems can be a little flaky, a little unstable. And a lot of times you'll be driving down the road and all of a sudden it loses connection to your phone, and it's like you can't get it reconnected while you're driving, and you're using that for your navigation or your media playback. And it becomes a real pain point for a lot of people. And the in-vehicle systems tend to be more stable because they're not going to lose connection to themselves.

Glenn Fleishman [01:24:02]:
I'll tell you, it works really great as a magnet because I've never owned a car with CarPlay or any decent projection system. So a magnet typically doesn't lose connection. So That's so far. Next car upgrade coming sometime in the next 1 to 15 years, I'll have to deal with that.

Mikah Sargent [01:24:21]:
All right, let's take a quick break here on This Week in Tech. We'll be back in a moment. Leo, take it away. All right, thank you very much, Leo. We are back from the break and it's time to talk about, well, a huge, huge story that happened this week and has led to a lot lot of panic and hardening of security and concerns about the future of online services and everything in between. That's because on October 21st, the PHP project shipped emergency fixes to 2 critical bugs that led an attacker take over a web server running PHP. And here's the thing, the attacker didn't need a login to do so, and on some setups didn't even need the site's own code to run. And you may be going, okay, PHP, but like, that's old school, right? PHP powers WordPress, Drupal, Magento, and a huge share of the web.

Mikah Sargent [01:25:29]:
I think there was one thing that said maybe it's behind about 70% of websites. So people are, I think, reasonably a little worried about this. And the fact, again, that it is what's called an RCE, or remote code execution, rated at 9.2 out of 10 on the scale of how bad is it. It's real bad, right, Glenn?

Glenn Fleishman [01:25:55]:
Well, it's— I run PHP on a number of my sites. And so I immediately was like, ah, And, um, but fortunately it was very— there was already a patch out. I was able to run an update. I ran a diagnostic using Claude to say, I gotta fight fire with fire. I said, what's exposed here? What's bad? And it said, uh, fortunately nothing. You have one thing that might have caused an issue and it's pretty obscure. Let's close that down. So that was, that was good news.

Glenn Fleishman [01:26:21]:
Um, what I'm hearing generally and seeing generally is that, uh, it doesn't sound like we're getting the scale. This is kind like with an earlier story. It doesn't sound like we're getting the scale of exploits that were predicted, because we know that— I think versions were vulnerable back for— I've forgotten the number of years.

Mikah Sargent [01:26:37]:
2 decades. It goes back to PHP 5 in 2004.

Glenn Fleishman [01:26:41]:
Yeah. So we know there are a million, million abandoned sites that are running PHP out there, and most of those haven't been updated in 1 to 20 years, let's say. So I would expect that if any— if the vulnerability were exploitable at a level that was useful, we would already have seen it because AI not only accelerates discovery of exploits, of course, including this one that was theorized some time ago, but only exploited recently by 2 different companies that said they used AI to aid their exploit finding. The fact that we're not seeing, say, sort of a mass massive outpouring of stories or reports about this exploit being used to some practical end. I wonder where we're at with that because it should be— I don't want to say relatively easy to exploit. The exploit condition is very obscure. You have to be able to do a whole bunch of things in a row right, but when you have a billion sites to go after, you only have to be right a very small fraction of the time to have some impact. So ostensibly, and also a layers of hardening are an issue, too.

Glenn Fleishman [01:27:47]:
So companies that have Cloudflare or other CDNs or similar firewall-style protection— Cloudflare updated its rules immediately, right? So if you're paying them, or maybe— I'm not sure if the free service also included that. You can have your own firewall rules. You can have hardening on your server. You can have features turned off. Even though PHP was vulnerable, you can have PHP configured in such a way. So it may have been that this I don't wanna say pre-mitigated, but it may have been mitigated already in a lot of ways that we'll find out kind of with the aftermath. So it was huge, tremendous. We're gonna see more of this, probably much more.

Glenn Fleishman [01:28:24]:
I have a friend in security who was like, this is— we are barely in the beginning of it. And he's been working on issues like Heartbleed and some other major ones for quite a while. Oh, cool. So he's not known to exaggerate. have excessive over-paranoia about this. But I think in this case, the big advantage is that it was a relatively easy fix. PHP Foundation was on top of it. The million sites that have Active Management were able to fix it.

Glenn Fleishman [01:28:53]:
WordPress, I'm sure, pushed out updates and all the WordPress chains and all the other outfits that use PHP in sort of common deployments were able to push out the relatively modest fixes that mitigated the problem?

Mikah Sargent [01:29:05]:
Yeah, so this is the thing that is, I think, particularly frustrating about this whole story. It's my understanding that this was discovered in 2024. So there was an outside security audit that was funded by Germany's sovereign tech agency, and it was carried out by QuarksLab. And they did this security audit on PHP. PHP, and it turned up the first signs of the memory limit problem. Right. The PHP security team said, well, this should be the way we fix it. No, this should be the way we fix it.

Mikah Sargent [01:29:40]:
No, this should be the way we fix it. And they couldn't agree on a fix. And so work on it had stalled for months. And now the PHP Foundation is saying, hey, yeah, so that was a structural failure. We— yeah, sure. And so that happened in 2024. 2024, no fix. August 2026 was when OpenAI says it first, by way of GPT-5.6 Sol, found the bugs.

Mikah Sargent [01:30:07]:
And then also Wiz, which is Google's security— it's Google, it's a Google-owned security firm— also says that its researchers found the bugs, and both used AI obviously as part of the process. This is where also it was kind of interesting, the rollout of this, because October 17th, AWS said that it saw at least one attacker who tried to exploit the flaws. That's 4 days before they were public. On October 20th, PHP warned admins that emergency patches were coming. And then October 21st was when patches began to ship because the CVE IDs, which are basically just like a registry— for people who don't know, it's sort of like a registration ID ID for each of these critical flaws that you— that they find, uh, started circulating online. Well, that's where Cloudflare had done its due diligence and had pushed firewall protections to every customer. Um, there were some different sites that actually went fully dark to protect themselves, and then Wikimedia also took its systems offline for the patch. So it was, um, in some ways a bit of a triumph in terms of how quickly the patches rolled out and also a benefit whenever you had somebody else managing the system who was getting things rolling.

Mikah Sargent [01:31:31]:
But when it turns out there's only one person, the open source PHP Foundation has one full-time employee and then 14 contractors, and yet it's responsible for 70% of websites, I think the WordPress, right? Or maybe that's not the case anymore.

Allison Johnson [01:31:51]:
Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman [01:31:51]:
Almost everybody is WordPress unless they roll their own, I think. Did you link to that? There's a site that someone posted recently, or page, that showed all of the critical features on the internet or pieces that we rely on, like the XKCD cartoon and how it's one person.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:32:08]:
Usually one or two people.

Glenn Fleishman [01:32:10]:
Yeah. And I wish I had that to hand. It's an amazingly presented piece of information. I knew about some of it before. One of the great successes on the internet with underfunded infrastructure is the folks who do Let's Encrypt, where they actually do a great job at fundraising, both for individuals and from corporations. So we went from having a very unprotected internet— gosh, what was that, 15, 20 years ago? Kind of the period of time when we had the Edward Snowden revelations. about what was being captured. Let's Encrypt started as a very shoestring operation, and then turned into— it is a critical underpinning, but they have managed to do a thing.

Glenn Fleishman [01:32:50]:
I don't know how or why. Maybe they just have a really good fundraising—

Sam Abuelsamid [01:32:53]:
Well, didn't it come out of EFF?

Glenn Fleishman [01:32:55]:
It did come out. It was spun off. That's right. And they're a very well-run, very efficient group, and they're issuing billions of certificates a year. The internet is now underpinned— there are still commercial SSL/TLS certificate providers, But it's like we need the same thing for kind of all of these things. Remember, OpenSSL was dramatically underfunded. It turned out there were like 2 people. And so Germany, various parts of the German government at various levels have been funding some initiatives.

Glenn Fleishman [01:33:20]:
Some corporations let their workers— they have full-time open source project workers. But I think we still have critical aspects of the internet that are woefully underfunded like this. And it's not per se anybody's fault. is that no one stepped up.

Mikah Sargent [01:33:34]:
Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:33:35]:
And another great example is sudo, which runs on all Linux. It's 2 people, is my understanding, that maintain that.

Mikah Sargent [01:33:45]:
These folks need a parade or something. We should give them something.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:33:51]:
You know, I think one suggestion I've heard is that, you know, some of the big tech companies, you know, they should They should hire these people, have them on staff, pay them a salary to just do that. And then provide some additional support, some additional people to work on this stuff and take some of the workload off these individuals. So it doesn't have to be just one person monitoring PHP for 20+ years.

Mikah Sargent [01:34:22]:
Wow. Yeah, that would be— Or it's gonna have to become like a priesthood where the same— you know, there's that whole thing where we're trying to figure out, because it's going to take forever for nuclear— because nuclear waste essentially continues to decay forever and ever and ever. Mm-hmm. We have tried to figure out ways to make sure that if other things visited our planet, or if in the future our languages are gone, how can we communicate that parts of the world are dangerous due to the nuclear waste that's there? And so artists have tried to come up with things and philosophers and all sorts of stuff to properly give some way of doing it. And somebody came up with the idea of having essentially a priesthood because of how— because of this lasting power of religion. And I'm thinking like, what happens when the PHP guy dies? We need a new PHP guy.

Glenn Fleishman [01:35:20]:
Oh yeah. In one case, one of the people went to prison because for— I can't remember the crime, but they were— I can say this, they were convicted and went to prison. And so there were almost no updates to some critical piece of software for 2 years because he was the guy who was maintaining it. It wasn't like he owned it, but no one else was working on it while he was in jail, more or less.

Mikah Sargent [01:35:39]:
Wowie wow. For people who are out there watching this, I'm sure that Security Now this coming week will have even more. But some of the things to be aware of, if you do run a site that involves PHP, update it. The fixed versions are PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, and 8.2.35. The PHP project does say, look, there's no complete workaround. So your only thing to do is to update. Again, Again, as Glenn mentioned, on managed hosting or WordPress.com's kind of platforms, your host will probably handle this, but of course you should confirm it. And then if you're on old PHP 8.1 or earlier, well, we know that the project no longer officially supports those versions.

Mikah Sargent [01:36:28]:
So those will be things you need to figure out on your own, which means that old servers that nobody has thought about in years are the real issue here. So I guess if my, I don't know, dental records go missing from the first place I ever got my teeth cleaned, then it's because of an old PHP server running at their place. Uh, and yeah, regular, regular degular everyday users, this isn't an issue with your phone or your laptop or anything like that. You, you very likely don't have concerns there. It's more likely this is something where you'll know you need to look into to it, and that's kind of your first hint that it is a bit of an issue for you. Now, because of this, I did want to kind of branch out the conversation to talk about Black October, because that's what this month is being called by some security researchers. Wow.

Glenn Fleishman [01:37:22]:
Okay.

Mikah Sargent [01:37:22]:
You, Allison, had talked about using agents recently, and we've got a lot of people doing a lot of coding as well. And there's— I was just this past week, I was on our show called Security Now, and Steve Gibson was talking about how Claude Code had cracked the— it's incredibly ridiculously complex and was confusing to me. But essentially, eventually figured out like the initial origin of some algorithmic encryption program. And basically he was describing how Claude Code had to do the thing, and it was kind of mind-boggling that it was able to do that. And then I pulled out these— some of you might be familiar with the company Flick, and Flick makes these little buttons, um, like Bluetooth buttons and Bluetooth, like, spinny thing. And you can, um, program them to, when you press the button, do different things. Well, uh, I was having trouble gaining access to the Flic app and I have a Home Assistant setup. And so I was like, I bet I can just figure out how to connect directly to these buttons and have them communicate directly with Home Assistant.

Mikah Sargent [01:38:48]:
And So I popped in a few things in Claude CodeLine, and suddenly this little critter, as they call it, is doing all of this stuff where it's like figuring out what, based on the key, the encryption key that it had for one of the registrations of a button by reading from an Android device that had the flag Flick app on it as I paired it to the Flick app, it was able to reverse engineer and figure out what the communication protocol was, even including the code or the encryption key to do so. And then the funniest part for me was that shortly after it finished the most difficult part of the process, it happened to do a web search And said, oh, uh, Flick has actually made this available in a GitHub repo. Oh, um. So I don't need to do all of this work. And then it gave me that information afterward. But I'm sitting here with like, I'm not, I'm not using some special version of Claude that has all of the, um, the security, you know, uh, bumpers taken off of it. I'm doing the normal stuff and yet it's able to do this. And so, yeah, um, Allison, I wanna start with you.

Mikah Sargent [01:40:09]:
Like, you are working with other folks all day, every day too, I'm sure, who are using and trying to understand AI. How's everybody feeling about where things stand? Is The Verge doing more to, like, harden down systems? Are y'all getting more security teachings like we are? Because we've had to start taking more security, you know, tests and stuff to make sure that we're not getting duped.

Allison Johnson [01:40:35]:
Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely a topic of conversation, and especially, you know, the privacy around making an AI agent run off and do shopping for you. And it's like, on the one hand, you want to test all the things that people just out in the world are being sold. You know, Meta is saying like, this is going to change your life. Here you go. go. So it's incumbent on us to try it. And it does put you in an uncomfortable position of, I'm like, oh, I need to turn off DOTS.

Allison Johnson [01:41:17]:
I enrolled in the OpenAI one. I named it Dottie McDotface. And just the other day, it popped up with a notification like, hey, you might want to look at this thing. I was like, Oh, you're still there. It's a very unique tech reviewer kind of problem. But I think there is just a strange moment we're in where I did some vibe coding this summer and I was doing all kinds of little, like I made a chore app, I made an app to diagnose what was wrong with the plants in my yard that were dying. and then make a plan to fix them. And you sort of— I think it's Jurassic Park.

Allison Johnson [01:42:07]:
I think Ian Malcolm says—

Mikah Sargent [01:42:08]:
Oh, yes.

Allison Johnson [01:42:09]:
Your scientists, they stood on the shoulders of other scientists or geniuses or something like that. And it very much feels like you can get so far out over your skis of, I'm like, I just had this robot go make me something. It says it's secure, you know? Yeah, it's reporting on itself. It's like, yep, we did a great job. And I'm like—

Mikah Sargent [01:42:35]:
High-fives itself.

Allison Johnson [01:42:36]:
Yeah. I'm like, does my little chore app have some vulnerability? You know, probably, probably not. I, I'm not, um—

Mikah Sargent [01:42:45]:
It's not secretly piping out your Social Security number,

Glenn Fleishman [01:42:48]:
but—

Allison Johnson [01:42:48]:
Right. It's like, it feels like just a little weird and icky just knowing that there's— yeah, I can get myself into something and you can be dangerous enough with it to like create something. But then I had friends asking me, you know, I put something on my Instagram stories like, look at this little app I made. And my cousin was like, oh, that's cool. Can I use that too? And I was like, I don't think I want to be the administrator of this app. You

Sam Abuelsamid [01:43:19]:
don't want to be responsible for messing up somebody else.

Allison Johnson [01:43:22]:
Yeah, right. It's best if it stays in its little sandbox here, but just a messy moment right now, I think. That's how I'm experiencing it.

Mikah Sargent [01:43:32]:
It is very messy. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman [01:43:34]:
I'll tell you a fun— this is a little related, I think, too, is that I'm using an end-of-life piece of software with a colleague where it's kind of critical for our workflow. And the people who made the software are no longer seemingly going to update it, although they continue to sell a version that's a little buggy. So it's causing us problems. So we just had Claude, you know, we didn't have it reverse engineer it so we could like post these, you know, cracked Photoshop versions and all that nonsense, but we're like, can you fix this Mac app? And it's like, yep, I can do that. And it, and with very little effort, mostly me, like just saying like, test this and see if it works and having it just do it in the background. It took me almost no time. Wow. It took mostly its time.

Glenn Fleishman [01:44:11]:
It fixed a few bugs and made things more reliable. So we continued to use it in the latest version of macOS. And right now, Apple is going to— is deprecating the old Intel Rosetta framework that allows pre-Apple Silicon software to run under Apple Silicon. That goes away with macOS 28 in fall 2027. So that app has components that won't work. So it can And conceivably, if we don't engineer a replacement for ourselves in the next year, we may be able to get an AI app to, you know, just for our personal use. We're not distributing it. I'm sure we're violating agreements, but it's, you know, sort of private use.

Glenn Fleishman [01:44:50]:
It's kind of like, can you rip music? Like, yes, for your own purposes. Can I rip an app and use it for my own purposes? I don't even know what the legal framework is there, but it just will let us continue to use it. conceivably for the foreseeable future. And I know a lot of people doing— now that the LLMs have gotten to that point, chatbots that are doing very little bits and pieces like that for personal use. And it's wild that you could have something that used to take a lot of people many months or longer. It's like, yeah, can you just fix this? Like, yep. Like, for me, just for me? Like, yep, can do it.

Mikah Sargent [01:45:23]:
Yeah, yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:45:24]:
I've been using it to replace some the services I've been paying for for many years. Like, you know, for years I've been using a service called Calendly to let people schedule meetings with me, you know, from outside of our organization. And, you know, I went into Gemini and just said, hey, make me something that replicates the functionality of Calendly so that I can post a web— have a website that someone can click on there and ask to schedule a meeting, you know, and they can see, they can see my available time in my, in my calendar. Um, and it doesn't show them anything else except the available time slots. And then they can click on that, fill in their information, and, and then it'll send me a meeting invite. Uh, and, you know, it took like 15 minutes to do it and, and debug it and then load it up onto my server.

Mikah Sargent [01:46:21]:
Right onto your server. Yeah. Yeah. There's, um, there's also a big thing going on right now that I've seen, and this is where I do— I go, uh-oh. Uh, people are basically hacking into their own televisions and simplifying the code on their televisions and removing a lot of bloatware. And some are doing it for their, like, their parents, so their parents had all this stuff on there that was kind of getting in the way, and it simplified. And it's interesting because it's right at the cusp of a lot of things that I— there's, there are some troubling aspects. Obviously, AI, generative AI in general, we talk— well, I don't think we talk enough about, but certainly each of us individually, I'm sure, has thought about the, the impact of generative AI and the current way that it's run.

Mikah Sargent [01:47:16]:
But there's also an interesting wrinkle in a way that works positively for me, which is a sort of democratization and agency component where I remember— this is the comparison that I'll draw— I've never been more kind of annoyed and just really disgusted than when I heard about the cars that had the heated seats that were trying to charge a subscription service to access the heated seats. Yeah, BMW. Yeah, BMW.

Glenn Fleishman [01:47:52]:
That's literally the— it's a story called Ubik by Philip K. Dick. It's one of his great stories where someone's locked in their house and the toaster's yelling at him and he can't pay to get the— he has to like disassemble the door because the door is intelligent and won't him out unless he pays them 25 cents or something.

Mikah Sargent [01:48:07]:
That is— that kind of a thing is so frustrating to me. And so this thing where you— this, this item that you purchased, you're doing with it what you want, I think is cool. And then there's also the aspect of, uh, just recently I started to see a thread of someone who had gone through and looked at their LG television and found some pretty nefarious code in there that was looking for other devices nearby to get more information about you. And so that also was like a, ah, I feel good about that. And but it becomes a difficult thing whenever it's also couched in a lot of the environmental concerns and the, the, the ethical concerns and everything there. So I don't know, I think I mean, I have a show, Hands-On AI, on this network, and there I talk about obviously how to use these tools, but I try to do so from a responsible place. And so I wanna get a little mushy here. How do you all reconcile, if you do think about it, reconcile the ethics your own use of it, what you feel about it, because it is a difficult time to be in tech as someone who's supposed to be an educator and an informer and also a human being and everything that comes therein.

Mikah Sargent [01:49:41]:
And Allison, if it's possible, I'd like to start with you.

Allison Johnson [01:49:45]:
Yeah, I think about this a whole lot, especially so I've inherited the role of testing the consumer AI agents, or I don't know, took the short straw. But it's fascinating. I love putting them through their paces. But I think alongside it is not just like, can it do the things it said it could do? Yes or no? write it up and call it a day. There's just such a whole— there's a whole lot of baggage and stuff that comes along with it. And it's like, just the fact of could it do a task for me is one data point. But there, you know, we're people, we're complicated, we have complicated lives. Our lives can't be boiled down to, you know, sets of clean data that we can give to an agent.

Allison Johnson [01:50:48]:
And I read a book called— I never remember the number. It's like 2,000 Weeks, or is it 4,000 Weeks? It's sort of— Oh,

Glenn Fleishman [01:50:58]:
yeah. Ironically, I think I'm a third of the way through that book.

Allison Johnson [01:51:03]:
Yeah, it's like time management for mortals. And it really just sort of questions the whole premise of like saving time. Is that a thing you can even do? And that our time is limited and it's going to fill up with stuff. And we sort of need to reckon with, you know, what time management isn't just what we agree to do, it's what we agree not to do. Hmm. So just the ability of an AI agent or AI tools in general to do a whole lot of stuff for you, where does that put you? You know, do you suddenly have a lot of free time you're enjoying and taking walks in the woods? Like, sure, that'd be great. I just have this sneaking suspicion it's gonna end up being more stuff you agree to do. Yeah.

Allison Johnson [01:51:55]:
And more things kind of filling the space that you cleared up. So really, that's kind of how I approach it all and sort of of try and communicate that to the audience and sort of bring people along of like, I'm going to go try these things out. So you don't have to sign up with your credit card on the— give Muse your financial information or whatever. But, you know, here are all the things that go along with it and all the open questions I have. And it changes by the week.

Mikah Sargent [01:52:31]:
Uh, what about you, Sam?

Sam Abuelsamid [01:52:33]:
I don't use any agents. Um, I, I like what you said, Allison, about, you know, is, is this actually going to end up causing us to take on more things than, than we probably should? Um, you know, the way I see it, you know, I, I use, uh, you know, some AI tools like, uh, Google or, you know, Gemini Notebook or whatever it's called this week, uh, you know, occasionally or, you know, doing, you know, doing some digging through some documents, you know, doing some comparisons of different versions of documents to see what's actually changed. Um, and, you know, as I've mentioned, you know, I've been dabbling a little bit with a little vibe coding for a few simple, simple personal projects. But for the most part, I don't actually use AI that much, uh, myself. Um, although, you know, there are certainly areas in life where I know it's being used kind of behind the scenes, like a lot of the automated driving stuff, that's all AI algorithms that are powering that. And a lot of assisted driving stuff. And increasingly in other areas it's being used. But, you know, when it comes to things like agents, you know, the way I see it, you know, I don't need, I don't need to have some little piece of code going out and doing all these things for me.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:53:52]:
If there are things, you know, I, I, I want to, I want to do the things for myself. I'm, I'm someone who likes to do things for myself, whether it is going online and booking tickets for a vacation or, um, you know, fixing something in my house, you know, doing some plumbing or some electrical work or building a bookcase. You know, I like to do it myself. And if, you know, if I, you know, if I have to make a choice between going out and taking a walk in the woods or just going out and walking my dogs every day, you know, and, or doing something else, I'm going to go walk my dogs. You, we have to take responsibility for our own choices and decide what are the things we actually want to do. And if we can't find the time to do it ourselves, Maybe we just shouldn't be doing it.

Mikah Sargent [01:54:46]:
And Glenn?

Glenn Fleishman [01:54:49]:
I'm all in on AI in every way, all day, every day. No, sorry.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:54:52]:
How many NVIDIA Sparks do you have running in your house?

Glenn Fleishman [01:54:55]:
The house is so hot right now. It's terrible. No, I was very much a complete AI rejector for a while, partly I think because I didn't like how OpenAI's development was going. I felt it was being thrown in our face. And then at some point, gosh, I don't know, a couple years ago, I said, I need to learn about this because I am a tech writer and I'm involved in this. So I need to start putting my feet in. And I quickly grabbed, you know, sort of navigated towards Claude because it felt like— it's funny, I don't know how they did it. They feel like the least bad of the lot.

Glenn Fleishman [01:55:25]:
I don't know how they've messaged that. Like, I feel like they're— what they just—

Sam Abuelsamid [01:55:30]:
They just said, we're the good guys, we're not going to do anything evil.

Glenn Fleishman [01:55:33]:
Right. We're not. Yeah, that worked pretty well. great for Google, it'll work great for us too. So, I mean, I've been making a joke this last week on social media. I said, you know, based on my numbers, I've made $80 billion more than Anthropic this last quarter. So, you know, hey, that's great. Wish it were in my pocket.

Glenn Fleishman [01:55:49]:
But I wound up starting to use Claude for some coding. And as I've gone by over time, I've like put like the guardrails on myself are I'm not going to talk to an AI. I'm not treating it like it's got intelligence or sentience. I'm treating it like another tool. And I've used many tools over my career in technology for multiple decades. And I thought, is this a useful tool? And originally it was kind of like, well, it's doing some good stuff, like helped me resolve some incredibly obscure Unix server issues and helped me with some coding. And I've been coding since I was, I don't know, 10 or 11. So I'm not a great coder.

Glenn Fleishman [01:56:22]:
And what I found over time is that I try to treat LLMs as an exoskeleton. So they're all enhancing my abilities. I can't lift 500 pounds, but with an exoskeleton, ostensibly I could. So I'm building complicated e-commerce sites for my micro-publishing company, for instance, or I'm doing research where I'm not believing it, but I'm saying, go and find this stuff. And the other day, it actually found an early 1900s book that I thought did not exist in any collection because it found, and I could not, a reference to a 1956 published index that had been digitized of books in other libraries' collections. So I went to the New York Public Library and I said, hey, I think you have this book. And they said, we don't think we do. And they looked around like, huh, we actually do.

Glenn Fleishman [01:57:05]:
We didn't know we did either. I'm like, how? So there's these weird capabilities that are not inventions. So I'm always checking out what it does. I'm never relying on it. But I'm like, what? How can I extend my abilities as an individual working in an incredible incredibly competitive world where I'm trying to do very specific things that it happens to be very good at. Writing, no. Like, I don't want to replace my craft. I don't want to replace photographers.

Glenn Fleishman [01:57:29]:
I don't want to invent scenes that don't exist. I don't like most of the generative word or image stuff. But coding has a more— I want to say a more defined ethical surface. So there's still huge issues, obviously, with using it for coding. But I feel like I have to reconcile concile that myself in a way that I'm not replacing a coder. I'm replacing myself because I would be that coder. I don't have— I'm not producing things where I could hire someone to do that work. So I'm being— what's the word— more productive and efficient and potentially improving the economy.

Glenn Fleishman [01:58:03]:
I don't know, whatever. My personal economy for sure. But I don't want to replace work. So I'm not replacing an editor or an illustrator or producing writing of my own, quote unquote, that's something else. So that's kind of that area where I'm like, if I can always think of it as a hammer instead of another being, then I'm going to be okay. But I'm a person of contradictions. I still have ethical issues. I'm not sure I'm doing—

Mikah Sargent [01:58:27]:
Yeah, that's that. And I think that's where ultimately where I am too, being a person of contradictions, because I still There's still some of it that's like, yeah, but at the same time, I just told you that I was using it to reverse engineer Flick buttons. So clearly it's not entirely something that I'm, you know, uninterested in. What I am interested in is taking another break. Leo, have you got another ad for us? Thank you, Leo, for that. I wanted to talk about As we round out the show here, I wanted to talk about the gaming space a little bit because there's been a lot happening with Xbox. There was a, I believe it was in Fortune, a Fortune profile. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [01:59:23]:
About the new CEO of Microsoft's Xbox. I believe Asha Sharma. And I had Sebastian Herrera on Tech News Weekly earlier this week to talk to him about his reporting and profile of her. And it was a really interesting conversation around the future of gaming and the future of Xbox. First and foremost, are any of you gamers, or do you consider yourself gamers?

Glenn Fleishman [01:59:55]:
I'm an addict, so I'm not a gamer. I'm a game addict, so I can't play because I never

Sam Abuelsamid [02:00:01]:
I play some Gran Turismo and I play some, uh, just some, some games on my phone from time to time, but that's it.

Allison Johnson [02:00:08]:
Yeah, we've— I'm on the, uh, our PS5 every night playing, uh, I play Clair Obscur Exposition 33 like every single night. I don't know. I don't know what that puts me in the category of.

Mikah Sargent [02:00:22]:
I think that makes you a gamer for sure.

Allison Johnson [02:00:24]:
A one gamer.

Mikah Sargent [02:00:25]:
Yeah, that's, that's fair. I, I tend to fall in that boat too. I'm not really— I don't play too often, and it usually is like the right kind of it. And I never have been able— this is another thing I thought maybe AI could figure out what—

Glenn Fleishman [02:00:45]:
It could play the games for you.

Mikah Sargent [02:00:46]:
Yeah, I could play the games for me. No, what category I fit in. And so I gave it like all of the games that I've ever played that I've loved. And it was kind of like, I don't know, because it's too eclectic. But anyway, I am just so fascinated at the difference between how things have gone with Xbox and how things have gone with Sony and the PlayStation. It's like the 25th anniversary of Xbox and they should be celebrating that 25th anniversary right now. But instead there are 3 more rounds of layoffs coming.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:01:20]:
It was more like a wake than a celebration.

Glenn Fleishman [02:01:22]:
Yes, exactly.

Mikah Sargent [02:01:23]:
It's a wake. And I think 25 is not long enough for that to be the case. Electronic Arts, of course, cutting jobs, shutting down BioWare. And it made me think about the— So my significant other is a gamer, and he plays pretty much every day. And I was thinking about the games that, A, he plays regularly, but also the games that he's looking forward to that are coming out. And some of the kind of the mark— what is it that I'm looking for? The money behind it. Games that have lots of purchases that you can make make for your character's appearance that don't have any impact on your in-game play. And I thought about how brilliant Epic is in terms of just making a money printer out of the stuff it does.

Mikah Sargent [02:02:32]:
Brilliant or evil? Yeah, both. Both brilliant and evil that too often go hand in hand. But yeah, I just overall wanted to talk to you all Do you have any analysis on where Xbox has gone wrong or even thoughts about that in the first place? I mean, Glenn, you said that you, if you started playing games, you wouldn't stop. I didn't know that about you other than you're a 2-time Jeopardy champion, but that's a game that you can't play unless you're invited back, right?

Glenn Fleishman [02:03:01]:
I learned this back in, unfortunately, in 1986 when I was in college and did almost would have flunked out because I was trying to play, what was it, Cash Castle Wolfenstein? No, no. Castle something-vania? I can't remember. It was some early game and I just needed to get to that top level. But fortunately I got there, I guess, and then I finished my— did my finals. Yeah, it's— I mean, I don't think it's insidious. I don't think gaming is like gambling despite the gambling industry's interest in using the word gaming around it. But I always— I'll say the closest thing I come to being a gamer is playing GeoGuessr. Oh, that's

Mikah Sargent [02:03:36]:
fun.

Glenn Fleishman [02:03:37]:
Good group activity. But yeah, nothing's ever quite appealed to me where I thought, I want to get into this and then spend the time to work through it. So it's not even the cost or the devices or whatever. My younger kid got a Switch at one point and bought some games. We played a little bit, but they were always so much more— it was so hard. I was laughing so hard when they tried to teach my wife and I to play so we could play one, you know, games together. And it was like, I feel like I'm relatively technically sophisticated, technologically sophisticated. And I am not, you know, this is like, I need like a college course for what you've already interpolated or learned.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:04:16]:
You know how the game works, the technology that makes it function, but actually the gameplay is something entirely different.

Glenn Fleishman [02:04:24]:
Yeah. It's a language you learn. Right.

Allison Johnson [02:04:27]:
Well, I can kind of bring it all the way back around to the folding phones. I've been testing these over the past few years and actually got a Samsung trifold earlier this year in my hands. And one of the things when you unfold it, I'm like, what do I do with this screen? This is huge. And I was like, I can play games. What's the state of of streaming games. Surely that's something you can do with a device like this. And I looked into it and I got signed up for Xbox Game Pass. Mm-hmm.

Allison Johnson [02:05:04]:
And it was just, I had just the worst time. It was like anything I wanted to play was not really like available for just the touch controls on the phone. And the things Yeah. But the things that were painful, I played, I think it was Banjo-Kazooie, like old school Banjo-Kazooie with the virtual controls. And it was awful. I was like, I'm not having fun here. So as someone who's on the fringes, I guess, of hardcore gaming or what is current in gaming or mobile gaming, it sort of felt like there's such a disconnect between like how capable the hardware is. Like the chips in all of our smartphones are incredibly capable.

Allison Johnson [02:05:59]:
You know, you can drop one, you can drop last year's chip into a MacBook and it's perfectly fine as a computer, as it turns out. But the infrastructure around, you know, Is a game in the App Store, then is that game developer okay paying with the cut, paying Apple or Google a cut of all the in-app purchases and stuff like that? Why can't I stream something on my phone that I bought and I play on my PlayStation? Or assuming Sony had any kind of presence in selling phones in the You know, you'd be like, that would be a cool thing. And just, just isn't there, doesn't exist is what I discovered.

Mikah Sargent [02:06:51]:
That's a, that's a bummer on many fronts. I do have a Steam account and I have played a few games on Steam. That's the place where I have found these games that are all over the place, but I am interested in and I can't find sort of a through line. But so often I'll have a friend of mine say, oh, you should try this game, and it won't work for the systems that I have available. Or if it does, it— if I mentioned that Surface laptop that I have that's a million years old, trying to run something on that Windows machine is hilarious and doesn't work. Mm-hmm. And that compatibility layer is really frustrating. But yeah, you've also touched on the other aspect of this, which is the distributors who've outlasted the others, or the gateways or whatever they're called.

Mikah Sargent [02:07:41]:
I can't remember in the EU. Gatekeepers, maybe? Whatever. Gatekeepers, yeah. Yeah. Okay. I was like, surely it's not gatekeepers. That's got some real connotation. Oh wait, no, it is.

Mikah Sargent [02:07:52]:
Yeah, that is, that has resulted in some companies not being able to make it work. And we keep seeing in, I think, far too many places, these indies not able to make it work, and that's disheartening. And then I hear about, um, I hear about these— there are some games that just people pour their heart, their soul, and everything into. And I'm glad that Clair Obscura got its attention because I think that's one where the people who built it really did do that. But a friend of mine was talking about a game recently that is just mind-boggling on so many fronts— engineering-wise, writing-wise, etc., etc., etc. And so often, like, those game awards go to the big games that are maybe there at the level but not up. And you hear about these folks trying to break through with the things that they're doing and they can't. And that is kind of heartbreaking too.

Mikah Sargent [02:08:57]:
It's a, it's a place that it's all kind of collapsing down and almost being filtered into just the 5 or 6 things. And I know everybody's very excited about the next GTA. One of the types of— one of the games that I do like is the, the one that I still have going is Assassin's Creed Valhalla. I really like the side quests that Assassin's Creed, and so I often just end up going off into the world and playing it that way. But Assassin's Creed has slowly started to make its way to being an online experience that's just— you constantly pay for. And I feel like that's the way that a lot of these games are going, and it sometimes takes the life— it saps the life from them. And that's—

Sam Abuelsamid [02:09:44]:
Yeah, I wonder, you know, I mean, so many of these high-end games are so incredibly costly to develop and take years and years. It's been what, 13, 15 years for GTA 6? Mm-hmm. Uh, and I think I heard, you know, maybe something close to $1 billion in development costs for that game. Um, you know, I wonder if the emergence of AI, you know, as much as, you know, I hate to see it putting people out of work, but, you know, maybe for some of these indie developers, you know, for these smaller shops, You know, by utilizing some of these tools, if it will, you know, we talked about it, you know, kind of as a force multiplier, you know, unleashing some of their ideas, you know, things that, you know, they maybe have some great ideas, but they can't afford to implement them. You know, maybe with some of these tools, you know, they can come up with some really interesting ideas. deploy that, you know, using, using some of these AI tools.

Benito Gonzalez [02:10:47]:
Hi, so this has been— this is Benito. So I play a lot. I mean, I'm probably the guy here who plays the games, right? Because I used to work for GameSpot and I worked for 2K and all that kind of stuff. So I played a lot of games. What's happening in the gaming industry right now is it's all about to collapse. It feels like it's like it's all about to collapse and they're all converging towards becoming PCs. All the consoles are just all converging to be becoming PCs. You know, like the Steam Box is coming, uh, this PlayStation 5 is almost totally jailbroken.

Benito Gonzalez [02:11:16]:
Um, like all this stuff is happening right now and it's all about to change like drastically. And an interesting thing about the AI that you were talking about is that the gaming industry and the gaming community is kind of the front line of the anti-AI movement. So I don't— so that kind of thing is also going to be That's gonna be a weird dynamic too when it starts, 'cause it's gonna happen, right? Like it's gonna happen. They're gonna use, they're gonna start using AI for these games. But—

Sam Abuelsamid [02:11:43]:
But, but you know what I mean? What, what if, you know, what if a little indie shop was able to take, you know, AI tools and create some, some kind of really compelling game? I mean, yeah, you're right. Uh, you know, I've heard, you know, gaming community is against AI, but if it allows somebody with a great idea to, to to create something, maybe they'll go for it.

Mikah Sargent [02:12:05]:
Hard to say because I wanted to, with Benito's point, the biggest outcry recently that I've seen against a specific, 'cause there's sort of a general, I think general generational malaise and distaste for AI, But something that had such a laser focus. Everyone's thoughts on NVIDIA's little tool that were supposed to make faces look more human or whatever. I can't remember what that thing is called now because it's been, you know, a while back. But oh my God, the vitriol that existed in that tool, that AI tool specifically. So it is possible that it's part of the culture and it's baked into the culture. And I think there's a big big souring in the mouths of a lot of, uh, the, these, the, the game industry because of the fact that, goodness gracious, right after journalism, that's like the second field that got just hit, hit, hit by changes to the internet. And I think that there's a, uh, a sandpaper against, um, cut flesh level of sensitivity, uh, Mm-hmm. There for anything that results in any job loss.

Mikah Sargent [02:13:29]:
That's understandable, but also, as you're saying, Sam, is potentially a limiter in terms of where leaning in could happen or experimentation could happen. But I don't know, I ultimately, for me, competition in tech has has, we've seen it truly produce some really great things. And the advocacy against monopolies in tech, as it started with Microsoft so long ago, and I would argue is one of the last things that's still good about the way that we're paying it, the way that the government is paying attention to big tech. It has a positive— it can have a positive impact. And I hate to see Xbox losing. And then, because I don't know, but Nintendo seems to exist in its own space. That's just sort of like it's in a beautiful pink bubble that Kirby blew and it just gets to live there and be fine. Meanwhile, you've got these 2 that were competing against each other.

Mikah Sargent [02:14:43]:
And now is it just going to be PlayStation? And then does PlayStation get to just kind of go, right, because they don't have anyone that they have to compete against? That's not great.

Benito Gonzalez [02:14:53]:
Well, the console wars is all about like game exclusivity. So if there aren't any game exclusives for the PlayStation, no one's gonna buy a PlayStation.

Mikah Sargent [02:15:02]:
What will they buy instead?

Benito Gonzalez [02:15:03]:
A PC. That's what— that's where— that's where we're all going right now. Everyone's gonna buy a Steam Box or something like that. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:15:08]:
I mean, functionally, both the current Xbox, well, the last couple of generations of Xbox and PlayStation are PCs. You know, they've got x86 chips in there and, you know, PC graphics and memory, you know, they're just locked down, but they're, they are effectively PCs.

Mikah Sargent [02:15:29]:
That's, I mean, yeah, I guess the thing about PCs has been that you have to buy all of these different components or make sure you get it just right. And I guess that's where Or something like the—

Sam Abuelsamid [02:15:41]:
yeah, I mean, the consoles just take that and, and, you know, put together an optimized package, or at least optimized as a snapshot in time when they introduce it. And then it kind of sits there statically for the next, you know, 7, 8 years until they come up with a new generation.

Mikah Sargent [02:15:56]:
Yeah. All right. Uh, we are going to take one last break with Leo and then we will be back to round out the show. All right, back from the break, and it is time for us to round out this episode of This Week in Tech, joined by Glenn Fleischman, Sam Aboul-Samad, and Allison Johnson. We've had a great show today talking about all sorts of, uh, tech news, cars, Apple, etc. But now I want to talk to you about spies. Have you heard the one about the OpenAI employee who recorded or bugged the, uh, who, who bugged OpenAI and may have ties to the Saudi government? Because I have, and I thought this was an interesting story. Many sites covering it— the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Ars Technica— all reported on the AI— excuse me, OpenAI worker whose name is Abdulrahman Al-Fazan.

Mikah Sargent [02:17:10]:
He bugged, or is accused— excuse me.

Glenn Fleishman [02:17:13]:
Alleged. Yeah, I was going to say, careful there.

Mikah Sargent [02:17:15]:
He's accused of bugging a restricted OpenAI conference room. And it's only been recently that federal prosecutors have mentioned that there could be ties to the Saudi royal family. It was at a hearing with a federal magistrate, and currently the judge has ruled that he should be held without bail pending trial because of him being a potential flight risk. Now, this is one of those security sort of conversations again, but in a different way, because we do have in the US, obviously, these companies at the frontier of generative AI, but they are competing with other countries like China who are offering much more open source and certainly open weight models. And there's kind of ongoing conversation about how the gap that we have in the U.S. is narrowing. But at the same time, we have seen a ban, or at the very least a cutback, on the amount of frontier chips that are being able to be used by these other countries. And so when it comes to training, training these models, we are limiting the ability for them to use the best hardware.

Mikah Sargent [02:18:55]:
And that has in the past been seen as, you know, an unfair advantage within the US. And it's a really complicated thing because we just talked earlier about Black October and the way that we found out about PHP having these flaws. I just saw, I want to say it was even Altman who was talking about it, certainly was quoted as having said that the bigger concern at this point are hardware. Like, we get past software, we get past, we essentially get past firmware, and we get even into the hardware coding. And if there are flaws at that level and bugs at that level that could be exploited, those we don't necessarily know how to address. And yeah, it's understandable that in the way that we are right now, which is not in the Star Trek fantasy land that I wish we all lived in, where Earth all works together, yeah, you as a country are going to put protections in place to make sure that you have access to these tools. But I don't know. I guess I was not prepared for the, uh, the, the spy movie of it all.

Mikah Sargent [02:20:24]:
Did this shock any of you, or were you all kind of just like, yeah, I mean, come on, of course they're going to be recording, uh, board member conversations? And like, what can you do with a recording? Because it doesn't have like the— you're not spitting out code.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:20:40]:
No, but you can, you can get, you can get insights into company strategies, um, you know, schedule What's the timeline for when they're planning to release something? What are they planning to release? So yeah, you're right. You're not going to get code probably, but there's a lot of other tidbits that you can get out of listening to those conversations. And that's the one that we know of. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman [02:21:09]:
The Saudis need a post-oil investment strategy, and they're working on it in a lot of different directions and having Intel from inside the boardroom is not a terrible thing when they have billions and billions of dollars at their disposal to invest and are willing to exfiltrate people as well as information from the United States if necessary after a mission goes bad or somebody commits or is alleged to commit a crime.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:21:37]:
The Saudis have had some significant struggles in recent years as well. as well with, as you said, Glenn, they've been trying to diversify beyond just oil. And the crown prince has been throwing money at everything. And arguably most of those efforts have been failing. The tens to hundreds of billions that they spent on the Neom and the Line. Oh my God.

Glenn Fleishman [02:22:11]:
The LIV, right? The golf thing.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:22:13]:
Yeah. I mean, there's all kinds of projects. Lucid Motors, which they mostly own, as good a car as it is.

Glenn Fleishman [02:22:21]:
Jared Kushner. They own a lot of Jared Kushner, I believe.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:22:23]:
Yeah. They pretty much own him outright, I think, now at this point. So yeah, I mean, they're facing a lot of challenges, and so it's going to be an issue for them.

Mikah Sargent [02:22:36]:
I honestly, there's not much to, uh, to say on this other than that the investigation is ongoing. And, um, again, it is— I think there was also an aspect of it to me that was like, what an odd bit of hardware to choose when we have all of these like Meta glasses and wristwatches and all sorts of other tools.

Glenn Fleishman [02:22:59]:
I put the, uh, here's Here's an amazing thing. I put the Wall Street Journal article into the chat. There's a photo alleged to be of Alphazon showing this incredible image of him looking, oh, from a hidden camera as he sticks the thing in where they were trying to track down who had done it.

Mikah Sargent [02:23:16]:
Oh yeah.

Glenn Fleishman [02:23:17]:
It's an incredible—

Mikah Sargent [02:23:19]:
That is a great photo.

Glenn Fleishman [02:23:21]:
Like, oh, you got me. I mean, also I'll point out there's another incredible A quote in this Journal article is, they're trying to set bail for him, is his wife and child were flown out by the Saudi government and military, business class tickets, 2 days after he was arrested, and they were trying to set bail, and the magistrate overseeing this said he brought up a letter from Saudi Arabia's consulate in Los Angeles that said it would cover Al-Fazl's entire bail bond. Even if I set it at $10 million, asked the judge, I find that problematic. Yeah. diplomatic, seems like a blank check. We're going to pay whatever the court wants to make sure he gets out. I was like, yeah, maybe. Maybe.

Glenn Fleishman [02:23:59]:
I mean, there's been many reported instances.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:24:01]:
He might be considered a flight risk.

Glenn Fleishman [02:24:03]:
Might be, yes. Many reported instances of Saudis exfiltrating their citizens, even people who have no power or influence at all.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:24:11]:
I mean, just look back at 2001 in the wake of 9/11. There was nobody flying anywhere except a couple of planes flying out a bunch of Saudis, uh, in the days following those attacks.

Glenn Fleishman [02:24:23]:
Strange. Yeah, not—

Mikah Sargent [02:24:25]:
I wonder why that's— I would have waited, I think, for the Blink check, and then it wouldn't have had to be a Blink check. Yeah. Um, anyway, and let's see what else we've got to round out the show here.

Glenn Fleishman [02:24:37]:
I see Musk, Musk, Musk, Musk. Yeah, I just really— Spam and Musk.

Mikah Sargent [02:24:42]:
I Musk not is what I say.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:24:44]:
It's kind of like Alex Gibney's documentary. You know, you could go on another 4 hours on that.

Glenn Fleishman [02:24:49]:
Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.

Mikah Sargent [02:24:51]:
Oh, I know what I wanted to talk about, Glenn.

Glenn Fleishman [02:24:54]:
Yo.

Mikah Sargent [02:24:54]:
Have you seen that some pop celebrities are bringing iTunes back from obscurity?

Glenn Fleishman [02:25:04]:
Oh yeah. So this is the story. This is exciting.

Mikah Sargent [02:25:07]:
Lately, according to the Financial Times, Well-known pop artists like Doja Cat, Charli XCX, Taylor Swift, and most recently, I believe, Ariana Grande have started to release their music first on the iTunes Store as an iTunes-only exclusive, and then they bring it to streaming so that people will buy their albums and actually—

Sam Abuelsamid [02:25:36]:
Does the iTunes Store still exist?

Mikah Sargent [02:25:38]:
I, that's what I thought. So

Glenn Fleishman [02:25:40]:
yeah, it's, I've written many, many books around all kinds of different aspects of Mac stuff for Take Control Books. And I was realizing updating something, I think the Apple account book I do was like, oh yeah, you're never going to see the word iTunes, except you're going to see in this one last place because they refuse to give up the branding related to a very small percent. I mean, everything is music, right? Apple Music. And then iTunes still appears. iTunes Match. There's a couple other places where it shows up as like, like the iTunes Store within, I don't know, Windows. It's very odd.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:26:13]:
There's still, there's still, you can still get iTunes for Windows.

Glenn Fleishman [02:26:16]:
Yeah, absolutely. That's amazing.

Mikah Sargent [02:26:19]:
That's funny. But I think more importantly, it's just the idea that you're, the music is being purchased than, than it is just being streamed as it is on Apple Music.

Glenn Fleishman [02:26:30]:
So this is the digital version of the LP analog comeback, right? Is they're selling They're selling— this is the weirdest circle, full circle. I mean, because, you know, it's amazing. The resurgence of vinyl is an incredible story. And cassettes. Yeah, and cassettes. Yeah. And the vinyl plants are running— they used to be like near shutting down, now run like 3 shifts a day, 7 days a week. They had to buy new machines.

Glenn Fleishman [02:26:56]:
I know you can— I work with a letterpress printer occasionally in London, of course. Of course I do. And a book I had printed by him, one of the things that he does that helps him make his living as a commercial letterpress printer in the 2020s is he prints the album covers for reissued vinyl that sold for hundreds of pounds remastered from the original tape. So people want vinyl at every price. I didn't know there was like an iTunes market for that. So people now want— well, I don't want a vinyl album, I don't have a record player, but I want the exclusive iTunes download that I will even though it's licensed, I will technically own forever. When the iTunes Store was announced, I embarrassed Phil Schiller, I want to say, in an interview. This is recorded, it wasn't like aired, but he said, when you buy music from iTunes, you own it.

Glenn Fleishman [02:27:39]:
And I said, oh, can I sell it? He said, no. And I said, all right, like, that's a license. Then you don't own it. But it was like, it was—

Sam Abuelsamid [02:27:49]:
You own the license, you don't own the song.

Glenn Fleishman [02:27:51]:
You own the license, but one could I would argue that the iTunes Music Store over 20, gosh, are we at 25 years now or something like that? That they have proven that they actually are not gonna take back music from you. Amazon might take back the book 1984 occasionally, but—

Sam Abuelsamid [02:28:07]:
Last week was 25 years since the launch of the iPod. And I think the store didn't come until the following year. Yeah, I think in 2002.

Glenn Fleishman [02:28:17]:
I have a great, my first, my Jeopardy story, when the first night I was on Jeopardy, Alex Trebek said, says here you broke the first iPod you got. That was my, It's true. Apple sent me an iPod and I broke it and then they sent me another one. So

Mikah Sargent [02:28:28]:
that's funny.

Glenn Fleishman [02:28:29]:
My memory goes back that far.

Mikah Sargent [02:28:30]:
Wow. All right. I know how we will end things today. I would love to hear from each of you on something that you would like to pitch or share with the listeners that they should check out. So let's go down the line from our newest guest And then, well, I guess so for me, it's gonna go out to in. Alison, tell us where people can find you online and check out all the great work that you're doing.

Allison Johnson [02:29:03]:
I'm on The Verge, of course. You can find me on Threads, Alison Jo 1, and the same on Instagram. Yeah, just Just having a good time folding phones, unfolding them. I wanna hear everybody's weird experiences with the Duo. If you bought a Duo and you have some strange hack, I'm collecting them.

Mikah Sargent [02:29:31]:
Nice.

Allison Johnson [02:29:32]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [02:29:32]:
A hack book.

Allison Johnson [02:29:33]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [02:29:35]:
All right, Sam.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:29:37]:
You can find my work for my day job at telemetryagency.com where I lead market research focused on transportation and mobility. And you can also, you can buy our research reports there. And in about 6 minutes after we're done with this, I will be starting up tonight's recording of Wheel Bearings, episode 476 of Wheel Bearings with my friends Jill Simonello and Stephanie Brinley. You can also check out some stuff I've done on greencars.com. as well as the Green Cars Podcast that you can find on YouTube in video form, as well as everywhere else that podcasts are available.

Mikah Sargent [02:30:24]:
Beautiful. And Glenn Fleischman, what about you?

Glenn Fleishman [02:30:28]:
Well, I can be found at glenn.fun. It's a redirect, but it's short and sweet. Glenn.fun, a real domain. And I am a micro publisher, apparently. That's what I've been told is a good way to describe what I do. And I've put out several books in the last few years, and I put out 3, 3 print books this year, and I'm gonna do a 4th one. No one can stop me. The 4th is gonna be very, very short and small.

Glenn Fleishman [02:30:54]:
But the latest book I'm working on is at the printers now. It's called That One Matt Bores Comic, which you can find at thatonematborescomic.com, of course. And it's about one panel of one cartoon that came out in 2016, and somehow became a meme, not because of Matt Boehr's efforts. And it's— if you've ever seen, we should improve society somewhat, and someone saying, yet you participate in society, that's the panel. An entire book with people ranging from Charles Schulz, amazingly, from the past, to Dan Perkins, the guy behind Tom Tomorrow, Elliott Kalan from The Flophouse and The Daily Show, and a lot of other people also have contributed cartoons and essays about that single panel. panel, insanely enough. This is, this is how micro publisher I am. One panel.

Mikah Sargent [02:31:40]:
I love it. I love it. Thank you, Glenn. Thank you, Sam Abul-Samit. And thank you, Allison Johnson, for being here today. Thank you everyone for tuning in to the show. If you're looking to find me online, I'm @micasargent on many a social media network where you can head to chiwahua.coffee. That's chiwahua.coffee where I've got links to the places I'm most active online.

Mikah Sargent [02:32:03]:
Be sure to check out my other shows on the network, which include iOS Today, Hands-On Tech, Hands-On AI, and Tech News Weekly as well. And I will be back this coming week for more shows while Leo and— while Leo's on vacation. And so I'll see you then as well. Oh, and next week we will have here on This Week in Tech, Devendra Hardiwar as your host. So I'm looking forward to watching that episode. Goodbye, so long, et cetera, et cetera.