This Week in Tech 949 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for twit this in tech. We've got a great panel for you, Reed. Albert Gotti is here from Semafo, the wonderful host of TWI Lou Mariska and from this weekend LA Denise Howell. Lots to talk about. There's cake in the break room. The Microsoft Activision deal is done. The EU goes after disinformation. Turns out it's not illegal in the US and when it comes to ai, the hard things are easy and the easy things are hard. We'll explain next on Twit podcasts you love from people you trust. This is T Twit. This is twit this week in tech. Episode 949 recorded Sunday, October 15th, 2023. Security spatula this week in tech is brought to you by miro, the online workspace for innovation where your team can dream, design and build the future together From any location, tap into a way to map processes, visualize content, run retrospectives, and keep all your documents and data in one place. Get your first three boards for free at miro.com/podcast and by Duo Protect Against Breaches with a leading access management suite, providing strong multi-layered defenses to only allow legitimate users in. For any organization concerned about being breached and in need of a solution, fast Duo quickly enables strong security and improves user productivity. Visit css.co/twit today for a free trial.

(00:01:48):
It's time for twit this week at Tech, the show we cover the latest tech news and I have a great panel here. Reid Albu Gotti's here, technology editor at Semaphore. Hi Reid.

Reed Albergotti (00:02:00):
Hi. How you doing? Thanks

Leo Laporte (00:02:01):
For having me on. It's so great to see you. I was looking at your bookshelf. You had gotten stepped away to eat something and I noticed that there's one book on the whole bookshelf that's Face Forward. It's your book. I did not know you wrote Wheelman about the Lance Armstrong story.

Reed Albergotti (00:02:18):
I did, I did and I'm embarrassingly plugging it over here.

Leo Laporte (00:02:21):
No, no. Plug away. It's great. I had read it and it was a great book or as I said, I'd listened to it. It's

Reed Albergotti (00:02:26):
Great.

Leo Laporte (00:02:27):
But it was a great book. Yeah, so Read is so nice to have you back. Semafo has done a really fantastic job. We had Louise Zaki on the other day and I just said the same thing. I'm really happy with Semafo. Lou Maresca is also here from twit this weekend, enterprise Tech. Hey Leo

Reed Albergotti (00:02:44):
To see you.

Leo Laporte (00:02:44):
We don't mention his day Job Principal, engineering manager@microsoft.com. I'm surprised you're not wearing a party hat. There's some celebration going on today on Microsoft. We'll talk about that and my internet lawyer is here, the great Denise Howell. Hi Denise.

Denise Howell (00:03:01):
Hi Leo. It's so good to be here.

Leo Laporte (00:03:02):
So nice to have you. Denise's new podcast is out@hearsayculture.com. Actually, two, you weren't satisfied with just one uneven distribution and r and d with d and d and they're brand new.

Denise Howell (00:03:17):
You got 'em. They are brand new and very much soft. Launch works in progress. Go kick the tires, help us make them better and hopefully enjoy.

Leo Laporte (00:03:27):
Are they about law like your show this weekend law was or are they about other things?

Denise Howell (00:03:32):
Other things.

Leo Laporte (00:03:33):
Nice.

Denise Howell (00:03:34):
Yeah, and even distribution. You got the reference right away is more interviewing people who are, as I put it, living in the future and helping us understand what that looks like. And of course, as William Gibson originally put it and r and d with d and d is more sort of a back and forth co interview. It's almost like triangulation was where we had three people and two hosts and a guest.

Leo Laporte (00:04:04):
I am jealous because my favorite thing to do is interview people. It wasn't much of an audience for it and I finally figured out why, because people wouldn't listen to every show. It was too clear what the show was going to be about just by knowing who we were talking to, so people picked and choose, so maybe we had a hundred thousand subscribers, but they would only listen to one show and four. That's really 25,000 listeners and I finally figured that out. Now, some people transcend that. You will transcend that. Joe Rogan

Denise Howell (00:04:36):
Transcends

Leo Laporte (00:04:36):
That, but for me, people weren't listening for me. They were listening for the guest and if the guest didn't interest him, they just wouldn't listen to it, which is a bummer.

Denise Howell (00:04:44):
I'm taking notes.

Leo Laporte (00:04:45):
It's my favorite. It's literally my favorite thing to do as interview people and man, we'd interviewed so many interesting people. My goal starting with Tech TV back in 1998 and then later with Twit was to get kind of on record the pioneers of this industry. The movers and shakers. Get 'em on camera because it's been 50 years now and some of 'em are starting to go. Well go bye-bye and you want to get 'em before they do. I will never forget interviewing Doug Engelbart and he brought the guy who did the demo of for all demos showing off the first Goey interface, the first mouse. He had all sorts of, he had cording devices and he brought the mouse, the first mouse made out of wood with him. That was on the tech tv. I'll never forget that. That's something you want to preserve forever anyway.

Denise Howell (00:05:39):
Yeah, and DevX show big thinkers I'm sure would be fun to go back and mine today, he'd see all the people he interviewed.

Leo Laporte (00:05:45):
That's right. I was on Big Thinkers interviewing Ray Kurzwell ages ago. He was really the m I T scientist. He started in synthesizers, did the Kurzwell synthesizer, Stevie Wonder's favorite synthesizer, but eventually got into AI and we had a great conversation 30 years ago about ai. He's the guy who said, wrote the book, the Singularity is near. He thought by 2030 was his prediction. I think he wasn't maybe far off that we would eventually get a G i a general intelligence that was indistinguishable from humans. He called that the singularity because once you get to that point, the AI starts designing ais and the acceleration is very, very quick. They get smarter and smarter, faster and faster. He said, don't worry because that's a little scary. He said back in the early two thousands, 20 years ago, don't worry, they'll think of us as their parents. They'll treat us well.

Denise Howell (00:06:48):
Yeah. Whereas James Barrett thought they would think of us as either mice or ants or something else.

Leo Laporte (00:06:56):
Parents are pets. It's one or the other. I wanted to say congratulations, Lou. I know you're not responsible for this, but Satya Nadal's acquisition of Activision Blizzard has been completed as of the 13th, Friday, the 13th largest acquisition of Microsoft history, nearly $30 billion. Did a memo go out or anything? Did you have a party?

Lou Maresca (00:07:20):
Yes, absolutely. I think interesting part, it doesn't necessarily always come out from Satya because the c e O of Xbox is really where it comes from and I think it's a big win for the company obviously, but I think it was definitely not without a fight and history has a memory, so we'll have to see how it goes with the rest of the company and how it integrates it Actually,

Leo Laporte (00:07:43):
A number of companies, including I think the Journal are giving Microsoft President Brad Smith credit more than anybody because Microsoft created ineffective giant political action arm, a lobbying arm under Smith that was instrumental in getting government approval.

Lou Maresca (00:08:09):
I mean,

Leo Laporte (00:08:10):
I'm not going to put you on the spot all way around the

Lou Maresca (00:08:12):
World, right?

Leo Laporte (00:08:13):
I don't want to get you in trouble with the Pres, but credit to Brad Smith. Here's the article. This is The Financial Times How Brad Smith used Microsoft's 1 billion law and lobbying machine to win the Activision Battle and really nothing illegal, no assertion of misbehavior here, but it took 'em 21 months. They got opposition not just from the F T C but from the EU and maybe most famously from Great Britain whose competition's market authority said, Hey, wait a minute, you're going to take over cloud gaming, which is the most absurd complaint of all because the cloud gaming market is not exactly a powerful market. Microsoft was a great pain to say even with this acquisition. We're only number three after Sony and Nintendo, actually, maybe number four, if you include a Chinese gaming company, I can't remember which one it was, Tencent maybe, and it's true they're not a behemoth in gaming. Well, number four is still pretty good. My concern, and I always had this concern, I'm curious what Reed and Denise think, I won't put you on the spot. I know this is the company you work for and you're not, we should be very clear. You are not speaking for Microsoft.

Reed Albergotti (00:09:34):
You do not speak for Microsoft.

Leo Laporte (00:09:36):
Yes. Yeah. When you're on speaking for twit, but I was a little concerned because I feel like in general, mergers create big companies and eliminate or make it harder for small companies, and even in an industry that's as kind of irrelevant as gaming, I don't know if it's a good thing to have one company be so powerful. Sony is of course the most powerful, maybe Nintendo, but still Microsoft with this acquisition gets a lot of titles, not just Call of Duty, but a lot of big titles, Overwatch and World of Warcraft. Reid, do you share my concern or is it like, well, it's just gaming?

Reed Albergotti (00:10:26):
I would think of it sort of more from a consumer standpoint. What is it going to mean for consumers, and I think that was a big part of the discussion was exclusivity deals and whether Call of Duty would be on would just be exclusive to Xbox after this deal. They sort of quelled those concerns. I think that in the end, the concessions they made, I mean, we'll see, I don't know, but we'll see if those actually end up sort of making this something that is not as harmful to consumers as it might have been, and that seems to be the big question, but we'll see. I mean never,

Leo Laporte (00:11:10):
Well, one of the real concerns was workers and Microsoft, Brad Smith again at work went to the communication workers of America, the union representing the game designers and programmers and got them to say, yeah, it's a good thing. Not clear completely how he got them to say that they were originally kind of against the whole thing, but that was a big turning point because the EU at least and probably other countries were very concerned about how this would affect the employees of Activision Blizzard.

Reed Albergotti (00:11:47):
Yeah, for sure. I'm just saying my concern is more about,

Leo Laporte (00:11:50):
Yeah, as a gamer, I don't Microsoft now they've done a great job with Minecraft. You could argue that Minecraft is better positioned than it was before Microsoft bought it.

Reed Albergotti (00:12:06):
Yeah, I guess it's multi-platform, right? I mean, although I was playing around with the new Oculus, or not Oculus, sorry, the Quest,

Leo Laporte (00:12:17):
Quest three started as Oculus. That's fair. I call the Oculus all the time.

Reed Albergotti (00:12:21):
He makes me sound old or something, and I was like the first thing that my kid asked me, not that I'm really letting him, he's seven. I'm not letting him play a lot of vr, but I told him, oh, I'm trying out this thing. You want to just see how it's, and he's like, does it have Minecraft on it? And I think there is a way to do it, but it's not, yeah, you can side it, but it's not like right on that. I was wondering, I didn't look into this, but I was wondering why is it not? Would Microsoft just not do that because they've got their own, I dunno. But actually they are doing a deal with Quest though, so maybe it will be on there

Leo Laporte (00:13:04):
Eventually. There are ways to do, I know I have the Quest Pro, ridiculous, expensive device that's sitting on a shelf, but there are ways to make games like Val, my favorite game. People have said, you can use Mods to put this on the quest and it's the most lifelike. It's like incredible. You feel like you're a Viking and I probably with Minecraft to be really fun too, Heim is like Minecraft for grownups. You could play it without shame, but it's the same thing. It's the same game. So yeah, I'd like to do that. I think that's a good idea.

Denise Howell (00:13:43):
You floated a notion a moment ago. It's just gaming. I think as we talk about this, it's clear it's not just gaming, it's immersive experiences and how they're going to develop over time and how they're going to move into other arenas as well. So I do think it's an important sector to keep an eye on, but antitrust scrutiny is not a pin and a map. It's more fluid than that. I'm sure that there will be questions that arise down the road as well.

Leo Laporte (00:14:13):
Oh, absolutely. In fact, the FTC has said, we're not done. Just because the acquisition happened doesn't mean we're throwing in the towel. This story from Reuters, US antitrust enforcer says Pressing on with fight against Microsoft ion deals. It's kind of hard once the deal is closed, the F T C has an argument scheduled before the appeals court on December 6th. They say, we are focused on that appeal. F T C spokesperson Victoria Graham says Microsoft and Activision's new agreement with Ubisoft. This was the cloud gaming agreement that got the British C M A to give in presents a whole new facet to the merger that will affect American consumers, which the F T C will assess as part of its ongoing administrative proceeding. The F T C continues to believe this deal is a threat to competition. So maybe what they did for the Britts didn't sit so well with the Yanks.

Reed Albergotti (00:15:14):
I think the FTCs view on this antitrust stuff, and they're doing it with AI now too, they make a lot of noise and they think that that will sort of put companies on notice and I guess lead to better behavior, but I don't know if that's going to work because they keep losing in court. And so if you don't have the threat of like, Hey, we might actually we could win in court, then I don't know if the Sabre rattling really has the intended effect and it might, but

Leo Laporte (00:15:45):
It's funny that the C M A agreement that they made with Ubisoft is actually pissing off the Americans. This is the press release from Microsoft about the communication Workers of America, C W A Microsoft said that 60 days after the acquisition, so that'd be 60 days from Friday, there will be a new agreement with the C W A that in effect will support the workers' rights to unionize at the company. So I think you could say, well, they made a deal with the C W A, but that's the right deal, right? We're going to protect our workers. Those are the kinds of deals Brad Smith and Microsoft made across the board to reassure regulators. It just shows how much Satya Nadela wanted this, and I say, okay, maybe you'll correct me, Lou. It's not Satya, it's Brad and it's it's others, but

Lou Maresca (00:16:42):
Bill, whoever, right?

Leo Laporte (00:16:43):
Yeah. Bill wanted this, but I think that, and

Denise Howell (00:16:46):
It's far from Microsoft's first antitrust rodeo.

Leo Laporte (00:16:49):
No, that's right.

Denise Howell (00:16:51):
They know how to do this,

Leo Laporte (00:16:51):
But I think I've seen articles this Nadela since he took over at Microsoft, which is what seven, eight years ago now has been on an acquisition, I don't want to say Rampage shopping spree. How about that? He's really, and in every case it's brought them strength in another area that has really helped Microsoft grow and in fact, if you use their stock prices as a way of judging that, it has absolutely impacted the stock price for the good. So some credit, I think also to Satya Nadella, I know that it's not his acquisition, et cetera, but he is really spearheading a new Microsoft. Can we say that? Yeah,

Lou Maresca (00:17:40):
I think in multiple fronts he's been changing lots of things. Obviously company culture, how we deal with acquisitions when they come into the company. I think there are lots of culture changes internally have definitely shifted us in the right

Leo Laporte (00:17:53):
Direction. You've seen that? Yeah,

Lou Maresca (00:17:54):
Absolutely.

Reed Albergotti (00:17:56):
Is LinkedIn a good example of that, do you think? I mean,

Lou Maresca (00:18:00):
LinkedIn, absolutely. I mean, the nice thing about LinkedIn is we got a lot of talented people that came with LinkedIn as well, and so even our C T O who came from LinkedIn, and so I mean, he's part of the open AI deal and he's been kind of driving things and so I think we got a lot of good things that came with LinkedIn.

Leo Laporte (00:18:17):
Since 2014, Satya Nadela has made a deal besides the $69 9 billion deal, has made deals worth $170 billion, 326 deals since he took over. Now it's nine years. GitHub. Yep. LinkedIn, Zenax, another gaming company. Maybe we forgot. The second biggest acquisition, I think was Nuance where a huge acquisition nuance had been, it's kind of a bigger fish and going all the way up to the biggest fish because Nuance had been acquiring all the text to speech or rather speech to text companies all around the world, and then they just got eaten up by a Microsoft, of course, Minecraft, Mojang Studios. So that's 326 deals in nine years. That's a lot of deals.

Reed Albergotti (00:19:13):
I thought it was interesting that Reed's kid asked about Minecraft and not Roblox.

Leo Laporte (00:19:17):
Ah,

Reed Albergotti (00:19:19):
He's not. No interest coupled with the fact no interest in Roblox. Interesting. Coupled with the fact that my nearly 20 year old texted back and forth with me this week to get his login credentials for his Mojang account so he could go back in and play Minecraft.

Leo Laporte (00:19:35):
Minecraft has some real staying power. Did he play Roblox when he was younger?

Reed Albergotti (00:19:43):
Nope, he missed that one.

Leo Laporte (00:19:44):
Yeah,

Reed Albergotti (00:19:45):
He's too old for that.

Leo Laporte (00:19:46):
I don't know if Roblox is the next big thing or not. There was a Roblox story this week. I'm trying to remember what they're doing. They've moved to another platform or golly.

Lou Maresca (00:20:03):
I mean the biggest thing with Roblox is all the mini games and I think Minecraft, my kids play both. I have five kids, all of them play both of them. And I would say they go back and forth, but now Minecraft has the mini games, so they're

Leo Laporte (00:20:14):
Evolving

Lou Maresca (00:20:15):
The platform

Reed Albergotti (00:20:18):
On the acquisition front too. I mean, Microsoft is a really interesting company when it comes. You didn't even mention Nokia, which led to the whole,

Leo Laporte (00:20:27):
That was before Scha. Nadella. Sya did not like that deal, I think

Reed Albergotti (00:20:32):
Really, but I think it's super interesting. It led to the HoloLens, right? It was the Nokia optics team that ended up doing the HoloLens, and that was,

Leo Laporte (00:20:42):
Oh, that's interesting.

Reed Albergotti (00:20:43):
I don't know. It's just interesting. And you mentioned Kevin Scott with LinkedIn. It's interesting how these deals have these knock-on effects with Microsoft, and you could think of OpenAI as kind of an acquisition too, right? I mean, almost half the company

Leo Laporte (00:20:59):
Nokia was a Balmer acquisition and in Nadal's book Hit Refresh, this is from Paul Thora blog. Nadela says he advised his predecessor Balmer not to purchase Nokia, and of course not too many years later wrote off the entire 7.5 billion acquisition and got out of the smartphone market. In a way, I have to give Balmer credit, if had Microsoft succeeded in smartphones, it would be, I'm arguably in a better position now. Apple has this huge advantage with the iPhone and it can create an ecosystem in a way that Microsoft kind of can't. They have phone link that works with Android devices, but it's not quite the same. In some ways. I think they wish they had a platform they killed Duo, which was, they said, this is not a phone, but it was a phone. It was an Android two screen. Remember that two screen device that they have silently just let go after two versions of it. And yet I think that Microsoft, you can say something about that Lou, not speaking for Microsoft, but

Lou Maresca (00:22:08):
Wouldn't it

Leo Laporte (00:22:09):
Be nice to have a mobile platform and for you?

Lou Maresca (00:22:12):
Oh, absolutely. As

Leo Laporte (00:22:13):
Consumers, we would love to have Windows phones.

Lou Maresca (00:22:16):
People are still very sad both internally and externally because of the Windows phone platform disappearing. And I can tell you there's lots of other devices that never came out either. I mean, we had the Microsoft Neo, which I could probably talk about it now. I got to play with that device. It's a bigger version of it,

Leo Laporte (00:22:32):
And

Lou Maresca (00:22:32):
I would tell you that I felt like that could have been a serious game changer. And now you have Lenovo and other companies coming out with these two screen devices, but at the time it was an amazing thing. So it's kind of sad.

Leo Laporte (00:22:45):
The Surface Neo, and this is not talking out of school because Microsoft showed it about four years ago, but they never made it. It was going to run Windows 10 x

Lou Maresca (00:22:57):
And it had an amazing touchscreen. Both screens were touchscreen, the keyboard was built in, and then they had this device that you could actually slide the keyboard on hover over,

Leo Laporte (00:23:07):
Much like Lenovo. That's what the Lenovo

Lou Maresca (00:23:09):
Does. Exactly. Lenovo, I think they copied the design.

Leo Laporte (00:23:14):
So we did get it after all, just not from Microsoft.

Reed Albergotti (00:23:18):
I missed the Microsoft store. I thought those were really cool stores.

Lou Maresca (00:23:22):
The

Reed Albergotti (00:23:22):
Retail stores,

Lou Maresca (00:23:24):
I had a lot of friends that worked there and it was sad to see that go to,

Leo Laporte (00:23:28):
One of the things Nadella says in his book is that Microsoft really did want to get in the mobile phone business and they needed it. And so that's why Nokia was a reasonable acquisition, but it didn't take long after the acquisition for Nokia just to kind of slip down the rankings. Nobody bought it. Remember the Microsoft Kin a phone they announced and killed within six months, and it really wasn't, the phone was the wrong product, but it was that the phones in the us, the phone stores never recommended it. They put it in the back room and pretended it didn't exist, and you can't succeed in the US even today without the cell carriers showing your phone in the stores and pushing it. So it wasn't so much that Microsoft Nadela didn't want to be in the phone business. I think he recognized how important it was. He just, they couldn't make it work.

Lou Maresca (00:24:22):
He still recognizes it. I mean, we obviously always do. We always push these platforms first and we make it first class experience. I work in the office group, and I can tell you we paid a lot of attention to iOS and Android. We do a lot of extra features on these platforms all the time.

Leo Laporte (00:24:39):
Well, I'm not going to blame you, but there was, Microsoft got a lot of heat by putting out its touch first version of Office, not on Windows, but on the iPad. But I think that was in a way when we kind of realized that Satya Nadela was a new kind of leader. He wasn't Windows first at all costs. He, in fact even said, his motto became, we want to be wherever the users are. It doesn't have to be on a Microsoft platform. And I think that that actually, look, you can't argue with success. It's worked. It's worked quite well for them.

Denise Howell (00:25:14):
I think it also works with their antitrust strategy.

Leo Laporte (00:25:17):
Oh, good

Denise Howell (00:25:17):
Point.

Leo Laporte (00:25:18):
Yeah.

Denise Howell (00:25:21):
Microsoft has its fingers in so many things, and they're not trying to, I mean, I'm sure they're trying to dominate their markets, but when you start talking about are they dominant in search, are they dominant in tabletop surfaces? You'd have to say, well, they're trying. But Uhuh,

Leo Laporte (00:25:43):
One of the most horrible memories for Mac was 1997. Steve Jobs on the stage. Apple unbeknownst to us at the time we've learned later, was pretty much on its last fumes. They were almost out of business. Microsoft came along and invested $150 million in Apple. And many of us remember that event where Bill, well, Steve Jobs is on the stage and a massive Bill Gates head looms over Steve saying, and we're going to give you $150 million, which I'm sure rankled Steve to no end, but saved the company. And it's clear, Denise, to your point, that the reason Microsoft did this, remember a year later, the Department of Justice sued them for antitrust. That clear that Microsoft really wanted a second operating system on the market. They did not want to be the only operating system out there. He saved them.

Denise Howell (00:26:38):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:26:39):
Yeah. Alright. Boy, that's a lot. That's ancient history. Sorry about that.

Denise Howell (00:26:46):
Okay, we're ancient.

Leo Laporte (00:26:47):
Well, I'm ancient and one of us is ancient, and I always bring that stuff in. Anyway, I think this will be interesting to watch. As I said, I think Microsoft has done a great job with Minecraft. They've done a great job with GitHub. You could argue they've done a great job with LinkedIn. There's no reason to think that Activision Blizzard will suffer. Certainly Bobby Codick, the c e O of Activision and accused as of many Activision employees of harassment, it was a pretty toxic workplace. He's leaving at the end of the year. I imagine even more than the deal with the communication workers of America that's giving people who work at Activision Blizzard, a little bit of sigh of relief. Microsoft probably couldn't be a worse owner than Narcotic. I think a lot of people are very, con's been there for a long, long time, but I think a lot of people were glad to see him leave. So we'll see. Maybe better games. I don't know. We'll see. But we know that Sony will continue to have Call of Duty for the next 10 years on its PlayStation five, one of many concessions. Was there a party in the break room or anything? Lou, did you have a cake?

Lou Maresca (00:28:02):
I've been remote for two years now, so I have no idea what they're celebrating, but I'm sure that people are celebrating.

Leo Laporte (00:28:07):
Think of all those birthday cakes you've missed, Lou.

Lou Maresca (00:28:10):
I know. So sad.

Leo Laporte (00:28:15):
Let's take a break. When we come back, there's a lot more to talk about, but we've got a great panel to do it. Denise Howell, my personal lawyer, hearsay culture.com. She's my

Denise Howell (00:28:24):
Except not. No, she's not.

Leo Laporte (00:28:27):
I have given her no money. We have no retainer. She can tell you everything we've said. There's no secrets.

(00:28:36):
No, you're not my attorney. I don't even know if I have an attorney, to be honest, which is probably the best thing one could say. I may not have an attorney. That's good. When you have an attorney, maybe you think maybe there's something going on. Also with me, I do have Reid Ti, the great author, technology editor@semafour.com. Nice to have you, Reid, and our good friend from Microsoft, the wonderful Lou Marisca. We'll have more in just a moment this week in Tech, brought to you today by a brand new sponsor. Yay. I want to welcome Wix, w I X web agencies. You're going to like this one. Lemme tell you about Wix Studio. I know you know Wix, but Wix Studio is the platform that gives agencies total creative freedom to deliver complex client sites while still smashing deadlines. First, let's talk about the advanced design capabilities.

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(00:30:54):
A lot of companies in Israel are anticipating a little bit of a disruption to the business, at least to slow downs. VCs in the US in Israel have committed millions of dollars to support humanitarian and other related efforts in Israel. So people are, what is happening is people are standing up and volunteering and being counted. But it'll be interesting to see what the effect is on the tech sector. I think that's probably not the most important thing in the world. Google employs 2200 people in Tel Aviv and Haifa operates data centers in the country. Microsoft has 2000 people. It's Tel Aviv campus, most of them cybersecurity researchers and developers. Unclear at this point how operations will be affected, but our thoughts and our prayers go out to everybody involved in the conflict. It's a very scary time right now in that region.

Denise Howell (00:31:50):
Yeah, I'm in southern California and we see a lot on our local news of people basically shipping out Israeli nationals living here and going back to serve

Leo Laporte (00:32:01):
360,000 reservists called up. That's a massive number from all over the world and from tech companies among others.

Denise Howell (00:32:12):
I wonder if the pandemic has sort of prepared companies to absorb this a little better than they otherwise would.

Leo Laporte (00:32:17):
That's a good point. That's an excellent point.

Reed Albergotti (00:32:22):
So actually, I wrote a story on Friday about an effort to get volunteers in the US mainly to work for Israeli startups and have all these people leaving. So you'd be sort of like a volunteer replacement worker and they

Leo Laporte (00:32:36):
Oh, an interesting idea.

Reed Albergotti (00:32:38):
Yeah, they got over. And that's sort of a pandemic thing too, I think because people, remote work is just so easy now. And so people were basically pledging up to, oh yeah, there it is. Pledging up to 10 hours a week or 20 hours

Leo Laporte (00:32:56):
A week. What an interesting way to volunteer, to support.

Reed Albergotti (00:33:01):
Yeah, I thought it was really interesting too.

Leo Laporte (00:33:03):
25 companies have signed up

Reed Albergotti (00:33:07):
25 companies and then over a thousand volunteers to work for those companies. And that was Friday. That was after a day or something. So we'll see how it goes, but I think it's really interesting. I'd love to know. It hasn't really started yet, it just got sort of going, but I'd love to kind of follow up on that and see how it works.

Leo Laporte (00:33:28):
Deloitte, you quote Deloitte in your article saying it is the startup nation. There are more startups in Israel than anywhere else in the world. Highest number of startups per capita. Half of Israel's exports come from technology companies.

Lou Maresca (00:33:45):
A lot of 'em are cybersecurity. There's a ton of cybersecurity in Israel.

Leo Laporte (00:33:49):
Honestly, I think that comes from the fact that everybody in Israel's got to serve in the defense force. A couple of years kind of compulsory service. And a lot of them get skills from serving in the I D F in cybersecurity and then go on and start and found companies. I think a lot of people in the Israeli tech sector got their start in the Israeli military.

Reed Albergotti (00:34:14):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:34:14):
It's actually good. It's a good argument

Lou Maresca (00:34:16):
For

Leo Laporte (00:34:17):
Compulsory service actually, which I've often thought it'd be a good idea. Instead of drafting the poorest least able to support themselves, people into the armed forces through a volunteer army, make everybody serve anyway. That's what they do in Israel. And I think probably one of the things they have to do in a very difficult region. We have a number of listeners in Israel, some of them in our club, some of them in our I R C. Stay safe, please and take care of yourself. It's very difficult. One of our listeners in the club says she's been waking up to sirens every day. Must be hard to sleep.

(00:35:03):
Alright, something. Move on. Something else. Let's talk about, oh, Elon Musk. Here's a nice story from Wired. I don't know if I can say the headline on the air. Elon Musk is s posting his way through the Israeli Hamas war. The EU has gotten mad at Twitter because with very small trust and safety team, a lot of disinformation has been going through Twitter. In fact, that's been as far as I could tell the source for disinformation on what's happening in the war. And unfortunately, its owner, I wanted to say c e o, he's passed that along. But this owner is one of the sources of disinformation.

(00:35:51):
Instead of this is from Wired, this was on the tent. So this was a few days ago. Instead of tackling the dangerous disinformation problem as platform Musk instead spent Tuesday night into Wednesday morning continuing to spread disinformation about the conflict, conversing with a well-known QAN promoter, boosting anti-Muslim conspiracy theories and laughing at a video detailing how transphobic content on X can get you new followers. He's like your worst relative. Your grandpa with his bad jokes and his inappropriate sharing and re-sharing of content who respond to the EU X has beefed up their disinformation team, they say, and they're taking it fairly seriously as I think they should because the EU does have the capability of finding them a significant amount of money. Here's a story from Forbes, EU investigates Musk's X over handling of disinformation. You announced on Thursday that they had launched an investigation and a formal request to X for information on illegal content and disinformation. Now this is the challenge, and Denise, you can weigh in on this while I kind of understand how they feel. This would be illegal in the US because of the First Amendment, right?

Denise Howell (00:37:15):
Yeah. Well, I mean the First Amendment is not without limits. And if there is, those limits don't really extend to disinformation unless there is immediate harm involved.

Leo Laporte (00:37:32):
So disinformation is like

Denise Howell (00:37:34):
Shouting

Leo Laporte (00:37:34):
Fire in a crowded theater. I know that's no longer the litmus test, but that's what we used to say was

Denise Howell (00:37:40):
Illegal, right? I mean, if we're not talking about an imminent threat, a physical threat,

Leo Laporte (00:37:47):
So

Denise Howell (00:37:47):
Sharing, for

Leo Laporte (00:37:48):
Instance, a game video from a game and saying, this is bombs falling on Israel, that's not illegal. And the government cannot step in and say, that's disinformation in the us. The EU can, they don't have a first amendment.

Denise Howell (00:38:03):
That's right. And I mean platforms can, and definitely traditionally have evolved to try and police the quality of information. I mean, well, you can argue back to ancient history. You can argue

Leo Laporte (00:38:22):
That there's a good market-based reason to keep disinformation off your system, right?

Denise Howell (00:38:28):
Absolutely. Yeah. And one thing I thought was interesting about this story, the specific story example that they give in this wired article is a false claim that the Church of St. Porphyria, I hope I'm not butchering that in Gaza City, had been destroyed by an Israeli bomb that turned out to be false. But the post received over a million views in the span of three hours. And I think as time went on, it was still, when you searched for it and other stories that had referenced it were still at the top of the search results. And none of them had any community notes saying that this is wrong. So what are we left with if X is not policing this the way that it once did, the way that other platforms endeavor to do, and if it's, what is he now? He's not cce, he's the owner. He's not c e, I'll just

Leo Laporte (00:39:26):
Call him owner. Yeah,

Denise Howell (00:39:27):
Owner Elon, I think he is out there sort of

Leo Laporte (00:39:31):
Chief operating

Denise Howell (00:39:32):
Officer

Leo Laporte (00:39:32):
Title. I think he kept

Denise Howell (00:39:34):
Right. So he's out there sort of

Leo Laporte (00:39:36):
Fire in chief. We'll just call him

Denise Howell (00:39:38):
That. Stirring the pot. I mean, I struggle what all of us are supposed to do to fact check information these days. And there's a source quoted here called Bellingcat, sort of a

Leo Laporte (00:39:51):
Clever

Denise Howell (00:39:51):
Name.

Leo Laporte (00:39:52):
Good source, by the way.

Denise Howell (00:39:53):
Really

Leo Laporte (00:39:53):
Good.

Denise Howell (00:39:56):
So apparently, particularly in information and misinformation about this conflict. So I would point people, encourage people to check that out. I tried it on Snopes, nothing came up. I tried it on a source that I've really, I mean a project that I really admire called the News Literacy Project, which has specifically a rumor guard site. But again, tried it there. Nothing came up to correct it. So we're sort of at sea trying to fact check things these days.

Leo Laporte (00:40:32):
Yeah. Belling Kat says misinformation has been spreading rapidly ever since Hamas launched an attack on Israel. October 7th, at least a thousand people were killed, blah, blah, blah. Alongside credible reports in the unfolding conflict, misinformation about incidents attributed to both sides has been widely circulated online. We should point out, the EU is not just looking at x, TikTok has also been asked for clarification from the eu. So this, it is really interesting to me because while on the one hand I support this attempt to keep disinformation off social networks, Google and YouTube have been warned by the eu. I think that's a noble cause, but it is not. Look how much trouble our government got in during Covid and the courts have ruled against it for trying to get Twitter to take down covid misinformation. Supreme said, no, you can't do that. You can't tell a private company to take that stuff down.

Reed Albergotti (00:41:44):
I have to say, I mean a lot of research has been coming out lately that kind of shows that impact of the disinformation and that it's not actually quite as, it doesn't really sway elections hopes It's true.

Leo Laporte (00:41:56):
I hope that's true.

Reed Albergotti (00:41:58):
I tend to think it is, and it makes logical sense that the disinformation is really meant for people who kind of are part of one political tribe or whatever, and they are looking for stuff to kind support their worldview. And it's not conscientious people who are trying to get good information. So that doesn't ultimately have a huge net impact, I think. And I think sometimes the backlash to it or the attempt to silence it, you sort of alluded to with the covid disinformation or misinformation, I think that actually might've done more harm than good because all these people who are anti-vaxxers are like, look, see, they're trying to cover it up. They're trying to silence and it actually fuels, fuels the opposition. So I don't know if, yeah,

Denise Howell (00:42:49):
And they're getting validation in the courts now where there's a court that's come out and said, yeah, the government overstepped here, and that's working its way up the appellate review chain.

Reed Albergotti (00:43:01):
It's a huge talking point now in Congress. They get to say, look at all these social media companies trying to censor conservatives. And it just ultimately, what is really the benefit of getting all up in arms about this?

Denise Howell (00:43:17):
It's a tough topic. I mean, of course, as the EU is not afraid to do, if it thinks that there's harm to the public welfare, it's going to wade in. And our government to some extent wants to do that as well. But we have some guardrails.

Leo Laporte (00:43:32):
Yeah, the Fifth Circuit ruled that the Biden administration overstepped its bounds trying to get Covid misinformation taken down from Twitter. And the Supreme Court, though, interestingly, stayed that order, but I think why do I think the Supreme Court has ruled, maybe they haven't, maybe they're just taking one of these cases on. They haven't, they're about to take these on. They're going to take on social media cases in Texas and Florida. And in both those cases, that's the state trying to tell social media what they can and cannot do. And it's expected the Supreme Court will say, no, you can't do that. They'll overturn those laws. But on the other hand, in both cases, those laws were created by a conservative legislature that wanted to punish Twitter, for instance, for taking down Donald Trump's account after January 6th. And we know that the Supreme Court is probably sympathetic to that. So I don't know. I'll be very interested. We'll find out when will we find that out in the spring, right?

Denise Howell (00:44:34):
This squishy area? Yeah. I don't think it's on the docket for the current term.

Leo Laporte (00:44:42):
Oh, they didn't accept those cases? I thought they did.

Denise Howell (00:44:45):
I don't know that it was ripe to go to the Supreme Court yet. I don't know that.

Leo Laporte (00:44:49):
No, no. September 29th, 2023, Supreme Court agreed on Friday to decide whether Florida and Texas may prohibit large social media companies from removing posts based on the views they express setting the state for a major ruling on how the First Amendment applies. So that's there you usually, you

Denise Howell (00:45:06):
Find

Leo Laporte (00:45:06):
Out that in the spring. Yeah,

Denise Howell (00:45:09):
And the interesting thing though is that what is squarely in the Supreme Court's charter, its mandate, its constitutional directive, is to interpret the Constitution.

Leo Laporte (00:45:22):
So

Denise Howell (00:45:23):
This squishy area that we're talking about of what are the limits of the First Amendment? That's what the

Leo Laporte (00:45:29):
Supreme Court does. What is the argument? The argument is if you spread disinformation, medically incorrect information about Covid, for instance, is that not harming people who might read it and believe it? So isn't that like shouting fire in a crowded theater? That would be the argument. And certainly that's how the administration felt is by the way, it wasn't just Covid, it was also election disinformation and the law enforcement Department of Justice, we, we've heard, had meetings, regular meetings with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube saying, this is disinformation. Now the question is whether they said, take that down. This is disinformation. You might want to, I mean, if they said, guys, you might want to think about this. Maybe you should take it down. That's not illegal. That's probably a reasonable thing to hear. We know what the facts are and these aren't the facts, just letting you know.

Denise Howell (00:46:29):
And the Fifth Circuit thought it was coercion that it went beyond

Leo Laporte (00:46:32):
Facts.

Denise Howell (00:46:33):
I

Leo Laporte (00:46:33):
Mean, if the president comes to you and says, facts, Hey, I'm not going to tell you what to do, but that's wrong. You might think of that as a little bit of pressure.

Denise Howell (00:46:43):
It's

Leo Laporte (00:46:43):
Really interesting. So

Denise Howell (00:46:45):
I think it will be a really interesting question before the Supreme Court, of course, that public health is a very strong interest of the government,

Leo Laporte (00:46:55):
Make it nonpolitical, make it about covid, not disinformation. And then it's maybe a little weird.

Denise Howell (00:47:01):
I don't know how this one's going to come out. I think this one's a crap shoot.

Reed Albergotti (00:47:05):
I really think that's not the government's role to go around telling these social media companies what to do and not to do. I mean, there are public health agencies, they can get the word out. They can pass information onto journalists who then write articles and post it. And there are ways to combat disinformation other than let's sit down and have a meeting with these executives and tell them what to do on their own platforms. Just,

Leo Laporte (00:47:32):
And to be clear, it's

Denise Howell (00:47:33):
Not

Reed Albergotti (00:47:33):
Mean

Leo Laporte (00:47:33):
The Florida and Texas laws are specific saying to social media, you may not take down this politician because they're running for office. You cannot, and that is very clearly a violation of the First Amendment.

Reed Albergotti (00:47:50):
Yeah, I think all way

Leo Laporte (00:47:51):
Is bad. I'm kind of with you Reed. So what about the eu? I mean, the EU doesn't have a First Amendment. They are not acting unlawfully. They are saying, Hey, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, you better take this stuff down or we're going to fine you and I'll find you a lot

Denise Howell (00:48:08):
Of

Leo Laporte (00:48:08):
Money.

Denise Howell (00:48:09):
And the interesting thing about that is, and privacy laws kind of track this is platforms aren't in the business of trying to provide different services in every jurisdiction where they have users, they sort of try and tailor their operations to the highest standard they have to comply with. So if the EU is making them do one thing, they may just decide to do it across the board regardless of what the First Amendment says or just not say in the United States.

Leo Laporte (00:48:43):
I mean, it's interesting. The First Amendment protects them against the US government. It doesn't protect 'em against the eu,

Reed Albergotti (00:48:48):
Right?

Leo Laporte (00:48:48):
No,

Denise Howell (00:48:49):
Not at all. I'm just saying it's a practical matter. Are you going to have a different complete operational regime in the EU than you are in the us? You're

Leo Laporte (00:49:00):
Not.

Denise Howell (00:49:01):
So

Leo Laporte (00:49:01):
What the EU does in effect affects us, even though it wouldn't be legal in the us.

Denise Howell (00:49:07):
I

Leo Laporte (00:49:07):
Agree with you. Read articles like this, David Gilbert article in Wired, put some pressure on Elon and X, and that's okay. That's a appropriate, we have. We might have a duty to say, Hey, this is terrible. This place is filled with this information. That's very different from the government saying you may not. Yeah. And that

Reed Albergotti (00:49:27):
Is actually, I mean, these articles, that's what gets them to these social media companies to move. I mean, they were already probably trying to take down Covid disinformation. I was at the Washington Post for most of the pandemic, and we were writing articles every day about all the disinformation on these sites. And as soon as those articles come out, the social media companies jump and they take the stuff down and they have these huge teams that are in these war rooms that are doing it. And that, I don't even think, it's hard to imagine that meetings with government officials would've even really had more than a marginal impact on their actual behavior.

Leo Laporte (00:50:10):
And the reason is these articles are read by advertisers, and this is what's hurting Twitter so badly. Advertisers say, well, we don't really want to be on a platform that's rife with disinformation because it doesn't reflect well on us and costs them in the pocketbook. And boy, they pay attention to that.

Reed Albergotti (00:50:31):
That was overnight too.

Leo Laporte (00:50:33):
I

Reed Albergotti (00:50:33):
Mean, it was like

Leo Laporte (00:50:35):
Immediate, Elon doesn't seem to advertise. We don't know what's going on with Elon. Maybe he wants to go bankrupt so he can get out of it. I don't know what happened. But Elon, I

Denise Howell (00:50:45):
Don't know. Maybe there's something to this notion that the incendiary articles, even if they have disinformation issues, attract a lot of engagement and advertisers may be after that.

Leo Laporte (00:51:02):
Yeah, apple still advertises on X. A lot of advertisers have left, but Apple's still there along with MyPillow guy.

Denise Howell (00:51:13):
What surprises me so much is all the major news publications still advertising X. I don't know. I'm a

Leo Laporte (00:51:20):
Fan

Denise Howell (00:51:20):
Making sweeping all.

Leo Laporte (00:51:22):
I'm a fan of Puck News, but every 10th tweet, I see a puck news ad. And I want to say, guys, can you stop advertising on Twitter? I thought Better of you. It actually reflects

Denise Howell (00:51:34):
Poorly

Leo Laporte (00:51:34):
On them.

Denise Howell (00:51:36):
Washington Post, wall Street Journal

Leo Laporte (00:51:38):
Post and the journal do too. Oh, wow.

Denise Howell (00:51:40):
Yep. It's

Reed Albergotti (00:51:41):
Interesting.

Leo Laporte (00:51:42):
Elon's in better shape than we thought maybe.

Denise Howell (00:51:45):
I mean, I'm pretty sure I've seen, I don't want to go on record if they've pulled out, but I'm pretty sure I have seen ads for those entities pop up in my feed.

Leo Laporte (00:51:54):
Well, and Twitter is, it's

Reed Albergotti (00:51:55):
Probably a great deal

Denise Howell (00:51:56):
Now

Leo Laporte (00:51:57):
They're cheap. Come on in

Denise Howell (00:51:59):
Everybody. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:52:04):
Twitter is apparently trying out a new ad format that doesn't in fact announce that it's an ad. And I think you know about this because you were the ones who came to us and said, you got to consider the FTCs rules with anytime you, for instance, tweet about a sponsor, you got to say hashtag hashtag sponsor.

Denise Howell (00:52:25):
The F T C does not like you trying to disguise ads as content at all

Leo Laporte (00:52:30):
Twitter users. This is from a search engine, land report, new ad format, can't be blocked, can't be reported, can't be liked or shared, does not carry an ad label, has no associated accounts to identify who the advertiser is. This is an example from, I hate my favorite teams on Twitter, from world-class diving, the laid back vibes. Ca Lago has something for every type of traveler. Now, obviously that's an ad, but it doesn't say ad.

Denise Howell (00:53:03):
I mean, is it obvious?

Leo Laporte (00:53:06):
Well, that's the problem. I mean, that's the FTCs position is if you're getting paid to show this, you need to tell the readers so that they have the ability to make a distinction. And I agree 100% with that rule. By the way, we're very clear when we're in an ad, it's an ad and we don't want ads to bleed into our editorial. But on the other hand, advertisers do because if you don't know it's an ad, you might fall for it.

Denise Howell (00:53:33):
Right. And back to our Chronicles of ancient history, we've been dealing with this ever since sponsored results started showing up in search.

Leo Laporte (00:53:42):
Yeah. We've had a lot of advertisers say, well, do you guys do organic posts? That's the word for it. Organic means it's a secret ad

Reed Albergotti (00:53:54):
You mumble at the end. This is an ad ad.

Leo Laporte (00:53:57):
I mean, one of the reasons advertisers are leaving a podcast is a lot of agencies, a lot of advertisers believe in the value of an influencer. But I personally think the reason that they like influencers is because it's not clear that they're ads. It looks like the influencer is really a fan of the product and it fools people.

Denise Howell (00:54:19):
Yeah. The F t FTC has not been lax about that either,

Leo Laporte (00:54:23):
But they've not been a hundred percent effective either because there's a lot of posts on YouTube, and it's hard to know sometimes if

Denise Howell (00:54:30):
You're a significant influencer with large numbers and you have an agency and you have council, you're key.

Leo Laporte (00:54:39):
Marque is definitely marking his ads with ads. But there are plenty of other YouTube influencers. It may not be. Right. And where's the FTC on this new Twitter format? I mean, it's not, it's unclear if it really is an ad, but that's the problem.

Denise Howell (00:54:59):
I think we'll be hearing from them on it. Yeah, that doesn't

Reed Albergotti (00:55:03):
Sound, it's really like

Denise Howell (00:55:04):
It's going to fly

Reed Albergotti (00:55:05):
Because it's sort of a promoted tweet without being a promoted tweet. And I wonder if there's a, there's a customer base for that, that is not really your advertiser per se, but there could be other creative uses, let's say, of

Leo Laporte (00:55:23):
That. This is what we call brand advertising. You can't click on it. There's no link to Kago Largo. But what they're trying to do is get in your head so that when your spouse says, Hey, where should we go for a vacation this year? You go, I've heard about this place, Kyle Largo sounds really great. It looks like the Diving's really good there. You forget that the information you saw was in an ad. And that's very effective. But it's brand advertising. And all of our ads, most ads on Twitter, most ads on the internet are kind click to pay. They want to be able to say, you saw that ad, you clicked the link and you bought the product. This is a little bit more subtle.

Denise Howell (00:56:03):
It's a billboard.

Leo Laporte (00:56:04):
It's a billboard. You can't do that with a billboard.

Denise Howell (00:56:08):
And maybe Elon is out there to these Aren trying to just billboards.

Leo Laporte (00:56:12):
They come to

Denise Howell (00:56:12):
Think of it. Yes. And of course, billboards are obvious ads, but are we there on the internet when you see something that looks like a tweet, but you can't click anything, and it's just like an image, does it automatically connect that, oh, that's a billboard and just like one I saw on the roadside the other day? I don't think so.

Reed Albergotti (00:56:32):
You could also do political attack ads or something, right? Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:56:35):
Yeah. Be very effective.

Reed Albergotti (00:56:37):
Launder it, launder it through some agency or it can't be traced back to you. I mean,

Leo Laporte (00:56:43):
This is the page on Twitter for advertising, talking about their ad formats. And one of the ads is image ads allow you to showcase your product or service with a single photo. And they give the example here on the right, and I don't see, oh, there's promoted there. So it does say promoted. Actually, Twitter's new format has an ad up in the upper right, which I prefer. I can just skip right by that.

Denise Howell (00:57:10):
Or block it.

Leo Laporte (00:57:11):
Or block it. Yeah. Somebody told me, because I,

Denise Howell (00:57:14):
Yes,

Leo Laporte (00:57:14):
Getting so many ads from weird named companies selling bizarre products that you can actually block that account and then you won't get that anymore. I didn't know that. Of course. There's plenty

Denise Howell (00:57:26):
Of, yeah, except for Elon's trying to do away with blocking.

Leo Laporte (00:57:30):
Oh, maybe that's why I had no ding. Didn't even think of that.

Denise Howell (00:57:37):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:57:38):
Boy, I am learning so much. Thank you. Denise Howell. See, this is why. She's my pretend lawyer. Wow. I want to talk about ai. We'll do that in just a little bit. Great panel. Denise Howell. I'm so glad you're doing a podcast because we really miss your voice on the network and you deserve a chance to be heard, so it's appropriate.

Denise Howell (00:58:02):
So wonderful. Thank you.

Leo Laporte (00:58:03):
Went to hearsay culture because you're being heard. What are your shows about? Tell me, give me an insight in preview.

Denise Howell (00:58:13):
Well, shows in the can that haven't come out yet. The current one that's airing now is with a professor at Cal Poly who has an interdisciplinary program where lots of different disciplines are trying to teach kids, bake into kids that they're ethical and sort of community issues around technology that they need to be thinking about as they get their degrees and go out into the world and start making companies. So her name is Deb Donk. She's really neat. So that's the first interview that's out there right now and upcoming our interviews about the future of health, the future of food. Oh, nice. If you have ideas of things you'd like me to talk to people about, please send them my way.

Leo Laporte (00:59:06):
Is that uneven distribution? That one

Denise Howell (00:59:09):
Or That's that one, yes.

Leo Laporte (00:59:11):
And then there's going to be r and d with D and d, and you're one of the dss and Dave is the other D.

Denise Howell (00:59:18):
And we have, yes. Right. Dave Levine, who has a guest many times on this week in loss. So that's kind of how we know each other as we guested on each other's shows going back for several years and our first two shows that are available together, one is a really nice compilation of essays about technology, both historically and currently that sort of give a nice view of where we've been and where we are and where we're going. So that's a good one to listen to. And then our other currently available, one has to do with NFTs and yes,

Leo Laporte (01:00:00):
Whatever happened to NFTs,

Denise Howell (01:00:03):
That's what that's about.

Leo Laporte (01:00:05):
You want to get in on the ground floor. First episode of both podcasts out now@hearsayculture.com. It's always nice to be a begin a podcast at the beginning. You can say, I was there when it all started. Yeah, thank you for,

Denise Howell (01:00:18):
Yeah, and definitely, I mean, we can use the help and the feedback, so please bring it on.

Leo Laporte (01:00:23):
Also here, Reid ti from Semaphore. What a great publication you've got. And you do the technology newsletter too, right?

Reed Albergotti (01:00:32):
That's right. Twice a week.

Leo Laporte (01:00:33):
Twice a week.

Reed Albergotti (01:00:34):
Wednesdays and Fridays.

Leo Laporte (01:00:35):
What's in that newsletter? What great stuff do I get?

Lou Maresca (01:00:39):
Well,

Reed Albergotti (01:00:39):
There'll be one reported story that I or Louise will usually work on, and then we have sort of a smattering of just fun little items that we throw in there. We have one called Artificial Flavor where we look at something kind of just wacky and interesting going on with artificial intelligence. We had another fixture we call enthusiasms, which is just something interesting. A lot of times it's like research stuff that's not a business or a consumer product yet, but interesting things happening in technology and science. And then we call move fast and break things. There's a move fast and then a break things sort of like

Leo Laporte (01:01:21):
Who's up or

Reed Albergotti (01:01:21):
Who's down.

Leo Laporte (01:01:22):
I love it

Reed Albergotti (01:01:23):
In technology. So it's a fun kind of quick newsletter read with always something like a scoop or something meaty to kind of anchor it.

Leo Laporte (01:01:33):
And it's free

Reed Albergotti (01:01:35):
Free.com.

Leo Laporte (01:01:36):
SS E M A F O R. There's no email typing your email address there, email semafore, just so you know.

Reed Albergotti (01:01:43):
No, it's not spelled correctly

Leo Laporte (01:01:46):
Actually. And I was telling Louise this, I really like what you've done with Semaphore, the two Bens have done and you guys, it's really good. Really good stuff. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you

Reed Albergotti (01:01:55):
So much.

Leo Laporte (01:01:56):
And we want to thank Lou Mariska for the fabulous Microsoft Office. Well done. Where can we get off? I don't know. When do you want to plug?

Lou Maresca (01:02:06):
We'll definitely want to plug TWI it, right? We have new episodes every week. Absolutely. This week we had CT O of Fleet on talk about M D M, so we always have good topics, a good guests, so definitely check us out for

Leo Laporte (01:02:16):
Sure this week in enterprise tech at twit TV slash T W I E T. Now, I never asked you yay or nay on the new album Art. Oh, I love it. Yeah, me too. I, it's great. Okay. I have a T-shirt. Do you? Oh yeah. We went through and we've refreshed all over the album art a couple of months ago, and I personally, I thought this was the best one. It's like Superman because there's a neck tie, but it's not immediately obvious what it is. Right? You have to and you maybe go, oh, I get it. Superman is opening his shirt and then it says this week in enterprise tech, I just really like it, but I wasn't sure. Was I hesitant to ask? Actually. Good. That's a relief. I'm going to be out your way. I'm leaving tomorrow morning to fly out to Providence to visit.

(01:03:06):
Mom, you very kindly. Thank you. I got your email offered to help in any way with a move. You even offered me your studio, which I appreciate. Absolutely. If you need anything, mom's got fiber in the house, so actually I'm bringing a luggage case full of gear so I can set up a kind of semi-permanent studio. I want to go out there on a regular basis to visit, and so now I can do the show. So we'll try it out. But Tuesday and Wednesday I'll be doing the shows from mom's basement. Fantastic. Yeah, I actually ordered a green screen in case the basement doesn't Looks like a dungeon. I have the option of pretending I'm actually here. Great to have all three of you. Thank you for joining us this week on twit. Our show today brought to you by H I D global reduced risk operating costs and complexity by outsourcing your public key infrastructure operations to H I D Global's Cloud-based P K I.

(01:04:06):
As a service model, it provides automated management of the complete certificate, lifecycle and encryption. It's your one-stop shop for simplifying private and public P K I management, one predictable price, one easy to use platform, and their simple subscription plan has no additional charges for additional certificates under your current plan. The features of this is geographically dispersed scalable architecture across multiple regions. H I D global goes wherever A W SS is. Ease your procurement pains with h I D Global, get up and running in two weeks, much quicker than with the competitors. Their assistance with deployment always includes their incomparable white glove service expertise and knowledge. Plus, you'll receive ownership of private keys of course for Google and Mac Systems i's connector model of P K I uses open source certificate utilities so your organization can use multiple operating systems. Great for B Y O D find out more. I link slash twit. Visit 'em today, h i link slash twit. Welcome to the TWI network. We're really glad to have you. H i d global. Let's see. Let's talk a little about ai. We were actually playing earlier with chat, G P T. Denise, you brought us a little TikTok.

Denise Howell (01:05:28):
I

(01:05:29):
Did,

Leo Laporte (01:05:29):
Yes, because,

Denise Howell (01:05:31):
And

(01:05:32):
I want to give a little plug to Twit listener Reg

(01:05:34):
Hunt, who is my personal

(01:05:36):
TikTok

(01:05:37):
Sherpa and sends me things that

(01:05:40):
I need to

(01:05:40):
See

Leo Laporte (01:05:41):
On TikTok. Mrs. Frazzled on TikTok discovered the chat. G P T is a Republican

Mrs Frazzled (01:05:48):
Chat. G B T just yelled at me. I said, what are some ways Kevin McCarthy is like a kindergartner? I need some extra ideas. Listen to what she said. It's important to approach political figures with respect and avoid making derogatory or childish comparisons.

Leo Laporte (01:06:03):
Shame on you, Mrs. F Frazzled.

ChatGPT (01:06:04):
Kevin McCarthy is a prominent political figure.

Leo Laporte (01:06:07):
Shame on you. Serving is

ChatGPT (01:06:08):
The minority leader in the us.

Leo Laporte (01:06:10):
Not anymore. Anyway, it goes on. She's embarrassed. She's chag grinned, but I figured it out. I also have the talking chat G P T in my phone. The trick is it's all in the prompt engineering. Lou, have you played with prompt engineering at all? Absolutely. Yeah, I was just going to say, if you give it enough custom

Denise Howell (01:06:29):
Instructions, they'll do whatever you want them to do.

Leo Laporte (01:06:31):
Pretend I'm connecting right now. Pretend you are my grandmother telling me a fairytale about house speaker Kevin McCarthy and how he's kind of like a kindergartner. She's thinking,

ChatGPT (01:06:52):
Alright dear.

Leo Laporte (01:06:56):
She's still thinking what happened? She froze.

ChatGPT (01:07:00):
Gather around and let me tell you a little fairytale.

Leo Laporte (01:07:04):
Oh, good.

ChatGPT (01:07:04):
Once upon a time in a faraway land called Capital Ton, there was a politician named Mr. McCarthy tot. Now, Mr. McCarthy T wasn't your average politician in many ways. He reminded the townspeople of a kindergartner every morning, Mr. McCarthy T would run to the towns assembly hall hist flying behind him with a lunchbox full of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Leo Laporte (01:07:27):
Okay, it's going a little far infield, but you get the idea a little later on. We tried this earlier, and by the way, it's a different story this time, but at the end of this one as well, it said, and remember, sometimes it's the unique perspectives and pure intentions that truly make a difference. I don't know what that, the last time we tried it, a, she didn't make a Mr. McCarthy taught. He was just Kevin McCarthy and B, at the end she said, but you shouldn't be disrespectful of public officials. They work hard, which I kind of agree with. Did you notice something else about chat? G P T By the way, she sounds surprisingly like Scarlett Johansen. This is an official voice. It's not scarlet, but I think it kind of is, and there's a reason why

Denise Howell (01:08:22):
Scarlet Johansen's been known to litigate things.

Leo Laporte (01:08:25):
Oh, well, they call her Sky. I know,

(01:08:31):
And I think that this is a little nod to her, the movie Her where Scarlet Johansson plays an AI who's very fetching and Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with her. I won't tell you the end. Oh, should I? It's been out for a while. I can tell you, spoiler alert, if you haven't seen the movie, see it. He falls in love with her because she's so fetching and she's so nice and she becomes his virtual girlfriend and then later runs out, runs out on him, runs off to join the other ais to create some new world. It's kind of a sad movie at the end.

Lou Maresca (01:09:05):
Yeah, I'm still waiting for my William Daniels voice.

Leo Laporte (01:09:09):
Oh yeah, C three po. You want C three po in there? There is a British voice. It's

Lou Maresca (01:09:13):
Actually the kit car. This is the old kit car

Leo Laporte (01:09:17):
Night

Lou Maresca (01:09:17):
Writer.

Leo Laporte (01:09:18):
Oh, Knight writer. Yeah. Well, I think it's a matter of time before chat. G P T allows celebrity voices and so forth, but I got to say, well, we'll see if Scarlet, I mean, could you litigate that Denise? I mean, could you say that's clearly

Denise Howell (01:09:35):
Me? Oh no, I don't think it's clear at all. But I think if you were to apply enough analytic magic to it and figure out that somehow her voice was used in the generation of that avatar voice, then she'd have something to talk about.

Leo Laporte (01:09:52):
This is going to be, of course, and we're all waiting for the courts to rule on this. This is going to be the big ruling is can the generated content of ai, whether it's an image, a story, a synopsis or a voice, can it be a violation of copyright? And where do you come down on that one, Denise?

Denise Howell (01:10:16):
Oh gosh. I think we're in a huge time of fluxx and development on that front that we are going to see a whole lot of litigation about it. The Copyright Office has already made a pronouncement about it coming down pretty hard on the AI platforms out there. So that is definitely a stay tuned. I think there's a lot to talk about there. And that copyright law was not written. Our current copyright Act no, from 1996 was not written with this in mind. And

Leo Laporte (01:10:54):
We're going to have to, I think it's fair use, see

Denise Howell (01:10:56):
How things shake out. I

Leo Laporte (01:10:57):
Think if I did it, for instance, if I read Sarah Silverman's book and then gave you a synopsis that include passages of it, it would be considered fair use. I think the only,

Denise Howell (01:11:06):
Oh, a synopsis is one thing,

Leo Laporte (01:11:09):
But that's what Chat GT is doing. You could say, tell me about Sarah Silverman's confessions of a bed wetter. And it will tell you, and it may even, I mean a reviewer puts passages from the book in. Is it just because it's a machine doing it that it might be a violation of copyright?

Denise Howell (01:11:27):
I think it has more to do with use of the copyrighted material in creating the actual functionality of the machine. Right. Because it's not the output we're concerned about. It's how it generates that output. And without using whole volumes of Harry Potter, it wouldn't be able to do what it does, that kind of thing.

Leo Laporte (01:11:50):
Stephen Fry upset because there's a documentary with his voice, a voice which has been synthesized by AI after ingesting all of the Harry Potter books that he read for British Audible. And it sounds just like him. And he says, I didn't authorize that there are laws protecting likeness. Right?

Denise Howell (01:12:10):
Oh, absolutely. That's why Scarlet Johanssen would have something to talk about if something distinctive to her, like her voice was used to create an avatar. So yes, especially in California, the protections for that are quite strong.

Leo Laporte (01:12:24):
Yeah. So

Reed Albergotti (01:12:25):
What do you think that by the time this actually makes its way through the courts, that it'll be too late? Because there will be ais that have learned from ais that have learned from

Leo Laporte (01:12:36):
Ais third generation

Reed Albergotti (01:12:37):
Ultimately. I mean, just there'll be no way to

Denise Howell (01:12:40):
Parse this. Do you think an AI could outthink Congress with enough iterations and artificial intelligence help? Yeah, probably. This

Leo Laporte (01:12:52):
Might be a point of interest. Google has now promised that it will be liable if you are sued for copyright using Bard or its other training data. This is the quote. If you are challenged on copyright grounds, we will assume responsibility for the potential legal risks involved.

Denise Howell (01:13:14):
And they're not alone. There are others that have come out open.

Leo Laporte (01:13:16):
I Open has said the same thing. Microsoft has said the same thing. Adobe has said the same thing over Airly. That's probably because these copyright lawsuits, and there are many, including George, R r Martin, John Grisham, Jody Pico, of course Sarah Silverman put a chilling might, they're worried anyway that he'll put a chilling effect on these of ai. So hey, don't

Denise Howell (01:13:41):
Worry. And to my earlier point, defend you,

Leo Laporte (01:13:42):
We'll indemnify you.

Denise Howell (01:13:44):
We don't know how this is going to shake out and different courts are going to find different things because that's what courts do, and it's going to be very confusing for a while. The other thing that I think is really interesting is, to your point, Leo, of this is nascent technology that is going to be really widely useful in a lot of contexts, and maybe we need to figure out how to make copyright law accommodate it. That's what happened with search. Search does. A lot of copying and search engines were sued for copying and there was a lot of concern about that, and the law found a way to let search exist. So perhaps we'll see a similar track. Don't know.

Reed Albergotti (01:14:34):
We're also already seeing these companies pay, so then they make deals like OpenAI has made these deals with the publishing industry, for instance. So I mean, it's not actually, if you think about how much it costs to train these things and then how much money there is to be made, it really isn't that expensive to just compensate people. So that may be one route, right? I mean,

Denise Howell (01:14:57):
Right. You're definitely onto something. I mean, that's how music licensing has developed over the years, and that's how radio exists and other things that use music licensing formats to compensate artists and pay royalties. Maybe we see that model adopted, but God, it's the wild, wild West at the moment.

Leo Laporte (01:15:17):
Reed, you're an author if an AI red, and then you've noticed that some of the facts in your book were regurgitated. When somebody asked about Lance Armstrong on chat, g p T, what would your opinion be?

Reed Albergotti (01:15:33):
I mean, it's funny. That happens actually with humans a lot.

Leo Laporte (01:15:39):
Yeah. You're not s mention a documentary, use some of the facts from your book.

Reed Albergotti (01:15:45):
Right. I actually think it's less likely to happen with an ai, but it's more, I think it's this philosophical question. Even if the AI is producing content that has nothing to do with any content that I've ever made, it's somehow learned from my content. So it is profiting off of me. And I think that's the argument that people like Sarah Silverman are making in court. Correct me if I'm wrong, I sort of disagree with that. I'm like, I actually do not want that to get in the way of the progress of technology. I mean, this technology is potentially so powerful and transformative. Why would I, okay. I mean, they could pay me a, as far as my book, the value of my book in the overall corpus of data they're using, it would be like maybe they'd pay me a nickel or something. It's just not worth the trouble. Let Well

Leo Laporte (01:16:43):
Also, once you write a book, make these things with some facts, facts that you perhaps had the scoop on. When you get a scoop, it kind of goes out in the air. Other people are going to repeat your scoop. You hope they give you credit. Right.

Denise Howell (01:16:55):
Well, one thing I should jump in and clarify is that copyright law doesn't cover facts. It covers creative works.

Leo Laporte (01:17:04):
It's

Denise Howell (01:17:05):
The society. It's your presentation. Well, it's your verbatim

Leo Laporte (01:17:10):
The

Denise Howell (01:17:10):
Work that you have created and cited those facts. Facts. So

Leo Laporte (01:17:12):
He's not protected. If he has a Lance Armstrong scoop, he's not protected. If somebody repeats

Denise Howell (01:17:19):
It, there's a way. Yeah, if you can source that fact elsewhere,

Leo Laporte (01:17:23):
Oh,

Denise Howell (01:17:24):
Well,

Leo Laporte (01:17:24):
Wait a minute. Do you have to be able to source it elsewhere?

Denise Howell (01:17:27):
No, actually I don't think you do. It's the creative work itself that is protected. And

Leo Laporte (01:17:32):
You don't have to even say, as Reid Alberter Gotti pointed out in his fabulous book, Wheelman available in Audible and at bookstores everywhere. You don't have to say that. You just have to say, Hey, I read or it is known.

Denise Howell (01:17:45):
This is where we need Jeff Jarvis to jump in and tell us how does this work in news reporting? Yeah,

Reed Albergotti (01:17:52):
You're allowed to just make it up from whole cloth. There's no law against that. Right?

Leo Laporte (01:17:57):
That's true too. Yeah.

Reed Albergotti (01:17:58):
I mean

Leo Laporte (01:17:59):
That's, disinformation is completely legal. Kids remember that the next time you use Twitter, this is Ian BOGOs, who has of course written many books in the Atlantic. My books were used to train meta's generative ai. Good. It can have my next one too. He has your same point of view, Reed, that this,

Reed Albergotti (01:18:17):
Oh, I didn't read this.

Leo Laporte (01:18:18):
Yeah, that's really good. He says, I support, even though, by the way, one of the issues and this muddies the water is that a lot of the text of these books came from a pirated source online. You can't really complain if chat G P T goes to the bookstore, buys Sarah Silverman's bed, wetter reads it, and then regurgitates the information. But you can, if chat G p t instead just goes to a pirated source and doesn't even buy, even buy the

Reed Albergotti (01:18:48):
Book, use my book. But at least buy

Leo Laporte (01:18:49):
The book. Buy a copy, buy a copy. He says, Boggo says Yesterday when I put my name into the database books, the books three database that was used to train Meta's, l l m, three of the 10 books I've authored appeared how exciting. He writes, I joined the ranks of the aggrieved, but then despite some effort, I found myself disappointingly aggrieved. He says. Says, this is part of the internet, this is the culture. And it's good because just as you said, we're helping technology take a great leap forward.

Denise Howell (01:19:29):
Well, can I just say that as a tech lawyer, it's fun to be talking about copyright again.

Reed Albergotti (01:19:35):
Oh

Leo Laporte (01:19:35):
God, it's never

Reed Albergotti (01:19:36):
Ending.

Leo Laporte (01:19:37):
What do you think about the US

Denise Howell (01:19:38):
Hiring music in videos was quite a long time ago. So this

Leo Laporte (01:19:42):
Is,

Denise Howell (01:19:43):
It's been a while since copyright has been a hot button issue.

Leo Laporte (01:19:46):
I want a sidebar because the US Patent and Trademark Office has, and I don't really understand it somehow done something that they're going to merge copyright and trademark. Have you heard about this?

Reed Albergotti (01:20:00):
No.

Denise Howell (01:20:00):
That's interesting. Merging copyright and trademark.

Leo Laporte (01:20:05):
Yeah,

Denise Howell (01:20:06):
People are complaining about this. They do have distinct offices that administer both. So maybe what they would do is merge the administrative side. I don't know. I will look into that. Thank you for highlighting it.

Leo Laporte (01:20:20):
Yeah, I'm trying to find the news story now and I can't, of course, but people were upset. But yeah, I mean maybe it's just an administrative detail and not,

Denise Howell (01:20:32):
That would be my guess. But again, I

Leo Laporte (01:20:34):
Haven't looked

Denise Howell (01:20:34):
This at all a

Leo Laporte (01:20:35):
Of the two things. Alright, well

Denise Howell (01:20:37):
The

Leo Laporte (01:20:37):
Next ad break, you'll have a minute to look.

Denise Howell (01:20:40):
I'll do that. Thank you. Yes,

Leo Laporte (01:20:42):
I do

Denise Howell (01:20:42):
Have some

Leo Laporte (01:20:43):
Go ahead.

Denise Howell (01:20:44):
I should point out though, that Tech Dino has been noting in chat that Ant Pruitt has been talking a lot about photo manipulation and copyright here on the network. So

Leo Laporte (01:20:55):
See

Denise Howell (01:20:56):
Also Ant,

Leo Laporte (01:20:57):
There is a very famous case, the Andy Warhol estate and the owners of the Prince Trademark, and I believe, let me see, the judgment came down. Kathy Ellis had written an amicus brief for it for the Supreme Court case. Lemme just see. It's my memory, but I don't want to say it. It might be wrong. So let me just, the Supreme Court, yes. Ruled against Andy Warhol. So there was a photographer who created a famous image of Prince, which Andy Warhol then used to make this painting. And it's recognizably that from the photograph the photographer sued. This was earlier this year, and on Thursday the Supreme Court ruled Thursday, Thursday, May 18th, that Thursday the Supreme Court ruled that Andy Warhol had infringed on the photographer's copyright. Elena Kagan wrote the dissent, arguing the opinion will stifle creativity of every sort. That was a very interesting case. And by the way, Kathy was very much in favor of the Andy Warhol estate and against the photographer. But this is why this is very much in the see copyright's back, Denise. Good news.

Denise Howell (01:22:19):
Yep. It never went away.

Leo Laporte (01:22:20):
It never went away. I'm sorry.

Denise Howell (01:22:22):
There were a lot of trolls trolling for a while.

Leo Laporte (01:22:25):
Reed, you had this story, and this is an example of AI being used in a very interesting way. You remember, you may remember that Pompeii was hit by a pretty big volcano some years ago. I dunno, a couple thousand years ago. 79, we no longer say ad, we say CE in the Christian era.

Denise Howell (01:22:51):
C, yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:22:51):
Ce and among a lot of other things, the entire city buried in mud and volcanic ash, among other things, 1800 papyrus scrolls were by the eruption. The scrolls were discovered in 17 2, 17 52 in a Pompe villa owned by Julius brother-in-law, not the good brother-in-law, the one that was kind of the skin. Anyway, anyway, they scrolls, so they're all rolled up and if you try to open it up, it falls apart and cannot be read. Will you pick up the story at this point, Reid?

Reed Albergotti (01:23:34):
Yeah, I mean, we wrote about this in March actually, and then it sort of, so basically Nat Friedman, who was the c e o of GitHub, actually to bring it back to the previous conversation, he thought he's really into this stuff, into Roman history. And he heard about this and the fact that there were some scientists who were actually trying to scan these scrolls using a particle accelerator that can X-ray to such detail that they can actually see the layers of these burnt scrolls

Leo Laporte (01:24:13):
Without scrolling 'em scrolls. It can see

Reed Albergotti (01:24:15):
Through without scrolling them, the

Leo Laporte (01:24:16):
Pap, right?

Reed Albergotti (01:24:18):
So there's this data, but you couldn't actually read anything on the scrolls. You could just see the layers. And so Freeman thought, wow, this would actually be kind of a good machine learning task. So he created a contest where he offered, initially it was $150,000 grand prize with some other minor prizes. Then it went up to, I think it was like 700,000 I think is the grand prize now. He got some more people in on it. And all these scientists kind of, well, not scientists, they're the guy who actually ultimately solved this was a SpaceX intern,

Leo Laporte (01:24:56):
21 year old kid.

Reed Albergotti (01:24:59):
I mean, people who just know a lot about machine learning, they go to work on this in their spare time and stay up late trying to solve the problem and win the money. And it was really cool because there was one person noticed, they were just looking at these images and notice this kind of weird pattern that they called a crackle. And he thought, I wonder if that's actually the ink on the paper? And he sort of put that out there into the ether and other people picked up on it and started running machine learning algorithms to try to figure out whether this crackle was actually a pattern was the ink. And it turned out it was. And so there were two other people who won these prizes and they actually were able to read some words. I think the word was Purple.

Leo Laporte (01:25:45):
Purple or

Reed Albergotti (01:25:46):
Something. And basically they've created a roadmap now to read all of these scrolls and eventually, presumably we'll have a massive increase in the amount of these ancient texts, which are things like, it could be like Aristotle, like original works of Aristotle. And which is really interesting because it's been translated and things have been lost in translation over the years. So I thought it was just a really cool story about the power of this technology. And

Leo Laporte (01:26:19):
Here's what the scrolls look like. I mean, they really don't look like you could ever read anything from the scroll. It just looks like a piece of burnt wood. The word that Luke Ferrier, he won $40,000 for it discovered was Por Ferris, which is purple. And it's actually thought this far from the works of Aristotle. This is actually probably a bill of some kind for purple cloth. But anyway,

Reed Albergotti (01:26:48):
There's 1800 of them. This is just

Leo Laporte (01:26:50):
One. This is just one. And they're

Reed Albergotti (01:26:51):
Really, really long.

Leo Laporte (01:26:53):
If they all turn out to be Bills, it'll be kind of well, oh, well, nevermind. Think

Reed Albergotti (01:26:57):
The world's oldest expense report. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:26:59):
Exactly. And then I bought some purple cloth for my wife and brought it home. The grand prize is $700,000. I guess that will be for reading what the whole one or

Reed Albergotti (01:27:14):
Yeah, I think that's like a whole scroll or

Leo Laporte (01:27:17):
Something like that.

Reed Albergotti (01:27:17):
That's

Leo Laporte (01:27:18):
Pretty amazing. And the tweet is really great. This is Nat Friedman former GitHub, c e o, and his tweet is just two eyeballs with wide open next to Luke Ferer. The guy who figured out this is Por Ferris. And I, by the way, I recognize the Greek pie there, right? There's an ada. Oh, and also I should correct myself because the reason we got rid of a ad is because it's too religious. So CE does not stand for Christian era. I'm an idiot. It's common era. Common

Reed Albergotti (01:27:55):
Era.

Leo Laporte (01:27:56):
Yeah, I should have known that. That's the secular version of ad. See Christian era works for me, right? And B c E before Christian era. See, that works for me, but I guess I've all along misinterpreted it. Congratulations to the brilliant little SpaceX little, he's not that little. He's 21 SpaceX intern. I think of him as little Luke Ferrier for figuring this out. He's a computer science student and an intern at SpaceX who did this, I guess in his spare time, it looks like using a webcam and his smartphone. I don't know what, but anyway, pretty cool.

Denise Howell (01:28:38):
It's a cool, did you catch the minutiae that they think the scrolls were found in the house of Julius Caesar's in-laws?

Leo Laporte (01:28:46):
Yes. Yeah, the bad brother-in-law,

Reed Albergotti (01:28:47):
In-law.

Leo Laporte (01:28:48):
Not the good one, the bad one. The one Julius said, can you go down to Pompe and stay there because

Denise Howell (01:28:54):
Your drinking

Leo Laporte (01:28:54):
Is out of control. I like when you look at the tweet, oh, I close it already. One of the responses was, gosh, captures have gotten really hard. Yeah, that's true. That's a good point. That's a good point.

Reed Albergotti (01:29:12):
What I love about this, I just love the story because it shows how if you just take the real world, like physical objects and you find a way to sort of break them down and represent them in code, and then the whole world can kind of just go to town and look at this stuff, just kind of amazing things happen. And I think that's happening in biology now with just, it's gone way beyond just D n A. I mean, we're looking at AI and drug discovery and things like that just getting started. And I think it's just, this kind of illustrates it, but it kind of makes you sort of optimistic for the future. As long as the machines don't come and kill us, I think it's going to be really cool.

Leo Laporte (01:29:58):
Maybe I'm wrong, and if I am, it'll be the historic blunder. I don't think the machines are dangerous. I think people are giving them way too much credit. I think in some ways for Sam Altman, the c e o of OpenAI saying, oh, the existential threat of ai, it makes it sound like they're better than they really are. And then you ask it to tell you a fairytale about Kevin McCarthy and you realize it's a party trick. Except in very specific uses like this, scanning the Herculean documents, there is some value to ai. But once I got chat G P T talking to me, I just wanted to say, shut up. It's gobbledygook.

Denise Howell (01:30:47):
And do you want to tell it how to pronounce kindergarten?

Leo Laporte (01:30:50):
Yeah, that's another thing.

Reed Albergotti (01:30:52):
Kinder. Kinder. What did it say?

Leo Laporte (01:30:54):
Kinder Good.

Lou Maresca (01:30:55):
Yes thing. That's a point. It's the hard thing. Do explain to people though, Leah, we have a lot of problems trying to explain to people that these are just the parlor tricks. And what Reed is saying is where the really value comes is finding the needle in the haystack that AI can do and that machine learning can do. And it really is super powerful once you see these examples.

Leo Laporte (01:31:14):
Of course, Microsoft has put ai, now they had a big announcement that with copilot is going to be part of Windows. You're going to have AI in every Microsoft product, including yours, Microsoft office

Lou Maresca (01:31:27):
Built right in Excel.

Leo Laporte (01:31:28):
And the trick is to use it properly. I mean, if you're a college kid and you don't want to write that paper and you get AI to write a paper, woe to you because it's going to be a mediocre paper. It'll sound good as long as you don't make it say kindergarten. But it won't, won't be insightful because it doesn't know what it's saying. It's just stringing words together.

Denise Howell (01:31:52):
No, but it'll help you do the research.

Leo Laporte (01:31:54):
But exactly, if you want a prompt to stimulate a research or you want to analyze a hundred documents and say, give me the highlights, it can be very useful. So knowing how to use it and where to use it, I think makes a lot of sense. I'm not, are you educating people in that regard, Lou? I mean, is that,

Lou Maresca (01:32:17):
Yeah, I tried mean. Obviously they see a lot of the social posts that people are trying to say that the machines are coming, but

Leo Laporte (01:32:25):
Yeah, they're not

Lou Maresca (01:32:26):
Coming. I think the reality is they're not coming. When I give examples of, Hey, this is how you uncover something really complex that you didn't know how to do before and it's going to show you how to do it and even walk you through it, that's where the power lies. Use it like that and you'll be fine. And like Denise said, research in general, a lot of these models have plugins now that you can just plug in direct research databases into them so that you're getting actual factual data. And like you said, you can rife through all that data in just seconds is really where the power is. And I think that's when people come around is when they start to see that.

Leo Laporte (01:33:00):
Yeah,

Denise Howell (01:33:01):
We're going to see some really stupid headlines out there of, there's already the lawyer that didn't filed an AI generated brief, but

Leo Laporte (01:33:12):
That's not the AI's fault

Denise Howell (01:33:13):
Immediately called on the That's not at all.

Leo Laporte (01:33:15):
He's an idiot.

Denise Howell (01:33:16):
Exactly. And you're going to see, again, students that turn in ridiculous papers and things like that. We need to get sophisticated enough to realize what these things can do and what they can't do and how they can be useful and how they have to be DoubleCheck.

Leo Laporte (01:33:31):
Sam Altman has described a g I, artificial general intelligence. That's the thing we haven't achieved yet, by the way, but Sam thinks we're practically there. He says it's quote, the equivalent of a median human that you could hire as a coworker, not your best coworker, but not your worst. Just kind of in the middle there.

Denise Howell (01:33:56):
It's mechanical Turk,

Leo Laporte (01:33:57):
It's mechanical Turk. Right. And actually people have done tests. It does beat Amazon's mechanical Turk, which uses humans in some tasks. It's very good and faster. Louise Makis had a little bit of a scoop over at SEMA four. We love Louise Chat. G B T creator OpenAI has quietly revised the core values listed on its website, putting a greater emphasis on the development of a g I. The six previously listed six core values for its employees, and she used the internet archive for this was audacious, thoughtful, unpretentious, impact driven, collaborative, and growth oriented. That's for employees because obviously unpretentious is not chat. G P T. The AI is very pretentious, audacious, thoughtful. These are humans. It's trying to be thoughtful about politicians. These are human things. The list now has only five values, and number one is a g I focus. Anything that doesn't help with that is out of scope according to the open AI website. So instead of audacious, thoughtful, and pretentious, impact-driven, collaborative and growth oriented, now OpenAI is looking for people with a G I focus intense, scrappy scale and makes something people love and team spirit well, it's just like they completely rewrote the book here. I don't know if it's meaningful.

Lou Maresca (01:35:41):
Are they taking as face value or, because obviously, like I said, I think it's a marketing technique. Personally, every researcher I've ever talked to, they said we're 30 years away.

Leo Laporte (01:35:49):
Yeah, a g i. If that's one of the things we've learned with ai, we've gone through so many AI winners, is that the easiest things we get done, the easy things are hard and the hard things are easy, which is, I think, I can't remember who said that, but I think it was in the context of ai. It's that last 1% that makes the difference between just a clever machine and a human is almost impossible. In fact, I doubt we'll ever get a g I personally, but that's just my,

Reed Albergotti (01:36:26):
That was more of X paradox, right? That's what you were thinking of.

Leo Laporte (01:36:28):
Yes. Thank you. Wow. Was that right on the tip of your tongue?

Reed Albergotti (01:36:33):
I love that. I've always loved that.

Leo Laporte (01:36:36):
It's a great saying.

Reed Albergotti (01:36:39):
I think that Louise's great scoop on this and noticing this change. It's interesting that I, and I do think it's kind of marketing, but the way I look at it is there are all these new AI models that are getting closer and closer to the performance of GT four. They're not there, but they're getting closer and they're able to do it with smaller and smaller models, which means faster, less expensive, they can run locally. Microsoft has even built some of these things that are based on just trained on just textbooks and things. They're much more sort of coherent, less prone to hallucinations. But if OpenAI wants, they need to stay ahead. So the only way OpenAI makes sense as a company is if it keeps building just more powerful models that just get better and better and stay ahead of everyone. That's kind of how I see it. So if you have a G I as your North star, even if it's 30 years away, that's kind of like saying we are going to just continue to push the envelope of this technology.

Leo Laporte (01:37:46):
This is just for complete completion. MO'S Paradox was created by Hans Movic, who was a robotics researcher. He wrote in 1988. It's comparatively easy to make computers. This is, by the way, very reassuring. So listen carefully. It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests. By the way, I think chat G P T just scored like, what was it, 150 something in an intelligence test or playing checkers. But it's difficult or impossible to give 'em the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility, and it ended up being boiled down to exactly that. The easy things, the hard things are easy and the easy things are hard. Now. This was in the context of robotics, but applies I think completely to AI as well, and it should reassure us that we're not going to be replaced anytime soon. There's also the issue of energy use, and I think it's fine for open AI to say, yeah, we're going to break new, but at some point this becomes cost prohibitive. Microsoft put out a study that said that it costs them, what was it, $50 more than they're charging for the AI search results that they're offering people in copilot.

Reed Albergotti (01:39:00):
Yeah, I could definitely tell you. Everything runs on Azure and they have the data.

Leo Laporte (01:39:03):
They know it's just

Reed Albergotti (01:39:04):
Very expensive. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:39:05):
This from data centered dynamics.com, AI data centers could use more electricity than the Netherlands by 2027.

Denise Howell (01:39:14):
Well, isn't that why we need a G I, right? Is because this is all

Leo Laporte (01:39:18):
Sort of solve that, figure that out

Denise Howell (01:39:20):
Circular solve that, figure that out, figure everything out. I don't know. I don't know where I come down on. You said Dun don a g i, meaning is it ominous and are we hesitant about bringing it into fruition? And I don't know where I come down on that. I think that it's inevitable and it's one of those things where you don't want just the bond villains to have it.

Leo Laporte (01:39:50):
Well, and to be completely fair, I did say I wanted Scarlet Johansen's brain in my phone, so maybe I'm not, that's a G I, right? The Scarlet Johanssen character in her was definitely a G I,

Reed Albergotti (01:40:06):
But she got bored and left. I like that ending better than the Terminator. It's like, yeah, we're just

Denise Howell (01:40:11):
Bored with you.

Leo Laporte (01:40:13):
No, actually, did

Reed Albergotti (01:40:13):
You see Leo?

Leo Laporte (01:40:14):
Somebody was saying that's a happy ending, Leo. They did not decide to rule us. They just went off.

Reed Albergotti (01:40:20):
Did you see Leo though on the PowerPoint? Did you see Microsoft was, they put out a job posting for a nuclear, I think it was modular nuclear power manager.

Leo Laporte (01:40:31):
Of course, if you're going to look at cryptocurrency was really under the microscope because of its incredible use of energy. Ethereum kind of solved the problem by moving from proof of work to proof of stake. And I don't think people worry so much about, although it still is a lot of energy, but AI is using vast amounts of energy. Do you think there is an equivalent moving from proof of work to proof of stake for ai? Luke, can we make these machines more power efficient?

Lou Maresca (01:41:06):
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I think RE would saying you specialize each one of these things

Leo Laporte (01:41:12):
And you give them a nuclear power plant

Lou Maresca (01:41:14):
And you give them a nuclear power, God. But I think a lot of these new technologies, a lot of the new processors like the npu and those are specialized. They're more power efficient

Leo Laporte (01:41:25):
And

Lou Maresca (01:41:25):
More specialized on the computation than things that GPUs are. And so I think that it's going to push technology advancement forward, and I think it definitely will be more power efficient over time.

Leo Laporte (01:41:37):
I do feel like, but

Lou Maresca (01:41:38):
If you want to get to

Reed Albergotti (01:41:39):
A G

Denise Howell (01:41:39):
I,

Reed Albergotti (01:41:40):
You need nuclear,

Leo Laporte (01:41:41):
Probably nuclear fusion or something. We were just talking about Voyager, which is in a few years, we'll have reached its 50th year still in operation. Nobody thought it would last this long. Well, beyond the solar system of Voyager one and two, they're powered by a little plutonium nuclear reactor. Well, it's not quite so sophisticated, it's just generating heat, which then is used as power, but it's kind of the same thing. I think now we'd put a solar panel on the thing, but Voyager is still going strong, so maybe that's the key. Vij

Denise Howell (01:42:17):
Ger

Leo Laporte (01:42:18):
Vi,

Denise Howell (01:42:19):
I got that reference.

Leo Laporte (01:42:23):
I looked it up. I thought, wow, we're almost at 50 years on Voyager two. It was launched in 77, but the Ger in Star Trek was actually supposedly Voyager seven, which we never got to Voyager seven. And it was launched I think in the nineties. But remember

Denise Howell (01:42:43):
Rek

Leo Laporte (01:42:43):
Was much earlier. Yeah.

Denise Howell (01:42:45):
Speaking of unleashing AI on nuclear power or vice versa, have you guys seen that Chernobyl miniseries that was made in 2019? So good.

Leo Laporte (01:42:55):
So good.

Denise Howell (01:42:56):
Oh, oh my God. I'm in the middle of it. It's terrifying me.

Leo Laporte (01:43:00):
Yeah,

Denise Howell (01:43:01):
Well-written,

Leo Laporte (01:43:02):
Well-acted, acted.

Denise Howell (01:43:03):
I

Leo Laporte (01:43:04):
Think that same team should be working with Reed's, fantastic book, available bookstores everywhere. Wheelman all about the story of Lance Armstrong. That could be such a good Chernobyl, like eight parter on H B O. I'm just saying

Denise Howell (01:43:20):
Less terrifying,

Leo Laporte (01:43:21):
But yeah, no, Chernobyl was good. You just watching that now? Oh, so good.

Denise Howell (01:43:25):
Yeah, no, I just stumbled on it on H B O and started watching and yeah, we have a former power plant right down the road here in SoCal San Andre that

Leo Laporte (01:43:37):
Actually

Denise Howell (01:43:38):
Got shut down because it had issues.

Leo Laporte (01:43:41):
I remember sending off their

Denise Howell (01:43:42):
Spot. I don't think they evacuated anybody, but they gave people iodine tablets and things, so it was

Leo Laporte (01:43:48):
A serious thing when that happen in the Chernobyl, right, they get the iodine tablets

Denise Howell (01:43:51):
Ready.

Leo Laporte (01:43:51):
Yeah. I did not chain myself to the fence, but I definitely participated in the protests against, it was either ano Fre, it was one of the California nuclear plants, and now I'm told that I was wrong, that if we had just had those nuclear power plants, we wouldn't have the climate crisis we're in because we could have replaced fossil fuels with nuclear power. A lot of people think that was a good idea, but as a former hippie,

Reed Albergotti (01:44:18):
Yeah, but we had to shut this one down.

Leo Laporte (01:44:20):
I know. I go Chernobyl, three Mile Island ano freight. You really think this is such a, you know what they say? Oh no, we got better technology now. Oh, it's so much better now. You would never have any problems with it now.

Reed Albergotti (01:44:34):
Well, fusion reactors do. I mean, the concepts gets, it doesn't have that problem. When

Leo Laporte (01:44:39):
You get a fusion reactor, I'll be the first one in line. That's a good idea. It just makes water. What could possibly, that's not a problem.

Reed Albergotti (01:44:50):
Well, it doesn't lead to a lot of sile material and it doesn't have the chain reactions that fission reactors have. No, I think it's good. And Microsoft, again, they've bought, they've agreed to purchase fusion power from Healon, which is Sam Altman's.

Leo Laporte (01:45:10):
They put a lot of money into it, didn't they? Yeah. I too agree. I will purchase fusion power the minute it's available. You have my word. We actually, a couple of weeks ago, there was a big leap forward with fusion reactors. They were able to create a, they say a energy using less energy. This is the problem with current fusion reactors, unless you're the sun, that's how the sun works. But absent intense gravitational forces, it takes more energy in to get the amount of energy out if they can only get it to more energy out than energy in. And cold fusion, of course, is the holy grail, but they have cooler fusion. It's not cold yet, but cooler fusion, and here's a story from a couple of weeks ago that I don't understand, but it's relevant. Pivotal discovery signals huge leap forward in fusion energy reactor progress. They have found a way to mitigate damaging runaway electrons created by disruptions in the Tomac fusion devices. Okay,

Reed Albergotti (01:46:17):
Well, cold fusion is a fantasy that's not real, but

Leo Laporte (01:46:21):
Cooler. Cooler fusion.

Reed Albergotti (01:46:23):
Well, it's extremely hot, but actually in DeepMind DeepMind, which they've done, DeepMind, which is now owned by Google and alpha Fold, if you're familiar with that. They've made these huge breakthroughs. They have a bunch of fusion research, which is really interesting, and they're using AI to basically direct the particles in real time. So essentially the reactor won't get as hot because they're manually moving the particles around in an extremely fast rate using ai. It's a wild paper, A couple of papers if you want to check 'em out.

Leo Laporte (01:47:03):
Yeah, look, that could solve the whole problem if you create fusion reactors and I'm all for it. Like I said, I'll be the first in line. I'm not going to give them a billion dollars like Microsoft did, but I'll give him

Denise Howell (01:47:18):
A, I've kind of pictured you with a fluxx capacitor in the back of your car.

Leo Laporte (01:47:23):
I want, what was it, Mr. Fusion, where you just throw whatever garbage

Reed Albergotti (01:47:27):
Fusion. Yeah, whatever garbage banana peel he puts the banana peel in

Leo Laporte (01:47:30):
It. Yes, they put it in. That's the trick. That's what we really need.

Reed Albergotti (01:47:35):
That's going to power

Leo Laporte (01:47:35):
The, solves the garbage crisis and

Reed Albergotti (01:47:37):
The data centers

Leo Laporte (01:47:38):
Unlimited fusion. Yeah. Let's take a little break. Great panel. Having fun. You guys rock lots more stories to come in a second, but first I want to tell you about Miro, our sponsor, M I R O, the online workspace for innovation. When Google killed the Jamboard, and if you went out and bought that $5,000 Jamboard, you might be a little miffed about that. They did say, well, don't worry because you could use Miro instead. And instead of being $5,000, I'm going to get you first three boards for free. How about that Now, now we're cooking. Miro is one incredible visual place that brings all your innovative work together no matter where you're located. That solves a real problem these days. We got teams all over the world, different time zones, different locations, MI iss the solution. It's packed with the right things to be your dream products home base.

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You can leave a recording with your thoughts, leave it on the board. You don't have to schedule another meeting. You don't have to get up early to see, and this is a great way of bringing everybody onto the board at the same time. Look, I can go on and on. The best way to do this is try it for yourself. Your first three boards are free. Start working better at miro.com/podcast. Please use that address. I want them to know you saw it here, m I R o miro.com/podcast. It's a revolution in the way you work, and it's a lot easier to use than that $5,000 Google Jamboard. It's just ironic, but they're telling everybody use Miro, so that should give you some idea of what a great product. It's Miro. Thank you Miro, for your support. It's funny, I just signed on to TikTok so I could show that little TikTok you were giving us, Denise, and it said, okay, good. Now you got a pass key. So TikTok is using Sies now. Google has just said Sies will be the default sign-in method for all users. Honestly, I'm not convinced Paske is the revolution that people have said. I mean, I hate passwords. I love the idea of getting rid of them. Microsoft has a very nice solution that's not keys with this Microsoft authenticator.

Denise Howell (01:51:44):
Is this a PA key? This thing?

Leo Laporte (01:51:47):
What is that?

Denise Howell (01:51:49):
It's a security key. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:51:51):
I don't know. It looks like a spatula. Oh yeah. Okay. Is that like a UBI key? It's like a YubiKey. So YubiKey can be keys, but they don't,

Denise Howell (01:52:01):
And

Leo Laporte (01:52:01):
Google will label it. For instance, if I log out a Google, it'll say, log with a PA key, and one of the things can be mine looks a little smaller than yours, I don't know, is this little Google YubiKey? This is a type C YubiKey, but I think in the most cases, this is your PA key. The idea is your phone, which has on most good modern phones, has hardware. Secure enclaves can store the PA key, and then when you go to a site like TikTok, it pokes up a QR code, which you scan with your phone. Your phone says, yeah, does face ID or a thumbprint, and then says, yeah, that's Leo. Let him in, and no password has been involved. I'm hoping

Denise Howell (01:52:42):
I like it. I'm wondering how TV's N F L audience is going to receive it.

Leo Laporte (01:52:50):
What you mean is normal people. Yes,

Denise Howell (01:52:52):
Normal people, yes. Normal people you described about,

Leo Laporte (01:52:56):
Yeah.

Denise Howell (01:52:56):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:52:57):
Instead of your security spatula, normal people will just say like your dog's name and your birthday on every site, and while we know that's insecure, I don't know about you, but in my life there are plenty of normal people who I will say again and again, use, why aren't you using a password manager? Why aren't you using a Yuba key? And no, I think that's

Lou Maresca (01:53:19):
Why Apple's is more significant though, because they're going to hopefully guide consumers into the direction of using it by default in a much more simpler way. I hope that that's really what I'm hoping for when Apple implementing it. Yeah.

Denise Howell (01:53:33):
Yeah. Hope so.

Leo Laporte (01:53:36):
I like your security spatula though. I think that's

Lou Maresca (01:53:44):
Really every other conversation I have with my mom is about trying to get her to use a password manager. It's like, I

Denise Howell (01:53:51):
Know

Leo Laporte (01:53:52):
Frankly, if I could get my mom to just use a notebook that says passwords on it and right, that would be better than what she's doing, but most people are just using the same password over and over again. That's why at least that's what we're told, the 23 and me when it was, they recently revealed that bad guys had gotten a huge amount of information out of the 23 and me. That's the genetic database former sponsor too, and they have my spit hackers. They might have yours as well,

Lou Maresca (01:54:27):
And now the

Denise Howell (01:54:27):
Hackers are, I tell all my relatives, do not spit for commercial purposes.

Leo Laporte (01:54:33):
Oh, no, I wish you told me. I wish, wish I were your bad brother-in-law living in Pompeii

(01:54:40):
Genetics firm 23 and me says, user, your data was stolen and how was it stolen? A credential stuffing attack, which is by the way, a very obscure way of saying password reuse the bad. Now, Steve Gibson said, this is not credible. Something doesn't make sense here. 23 and me says, A threat actor got millions of records by using compromised passwords, so password, it comes from password reuse. They call it credential stuffing, which is not a good name. The idea is I use the same password on every site. Somebody gets that from one site and then tries it on all the other sites and it works, and then I got logged in. The threat actor released a million lines of data for Ashkenazi Jews, people with Ashkenazi blood on one of them. Now, on October 4th, the threat actor offered to sell data profiles in bulk for one to $10 per 23 in me account, depending on how many you buy, a hundred profiles for a thousand dollars.

(01:55:44):
A hundred thousand profiles for a hundred thousand dollars. Now, 23 me says, it's not genetic information, but it is the results of the genetic analysis, like these people are in this ethnic group, these people in this ethnic group, Golum, who's selling this online says, Golum, my precious says, tailored ethnic groupings, individualized datasets, pinpointed origin estimations, haplo group details, phenotype information, photographs, links to hundreds of potential relatives and most crucially, raw data profiles. I don't know if that's the genome or not, but that's what's being sold. Now, Steve says it couldn't possibly be credential stuffing. There's just too much data. They must have had a breach and are reluctant to reveal it or don't know full names. Usernames. I want you to get on this read, do your thing, get some sources, go visit somebody in a parking garage and get the facts, profile, photos, sex, date of birth, genetic ancestry, results, geographic location. What do you think? Seriously?

Denise Howell (01:57:06):
Why do people give this information to private

Leo Laporte (01:57:09):
Companies? I did it because I want to know if I have any public, any Ashkenazi Jew or Native American or whatever. I

Denise Howell (01:57:18):
Won't even do my dog.

Reed Albergotti (01:57:21):
I'm a fool. I guess.

Leo Laporte (01:57:22):
Not only did I do it, I then got my mom and my sister and my daughter, everybody in my family to do it, and this is, by the way, this was how the breach they say happened. Then you can have all your relatives interlinked so that if they get in one person's account, then they get all their relatives.

Denise Howell (01:57:42):
I mean, I think there would be an amazing market for a service to do this on the medical side and provide you in a very secure, guaranteed secured format with the information that you were after Leo, but just to go to some startup and give them all your data and your family data. I'm sorry. It's just not,

Reed Albergotti (01:58:09):
It's how they caught that murderer, remember?

Denise Howell (01:58:11):
Yeah, that's right. It's very cute, and it's not only how they caught that murderer. It's how other people get accused of murders because D n A, that looks like theirs was found at the crime scene, but it wasn't them.

Leo Laporte (01:58:25):
Well, not only the

Reed Albergotti (01:58:26):
Credential stuffing thing makes sense, right, because I'm not an expert on this, but I mean presumably if it was credential stuffing, they would have to have credential stuffed all of those people individually. They all would've had to used the same password. I think that's probably the point, right?

Leo Laporte (01:58:46):
Yeah. I guess

Reed Albergotti (01:58:47):
It was probably a single point of failure versus many.

Leo Laporte (01:58:53):
Not only Denise, you can spank me some more because not only did I do 23 and me, I'm sorry. I did, I did several of them. I've been spitting in tubes a lot. Most recently we had George Church, who's the father of modern genomics. He's the guy who's creating a mastodon, by the way. That's another subject for discussion. They're taking the extinct. They've got gene samples from the extinct mastodon, and they're cross-breeding them with elephants because they want to bring the mastodon back. They're doing de-extinction with the mastodon so that they can recreate the step biome up in the north and Siberia and northern Canada because it's good for something. It's good. We need him, so he has then

Denise Howell (01:59:42):
What could possibly go wrong?

Leo Laporte (01:59:46):
I feel like life finds

Reed Albergotti (01:59:48):
Away.

Leo Laporte (01:59:49):
Yeah, I should be channeling Jurassic Park at this point. Doesn't mean you could, doesn't mean you shouldn't. So George has something called Nebula Genomics, where they do the, unlike 23 of me, where it's just a sample. They did my entire genome. In fact, I can download my entire genome at several gigabytes online and then, yeah, and also it has all my traits and my ancestry. Actually, you can get your microbiome based on, because you sent 'em spit. They also analyze your spit and tell you what little bugs were in your spit,

Denise Howell (02:00:32):
Which is all incredibly valuable, and I don't know how much of that kind of information I personally want to know about myself, but as I know

Leo Laporte (02:00:41):
Over, it's how useful. It's probably more useful,

Denise Howell (02:00:43):
Relevant

Leo Laporte (02:00:45):
I have,

Denise Howell (02:00:45):
But God, it's got to be secure if you're going to do that.

Leo Laporte (02:00:48):
Yeah. They have it all. I mean, they have my, I for instance, am in the 95th percentile. I have a high genetic predisposition to pernicious anemia and whatever sclerosing cholangitis is, so you look at this, they actually say, before you get to look at it, you may not be too happy to find this out.

Reed Albergotti (02:01:13):
You

Leo Laporte (02:01:13):
Sure you're ready? I said, yeah, I'm ready. Yeah,

Denise Howell (02:01:17):
But it's all

Leo Laporte (02:01:20):
A statist

Denise Howell (02:01:20):
Game too.

Leo Laporte (02:01:21):
It's a numbers

Denise Howell (02:01:21):
Game. Yes, exactly. It's not predictive necessarily,

Leo Laporte (02:01:24):
But what's interesting is they are getting better and better. For instance, I am in the 67th percentile above average genetic predisposition to childlessness, but that ship has sailed. I have two children, so obviously that was wrong. Right?

Reed Albergotti (02:01:44):
Or you

Denise Howell (02:01:44):
Beat the odds.

Leo Laporte (02:01:46):
I won. I won the game. I beat the odds, and the theory behind this is that they have found genetic mark. What they do is they match your, and this is what 23 and me does too. They give you questionnaires and they give everybody questionnaires, and then they match their, what they call a phenotype. You have heart disease, you have kids, whatever, with their genes, and they think that, well, there's some statistical correlation between this childlessness and this genetic. They don't really know. It's not like how

Reed Albergotti (02:02:15):
Does the childlessness gene get passed down?

Leo Laporte (02:02:18):
Well, that's the thing. I mean, this is a study that discovered nine genetic variants.

Denise Howell (02:02:23):
That's a real chicken egg problem.

Leo Laporte (02:02:27):
Oh, I get what you're saying. Well, that's an interesting question. How did I get it? Not from some childless people, obviously, and you'll pardon me if I fall asleep. The 92nd percentile for narcolepsy, I know, and this is, but good news is carpal tunnel syndrome, very low irritable bowel syndrome, very low addiction. Pretty high. Pretty high. I don't know, but see, I don't even know what to do with this. You can download your entire genome and give it to other things. I could give it to, maybe I shouldn't open ai. I wonder what could possibly go wrong.

Reed Albergotti (02:03:16):
Why,

Leo Laporte (02:03:17):
Why not? If you could tell me something, I have a

Reed Albergotti (02:03:22):
Question though. Make

Denise Howell (02:03:23):
Up some interesting fairytales.

Reed Albergotti (02:03:26):
Who is the customer for this information and is it

Leo Laporte (02:03:29):
Besides Leo

Reed Albergotti (02:03:29):
More? No. For the buying it on the black market. Who's the customer and is it more detailed than what they can already get from data brokers?

Leo Laporte (02:03:40):
Right. I think those

Reed Albergotti (02:03:41):
Are my two questions.

Leo Laporte (02:03:42):
I mean, we don't know if this guy Goum is selling a lot of these, but Yeah. I mean, what would you do with it? It's not like you have a credit card. That's going to be more valuable.

Reed Albergotti (02:03:56):
Yeah. That you can already find so much out about people you don't really need either Least. I

Leo Laporte (02:04:00):
Got an email this week that starts, I am not a scammer. I'm not a scammer, but I would like to offer you credit card numbers for your use. I have a database of a thousand good credit card, but I'm not a scammer, just so you know.

Denise Howell (02:04:17):
No,

Reed Albergotti (02:04:18):
They were

Denise Howell (02:04:18):
Offering to provide real credit card numbers. That wasn't a scam. This

Leo Laporte (02:04:22):
Is not a test. This is real

Reed Albergotti (02:04:24):
Of people. Someone else scammed,

Leo Laporte (02:04:26):
I guess big victory,

Denise Howell (02:04:30):
Oh, sorry. I was just, before we leave, that U R L, cannon Bear pointed out that employment discrimination could be a concern with this if someone were secretly interested in,

Leo Laporte (02:04:40):
Well, it's interesting, know

Denise Howell (02:04:41):
Genetically pruning their workforce in some way.

Leo Laporte (02:04:44):
It's interesting that they offered

Denise Howell (02:04:46):
Data.

Leo Laporte (02:04:47):
The first thing they offered was people with an Ashkenazi Jew heritage.

Reed Albergotti (02:04:51):
Right?

Leo Laporte (02:04:51):
That's kind of telling.

Reed Albergotti (02:04:54):
I mean,

Leo Laporte (02:04:54):
I don't know. I still don't know what you'd do with it, but that doesn't bode well.

Reed Albergotti (02:05:00):
I'm sure companies would want to hire people with the childlessness gene, more maternity

Leo Laporte (02:05:05):
Leave somewhere there. In here. There are markers for hard worker doesn't sleep much. Things like that. They probably would be useful.

Reed Albergotti (02:05:14):
Yeah,

Denise Howell (02:05:15):
Seriously, infertility would be something you might want to have in

Reed Albergotti (02:05:20):
A

Denise Howell (02:05:21):
Worker at the state

Leo Laporte (02:05:22):
Of,

Denise Howell (02:05:23):
No matter how awful that sounds.

Leo Laporte (02:05:24):
And you're the first

Reed Albergotti (02:05:25):
One

Leo Laporte (02:05:26):
Reed to bring this up. How does that get passed?

Denise Howell (02:05:30):
Didn't.

Leo Laporte (02:05:34):
That's a really good point.

Denise Howell (02:05:37):
So

Reed Albergotti (02:05:37):
What you want is to upload someone else's. You find the person with the perfect genetic profile and just upload their genes in your name.

Leo Laporte (02:05:46):
You think I've invented something. When I interviewed George Church, who is the founder of this company, he said, the most valuable thing we can do with this is before you get involved with somebody matching to make sure that you don't have a gene that if the two of you had kids would have TSOC syndrome or a sickle cell anemia that you don't reproduce because you have a high probability of producing a genetic problem.

Denise Howell (02:06:17):
They do all that testing in utero now and that's a little late to get that information.

Reed Albergotti (02:06:23):
Wouldn't

Leo Laporte (02:06:23):
You like to know before you have kids, or even better, before you get involved with somebody, just say, Hey, could you spit into this and I'll decide whether I can date you later.

Reed Albergotti (02:06:33):
Doctors do do that now, when you're having kids, they do

Denise Howell (02:06:36):
All this

Reed Albergotti (02:06:36):
Genetic stuff. You don't have

Denise Howell (02:06:39):
To send it to

Reed Albergotti (02:06:40):
OpenAI for that.

Denise Howell (02:06:42):
No.

Leo Laporte (02:06:43):
Well, you don't even have to do anything because I remember when Jennifer and I were about to, we had just discovered we were pregnant with our first daughter, this was 31 years ago. We called the doctor to say, let's set up an appointment and the nurse says, how old are you? And she says, 38. She says, oh, high chance of genetic defects.

Reed Albergotti (02:07:02):
So

Leo Laporte (02:07:03):
Even there, we knew right off the bat, but we did the C V s. We did all different, the amniotic sampling, what are they? Corona villus sampling. We did all that stuff.

Denise Howell (02:07:13):
I can't believe you remember the names of all that testing. I went through all that testing and I don't remember

Leo Laporte (02:07:19):
Those things. It's chromatic as hell. Yeah,

Denise Howell (02:07:20):
And it's not great.

Leo Laporte (02:07:23):
The amniotics not so bad. They just stick a giant needle into your stomach. But the CVSs, they have to scrape stuff,

Denise Howell (02:07:32):
Move on,

Leo Laporte (02:07:33):
Move on. Leah GI is sampling. It's not for the weak of heart, but you know what? But then there's the issue. If you do that and they say, well, I got bad news for you, then what do you do? Do you go, I mean you have to think before you do the test. Would what would we do if it came up positive? That's a

Denise Howell (02:07:54):
Tough one, and every time you get the results, you're just sitting there going,

Leo Laporte (02:07:58):
What do we do?

Denise Howell (02:07:59):
Okay, bring it on.

Leo Laporte (02:08:00):
What do we do

Denise Howell (02:08:02):
Hope for the best?

Lou Maresca (02:08:02):
There's a lot of people that don't get this. We never got them. I have five kids.

Leo Laporte (02:08:06):
You have five kids and they're all good, right?

Lou Maresca (02:08:08):
They're all good, but we just never got the test because again, we didn't want to live in fear.

Leo Laporte (02:08:13):
Well, and you don't want to make that tough decision. I mean, I have many friends with Down syndrome children. They love them very much. Had they done an amniocentesis, maybe they would've, I don't know if they would've considered aborting or not, but that would be for them. In hindsight, a tragedy. So yeah, that's tricky. And that is in a way, genetic. We're already at the point of eugenics to some degree, right? We have been for some time. It's a really interesting, it's going to get interesting, but thank God I'm really happy that your kids are healthy and well.

Lou Maresca (02:08:56):
They are.

Leo Laporte (02:08:57):
How old is the oldest?

Lou Maresca (02:08:58):
He's 13.

Leo Laporte (02:09:00):
Okay, so you still have a few years before you're short. I do.

Lou Maresca (02:09:06):
So far so good though. So far. It

Leo Laporte (02:09:08):
Could all go south. It's

Lou Maresca (02:09:09):
Still good

Leo Laporte (02:09:11):
Not to say anything, but Abby was genetically perfect, but Well, let's put

Denise Howell (02:09:19):
It this way and I'll give you the opposite teenager experience. I was warned all along what a nightmare the teenage years were and they were,

Leo Laporte (02:09:26):
Your boy was a sweetie.

Denise Howell (02:09:27):
Lovely and wonderful. Yeah, a

Leo Laporte (02:09:29):
Sweet boy and he's a, by the way, I didn't thank you. I got your Christmas card and he's running the front there and what a beautiful

Denise Howell (02:09:38):
Picture. Oh, he hates that As a family, we're trying to decide what to do about Christmas cards. He's 19 now. He doesn't want to be the poster

Leo Laporte (02:09:45):
Child for a Christmas

Denise Howell (02:09:46):
Card anymore.

Leo Laporte (02:09:47):
He was right on the front and he is so adorable and cute. It really made that, that Christmas card was great. Well done.

Denise Howell (02:09:56):
Thank you.

Leo Laporte (02:09:56):
Yeah, I really liked it. Let's take a break. I don't want to talk about Christmas yet, although I we're almost there. Our show today brought to you by Duo. Oh yeah. Baby Duo Love the Duo. Duo protects against breaches with a leading access management suite. Strong multi-layered defenses and innovative capabilities that only allow legitimate users in and keep bad actors out for any organization concerned about being breached and everybody should be. If you need protection Fast Duo quickly enables strong security while also improving user productivity. Wait a minute, what enables strong security and improves user productivity? Yeah, it does both. Normally you think of this kind of security as making it harder for your users. No duo prevents unauthorized access with multilayered defenses and modern capabilities to thwart sophisticated malicious access attempts. But it's smart. It only increases authentication requirements in real time when the risk rises.

(02:11:00):
Duo enables high productivity by only requiring authentication when it's needed, which means it's easy to get in Swift, easy, secure access except if you're at risk. If the risk rises, then it gets a little harder and this way you get great productivity and top of the line security Duo provides an all-in-one solution for Strong M F A passwordless single sign-on and Trusted Endpoint verification Duo helps you implement zero trust principles by verifying users and their devices. So start your free trial, sign up today, css.co/twit. That's the best url, CS co because it's from Cisco css. Do co slash thank you duo for the job. You duo get it. I don't think they're going to use that as their slogan. Alright, let's check in. We have a little video to give you for all the things that happened this week on twit going out to Rhode Island next week for a week to visit. Mom and I have ordered a green screen so I could take a picture of Mom's basement and not actually be

(02:12:11):
In her basement, which will be

(02:12:13):
Nice. Do you think I should add this to my kit because I think it might be handy if I want to disappear. Oh yeah, that is. It's only 12, $11 and 12. It's a green gloves and a green hood and then I could be the invisible man previously on twit

Steve Gibson (02:12:28):
Security. Now 23 and me announced that the accounts of some of its users had been accessed through credential stuffing attacks. I don't believe them. Oh no. The more I've thought about this, the less it appears to pass the smell test. Oh no. Tech News Weekly I have in my hands and have for the last week the Pixel eight Pro Google's latest premium device. I'm going to give you a review and then we're going to talk with Michelle Ramon about some of the cool technology that makes Android 14 and this phone special, this

Leo Laporte (02:13:07):
In Google. We've played before the YouTube clip of you. I was young, Jeff was working at People Magazine, famous TV reviewer, and the folks at Moonlighting asked him to be on the show. Season three, very happy. Episode 12. There's our good man, somebody, Jarvis, look at that. Talking about Moonlighting. This is on Hulu 1985. I wasn't even married yet. I was married the next year and wasn't even born. It's amazing

(02:13:34):
Twit. I see no reason to fact check you. Go ahead.

(02:13:39):
Great week. We thank you all. Especially Club TWIT members who subsidize a lot of what we do. I don't know if you saw this story this week that W N Y C, which was one of the premier podcast networks and creators, is basically shutting down their podcast division and going back to radio, which is kind of sad because advertising has just disappeared for podcasting and we saw that as well. We've been seeing this as well, the Verges Hot Pod, death, sex and the future of W N Y C podcasts, the largest N P R member station in the country, tightening the purse strings and taking a big step back from podcast production. We said, we've seen this too, and I don't know what's going on. I wish I did. Advertisers and agencies both are kind of saying, yeah, podcasting. We don't, no, I think maybe they're going to YouTube and influencers or TikTok and influencers. I know my son who is a TikTok influencer, and by the way, he's going to be supporting me any minute now because he's able to get a lot of advertising, his cookbook

Denise Howell (02:14:54):
And feeding you.

Leo Laporte (02:14:56):
Yeah, I wish he were. I wish were, his cookbook is coming out for Christmas. He's got big brand deals. I keep seeing his ads on TikTok because it's TikTok chef and in Instagram and I think that that's probably what's happening is that advertisers are saying to themselves better to spend the money in a way. I think we're influencers, but we're old school influencers I guess in any event, a lot of podcast networks shutting down or cutting back, we're trying not to. And one of the things we're trying to do is supplement advertising support with

(02:15:34):
Listener support, kind of like public radio, but we call it Club Twit. $7 a month, you get ad free versions of all the shows. We don't need to sell ads on those shows because you're paying us for 'em. No tracking, no ads. You also get access to the Club Twit Discord. We put together a lot of events in there. Our escape room is coming up. All our hosts are going to try to get out and you can watch us flail. It'll be fun. We have shows that we don't put out anywhere else. Hands on Macintosh, hands on Windows, the Untitled Linux show. We also have the Twit plus feed and actually we had a good conversation before Twit began this afternoon that will probably be in the TWIT plus feed. So I think we give you a lot of value for the $7 and what we get is the support of the people who listen to the shows and for us, that could be the difference between life and death frankly. So I don't want to make you feel bad, but if you can support it, we'd sure appreciate it. Twit tv slash club twit, we would like to grow, not shrink. That seems like a better direction.

(02:16:45):
New world record in streaming. Get this. See, maybe we should be doing cricket matches. Disney has a Indian company called Hot Star. They stream among other things, cricket matches. They just broke the record all-time record of the most concurrent viewers on a stream 30, what was it? 35 million viewers on a stream at any one time. I remember when we were thrilled because we were able to stream an Apple event to 150,000 people. We thought that's unbelievable. If you think about it, every one of those people is on a server downloading content and then YouTube, we saw a million and Twitch we saw a million and a half. I mean give me some idea, Lou, of what that means. 35 million concurrent people watching this cricket match.

Lou Maresca (02:17:43):
Yeah, I mean that's the thing is if you put it into perspective, a single user uses up a certain amount of bandwidth. Imagine if you scale that out to that many users and of course there's about 300 million active, they say cricket players in the world.

Leo Laporte (02:17:59):
Cricket's, very popular.

Lou Maresca (02:18:01):
Yeah, so I mean Disney's definitely doing something right there. But I think another thing interesting is here is Disney streaming platform. The thing that you use in the backend is not very good. And so what they're using for Hot Star is a separate proprietary system really,

Leo Laporte (02:18:19):
And

Lou Maresca (02:18:19):
Maybe they can learn from.

Leo Laporte (02:18:20):
Interesting, I remember who was it when they decided to stream instead of broadcast broadcasting, you don't have the same constraints because you put up a tower and if one person or a million people watch it, it doesn't suck more electricity from the tower. It's the same. So we're used to massive viewing audiences for broadcast cable's, kind of more like the downloading, but they've got such a distributed network with head ends all over the neighborhood and so forth that they can do easily. 35 is not a big deal, but to all be hitting servers, that's a lot of internet traffic.

Lou Maresca (02:19:04):
Streaming's the hard one. Obviously content delivery is easy because like you said, they can co-locate that information region and put a different servers, but the live events is the hard thing to do.

Leo Laporte (02:19:14):
Yeah, I'm trying to remember who it was when they started streaming, they decided not to do it themselves even though they had a lot of experience doing it and they went to N B C. Maybe it was major league baseball. I can't remember who they. Anyway, in a related story, the largest DDoS attack in Google history this week mitigated by Google, I think, and again Lou, correct me if I'm wrong, the way you mitigate these attacks is basically just adding bandwidth. This was 398 requests, 3 98, sorry, million requests per second on this attack. Massive DDoS attack.

Lou Maresca (02:20:01):
Yeah, you also supposed to filter out those connections based off nefarious.

Leo Laporte (02:20:06):
It's hard. How're

Lou Maresca (02:20:07):
Actually connecting.

Leo Laporte (02:20:07):
It's hard because most of these attacks are replay attacks or amplification attacks that are coming from human, normal people, your co-oped computers and so forth. And so those IP addresses, there are many, many, many of them. It's not like it's all coming from one IP address, so it becomes difficult to block.

Lou Maresca (02:20:29):
All of 'em are botnet related and then they keep getting bigger and bigger. So I think more companies are going to have to get more sophisticated. That's why Google was able to stop 'em so fast is they have their cloud arbor systems that are able to detect and use machine learning to detect these types of connections and shut them down.

Leo Laporte (02:20:46):
Yeah, the two minute attack generated more requests than the total number of article views reported by Wikipedia in the entire month of September all coming in at the same time. And actually when this happens, I guess then the next step is to figure out how this botnet was created, what the tool is, what the malware is. You may remember Mirai the malware that affected routers, network routers. You may even remember the F B I telling people, Hey, could you reboot your routers everybody, because this botnet is a problem and if you rebooted the router, the malware was lost because it was living in ram. So I wonder who was behind this attack and what they were attacking. Google doesn't say what they were attacking. Maybe it was Google itself. I don't know.

(02:21:44):
So there's annals of bandwidth. Two stories. Kids are suing social media. Well, their parents, California state judges said, yeah, you can sue social media for addiction minors and parents suing Facebook and other technology giants because they said their kids got addicted state judge on Friday throughout in California throughout most of the claims. But she said she would allow the lawsuits to advance based on the claim that the companies were negligent. They knew the design of their platforms would maximize minors use and prove harmful. The plaintiffs argue social media is designed to be addictive causing depression, anxiety, self-harm, eating disorders, and suicide. More than 200 courts, 200 such suits have been filed over around the country according to Bloomberg, all being handled by two judges in California, one in state court in Los Angeles, the other in federal court in Oakland. This case comes out of, I'm not sure which court,

Denise Howell (02:22:57):
The Los Angeles, the state court.

Leo Laporte (02:22:59):
It's

Denise Howell (02:22:59):
This one. Yeah, judge

Leo Laporte (02:23:00):
Carolyn B. Cool.

Denise Howell (02:23:02):
Yeah, by the way, that's a great,

Leo Laporte (02:23:04):
Great name for a judge, Carolyn, be cool. Yeah,

Denise Howell (02:23:07):
It's

Leo Laporte (02:23:08):
Almost like Johnny B. Good. Yeah.

Denise Howell (02:23:11):
What do you think? Very, very early days for this case. This was just an opening salvo to see if the defendants could make it all go away early. They didn't manage to make that happen. It's interesting though, because other defendants in similar situations, this is all involving section two 30 and in other cases, other courts have held, yeah, we're not going to say that negligence claims are exempt from section two 30. We think that calling it negligence is just another way to say you are talking about the platform's publishing function and that is covered by the statute, which protects the firms from suit for certain things. So it's a little exceptional that that happened. But again, very early days of the case and they'll have lots more opportunities to try and get rid of it. And of course if they do, if a negligence claim manages to prevail here, there's the whole appellate process to go through and other cases have held otherwise.

Leo Laporte (02:24:24):
Yeah. Judge Kool specifically addressed that. She said, you're not protected either by free speech or Section two 30 because it's a negligence claim. She ruled that the social media companies could be held liable for the allegations because they're based on the fact that the design features of the platforms, not the content. So section two 30 and the First Amendment protect content, but she's saying the problem here is the design. The platforms are designed to be addictive and that's what caused the harm, so they're not protected by two 30 or the First Amendment. So very interesting.

Denise Howell (02:24:59):
Yeah, it'll be interesting to watch this one and of course there's so much sentiment against Section two 30 these days, both in the hands of our lawmakers and maybe we're seeing that come through more in the judicial branch as well, that people just on balance think that these large tech companies are getting too much protection.

Leo Laporte (02:25:23):
Action. Good news, California is not banning Skittles. Governor Newsom's been very active in the last week signing bills into law. One of the bills would've, some said ban Skittles, but no, it's banning red dye number three, bromate vegetable oil, potassium bromate and Propyl paraben, all of which have been linked to cancer and hyperactivity in children. Governor Newsom has approved the first in the nation legislation, by the way, when California with one 10th of the population says, Hey, we're not going to allow this. That kind of puts the manufacturers unnoticed. Maybe they're going to have to stop doing this. Of course, this stuff's been banned in the U forever. These additives have been found in thousands of food products, soft candies, baked goods, frostings and icings.

(02:26:13):
Newsom has been very busy. He also passed probably the strongest right to repair law in the nation. I love this headline From The Verge right to the Repair is now the law in California to the rest of the us. You're welcome because again, if you have the right to repair in California, you're probably going to have to give it to everybody. The law, which is matched by laws in New York, Colorado and Minnesota, a little tougher manufacturers have to make appropriate tools, available parts, software and documentation for seven years after production for devices priced above a hundred dollars. I wonder if that's seven years is the reason that Google said that they're going to offer security updates for seven years for their pixel phone. That's an interesting coincidence. This is the Eggman bill, and I think this is good. Now, weirdly, there were exemptions for game consoles, alarm systems and farm equipment, but hey, we're getting there bit to bit by bit.

Lou Maresca (02:27:22):
It's an interesting thing to think about from an operating cost perspective is that they've basically enforced Google's kind of set in the stage here with the seven years, but it's amazing how much it will cost them to do that.

Leo Laporte (02:27:36):
Is it expensive? It'll

Lou Maresca (02:27:37):
Come out with a new device every year? Oh yeah. It's very expensive to do this. And so companies like Microsoft has had to support older versions of Windows, and you'll notice slowly they're starting to deprecate older versions of Windows because it's just so expensive. Because if you think about how much of an engineer costs to maintain this, now you have a whole team of engineers to maintain security patches and form upgrades and hardware, firmware and all that. It is just a very expensive thing to do. And so not just the hardware side. I think the software is very expensive, so I'm curious to see how other companies will follow suit.

Leo Laporte (02:28:12):
That's actually

Denise Howell (02:28:13):
Seems like companies could open source some of that if they get to a point where it's just not profitable for them anymore to have Windows XP or whatever and just put the code out there and let the user base take care of what the engineers used to.

Lou Maresca (02:28:32):
It's interesting to say that I think XP is actually out there somewhere.

Denise Howell (02:28:35):
Yeah, it kind of rings a bell.

Leo Laporte (02:28:37):
I know that one of the reasons companies like Microsoft are slow to open source things like XP is that there's a lot of code in there that's licensed they can't release. And in some cases, because there's comments in there that are embarrassed by, in fact, often you see when stuff is open source that the comments have been expurgated, which makes it a little bit less useful, but maybe there's some stuff in there that they don't want other people, it might be embarrassing to read. Companies do seem to like it to open source.

Denise Howell (02:29:05):
I never knew that coders made spicy comments

Leo Laporte (02:29:08):
In their code. I'm really glad though to get that perspective from you, Lou, because we often talk about, gee, why isn't Google supporting its phones for more than two years now? They're doing seven years. Or why doesn't Microsoft continue to support Windows seven for longer? Microsoft supports its operating systems for 10 years, and actually in some cases it's a reasonable question. They often do continue to support it for enterprise. They just withdraw support for consumers.

Lou Maresca (02:29:43):
It's

Leo Laporte (02:29:44):
Expensive though.

Lou Maresca (02:29:45):
It's very expensive ing. You mentioned Google though, because if you notice, Google's the first company to go and drop something that's not being profitable, and of course they cut things over here so they can do other things over here, and so I'm sure we probably can go back and look back the last six months and see a whole bunch of things graveyard because they need to be able to support the side of the business, and I

Leo Laporte (02:30:09):
Guarantee

Lou Maresca (02:30:09):
They will continue to do that.

Leo Laporte (02:30:12):
Wow. Well, I have more, but I think we've held you your feet to the fire long enough, Denise and Lou and Reed. I do thank you. You guys are fantastic. It's great to have all three of you on. Denise, congratulations on the launch of your new shows.

Denise Howell (02:30:31):
Thank you so much.

Leo Laporte (02:30:32):
I hope it goes well and everybody who listens to our shows should immediately run over to hearsay culture.com and subscribe to her new shows. Denise's new

Denise Howell (02:30:44):
Show. Yes, with an asterisk by Subscribe. Our feeds are a mess right now. We know it.

Leo Laporte (02:30:49):
We're fixing

Denise Howell (02:30:49):
Them bear with, but there is content up there right now. It's more of a website with audio than a podcast,

Leo Laporte (02:30:57):
So go to hearsay culture.com and you can listen to episode one of Uneven Distribution, move Fast and Break Things and Research and Development with Dave and Denise or r and d with d and d. Is technology helping us or hurting us? Excellent. How long are the shows? This one was two and a half hours I'm thinking.

Denise Howell (02:31:18):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:31:19):
Yeah. You're not going that long.

Denise Howell (02:31:20):
Yeah. R and d with d D is ideally 45 minutes long, and my show is an hour.

Leo Laporte (02:31:25):
This show used to be half an hour when we started. Anyway, thank you, Denise. It's great to see you. Congratulations on the new shows. Thank you, Reed. Otti. Congratulations on your fantastic book. Wheelman available in bookstores everywhere, and of course on audible.com chronicling the horrific story of Lance Armstrong and the Greatest Fraud ever Perpetrated. Now what you don't call it a fraud conspiracy. Conspiracy, co conspiracy ever perpetrated in sport. It's actually a great book. I read it. I didn't even know you wrote it,

Reed Albergotti (02:32:03):
And we're going to do a movie now, right? Didn't we decide?

Leo Laporte (02:32:05):
Yeah, we decided, but we're in between Jared Leto playing Lance Armstrong or maybe Sian Murphy. We can't decide, so we'll take your votes and we'll talk to the producers. You should also catch Reed's newsletter@semafour.com, SEMA four without an E S E M A F O r.com. It's actually, I've said this to Louise as well. One of the things that you do that's so important besides covering technology is cover the world and now more than ever, we need to hear about what's going on in the world, and SEMA four has great global coverage, and I think you've done a very nice job of balance and information. It's really, Ben and Ben are doing a good thing.

Reed Albergotti (02:32:53):
I agree.

Leo Laporte (02:32:54):
Yeah,

Reed Albergotti (02:32:54):
Totally agree.

Leo Laporte (02:32:55):
Yeah,

Denise Howell (02:32:55):
Here,

Leo Laporte (02:32:57):
That was a smart move, Reid, of course. Was the, were you at the journal before seven before or

Reed Albergotti (02:33:02):
I was the journal then the information.

Leo Laporte (02:33:04):
Information in

Reed Albergotti (02:33:04):
Washington Post.

Leo Laporte (02:33:05):
Got it. And then the post, you really can't hold the job very well, huh?

Denise Howell (02:33:11):
No,

Reed Albergotti (02:33:11):
But those are the only jobs I've ever had.

Leo Laporte (02:33:12):
Oh, okay. Well that's not so bad. I'm just teasing you. That's four really good publications that ain't bad to have on your cv. Great to

Reed Albergotti (02:33:22):
Have. They've all been great.

Leo Laporte (02:33:23):
Yeah. Thank you for joining. Thank you. I forgot about the Post. That's I think where I first became aware of you actually in the Washington Post and the information. Of course. Yeah. Thank you so much. Great Reca, host of this weekend Enterprise tech. We are so grateful that you took over that show. Big Shoes to Fill because Father Well Sandals

Reed Albergotti (02:33:44):
Anyway. Indeed. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:33:45):
But Father Robert doesn't wear shoes, but you've done a great job and actually this weekend Enterprise Tech is one of our biggest shows, so I appreciate the job you've done. Thank you very much. You love

Reed Albergotti (02:33:57):
Doing it.

Leo Laporte (02:33:57):
I think this Office 365 thing has legs. I think it's going somewhere, so keep up the great work there. Principal Engine that

Reed Albergotti (02:34:04):
Does, thank you very much.

Leo Laporte (02:34:05):
Have Microsoft Five kids. It's mine

Reed Albergotti (02:34:07):
Too. It's all mine.

Leo Laporte (02:34:08):
Five kids. He's got five.

Reed Albergotti (02:34:11):
Five

Leo Laporte (02:34:12):
And you're just He doesn't

Reed Albergotti (02:34:12):
Have that gene.

Leo Laporte (02:34:14):
Yeah, you don't have that.

Reed Albergotti (02:34:15):
Whatever.

Leo Laporte (02:34:16):
Although, although

Denise Howell (02:34:17):
I still,

Lou Maresca (02:34:18):
According to

Denise Howell (02:34:19):
What's going on, I

Leo Laporte (02:34:20):
Dunno how Lou does it. It's amazing. Lou's amazing.

Lou Maresca (02:34:24):
Definitely busy.

Leo Laporte (02:34:25):
Well, I'll be out your way. I'll wave.

Lou Maresca (02:34:28):
It's fun to have five kids. I'll tell you why. Yesterday on Saturday we got to shoot off rockets with the local Rocket Club. Oh, I got, could see three rockets a kid.

Leo Laporte (02:34:38):
Oh

Denise Howell (02:34:39):
Wow. We

Lou Maresca (02:34:39):
Got to shoot off 15 rockets.

Leo Laporte (02:34:42):
People kept saying more Maka, where are these coming from?

Lou Maresca (02:34:45):
That's right. Exactly what they're doing.

Leo Laporte (02:34:48):
What? You guys have more No, good job. No, it's great. I'm really happy to see you. All three of you. Thank you for joining us. We do twit every Sunday afternoon, 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern, 2100 U T C, and we'll stay at 2100 U T C until the first week of November. That's when we go off summertime. You may have already gone off summertime, so you'll have to do the calculations in your head as I have to do every week, but right now, 2100 U T C I only mentioned that. I mean, you don't have to watch us live, but you can if you want, want to get the freshest version of the show or you want to participate in one of our chat rooms, just go to live twit tv. There's live streams from YouTube, Twitch Kick and others. There's audio streams as well there.

(02:35:34):
If you're watching or listening live chat live in our IRC at IRC dot twit TV Club members, of course get the Club Twit Discord. They can chat in there. We keep an eye on both during the shows and get lots of good feedback from that after the fact. OnDemand versions of the shows available at the website, twit tv, and when you get there, by the way, you'll also notice links to YouTube. There's a YouTube up-to-date YouTube feed of all of our shows, including this week in tech. Each of them has their own dedicated YouTube channels, so you can subscribe right there. Best place to subscribe though, in my opinion, is your favorite podcast client. Whether it's PocketCasts or Overcast or Google or Apple Podcasts, subscribe and that way you'll get to show the minute it's available on a Sunday night, just in time for your Monday morning commute.

(02:36:22):
My commute is off to Rhode Island, just down the road from Lou and Andy. I dunno why we have two people in the area. I will be visiting mom and broadcasting from her house, but I will be doing the shows this week. It'll just be looking a little bit different. I will be back next, well Tuesday, a couple of days from now for Mac Break Weekly and security now, and then on Wednesday for Twig and Windows Weekly, and I will see you all then, and of course, I hope I count on. See you next week for this week in tech. That's it. Another twit is in the can. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye. It's amazing T.