This Week in Tech 993 Transcript

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Twit this Week in Tech. Brian McCullough is your host of the Tech Meme Ride Home podcast, Nicholas DeLeon from Consumer Reports and our old friend Dan Patterson from Blackbird AI. We'll talk about the biggest breach in history 2.7 billion social security numbers. Or is it? The new Pixels are here. Does their ai beat apple ai? And the premier league ditches its video assessed assist referee for a fleet of iphones. All that more coming up next on twit podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit.

00:39
This is TWIT. This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 993. Recorded Sunday, august 18th 2024. The Save Money Button. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news. Hello from the Attic Studio, week two. I apologize for last week. I knew there was a problem when I started listening and I said this is Twit. We have moved to the Lithper and now I may be sibilant, but I won't be Lithping, okay. So I apologize, we're tweaking it, we're learning it. We have moved to the Lithper and now I may be sibilant but I won't be Lithping, okay, so I apologize. We're tweaking it, we're learning it. Just right before the show started, I had to figure out what the RGB values were for this light over here, because it didn't match this light over here. Things like that we're learning, but that's okay. You're on the journey with us and we thank you for your patience. Great show planned for you today. Let's kick things off with dan patterson.

01:48 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Hi, dan, hey leo, it's great to see you. That is a fantastic looking studio. I love the rgb, yeah, and the sound, yeah. What kind of microphone are you talking to us on?

01:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm still using the same one. You are the high lp 40. I brought my magic gold one back with me from the studio. Yeah, me too. I love this, and we are doing a little processing in the RODECaster Duo, which I was skeptical of, but Anthony convinced me that it was a good mixer and it's been a very nice mixer. Plus, because of this, I have this Sound effects.

02:22 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Is this a soundboard? So you are back to broadcast, back to bad broad it's like a radio. Yeah, I just started in fm radio with soundboards. My pd always yelled at me more soundboard engagement, more like oh my god, they wanted. So yeah, fm radio loves the soundboard yeah, they do and I don't.

02:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so I'm and I, you know, I haven't got any complaints On this week in Google I discovered that I had a button that says monster and I can make a monster voice. But I thought maybe I overused it last time, so I'll save it for a good moment. I think the best time to use is when I'm playing devil's advocate. Then I can really play the devil.

03:03 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Most people say I just always use my monster voice.

03:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Daddy, stop using your monster voice. Dan, besides being a proud papa, is also director of content at Blackbird AI, and he had a message for another papa on the show today. Brian McCullough is here from the Tech Meme Ride Home podcast and he asked you how your son was and I thought, oh my God, is he in the hospital? But no, it wasn't that.

03:32 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
There was a missing duddy.

03:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that has been replaced Was it a blanket, a teddy bear.

03:39 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
It was a blanket, yes. Why it's called a duddy? I have no idea.

03:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every dad who's listening, and mom too too, knows what you mean when you said a missing duddy.

03:49 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yes, and every parent would know what it's like to go through Chicago in a eight block radius checking every dumpster to see if whoever stole it out of our car dumped it in a dumpster. But moving on from that, leo, leo, uh, you need the the what Howard has. That old school, uh, the, the. Uh, arnold Schwarzenegger, um, one, that who's your daddy? What does he do?

04:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That one I have all of those, uh, and I am prepared to load them into the sound machine If I am given permission. I have actually, because when I worked with Dvorak he was a big fan of sound effects and I have a complete. I have a Arnold Schwarzenegger your amigo library of of sounds affirmative, so you expect me to believe you if you need your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle. If you ever want any, Arnold, just let me know.

04:49 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
You got to have the. They're becoming self-aware Every time we do an AI or something.

04:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's see. I have this. I'm a cybernetic organism. Yeah, I don't know if they're becoming self-aware is in my set. I'm going to have to update this.

05:08 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
How about the?

05:08 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
same files that I do. That is very John Dvorak yeah these are leftover.

05:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I collected them from Dvorak way back when we were doing a radio show in the early 90s. So that's the only problem with this it ends in the early. Every sound effect is pre-1995 anyway, I have all fm radio big surprise if you need it well, and also for arnold.

05:34 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I mean, you don't need to go past.

05:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, you don't want to frankly. Yeah, anyway, good to see you, brian. Thank you for being here, somebody who is not a daddy nor, as far far as I know, is he working on it Nicholas DeLeon, senior Electronics Reporter. Consumer Reports. Hello Nicholas.

05:51 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Hello Leo, Thank you for having me.

05:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's so nice to see you. Last time you were here you were in studio at our old studio and got to meet your girlfriend, ashley, and it was really fun to see you.

06:05 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Yeah, it was great. It was great to be in the studio. Yeah, having heard so many shows broadcast from it, it was nice to sit in the chair and be with you guys.

06:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, so, yeah, thank you, I, no one is allowed in this studio. You can't. There's no, there's no room for one thing. There's nowhere for anybody to be there. It is. This is, uh, this is the entire expanse. You could sit here right next to me, but that's about it.

06:30
Anyway, let's talk about the news, of which there is a surprisingly large amount, given that we are in August, which is normally kind of the dog days and the least busy time. The one that is most upsetting, and it seems to be getting more upsetting by the minute, is the announcement that a data broker called National Public Data, a company that collects and then sells your personal data, whoops had a little oopsie and leaked 2.7 billion records of personal information, including social security numbers, all known physical addresses, possible aliases and, of course, names. National Public Data is one of those companies that sells background checks, you know, for private investigators. They scrape it from public sources and, of course, they buy it from internet service providers and other surveillance capitalism entities.

07:28
In April, a threat actor with the ironic name USDOD claimed to be selling 2.9 billion records containing the personal data of people in the US, uk, canada, stolen from the national public data. He wanted to sell it for 3.5 million stolen from the national public data. He wanted to sell it for 3.5 million. He claimed it had records for every single person, which it might, because there's, I mean, 2.9 billion records is more than the population of all three combined can you explain to me, leo, how this has evolved?

07:59 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
because this is one of those where I did it like as like the third story on my show on Wednesday or Thursday and I was like, doesn't this seem like a bigger deal than the third story? But it was weird because it was like is it everybody's? But at this point are we sure it's basically everybody's social security numbers out there?

08:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, we don't know. In fact, troy Hunt of have I Been Pwned? Fame posted a blog post on the 14th, a couple of days ago, inside the, and he put in quotes the quote 3 billion people end quote national public data breach Right of what's being described as one of the largest data breaches ever. We're talking about a data aggregator, he says, who people have never heard of A threat actor, usdod, who's published various partial sets of data, but it isn't easy to attribute it back to the NPD and, of course, there's no way to verify that everybody's in it and every social security number's in it, even if you bought it. I mean, that's a. That's a lot of records to go through, um, I think nuance might be the key word.

09:17 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I'm sorry to interrupt.

09:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Go ahead, please dan, because you cover this stuff you know about yeah I?

09:21 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I mean I covered data privacy and cyber security for a very long time and I mean pithy, my pithy reaction to this was I wish it happened two weeks ago at black hat, which was kind of a slower black hat this year. Um, but my, when I covered this, the challenge I had was explaining the scale and the keyword nuance to an audience. It was at CBS News and CNET, so a fairly sophisticated but broad audience of people who are tired of hearing about data breaches all the time. Yeah, in fact, I normally ignore them. Breach fatigue yeah.

09:54
And when we talk about 2.4 billion, that's such an abstract number, it's so high. And when we say records, what does that mean? It's hard for me to parse that and, like Brian said, this was kind of a kicker story in the middle of the week, it wasn't like let's really dive into this. But it is a massive breach and, as we all know, every threat actor out there will obtain these, whether they buy them or just obtain them from other actors and then they combine those data sets. What you can be assured of is that if we can do it in normal, normal, everyday technology, then bad actors can use tools to do the exact same thing. So they will combine assets to create master sheets that contain different types of assets. But we really don't have a good idea of, we don't have a definition of terms here that helps us really explain to people the significance of this.

10:51 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Let me frame it this way, Dan Am I right to assume that all of this time, in essence, everybody's social security number has not been out in the open? There you go, and until now so is that what we're saying is the reality? Now Is everybody's social security number out there?

11:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apparently not. I mean, troy Hunt deals with this and, by the way, he is a trusted voice in all this because he runs. Have I Been Pwned? He's probably the number one source of breach information. He said he did find legitimate of breach information. He said he did find legitimate information in there. He did what he often does, which is search for himself in the database, and he did find. He says. I'm constantly surprised by the places I find myself in, including this one, but it's an email address of mine, but none of the other data is mine. So it's a kind of a mishmash of stuff. And of course, you can't really trust a hacker when they say, hey, guess what we got and where we got it from. They have every incentive to lie about it.

11:57 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
On the other hand, he says you can't go to NPD and say, is this real?

12:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're not going to talk to him.

12:04 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Is there a good way to search this? I'm not familiar so maybe there is, but I have not seen one.

12:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, no, I mean, what will happen eventually? Is Troil incorporated into have I Been Pwned and then you can search the have I Been Pwned database? He says he wants to reemphasize the point that he's been making in this article there were no email addresses in the social security number files, which means you're not going to get an email from have I been pwned if your social was leaked, he says if you find yourself in this data breach via have I been pwned, there's no evidence your social security was leaked because there's no matchup between the social securities and the emails. And he says and if you're in the same boat as me, the data next to your record may not even be correct. Not that data brokers spend a lot of energy making sure the data is correct. Right, that's correct.

12:59
It doesn't mean it wasn't actually leaked from npd it. But he says and I don't have a mechanism to load additional attributes beyond email addresses into have I been pwned, nor point people in the direction of the source data. I'm definitely not equipped to be your personal lookup service manually trawling through the data and pulling out individual records for you. So he says treat this as informational, only, an intriguing story that requires no further action, but not because it didn't happen or because you're not in there, but because we just can't verify it, I guess I'm still concerning I would encourage people to check out.

13:38 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I was doxed in 2018 just as a part of my job. My wife has had similar security issues and we both have paid delete me dot com. This is not an ad or anything, but I. I know they're and I should say that they are a sponsor, just as a part of my job. My wife has had similar security issues and we both have paid deletemecom. This is not an ad or anything, but I-.

13:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, and I should say that they are a sponsor, so go ahead.

13:49 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Oh, okay, well, but I have found that what they would do they're also you can go to. You have to manually do it, but you can go to data broker sites and there are opt-out forms. There are opt-out forms. There are supposed to be opt-out forms on data broker sites, but Deleteme. I found that it was pretty effective at getting rid of a lot of our personal information and now we just use a UPS box. We don't tell people where we live, yeah.

14:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We use Deleteme too, and there are other companies that do this. To be fair, what Deleteme says and I think it's accurate is even if you fill out that form and there are hundreds of, maybe thousands of data brokers so you'd have to know what they all were go to each and fill out the form, they repopulate it. So it's kind of like painting the Golden Gate Bridge a job that's never done. This is haveibeenpwned haveibeenpwnedcom, and you can see now why Troy is saying I can't help you. It works by email address, so all you can do is check to see if your email address is in a data breach, and if the database with socials doesn't have email addresses, he can't verify it.

14:55
There's one other part of this site I would point people to, which is passwords, and this is really valuable. If you click at the top of the page, if you click passwords, you can enter in a password that you've reused. Now you might say, well, I'm not giving him my password, it's safe, it's going to be hashed before it gets sent to his website, he's reliable, it's trustworthy, but what it will do is tell you if that password that you've been using over and over again is in a breach and, if it is, stop using it, you probably shouldn't use it anyway. Over again is in a breach, and if it is, stop using it, you probably shouldn't use it anyway. So that's useful, but yeah, there's not.

15:27
It's funny there's very little to be said about this particular breach because we're kind of going by what the hacker said as opposed to being able to verify it. Now, bleeping computer, lawrence Abrams, who I find also very trustworthy and reliable, does talk about it, um, and acts as if it's legit. Was your sense, brian, that it might not be or there might not have been this, this leak, that this, my guy might just be bragging?

15:58 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
no, no, no. It's that I always say every time before I do a breach or a hacking thing. I'm like if I didn't have a standard, I'd be doing it every day right? Well, that's true, yeah. So I'm always like there has to be a threshold for where it's interesting to me and the fact that it was flying under the radar, I still put it in the show because I was like, wait, everybody's social security number, that would be a big deal, yeah, and I was like, wait, everybody's social security number, that would be a big deal.

16:28
So I kind of treated it like that, where it's like, just FYI, this is what the headline is. I don't know what the nuance is, so that's kind of why I was curious what you all thought.

16:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean Lawrence says if you live in the US, this data breach has likely leaked some of your personal information. Honestly, the reason I mention this at all is just to stir up anger at the existence of data brokers and that it's completely legal for people to do this, that there is no comprehensive federal legislation against collecting people's information after all these years after all these years.

17:06
So pentestercom has a website. This is from um patrick delahanty, our engineer, he, and he said he found his info on this site. It's npdpentestercom, and this is apparently a way of searching. Pen testercom, and this is apparently a way of searching. Should I? Should I just do?

17:29
this, let me just don't put your social no, it doesn't require my social just my name, first and last, my state and my top secret birth date. Now let's see. Oh, there's my. Oh, don't show this. Oh, don't show this. Okay, okay, there's my dad's address, my old address.

17:48 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
You should have done, Tom Cruise Leo.

17:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Holy cow, this has my addresses going back 25 years and it has the last two digits of my social, so you know what I'm going to say.

18:06 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
It's real Well, that was the other thing from the story. Is that okay? Holy cow, I'm devastated.

18:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People did say I'm in shock.

18:13 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Excuse me, I have to leave now. Even if their email wasn't connected, it was connected to addresses and phone numbers. So wait, social connected to addresses and phone numbers seems like a big deal to me. It does say that site again.

18:30 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Leo, it's bad testercom npdpentestercom.

18:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
um, all I can say is data brokers bad now. Now somebody is saying in our chat untoward media, in our YouTube chat government surveillance depends on data brokers. That's always been my opinion. The reason there is no comprehensive federal legislation against this is because law enforcement federal and local use these databases, so that's why they don't want them to go go away. So it's a little bit of a conflict of interest. Uh, the fact that they had the last two of my social I mean, obviously this website's not going to reveal more than that but the fact because all I needed was my name and birth date uh pretty much confirms to me that this data has been leaked oh, mine is not accurate.

19:25 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
None of these are accurate for me, okay and I I saw that too that, um, some of it would be accurate. And then people were saying, yeah, but half of the addresses for past addresses were for people that I had no connection to so yeah, fortunately I have a common name and I live in a massive city yeah, leo laporte.

19:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's pretty. You know that's fairly unique. My dad's name is the same. That's why I found his information as well. Um, what do you tell nicholas? What do you take? Because you're see, nicholas is our man in the street. He talks to real people at consumer reports and I always ask you this when you're on the show what do you tell real people about this?

20:03 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
uh, for stuff like this it is tricky because, like we were saying earlier, there is sort of breach fatigue and people do kind of tune out oh, another hack, who cares? But for things like social security numbers it's a little bit more serious and we do kind of have like general advice for folks and that is you know, you should just freeze your credit anyway, like it should just be frozen. Frozen, there's really no reason for it to be not frozen. And if you do suspect that you've been the victim of fraud, to put an identity theft, uh marking on your credit reports, just to alert the credit bureau.

20:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I freeze all my credit reports I will say.

20:37 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I will say I was. I was impacted was the word they used by the uh, the equifax hack. A couple years ago my social security number was stolen. I remember I was sitting at my desk at cr and I got a notification. I used to use the budget app, mint, and the mint app said something like uh oh, your, your paypal credit card application has been declined. And I was like paypal, fred, what are you even talking about? So I just set it aside. And then I woke up like in the middle of the night, later in the day, like 2 am. I was like, wait a minute. I never checked to see if I was hacked in the Equifax hack. I logged into the website and, lo and behold, it says I was impacted.

21:16
And it was a real hassle because I had to go. I was mistaken. I mistakenly thought I had to go to the police precinct where I lived at the top. I went to long island city queens to file a report and they're like actually no, it's where you live currently. So I had to go to the yonkers police department to file a police report and the guy was like, hey, what you got?

21:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
a data breach big deal, man. I mean everybody's got those.

21:38 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
The guy at the yonkers police which I mean it was funny it was, it was very truthful. He was like we know we're not going to like solve this crime, like I'll give you the police report because you need it, because I had to contact all the credit bureaus. It was a real hassle, uh, and it just kind of like I just I solved it by more. Let's just stop paying attention to it, uh, you know my credit, my credit records was just riddled was wrong.

22:01
It had me living in brooklyn. I've never lived in brook. It had me living in Brooklyn. I'd never lived in Brooklyn. It had me living in Newark, new Jersey. I've never even been to Newark, new Jersey, and so it's like. So my question is like okay, what value does this data even have in the first place If my credit report is just filled with wrong information? If I'm like a car dealership or Verizon trying to find out whether or not Nicholas is credit worthy, well, the information is wrong anyway. So, like it, never really made sense to me.

22:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have you bought a car or tried to lease something lately, or I mean what?

22:32 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
happens. I bought a car two years ago and the only real complication is that, like whenever you want to do something involving credit, you have to unfreeze it. So like when I went to get the loan from I guess I got it through Toyota I had to unfreeze it. So, like when I went to get the loan from I guess I got it through Toyota, I had to unfreeze the credit for like 24 hours so that they can run it. And it was fine.

22:50
I ran into this a few weeks ago. I was looking into buying the T-Mobile fixed 5G wireless broadband just to test to play with it. And so you go online, you fill out your information and they require a credit check. I was like, okay, you fill out your information and they require a credit check. I said, okay, you fill out your information, we're going to now check your credit. And I was like I'm going to click okay, and we're going to see what's going to happen. And it said like, oh, error, we can't find your information, please call. So I said you know what Error, I don't need it that bad.

23:17 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
So I said never mind, if you freeze your credit report, it's not a problem for you until you want to.

23:25 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
You need credit.

23:26 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Right, right, but on a daily basis, unless you're opening up credit cards or buying cars all the time, it's not a problem. But do you have to do it for all three major bureaus, or can you just do?

23:36 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Well, it usually depends on like Toyota is like oh, we'll check the Equifax or we'll check Experian. So two years ago I was renting an apartment, I the equifax, or we'll check experience. So you, uh, two years ago I was renting apartment, I was looking to rent an apartment, and every time I asked them it's like okay, what credit bureau do you use so I can then go and unfreeze?

23:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that account, uh, so you do need that information so it adds a little bit of friction, but yeah, not that big a deal, and I have to say I've recently done that and they said we use all three, so I had to go to all three. Now here's the good news. It used to be to unfreeze. They would give you a free freeze, but the unfreeze used to cost money. In fact, in some states it cost a lot of money. Fortunately, a federal law was passed a few years ago that they could no longer do that, so they're required to freeze and unfreeze for free. Some make it harder than others, but generally it's fairly easy. Freeze now for sure. And if nothing else, this breach should probably make everyone in America freeze their credit which, by the way, these bureaus hate because that's how they make money is selling your information and to clarify the word is freeze, because freeze is like a legal term, because they'll try to sell you like lock or pause or whatever.

24:43 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
That's fake. Don't do do that. You need to freeze it.

24:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's free to freeze and unfree. They're required to provide it, for federal law requires it. Uh, I do it routinely, I've done it for years and, yeah, that's going to prevent a lot. I mean, I don't know if it'll prevent all identity theft. It's just creepy, though, for me to go on that database and see all those addresses and see my last two of my social and my dad's social. That's just, if nothing else, it's creepy, so and potentially harmful for sure, freezer.

25:18 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I will say it was very scary going through that. I lost like several days at work. Luckily the folks at CR were very understanding. But like I lost several days at work, luckily the folks at CR were very understanding but I lost several days going between police departments and on the phone with the credit bureaus and they're really not. I mean, they're helpful to the extent that they have to be, I guess but you try to call them and try to explain and it was a very stressful time, to be honest.

25:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was a fraud alert. You don't need to do that for a credit freeze. Everybody's eligible, everybody's entitled costs you nothing. Uh, the fraud alert is a different thing, which is why you needed a police report, right?

25:54 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
yeah, yeah.

25:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's a yeah, that's separate but but freezes are free and do it. I really this is just and I don't know whether this is real or not I get the sense it is if Lawrence Abrams says, yeah, probably everybody's social is now online and that website kind of confirms it. Holy moly, of course. Part of this is it. You should never have been using social security numbers for identification in the first place, and I blame the companies that do that. You're not supposed to and because it's so hard to change them. You can't change them, but it's so hard. It's like using your fingerprint for identification. You shouldn't, because you can't change it and if it gets a breach you're out of luck.

26:38 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Yeah, I know the CR folks. We have an office in DC, the advocacy it's called. They've been really trying to get these laws to be way more consumer friendly than they are and, as with anything, it's just you just meet resistance, you meet.

26:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know people make money off the system, so it's very hard to change that system and politicians represent not just you and me, but credit reporting agencies and they represent and that's practically me. They represent them more because they spend more money on politicians and they probably also represent data brokers and they certainly represent law enforcement, local and national. So they have a lot of constituencies. It's not just we the people they have to respond to, unfortunately. Yeah, it says right on your credit card number. You're right, eric Duckman in our YouTube. It says right on your social security, rather Not for identification. But how often do you get asked for your last four digits of your social or, in many cases, your actual full social? When I call my bank, they want my full social. I know, they know it, but I shouldn't be given it all right. I'm going to ask. I know some of you are premier league fans. I feel like nicholas, you're a premier league fan I don't know, yes yes, I just started this weekend.

27:46
Yes, you just started being a fan this weekend.

27:49 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
No, no, no, this is actually my 20th. Uh, I was doing 20 years watching, yeah nicholas, what's your team? Uh, I like barcelona, which is not in the premier league. Obviously I watched the premier league as as just like a fan of the sport, basically.

28:02 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
So all right. Right, I'm claiming Arsenal, so anyone? Else you can have Arsenal, that's fine.

28:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anybody for Wrexham? Anybody? Okay, so apparently the English Premier League is going to ditch its hated VAR offside tech for iPhones.

28:25 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
But, not yet. By the way as Nicholas is saying, yesterday and today, or actually on Friday, were the first games and there's already controversy. We can get into what the tech is, but this stupid company, what is it? Genius?

28:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Aptly named, I guess.

28:43 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Think of the term would be the integrity of the competition, so you would think that they would have this technology ready for the start. It's 38 games. Everybody has to play each other twice. We still don't have a date when this is actually going to roll out.

28:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I thought it was this week.

29:00 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
No, no, in fact, I was watching a game today where there was an offsites controversy and they were saying well, eventually this will be automated and we won't have to worry about this, but get into how they're using iPhones, because if they ever roll it out, it'll be hopefully better.

29:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is video assist referee. So the referees kind of how we do it in football and baseball in the Americas, in the US of A, where we play real football the referee can ask for in some cases it's automatic an instant replay, look at it, review it and then make a decision. And that's what they've been doing right, and it's for offsides in particular.

29:42 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yes, well, for all sorts of things, like there's tech inside the ball so that if the ball goes over the goal line, the ref gets a buzz on his watch that says that this actually was a goal. But the key part of this is, I hope there's no lag in that oh yes, a minute left.

29:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh wait, a minute. That was a goal A minute.

29:59 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Leo a minute. Why do you think everyone hates Farr? It takes five minutes sometimes, okay, but so the point is, is that the current we're talking about offsides, which is, so you know, a striker going beyond the last defender? Up to this point, they've been using the cameras in the stadium and they literally try to draw a line, and there's been so many controversies about where they draw the line. Should they have drawn it over his elbow? Should they have done this? So, in theory, this technology is better because, using these iPhone cameras that are in a box, it can track between 7,000 and 10,000 points on each player's body at all times, then uses AI to say because again, there's nuances, for well, if you're, if you're, the part of your sleeve is offsides, that doesn't count, but your, your standing foot would count, and that sort of thing. So, in theory, it's better because, essentially, the iPhone cameras can do like incredible, do incredible, many frames per second, beyond what even the broadcast cameras can do.

31:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Genius, which came up with this genius plan to use iPhones for this, says that the problem is players clump up. This is from the wired article. They pile on top of each other, which causes occlusion. Even with a dozen or so camera angles, the right angle isn't always visible, to judge offsides. Historically, machine learning systems have filled in this gaps with what amounts to uneducated guesses about where the stuff they can't see is likely to be. Um, this is probably not ideal. Dragon, which is this new camera system, will use between 10 and 15 cameras, plus the ball sensor to track a few dozen body points on every player. It will. Oh, I'm sorry, that was the old system. The new system is 28 iphones in every stadium in the premier league, more in some cases. Uh, uses iphone 14s and newer. They're housed in custom waterproof cases with cooling fans and connected to a power source. The team designs mounts that hold up to four iphones clumped together and once they're positioned, they capture a constant stream of video. This is crazy, is it?

32:27 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
reviewed then by somebody presumably and those extra frames mean they have one or two extra frames where they in the review process they could the call is still made by the var official.

32:41 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
the video after review official, it's still the human has to make the call. But again, I as an Arsenal fan. We lost the game last year because again I was talking about the old offsides thing where they draw lines on the camera. We lost the game because they just decided not to draw the lines. The people in the back just were like, no, it's offsides, and you can hear there was a huge controversy. You could hear it on the audio later. Like are you sure about this? No, no, no, it's fine, it's fine.

33:14
Like if you don't bother, Well, fortunately, soccer fans are notorious for their cool, calm, collected demeanors, Well so when we say that it's automated, it should automated, Lee tell you, but it should still give you the video so that the in theory infallible var person in the booth can still approve it.

33:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's gonna. It can do up to 200 frames a second and to balance latency, accuracy and cost it'll be capped at 100 frames a second. But that's still a lot more than the broadcast video, which is 50 to 60 frames a second. But did they not plan to implement it this week? Was it just that they're going to do it this season sometime?

34:03 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Again, Americans that don't care about this. You're learning a lot about.

34:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
English football today, folks the Premier. League is a clown show, so imagine that they'll implement this it's the richest league in the world's most popular sport, my friend.

34:20 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yeah, listen, listen. So when they implement it in in November, where a dozen games will have already happened, and so those games people will have won and lost points because, they didn't have it Right Exactly, but also there are.

34:34
There are competitions like the, the FA cup or the or the league cup, where, because you only had video after review in premier league stadiums the, the, the competition's already suspect, because if you're in a League Two stadium they don't have all the cameras to do that stuff. So there's already sort of this have and have not for this sort of technology and even English soccer.

34:59 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I mean, I have the solution to all of this. It is just to get rid of this entirely, 100%. Like nothing has torpedoed my interest in this, entirely 100% VAR like nothing has torpedoed my interest in the sport than VAR.

35:09 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
to be honest with you, People hate VAR.

35:10 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
You can't celebrate a goal without like waiting for like a minute or more. It's just weird, like technocratic, like we can find the correct answer through science. It's like this is a game, this is a sport. Just empower the referee.

35:29 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
And you know, Nicholas, you know this from there are historical games where, like, the ball is over the line in the goal, there's daylight between the line and the ball, and because the referees were not empowered to go to the cameras that everybody in the stadium can see, then you would have goals that would not be allowed. Where everyone's like that was a goal. There's got to be a middle ground.

35:53 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Here is my question. Nicholas, question for you because I'm 100% with you and Brian, I think you might be aligned as well. So I'm not a huge soccer football fan, but I am a big fan of baseball and American football, and I am the same mindset of Nicholas when it comes to baseball. Look, we're all technologists. Technology is encroaching on baseball as well. I want to see Angel Hernandez make terrible calls.

36:21 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
It's part of the fun, I want to watch an umpire, run out and kick dirt and spit and scream I don't care about tech in my baseball.

36:28 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I want to see a weird game.

36:40 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
The point that Nicholas is making is that it is weird because VAR has only been, at least in the English game, about two years and you're like okay so the controversy has died down in terms of referee decisions, oh no, no, it's worse, it is way worse Reacts, because all that it comes down to is people are like wait, the VAR, the video referee looked at that and still made that call. So it's there's still humans involved in this, and so it hasn't really fixed anything.

37:00 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
And then if you listen to like podcasts, like on the Guardians podcast, you know totally football. It's like the entire show is now dedicated to VAR discussion and it's like this is it's? Real, it does take the fun out of it and it's like so many things. It's really it does take the fun out of it and it's it's like so many things. It was well-intentioned, but I don't know that it is actually what, what we need, yeah totally agree, and it's, you know, maybe bringing this back to tech just a little bit at least in baseball.

37:27 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
It is right, right, sorry, I don't mean. I don't mean like that, I just mean like a broader tech. You know, when we talk about artificial intelligence and technology, we do talk about sometimes about changing economies and taking jobs. In baseball it's taking the job of the catcher. They used to call the game and frame the game and the entire. You might focus on the pitcher or other people on the field, but it is the catcher who makes that game what it is, and now that job is just done. You're just the guy who catches the ball.

37:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and, furthermore, because every umpire had a different strike zone, there was a lot of intelligence on the part of the pitcher and the catcher, yeah, and the batter.

38:08 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Frankly, that's where the strategy was there was strategy and it was fun to see the strategy and the adaptation and the permutations of that and now it's like I don't care, those are Robo-Om.

38:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And now there's a designated hitter in the National.

38:20 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
League. I don't know what's going on.

38:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Interleague play Nicholas. I don't know if you'll agree with this.

38:27 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
but the one thing that Americans might agree with is how Americans are always like oh, they're always diving and rolling on the floor when they get fouled or whatever. The one thing that VAR has fixed is that when they look at the video and that guy goes down and he feels like he's clutching his knee, like it's been blown off by a shotgun, the video will show the referee that, yeah, he wasn't touched and that's the one thing that they've taken out of the game.

38:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's useful, isn't that a?

39:00 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
good thing, I mean as a Latin person theatrics in soccer. That's right, you like Spanish football? Oh, wait a minute.

39:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nicholas, you just chipped my elbow. All right, we're going to take a little break. It's fun. I like to do stories like this because you've got a panel of techno enthusiasts, right. This is all we talk about. This is our thing is technology and universally, you loathe the addition of technology in these sports, which is great, right, humans, they're not the worst thing ever invented. You're watching this Week in Tech, nicholas DeLeon is here from the Consumer Reports folks. He is a senior electronics reporter. Great to have you, nicholas. Dan Patterson, our friend, dear friend, longtime reporter at CBS, now he is. He's doing the AI thing at Blackbird AI. What's Blackbird AI?

39:51 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
We find I mean we, we call them narrative attacks because it's an easier way to talk about misinformation and disinformation. So we use a combination of not just artificial intelligence, but we use a combination of artificial intelligence and human intelligence. We have human threat intelligence analysts A lot of them have worked professionally at three-letter organizations and the AI can find what we call a narrative attack that is, traveling across social networks. It's not really and you guys kind of all know this instinctually disinformation and misinformation is not. It doesn't stay in one social network, it travels pretty quickly.

40:27
So a narrative attack is disinformation basically yeah, yeah, it's just an easier way to say that, and so we use humans and robots to um, uh kind of god knows the narratives.

40:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this is we have been saying this for a while as we come into the last uh quarter three months before the us national election that this was going to be the you know kind of silly season for disinformation. Is it, is it? Is it? Is it going crazy? Is it? Is it increasing?

40:54 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
yeah, but what we're really seeing and I don't want to delay the the ad break here um, you know, in speaking of black hat, this was like the cornerstone of black hat this year was really cyber attacks are now coupled with disinformation and narrative attacks which, if you followed cyber, you know. Going back to the, the russian ransomware gangs, they all use disinformation to make cyber attacks more.

41:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, spear phishing things like that.

41:16 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, and name and shame right. They would steal your data and put it on a website and then salt it with a bunch of bad data and say if you don't pay us, we're going to put your data on the web and anybody can have it. Why are people so awful?

41:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Money, money, money makes the world go round. Anyway, great to have you, dan, of course, as always, and the internet historian, brian McCullough, host of Tech Meme Ride Home Podcast. Great to see you also. Great to see you, leo, and your little blankie Daddy, our show today, brought to you by Mint Mobile. I love my Mint Mobile phone. I've got an iPhone SE that is on Mint Mobile. It is the best phone for the least amount of money ever.

42:00
Now, I love a great deal as much as anybody, but I am not going to crawl through a bed of hot coals just to save some bucks. Right, I mean, I'll do it, but it's got to be easy. It can't be a lot of hoops, a lot of BS. I don't want to feel that discount slipping away. So when MinMobile said we can get your listeners wireless for $15 a month when they buy a three-month plan, I said no, no, no, come on, there's going to be some hitch in this. Right Turns out, no, it's actually easy to get wireless $15 a month. It's actually easy to get wireless $15 a month. Really, sometimes the hardest part of it is the time you spend on hold waiting to break up with your old provider. They do not want you to leave, and you know why? Right, they're getting 70, 80, 90, 100 or more a month for exactly the same service. You're going to pay Mint Mobile $15 a month for. They hate that, but it's really easy to switch to Mint Mobile. Just go to mintmobilecom slash twit.

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43:47
Find out how easy it is to switch to Mint Mobile. You'll get three months of premium wireless service for $15 a month. I liked it so much. I signed up for a year and then another year and another year it's been five, I think. To get this new customer offer and your new three-month premium wireless plan for just $15 a month, go to mintmobilecom slash twit. That's mintmobilecom slash twit. Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month. At mintmobilecom slash twit, 45 up front payment requirement required, because you know that's 15 for three months. New customers on a first three month plan only speed slower when you get about 40 gigs on the unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees, restrictions apply see mint mobile for details. Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month. Mintmobilecom slash twit. Google had their event this week. Google's was an interesting company. What was your reaction, nicholas, when you I'm sure you watched the pixel event? Yeah, yeah, were you excited, did you? Did you jump up and down? Did you say I can't wait to get this phone?

44:57 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I mean, I think my opinion on phones is like they've been very good for the past several years and so any kind of year-on excitement is not quite where it used to be. You know, like I know the Pixel 9 is going to be awesome, but the Pixel 8 was pretty awesome too, so it's like yeah, so I I don't know if how exciting, uh, the space is really anymore.

45:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe I'm right, like apple the thing they pushed, of course, is ai on these, yeah, yeah, and like apple, they did the smart thing, which is they showed uh ai features that are, you know, not wh bang, but just useful things like uh. I kind of thought it was kind of cool. You could take a picture without yourself in it and then get on the other side of the camera and add yourself to the picture, and then you've got all of you in the picture, which, as a father of a family, I'm not in any of the last 30 years of pictures. It's all of them because I'm the one taking the picture. So that appealed to me a little bit.

45:57 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Leo, did you do you feel I'm not the first person to say this? And you're right to frame it as, like these are not, you know, going to change your life features, but they, their AI features, like they're like two or three years ahead of Apple and like the what you're, you're, you're saying the add me feature. There's the re-imagine in magic editor, which is like you can add, you know, put a dragon in the photo behind me using AI.

46:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What do you think of that, though? That worries me.

46:28 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I mean talk about with Dan's disinformation issue no photo can be trusted ever again disinformation issue, but but my photo can be trusted ever again. That's, we can talk about that, but my my first point is is that, like again, google is adding this with their own ai, as opposed to partnering with open ai, but like, right, this is with gemini gemini gemini.

46:48
There's the, the stuff that they continually offer, like for Apple's first swing at that they had nothing like. There's three things that we just named, like auto frame, and, and, and add me in if I'm not in the photo like that, apple's just like oh yeah, well, maybe have a smarter Siri at some point, but yeah. And is it?

47:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and, by the way, apple intelligence is delayed for months, right it's not going to come out with a new iPhones next month. Right, google says all of these features will come out immediately. It'll be on the new Pixel 9 when you get it.

47:22 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, I think I tend to. We are experiencing with AI a lot of I'm sure everybody listening is familiar with this, but this very similar patterns that we had with crypto and with metaverse, where there were many promises made about things to come, and I think that we're seeing that with Apple. And I think the most significant thing of this, at least for me, is that these features are, like Brian said, they're very capable features and they seem to be shipping now, like you will have access to this now, as opposed to like wait and shrug, like it's a video game dlc.

48:01 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I don't know, maybe we'll ship it, yeah well, and that's true for one of them, the the uh auto frame. I think they promised it, or no. It was zoom, zoom enhanced. They promised it on the pixel 8, but it finally came on the pixel 9. I'm just framing this as a horse race thing, which, again, I'm completely open to the idea that these are gimmicks. I don't know that you're going to upgrade your phone because you can add yourself into the photo. What I am saying is that Google has a cadence of adding these things. That again, yes, apple is just adding Apple intelligence right now for the first go at it, but if you're just doing apples to apples every year, google's adding these AI things that I don't see Apple doing yet.

48:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, ok, this is what I'm asking. So you see this as a big, big win for Google that if people want these AI features and I guess you could debate whether people want these AI features but if they want them, google's the place to go.

49:03 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Well, number one, it's all their internal stuff, so right.

49:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, apple's will be Apple's Eventually, three or four years from now.

49:12 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yeah, yeah yeah, they had to partner with OpenAI. Again, I don't know that this matters, because would you upgrade your phone just to put a volcano in the background of a photo that didn't have it? Maybe, maybe not, but the fact that if, in this cycle of smartphones, everybody is trying to add gee whiz, ai stuff to get you to upgrade, google has the cadence and the speed of adding new features that Apple has not shown at all all.

49:50 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, I think, you said something that's really important there, which is matters, and I wonder, to whom?

49:57
uh, to consumers yes I, I'm, I'm 100 with you and I think I'm with you if we talk about matters to the stock market or the stock price, and when we talk about horse race, when we, when we look at a handful of companies that are in a horse race with each other and these features, maybe you, you will buy one of these devices based on the a. I don't know, I'm trying to think like a consumer, but what I want, maybe, as google, is to have this distributed as widely as search and on all of my mobile, which is far wider than Apple, and I can affect the competitive ecosystem.

50:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do have to say there is one thing that Apple has a big jump on Google, and that's the processor. So we're already hearing that the Tensor G4 and these new Pixel phones slows down by as much as 50% as it gets warm. I don't think Apple has this problem with its A-series processors in its phones. The other thing, of course, is Google's announcing this three weeks before Apple announces their next generation, so they're comparing themselves to last year's iPhone. We're comparing them to last year's iPhone. We don't know what this fall's iPhone will bring, but it will probably bring a processor that is superior to the Tensor G4.

51:18 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
And also the point to be made is and I'm using the word gimmick on purpose here like adding gimmicks to taking photos is great, but like the real revolution would come if the AI on your phone has access to your email and your calendar and whatever. Well, google sort of promised that.

51:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Remember the demo that failed twice finally worked. God, I was just my heart was in my mouth with this poor guy. He took a picture of his calendar and asked Gemini to tell it when this artist actually it was a picture of an artist touring calendar and how it would coincide with his life and when he could go see this artist. And actually it was a picture of an artist's touring calendar and how it would coincide with his life and when he could go see this artist. And it did it. It took three tries but it did it, which is actually a little too close to home. I mean, this is kind of what our experience of these assistants has been anyway, you know.

52:08 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Leo to that point as well. I think something else that is very significant about this is flashback, 18 months, and Google's rollout of Bard. It was largely considered a flop and they were considered maybe staggered in the race. Now we're all talking about this and Gemini is a potential leader. So I think that that is that speed at which they were able to kind of identify the flaws and release products that made us forget about them is pretty impressive.

52:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The thing that, to me, would be the killer app for all of these is a genuinely intelligent assistant. Isn't that what we think of when we think of AI? We think of Her, the movie Her. That what we think of when we think of ai? We think of her, the movie her. Uh, now, as far as I know, nobody's come close. Uh open ai, gemini and uh anthropic all have assistants you can talk to.

53:05 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I think anthropics does, and, and I talk to my assistant a lot, but it's not at all interesting it's weird that we're in like the uh, not to put history hat on, but we're in the um the era of the search engines. Where is alta vista slightly better than, uh, you know, excite or versus?

53:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, we are kind of there is no winner yet.

53:27 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Is there like right, because a lot well, but like there are people that, like I prefer claude from Anthropic to ChatGPT from OpenA.

53:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're effectively the same.

53:38 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Right, but that's the thing is that we're still at the point where they're all kind of doing there's no Google leap where it's like, oh, this is so far, generationally beyond what we're used to.

53:51 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Nicholas, do consumers care?

53:59 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I don't know, I don't know that I see a whole lot of people willing to like we were saying earlier, like are you going to buy a new phone because you can put a volcano in the background? I don't know how many. I mean, inflation is still a thing. The economy is kind of weird.

54:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like a phone you got a you got. You got a thousand bucks. You could put a phone in your pictures. Yeah, but at the same time, aren't there like?

54:15 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
aren't there like a hundred million people that are, that are using ChatGP? I don't know that they're subscribed, but in terms of the adoption, there is tens of millions of people that we know for sure. And by people we could also include enterprise or whatever that are using some form of a bot right and are paying for it at this point, but your point is well taken, nicholas.

54:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
While we here on this panel probably pay for a I know I pay for every one of them, which is ridiculous. Normal people are probably not saying, oh yeah, quick, let me get my pocketbook, I gotta buy a chat assistant. They're not yet useful, which is why I think Apple and Google both are kind of focusing on these secondary things. Google kind of got a pass, in my opinion. Remember how beat up Microsoft got over their recall feature, the feature that would kind of keep track of everything you were doing on your device and then you could search it later. And, of course, security officials uh, security, uh experts and others pointed out this is just a. This is ripe for plucking by bad guys. Uh, microsoft put it off. They said well, maybe we're not going to ship it with a new copilot species. But google has something easily recall information from screenshots. Uh, you can do screenshots and it's basically databases these and turns them into a searchable database of things. Now I guess the difference is you're.

55:42 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Notice they use the word recall.

55:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
by the way, easily recall information from screenshots. You are adding it manually. It's not memorizing everything you ever did, but isn't it the same problem, or maybe not?

55:55 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
no, because you were. You were electing to take that's your choice I think this might also be a very smart move on apple's part in the very, very, very short term at least the next, like six to 18 months is this partnership with open ai.

56:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It might let them kind of defer all negative hits to say ah apple's trying to walk this line, though, because they also have their own AI, and what they're saying again and again is if you query Siri or you query this new AI assistant, it will try to do it locally. If it can't, it will do it on our safe servers where your privacy is protected, and if you want and if we think that OpenAI could do a better job, we'll offer it to you. And if you want, knowing the hazards of sending this data to OpenAI, you can use OpenAI as well. It's not that it is the main AI on the Apple iPhone. It is a secondary AI, and presumably Gemini will be as well. I mean, they've been talking to Google. In fact, I think they're talking to Anthropic as well but Apple says they have this intelligence Now, of course, we don't know because they haven't released it yet. More, they have for developer betas, but I don't hear anybody.

57:06 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
You know, the holy grail for them is to do as much on the edge on device as possible. Right, and so these are all. What Dan said was the key point is that, for now, if you go to OpenAI on an iPhone and you don't like what happens, you're not going to blame Apple, you can blame OpenAI. And then, in theory, three or four years from now, when they can do 90% of it on device because, again, as you're saying, leo, their chips are potentially superior then you don't have to worry about it, because they'll claim it entirely and say look at how great Apple intelligence is, because we do it all on our own chips and our own hardware.

57:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's also this issue of well, what are you going to do for me? That I really want I mean a thousand bucks so I can have volcanoes in my pictures is probably not going to do it.

57:56
Google announced a feature called call notes. That might be something people want. It saves a private summary of your conversation after a phone call so that you can get a summary of it. Action items now. Uh, we were wondering when they announced it and they didn't mention this, but we found out later that Google Notes will run or call notes will run fully on device, so it won't be sent out to a server and everyone on the call will be notified that you are in effect recording this and will be using the AI to generate notes. Yet this does seem like a feature I don't know. That sounds like a great feature. I would like that. Not that I make many calls anymore, but does anybody. And then, and when we talked about this on this Week in Google, paris Mardinot, who's a reporter for the information, said that would be great. But I have a real problem with it because these are confidential sources.

58:52 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah right, Any source worth their salt doesn't want to be recorded.

58:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, oh, by the way, we're recording this. Whoa, hold on, I'm in deep throat. Let's move to signal. That's what they say. Let's move to signal.

59:04 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
You know, I think it's also. I will be shocked if, in 20 years, my kid grows up without an AI friend. I think that kids born today are definitely going to have ai buddies well, I agree that's what we want.

59:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not convinced. I don't know we're going to get there. Do you think we'll get there?

59:25 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
dan, I don't, I don't know. I don't know. I used to be. I think probably, if we listened to these shows in like circa 2017, 18, 19, I probably would have been pretty bullish on AGI and super intelligence. Now I think it could easily hit a wall and and I it could accelerate and continue going. Or it could just be like oh, these are nice tools like Photoshop and Adobe.

59:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah yeah, google did get in a little trouble when they sent out pixel nines, requiring influencers to prefer the pixel nine over competition or have the relationship terminated. Now, this was not for reviewers.

01:00:10
Nicholas, the good thing about Consumer Reports you buy everything, so you're never subject to these agreements, but it's the Team Pixel program which seeds pixels to influencers, youtube stars and so forth before public availability, but they also send used to. They actually changed this after the Verge reported on it. They used to send out here's a screenshot of it. They used to send out here's a screenshot of it by opting out into this program. By opting into this program, you acknowledge you're expected to feature the Google Pixel device in place of any competitor's mobile devices.

01:00:45
Please note if it appears other brands are being preferred over the Pixel, we will need to cease the relationship between the brand and the creator. And then you have to say yes, I acknowledge and agree. If you say no, you don't get the pixel. Uh, google got a lot of heat and they said oh um, we missed the mark with this new language and we've removed it. But I don't actually think they missed the mark. I think this is exactly how it works when you have a team pixel of influencers. Reviewers are not subject to this and the verge was quick to point that out that tells me there's a bunch of follow-up stories waiting to be written weirdly.

01:01:29 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Oh sorry, go ahead I well, I mean.

01:01:32 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
So I mean, I would ask that spokesperson, like why did you miss the mark, yeah, and how did you allow this to go forward? And do you apply the same like does Marques Brownlee get the same treatment or does he like Consumer Reports which smartly buys their devices?

01:01:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Brownlee was quick to post on X.

01:01:54 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I was kind of sick, who I'm a big fan of. I just used him as an example. Yeah, he said this here's my outside looking in perspective on this whole Team Pixel thing. I don't know if you guys have seen any of the book.

01:02:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No YouTuber can do anything in 20 seconds. But basically he said, no, I'm not doing this and I wouldn't do this, but he's a reviewer. Now he said, no, I'm not doing this and I wouldn't do this, but he's a reviewer. Now he still gets sent phones but he reviews them and actually I don't think he sends it back, because I've seen the drawer of phones. He has his thousands of these, but there are plenty, and this is the problem. This is what blurs the line. There are plenty of people on YouTube and Instagram and elsewhere that are on Team Pixel, and maybe you didn't know this, but they had to, in order to get onto Team Pixel, make this agreement.

01:02:42 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
This is what I was going to say Speaking of drawers of devices, and this is really inside baseball. But Google has been for years, until this year famous for if you go to any of their phone events, everybody gets one. I've got about four or five pixels in the drawer and so, again, this is inside baseball.

01:03:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I'm curious as to why, all of a sudden, they got a little more stringent about their Apparently, they hired an agency to manage this, and I think the reason I bring this up is it's important for you, our audience, to understand that these agreements are routine. In many cases, there is a difference between a reviewer and an influencer, and many influencers do not have the same ethical concerns that reviewers might. But it would also behoove the smart consumer to figure out what when you're looking at a review which you're watching. Is this a reviewer or an influencer? And if they made a deal with the company whatever company to prefer the company's device in order to get the device? This was a program handled by a pr agency called 1000 heads and I mean there are, there are laws about that.

01:04:02 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I mean there are ftc is very clear, yeah you know from reading ads like if you there, I can't endorse something I don't use exactly, exactly um and so.

01:04:13
So that would be the differentiator. If you're reviewing it, you're doing a certain job. If you are an influencer that was given this as swag, then you have to uphold, according to the FTC, a certain sort of. You can't just be like, all of a sudden, the Pixel is the greatest because I got a free one, in the same way that if you got a Tesla, whatever, like, you'd have to differentiate between that.

01:04:43 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I can tell you from experience at CNET which was consumer technology, but I mean every tech magazine, including Consumer Report and elsewhere you are sent review units. However, you do sign a document that says these are going back to you after six weeks. This is not mine, it's not owned by me, the reviewer, it's not owned by the company. This is a unit that I'm being sent to review and you agree that you don't get to shape this review and we would, ethically everyone. This was disclosed, so the audience was well aware that this was a review unit sent for review. However, I can share.

01:05:25
You know this started to change a little bit around the pandemic when everybody was kind of working remotely. Companies Samsung just sent devices, sent tons of devices. I think I had three or four that when we uh opened back up, I just brought back to cnet and plopped in the drawer. But it things changed around the pandemic, companies didn't care and they didn't sign anything and they didn't ask you to sign anything well I want to speak to cr briefly, if I can yes, please do, because I know you have a very weird.

01:05:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're yeah, we're old and different uh, and with high standards yeah, no, it's.

01:05:59 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
It's in a way, it's like very nice, like I don't have to deal with any of this. I remember I went to one google event where I think they were handing out the home, the home minis or whatever the little that circle speaker. I had to give that back, exiting the show. I was like, yeah, I can't take this, sorry. So, crworks, is that for certain preview content, like, let's say, the iPhone next month? If Apple sends out the iPhone to like the Verge and Engadget and everyone, we may or may not be on that initial kind of like preview tranche, but the final review, the rating in the ratings, the ratings in the magazine, that is all based on devices that we purchased. We purchased cars, we purchased tvs, we purchased induction stoves. Any review is something that we've purchased with our own money, that we get from selling subscriptions and it's part of that, because you can assure that they're not just sending you.

01:06:52 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Okay. This is the top one percent of what we produced off the line.

01:06:57 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
And now it's interesting because if I am a kid and I'm scrolling through TikTok or whatever, am I making that distinction between it's all content? Now, right, it's all just some influencer saying, oh, the new Pixel is so cool. It's like, is that any less trustworthy than Consumer Reports saying, well, we bought this ourselves, we tested it in our labs in Yonkers, or whatever the case may be. It's like do people care? I think about that all the time. It's like do actually people care about whether or not this is like above board? Is all just content? Is it just stuff on the feed that you forget about? You know, seven seconds later.

01:07:32
That's something that we talk about internally all the time, actually, and I don't know, I don't know to what degree people even will make the distinction between Team Pixel and the reviews program. All this stuff just gets very fuzzy and ultimately it's just like a vertical video of a young person talking about Pixel AI. It's like I don't know where we are. I will say that I was shopping for headphones and ones I'm wearing on right now, about a week ago, and it's rough out there, like I was trying to find, like, which of these are just paid adverts, which of these is just content. Which which reviewer bought these, which was which reviewer was just sent this and like well, you know, the the headphone company doesn't have any sway over what I write in my review and it's like I ultimately just trusted like a bunch of like headphone nerds on some like obscure message board to like buy these.

01:08:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, I trust that. Yeah, this is the ascendancy of Reddit. Yeah, exactly.

01:08:23 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
It wasn't even Reddit, it was like some audio science, it was some, but it's like it's rough out there, man, like if you really want to but kind of my'm like well, I'm just gonna like I'm just personally interested in buying less stuff than I was even a few years ago, just because it's hard to find like qualified, like objective, just even just like educated opinions, like if you're just getting headphones in the mail willy-nilly, you're just getting phones in the mail willy-nilly, like I don't know. It just feels, it feels very silly to me, like even just zooming, zooming out, it's like what are we doing? It's just we're just like I'm T-Pixel. It's like okay, what, like what? What? What is happening?

01:09:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
here and, let's be honest, the reason Google does this and the reason they had that agreement. Whether they leave it in or take it out, it was always implied. Google does this because you don't know the difference. So you might be watching. The influencer says oh man, I, this phone is the best phone, I love this phone. Look what I can do with this phone, blah, blah. And you have no idea that they were given the phone by google with either an explicit or implicit tit for tat that you will feature this phone, you will love this phone. You will not show this phone next to an iphone and make comparisons and that does a disservice to people and good.

01:09:39 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
And the problem is these companies know this and they're doing it yeah, it's the fuzziness they want you to think these are reviews, otherwise they wouldn't do it there is a trust that was at the foundation of much of um the previous generation and and I think that maybe, as I say, in politics the overton window has shifted a little bit, but the so our norms have shifted, our cultural norms have shifted. Just like nicholas was saying, it's just a vertical video with some person saying something about a product, but it's. It's very interesting to me that the company that owns the distribution platform, google, owns YouTube and they have built a product that they are then advertising on the distribution platform to creators who use that distribution platform to reach an audience. There is a really interesting relationship there between the parent company, the media company that they own, and the creators that use that platform and the hardware device that they're promoting.

01:10:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It might be even worse outside of technology and other consumer goods. My son, who is a TikTok chef and influencer in cooking, has a lot of millions of followers on Instagram. Tiktok has a room in his house where he throws stuff that sent him unsolicited and when his friends come over, when his dad comes over, he says, yeah, go, take anything you want. You know, I don't even know, I don't. I think his attitude is if you're not going to pay me for an advertisement, I'm not going to plug anything. He's not a reviewer, right? He's just cooking.

01:11:13
But I think this is universally true and the industry all industries have woken up to the power of influencers and what they try to do is get these influencers to in any way, subtly or unsubtly, recommend their product, because it really has huge value, better than any advertisement. The FTC is well aware of this. In fact, they've announced a final rule banning companies from creating or selling fake reviews, especially AI-generated reviews, which is a big problem, especially on sites like Amazon, where a lot of the reviews you see on an Amazon page are not by humans you know, somebody did the search for uh, as an artificial intelligence.

01:12:00 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I cannot, or whatever the the key phrase was on Amazon found thousands of that prepositional phrase right as, yes, the digital age changes comma you know what's.

01:12:11 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
The bigger one, though, leo is. Um, they finally cracked down on and this has been around for 20 years or more. Um, the somebody creates a sock puppet review site for your mattress or mattresses or whatever. Many of the review sites, whether for headphones or mattresses, are that and again, uh, nicholas obviously can speak to this greater than all of us, but, um, like the fact that we're just now getting around to being like oh, why is uh mattress number one rated the best? Because it's mattressreviewscom is owned by the.

01:12:43 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
yeah, I will say I won't mention any brands or anything, but I had a. I have a friend who years ago was very high up in one of the famous uh mattress companies. Uh, and she would. She would tell me all the time is like the only place I will trust for mattress reviews is Consumer Reports, because we're just sending these things out and there's no audit, there's no nothing. So she's like why would you trust these reviews from these random people? At least you guys buy the stuff and you have that. Now again, if you're a young person, will you make that distinction? Will you care or not? I don't know.

01:13:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But this person again was high up. People are paying attention. I mean, they don't think about this at all until they need a mattress. And then they go online and they see mattressfusecom. Oh, that's fine. Okay, let me see what they say. Oh, they like the Tem, that's what I'm going to get. And they have no idea what the tit for tat was or whether this is legit or not.

01:13:35 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I don't say it's really. It's really rough out there, if you're if you're a consumer, and I'm very sympathetic, you know, at my role at CR.

01:13:41
It's like we write for, you know, predominantly family families, people with, like, they have lives, they have things, they have kids. You know they have jobs. They don't have all day to research a mattress or to research a phone or headphones or a car, so they are. They're outsourcing their decision making to ostensibly what they would hope to trust these organizations, and now it's being replaced by, you know, just random vertical videos on the feed and it's like is that?

01:14:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you know, is that really the big deal? By the way, consumer reports for my whole adult life. But I have to ask you uh, do you think, because there is so much review content online, because is are you guys still thriving? Is there still interest in objective reviews?

01:14:24 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
uh, we think so we're doing. Well. You know we're not, we're not up. I'm here to break news, we're going back. No, no, we're doing fine, as far as you don't sell ads. You don't know, we don't sell ads review pro you buy the cars you talk, I mean you do everything 100.

01:14:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right really.

01:14:38 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I mean, you're the gold standard for this now I think what we could do a slightly better job of you know, speaking of like vertical video, like I'm. I'm going to be doing more videos on like tiktok and instagram.

01:14:48
Just presenting the stuff that we generate above board, but like in a way that maybe we could reach a different audience, like that's a totally valid thing to do. What's not valid is to just go to samsung and say just send us everything and we'll just write it. We'll just write it. No, that would. That would destroy the brand, like we're still going to buy everything and we're going to test it as we've tested it. But maybe I could, maybe there could be more videos of me and instagram. You know talking about it, know.

01:15:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Listen to what the FTC prohibits, and what this tells you is what the practices are, otherwise they wouldn't bother writing a rule against it. Right, the FCC says you may not offer incentives to customers in exchange for writing a positive review or negative feedback, by the way, on competitors' stuff. Right, you can't pay people for their review, reviews and testimonials written by and this is in quotes insiders at a company who fail to clearly and conspicuously disclose their affiliation with the business. This happens all the time A mattress company says go out and write reviews on Amazon for our product. It prohibits company controlled review websites, which often and I don't know, by the way, we should say I don't even know if there is a mattressreviewscom website and I certainly don't know who owns?

01:15:59
it. So that's just an example, not an actual accusation, but there are, and we know which ones they are. There are company-controlled review websites which advertise themselves as providing independent opinions on products they actually own. Ftc now forbids this, by the way. Now forbids this. Hasn't in the past Forbid this Threatening or intimidating customers into removing negative reviews. And you can't buy or sell fake followers or views on social media.

01:16:30 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
History hat Leo. This is what e-commerce has done, in the sense that back in the 30 years ago, when you could only go to a store and maybe you had the better business bureau look at how powerful reviews are oh yeah now. And like that did not exist before I was saying with influencers too.

01:16:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because I mean that's, this is a whole new world it shows the power of parasocial relationships, right?

01:17:00
yeah, I mean, this really is about trust and I shouldn't complain because we have advertisers who are playing off the parasocial relationship you, your dear, dear audience member, have with us. Uh, for those ads and and that's why those ads work. But I have to say we have very high standards. We don't take ads for companies we don't like or products we don't use and etc. Etc, etc. But not everybody does this by any means. I think when you watch a network television show, when you, you know, when you're watching abbott elementary, you're not assuming that's an endorsement for those products. On habit element, they're advertised. They're completely separated from the content, right, but it's very different in podcasts and in tick tocks and instas, because it's all, it's all.

01:17:46 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
you're describing a broad media and again, not to use your son as an example specifically but it's a niche media where if I come to trust your son for his cooking tips and his recipes and things like that, I trust his opinion, and then it's not the same thing as Abbott Elementary and then Cialis ad Right yes.

01:18:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm assuming that seems fair, although I'm sure bob dole used viagra, right? I mean he had to let's over those rules, in effect.

01:18:24 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I don't know if you had you, if you had to go before the ftc and pop the pill? Yeah, in order to sign the deal, mr Dahl.

01:18:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, lena Kahn, who gets a lot of heat, could thank you for getting this rule passed Five to nothing. Republicans and Democrats agreed in the FTC. It'll take 60 days to go into effect after it's published into the Federal Register and the maximum fine just influencers listen $51,744 per violation. So now, will this fix this problem? I don't think so Because, for instance, this example with the Pixel Team, pixel review these aren't reviews. Pixel review, these aren't reviews.

01:19:17
And this relationship that Google has with these people that it gives pixel phones to, whether it's explicitly in the contract or not, is we're going to give you a phone? This is a thousand dollar phone. We expect you to show it off. Is that, do they? Now, I don't know what the FTC is the FTC going to say? Well, you have to disclose that. I think a good site will say we receive this phone from google for review, or this phone is, you know, provided by google. I see that on sites all the time. Um, I at least do that and, yes, I did use the manscape clipper in front of lena kahn and the FTC.

01:19:55 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yeah, no.

01:20:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did use it in front of no one, in the privacy of my own home. They're asking, inquiring minds want to know, and I will, of course, be honest with you still have it. It's still on my, on my counter. Uh, okay, let's take on that note. Let's take a little break. You are watching this week in tech with a great panel dan patterson. He's here from blackbird ai, where he's director of content, from the tech memeeme Ride Home podcast. The wonderful Brian McCullough. And our good friend from Consumer Reports, where he is in charge of electronics reporting, senior electronics reporter, nicholas DeLeon. Thank you all three of you for being here. We really appreciate it.

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01:25:49 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
It's like tearing down Mount Rushmore tearing down Mount Rushmore, it feels like again for narrowly. What was the problem here was? Wasn't it paying to make the search the default right the?

01:26:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
judge, judge Amit Mehta, ruled this on August 5th, so it's been a couple of weeks. He said Google illegally monopolized the markets of online search and text ads. That that was the area. You know they're in a lot of areas, but that was the area where they will in an illegal monopoly $26 billion last year to Apple, firefox, mozilla and Samsung to be the default search engine on those companies' platforms. And he said that is the example of what a monopoly does to ensure their monopoly. That's the antitrust violation.

01:26:48 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Far be it from me to defend one of the biggest companies in the world, but then stop pay to play, which weirdly would harm Apple and Firefox more than Google. But if what the harm here is is pay to play, then I don't understand the leap Go ahead.

01:27:10 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Dan the remedy. Or you say well, I think I'm tracking with you, but are you getting to the remedy? Yes, Right.

01:27:20 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
So if the remedy is to break up like let's separate Android from Google, let's separate search from ads, or something like that, but if what the problem was, if what the monopolistic behavior was was pay to play, we will make sure that no one else can be the default search on iPhones and we're going to pay you $20 billion a year to do that, then just cut that out.

01:27:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that was the top line, but there were other things Meta didn't like. He said the fact that Google requires device makers to sign agreements in order to use apps like Gmail and the Google Play Store, he felt was also an antitrust violation. According to Bloomberg, these requirements the agreements, also require Google's search widget and Chrome browser be installed on these devices in a way they can't be deleted. He found that anti-competitive. They can't be deleted. He's found that anti-competitive. But I do think you're right that the DOJ is saying hey, victory, let's shoot the moon. You know, according to Bloomberg, divesting the Android operating system is one of the remedies most frequently discussed by Justice Department attorneys.

01:28:33 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
And also OK, so I'm just going to come back to this point. I don't see that A leads to B there, but then also, B also means how can Android stand alone when you're breaking up companies.

01:28:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I see what you're saying. Even if you sold off Android, there's still a monopoly. That company will be a monopoly. There's only two phone operating systems ios and android. Yes, so they'll still have that same cloud.

01:29:01 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
They'll still be able to go to a phone company, say, well, okay, what they won't say is you got to put google stuff on here though I thought my understanding and I I am a layperson just watching this happen but my understanding was that Android was part of the distribution and that was part of the problem. That because Android was in so many hands and because this was tied to a default in so many hands, there wasn't an easy solution many hands.

01:29:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There wasn't an easy solution. Matt is ruling. This is again from. Bloomberg found that Google monopolized the advertisements that appear at the top of search results pages to draw users to websites the text ads. They are sold via Google ads and they offer marketers a way to run ads against certain keywords. By the way, this is two-thirds of Google's total revenue is from search ads 100 billion dollars in 2020 okay, now again maybe they'll sell. They say sell off adwords.

01:30:01 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
That might be another thing okay, but if you separate search again, I don't know how I'm in this place where I'm defending, but like, let's say, you separate.

01:30:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So your point is this is a hard thing to do.

01:30:14 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I understand yeah, I don't understand like you could. What if you break up the company and by being like, okay, searches over here and ads are over here, ads is 90 billion dollars a year, searches nothing 300 million dollars a year? So, uh, how do you like? Like you would kill it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater? I don't. I mean, look again. Smarter legal minds than us are, in theory, thinking about this, but it's hard to know, because is the DOJ?

01:30:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
are the DOJ lawyers smart, old legal minds? They're trained legal minds, I'll give you that. It does seem like they're kind of going for the jugular, or maybe they're just very likely they're floating these as trial balloons to bloomberg to see what the markets and others I think that's, I think that's pretty accurate.

01:31:02 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yeah at least that's a component of it. Yeah because, again, like if you, if you just spun off android by its lonesome, uh, in theory that could be worth a lot of money, but, like, from a standing start, would that be a company that could survive? We don't necessarily know that, because Android exists.

01:31:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The last time this happened it was breaking up AT&T and there was a natural, easy way to divide it into the regional bells without harming anybody. But they're breaking up with the monopoly. It is not as obvious with Google.

01:31:37 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, the lines of delineation right, right, right.

01:31:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact Microsoft for a while. That's what the DOJ wanted to do in the late 90s, early 2000s. They wanted Microsoft to break up, and the obvious breakup was the office business and the operating system business, and both could have survived on their own. But your point is well taken, brian. How do you break up Google without killing the baby? It's not easy.

01:32:02 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
There's only one thing that's valuable. As you just said, by two-thirds of Google's revenue comes from search ads, so I don't know how you separate that from search, and then search still lives.

01:32:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What if you made them and, by the way, this has not been raised, according to Bloomberg but what if you made them? Divest YouTube.

01:32:22 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
That is a clearly delineated I mean that's kind of right there, there aren't even if there aren't geographic boundaries right, there could be business boundaries which are blurred by the monetization and YouTube kind of stands alone.

01:32:35 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Except for the fact that, again, we're none of us here are lawyers, I that that's not what we're talking about. Like, is that a way you could do that? Hey, we are wrapping you on the knuckles for your behavior over here. We want you to divest from this thing over there, which, by the way, youtube as a standalone company. I will buy into that as soon as it's available.

01:32:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and that was what Dvorak always said about breaking up Microsoft you just get two incredibly valuable companies. It's not. There's no punishment, but I don't again and you've made this disclaimer, so I'll stipulate it we're not lawyers, but I don't think the goal is to punish Google. It shouldn't be right. This is not. We're not talking about punishment, we're talking about a remedy.

01:33:20
Remedy, remedy yeah, and in which case your point is well taken. Is that a remedy? Does it make things better or does it just make Google into an untenable business, a search business without any revenue? Yes, one thing that maybe this is maybe more doable is, and also is being, according to Bloomberg, being considered licensing out the search index. So another option this is from Bloomberg Direct would require Google to divest or license this data to rivals like Bing or DuckDuckGo.

01:34:02 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Then in theory could you have a field with flowering Googles grow, if that index is available.

01:34:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let a thousand.

01:34:13 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Googles bloom. Yeah, yeah, I was terrible with my metaphor there.

01:34:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's the idea, because right now, I guess, the presumption is Google's on top, because they have a better index and no one can seem to compete.

01:34:28 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Wait wait, wait, wait, wait. Weirdly, we're at an inflection point where, in theory, if these new AI search things like if someone helped me, the company's name is Perplexity Perplexity, right, where it's like hey, we're not going to send you to a web page, we're just going to summarize the web for you, and then they're cutting deals with publishers and things like that. Maybe the timing is right where that could work, where you could, um, have, uh, different offerings for search. Am I crazy?

01:35:04 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
well, that's of course that's the same thing, right, or something very similar arc, arc, arc arc search.

01:35:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, well, it uses perplexity actually. Oh, does it?

01:35:12 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
yeah, yeah uh, at least mine does. But my you know, my google search index is all just generated now.

01:35:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, yeah, have you seen the latest Google results? They do a whole paragraph of AI above, which I think is of dubious value. To be honest, and if I were the websites creating the content that they're summarizing, I'd be really pissed Because I imagine that's biting into their traffic. Well, they're summarizing. I'd be really pissed because I imagine that's biting into their traffic eating into their traffic Well, they're pissed and making deals at the same times.

01:35:40 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Well, they're making deals, if they can. Yeah, if they can. I would be very pissed if I owned a media company. I left a media company in part because there were untenable business models. I would be yeah if I owned a media company and look, you can look back in history models. Um, I would be yeah if I owned a media company and look, you can look back in history. This I'm not pointing out any one particular uh tech company, but if I love brian's history hat, um, so let's put our history hat on and look at the the early days of search, the early days of google books, the early days of social, and now ai, the same language. Was you? Oh, that's what a I have my.

01:36:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, that's pith hat.

01:36:14 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
This is mr livingston, I presume history hat do you have a cigar or a pipe you can smoke?

01:36:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh yeah, I've got all sorts of oh there you go yeah, I have. I'm fully equipped. I may not have brought the uh canary with me, but I got the hats oh, there you go, that's a better one.

01:36:30 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
This is the yosemite history hat right.

01:36:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, no, I'm sorry, I I sidetracked you no, this is a much better side.

01:36:37 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I think media companies have heard the same language from tech firms for the last two and a half decades and and honestly, we're not going to screw you, just just trust us yeah.

01:36:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there are a couple of things that people have said. One is these kinds of actions by the courts and by the DOJ are so much slower than the rate of change in technology that they're always after the fact they're too late, and that's the point. I guess that right now search is kind of being disintermediated by AI search and other tools and maybe Google doesn't have the monopoly anymore, Just as Microsoft started to lose its internet monopoly right about when the DOJ said, hey.

01:37:19 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I was just. I was raising my hand, leo, to say do you buy into the idea that the reason that Amazon is an independent company and I don't know, google's an independent company, Facebook's an independent company, is because Microsoft had to sit on their hands for a decade and they couldn't just absorb?

01:37:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I actually do, by the way. I mean, we have no way of knowing. But I do think that the DOJ consent decree with Microsoft and just the chilling effect it had and we know this is the case from Microsoft executives who said, yeah, we thought of acquiring that company, but then we went, oh no, we better not. We thought of crushing that competition. We thought, oh, the DOJ is not going to like that. That gave Google an opening. Google arose because Microsoft did not crush the competition they were not allowed to.

01:38:14 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Boy, that is so smart. I had never thought of that, brian, that is.

01:38:18 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
They would have bought Amazon by 1999. Oh yeah, all in no questions asked. There would be no Amazon. They had Expedia, they launched Expedia themselves and things like that. But yeah.

01:38:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Again, we don't know, though, because, honestly, are you sure that they would have managed amazon as well as jeff bezos?

01:38:37 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
oh, I'm not saying that they would have been successful at doing it, but I my point was amazon, an independent company, wouldn't have happened maybe if that had, if the doj had gone after amazon in that time frame, jet would have survived hey, does that make you rethink all the acquisitions google made in the last decade and a half and then squashed? Oh for sure, Like double click and stuff like that, or no wait, I mean decade and a half Sorry.

01:39:04 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I mean for the last 10 or 15 years. The joke about Google has always been that they either buy or start companies and then shut them down.

01:39:10 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Well, and listen, I am also open to the idea that you can go too far in the other direction, where, okay, in this AI moment, companies are having to do weird backflips, to do acquisitions and all but name because they can't acquire. And so is that a healthy market? Where, if it's a market that's growing, you can't put together a tool belt of products because the government won't let you acquire your way to putting a tool belt together?

01:39:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it may be foolish for the Department of Justice to try to preserve the business of search at a time when search is being disintermediated by other tools, when search is dying a late guys, uh, you know, just as google's going down, you've decided to hit them as a monopolist. I don't know. I also think you can make the case and I really have believed this forever that google is too powerful, too big. If, if you are not in google search index, it doesn't matter. If you're in bing and duck duck go, you don't exist on the internet.

01:40:14 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Right, that's too much power for well and speaking of youtube, like google has screwed up search so much anyway at this point that uh, well, that's the irony. Google search is terrible, well, but but I'm gonna let me just make this point real quick the only place that old school discovery happens anymore is youtube.

01:40:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This was a huge part of the case, yeah right well, I also I've told by uh, I actually know some young people and they say they don't use google, they use tick tock for search which baffles me how do you?

01:40:49 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
search on tick tock so sorry I keep jumping in, but I like ever since this was a part of the case.

01:40:55
I've just been itching to talk to people about this. I hear that anecdote all the time and it might be true, but a huge part of the case was general search, defining general search versus vertical search. And Google for a long time said we, we don't really. You know, we're not really a search company. We're, we're all sorts of different things. And if you look at TikTok search or people used to say that about Twitter I mean, I heard that about Tumblr back in the day.

01:41:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And Tumblr had the worst search and Reddit.

01:41:21 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
And Reddit. Everybody has said the same thing about every social network or every whatever it is now, and that vertical search versus general search was a huge part of the reason. They said no, look, just like you guys are saying google. You can't imagine search on the web without google and whether we agree or disagree that, that they the results have eroded, the consumers have no other option. And while you can search in tiktok or you can search in twitter, those aren't the same things as a broad search. Sorry, anyway, I didn't mean to jump in.

01:41:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was just a huge part of that, dan if you don't jump in, you will not be heard. Jump in, by all means. We're all friends here. This is a vigorous conversation.

01:42:12 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I thought this would be the most boring. I mean, it just flew under the radar for so long, I didn't pay attention to it for so long. And then the last two or three weeks it was like, oh, this is something that's happening. The.

01:42:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
DOJ thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's been a long time since the federal government tried to break up a company, I think since Microsoft.

01:42:35 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Can I predict?

01:42:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, historian, federal government tried to break up a company since, uh, I think since microsoft, can I? Can I predict?

01:42:38 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
yes, historian predict it's not. It's not going to be very much. It's, it's going to be. It's going to be. Essentially don't do pay to play anymore, in which case it'll harm firefox and apple more than it'll harm. I would be extremely shocked not not a politician, not a lawyer, all that stuff if they literally make them segment out part of their business.

01:43:01
This is why, Brian, our job is tough, Because you and I know we look at this, we go well, no matter what, it's going to be five years, Nobody's going to even remember this conversation and remember what happened to microsoft is you had a, you had a regime change, you had a different party in power and then, by the time, the actual ruling came down, yeah, and then you had a consent decree and I mean so this is this, is this is just the beginning of a long fight, and it's the same problem with breaches.

01:43:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like you want to report breaches, well, yeah, but it's just, it's background noise at this point.

01:43:40 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
This is just more background noise the idea of pay to play being eliminated. Like I just I searched really quickly. Uh, google is is responsible for 81 percent of mozilla's revenue.

01:43:51 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Well, that's like a problem.

01:43:53 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Yes, that's what happens to mozilla. Uh, I guess we know what happens to mozilla's revenue. Well, that's like a problem. Yeah, yes, that's what happens to mozilla. I guess we know what happens to mozilla. Yeah, you know, and that stinks because I use fire. I mean plenty of people use firefox every day. Uh, you know yes, does that?

01:44:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this is a perfect example of unintended consequences. Is? Is that? Oh, yeah, okay, so we're gonna stop them from paying that money, because that's that's. That's strengthening a monopoly. Oh, by the way, you just killed Firefox, which is the only credible threat to Chrome. Exactly so you just strengthened the monopoly. Google has the stranglehold on the Internet with Chrome.

01:44:29 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
And even like I'm not saying I'm not defending Apple but like you, would take $20 billion a year of pure profit out of Apple's bottom line. That I'm okay with. Which, hey, I get it. But also like A to B to C, does that make any sense?

01:44:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, we're punishing. You're punishing the wrong people, yeah.

01:44:49 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Wait, no, it's not punishing, it's remedying. We're remedying Google, but we're punishing Apple.

01:44:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, exactly. Google just gets a remedy, apple gets spanked.

01:45:01 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Meanwhile, the consumer is scratching their head.

01:45:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like if your daughter gets spanked for what your son did. It's not right. It's just not right. All right, let's take a break. We're going to talk more with our great panel.

01:45:15
I'm glad you're here watching this Week in Tech, and we thank our club for making it possible for us to stream everywhere. Now this is kind of a new thing we're doing. I've got people chatting with us on YouTube. We stream at youtubecom slash twit. Slash live twitchtv, slash twit. Linkedin, facebook Kik discord for our club members. Oh, I almost forgot xcom. I feel a little guilty about that one, but hey, you know, if you're on x, you get to watch us. What's wrong with that? As long as we're not being d-dossed, we're okay. Thank you, club members for making that possible, and if you're not a club member, I invite you to join. Seven bucks a month. Month. Lots of benefits. The biggest one is you're supporting what we do. We've cut our costs as much as we can. That's why I'm at home, don't have a studio anymore. We want to be as efficient as possible, but we want to keep doing what we're doing and with your help, we can. You see that QR code in the upper left, no matter what platform you're on scan that, join the club or visit twittv slash club, twit and me. Thank you so much for your support the show today brought to you by 1Password.

01:46:30
We got some really good news a few months ago. One of our sponsors, kolide K-O-L-I-D-E, announced that they had been acquired by 1Password. I thought that's great. I mean, both companies are kind of in the authentication business. It's kind of a natural match. Well, now we're seeing the result of that acquisition and it's really really great.

01:46:51
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01:48:10
Extended access management from 1Password it solves problems traditional IAM and MDM can't touch. They like to use the analogy that your company network, your security, is like a college campus's quad. You know the quadrangle with all the beautiful grass and the nice brick, ivy-covered buildings all around and the beautiful little paved brick paths between the buildings. So the buildings are the company-owned devices, the IT-approved apps. You've got your little managed employee identities walking up and down those paved paths. But then there's also the paths that people actually use, the shortcuts, the shortcuts through the grass. You know the dirt paths that are the actual straightest line from point A to point B. Those are the unmanaged devices, the shadow IT apps, the non-employee identities like contractors. Truth is, most security tools work on the happy brick paths, but a lot of the security problems take place on the shortcuts, and that's why you need 1Password extended access management and security for the way we work today. Right now it's available to companies who use Okta. It's kind of an add-on that lets you ensure that everybody's authenticated and every device and app is safe.

01:49:24
Coming later this year to Google Workspace and Microsoft Entra 2. This is a great solution. Check it out. 1passwordcom slash twit the number one P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D. 1passwordcom slash twit. We thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. We really appreciate it. We're big fans and we're very happy to be partnered with you in this new venture. 1password Extended Access Management. The bad news keeps on coming. This is another story, brian McCullough, that I don't you know. It's like oh, more layoffs. Uh, last week it was 15 000 employees from Intel. Dell has just announced and I'm it's so sad an additional 12 500 employees will be laid off this week. 24, 515 months, and Dell is not. It's not like Dell's going out of business. It's not like Dell's going bankrupt, it just is it the PC industry is just collapsing? What's going on of business? It's not like Dell's going bankrupt. Is it that the PC industry is just collapsing? What's going on?

01:50:25 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
No, you could say the same thing for Intel, though their sales aren't necessarily going down. It's the thing that you're asking about Dell, but I'm going to answer about Intel. I've been saying on the show that they're in the stage where they're looking for anything that's burnable to throw on the fire, to stay alive. Anything that's flammable, they're throwing on the fire right now. I did a story this week about how Masa San and SoftBank went to them and said hey, you know what we'd love to do Create a meaningful competitor to um nvidia.

01:51:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and intel couldn't make it happen sure, and last week it was tesla, and the week before, you know, it's like the flavor of the month. The stock market is so focused on what, how much? What did you make for me last quarter? I don't know how these companies survive. This is what Windows Central said. Dell will cut thousands of jobs this week in a move that will reorganize the company's sales team and place a bigger emphasis on AI. Oh yeah, that'll fix it. Just do AI. That's what the stock market wants you to do seems like this is happening.

01:51:44 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Oh, go ahead, brian.

01:51:45 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I was going to say it is what the stock market wants them all to do right now oh, yeah, we give it.

01:51:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Talk to us in six months. Yeah, is it good business? Is the question? Um, I guess part you know, look, nobody wants. It's tragic, and and if you're in that group of 24, 500 people have been laid off off from Dell in the last year.

01:52:04 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Dan Dan, I cut you off, please, no, I it's, you're right, the stock market, and it is happening in multiple industries. If you're a video game player, this is happening in that industry. If you work in the media business, it's happening there. It's just total collapse in the media business. So it I mean it seems this is very sad about tech, and I think I'm curious about how this will transform the industry, but sadly it doesn't seem to be isolated with tech.

01:52:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, okay, I don't you know. I just you have my sympathies and I don't know if it's the rate of one in a business. It is. It is, you know, very possibly the case of one in a business. It is. It is, you know, very possibly the case. These companies overhired and uh, and then all the people being laid off are expendable. I don't know where they go to get a job.

01:52:52 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
They don't go to intel you know, I'll make an argument for you, leo, that is friendly to the worker, which is that, uh, because a lot of the you know, the meta layoffs, the alphabet layoffs, all of the big tech platform layoffs happened earlier in the year, and that seems to have stopped.

01:53:10
So, like this is the tail end. It doesn't make any difference to the people being laid off now, but what were you being rewarded for by Wall Street in 2020. When Amazon and Meta and everybody were increasing their headcount by 15% a year, year over year, wall Street was rewarding you for that by being, like you know, listen, you're the Fang stocks, you're the nifty, whatever, and just keep. Everything you're doing is just working like crazy. And so that's how they responded to the street. So I'm literally not giving a pass to the management at the tech companies, but I am saying that they were taking direction from what Wall Street wanted, and Meta's stock is almost up 100% this year because they had their time. I don't even want to call it a year of what. Did he call it a retrenchment?

01:54:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but they got punished because the metaverse was a crappy idea.

01:54:20 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
But what I'm saying is but, leo, the stock is back up because they're still spending like crazy on CapEx, because it's AI. It's all about what Wall Street wants to hear. They laid off tens of thousands of people a year of efficiency. But also our CapEx isn't going down because you want AI, we're going to do AI. It's expensive.

01:54:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's traditionally thought. James Surowiecki wrote the book the Wisdom of the Crowds. It's traditionally thought that the market combines the wisdom of multiple players and it always produces the right result. Is that right?

01:55:00 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
On a 18-month leading or trailing indicator. Yes, Depending on where you are on that.

01:55:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Really, yeah. I mean, I guess they're producing the right result for the people who are investing in the stock market. Maybe not for the companies that they're investing in, I don't know. I mean, if the stock market likes AI, who are we to say? The stock market's wrong?

01:55:23 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
But it's also like you know how the bond market or the stock market can be a leading indicator for the next recession. Or we'll tell you like when we come out of recessions, the stock market goes up like six months or 12 months or 18 months before. It is an accurate indicator of things, but just not the accurate indicator of things right now, today. Yeah, do you know what I mean?

01:55:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and so it depends on where you are it's the quarterly uh result focus that keeps you from doing long term you know that you know that phrase, you.

01:55:56 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
you can't put your foot in the same river twice like, so it depends on where in. No, I don't know that I've never heard that.

01:56:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I see what you're saying Because, the river keeps flowing.

01:56:05 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Right, it's a different river every moment.

01:56:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, right, right. I didn't think about that.

01:56:10 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
So it depends on when you put your foot in the river. The market could be right, depending on if you're expecting a recession tomorrow or a recession 18 months down the road. It depends on what your timeline is, I guess.

01:56:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right. Well, I don't know anything about Dell's business, so I don't you know, and I don't know if AI is going to improve Dell's business. I just don't know if the market knows what's right either. I just don't know if the market knows what's right either. Quantum cryptography is still not a thing, but the National Institute's standards and technology has settled on the post-quantum cryptography standards that you will all need to use if you want your passwords to be secure on that magical day when the quantum computers come online and they can crack the simple rsa algorithm like like a walnut sorry, I know I've been talking a lot lately, but the thing that was it.

01:57:15
I never, I never thought about this before this is why, dan, you just have to shut, just shout out what you want to yeah, yeah, I am so familiar with shouting out the thing that I hadn't thought about before was you need to encrypt this stuff now, if you go through this article, road right so like it's.

01:57:37
It's almost like the inverse y2k although I have to say I hope that they can crack the rsa algorithm, because then I can get my bitcoin out of the wallet and, uh, and I'll be rich, and the good news is, by that time it might be worth millions. Wouldn't that be a funny, uh kind of coda to my career? He had 7.85 bitcoin and could never sell it because he didn't know the password. Then the quantum computers came along and they chopped his head off, put him in a jar, but it's, but he's got a lot of, a lot of bitcoin well, point is, if you're a bank, yes, encrypt with this new algorithm.

01:58:19
Ml chem, formerly known as crystals kaiser. Mlchem, formerly known as Crystals Kyber. Mldsa, formerly known as Crystals Dilithium I guess the NIST folks didn't think dilithium was a word that would inspire confidence, I don't know. And SLHDSA initially submitted as Sphinx Plus. This was a little competition. In fact. Some of the algorithms fell by the wayside. They were not in fact quantum hardened. But these three apparently are so good news and I bet you, steve Gibson, will address this on Tuesday on security, steve Gibson, 1.10.

01:58:58 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, this quantum cryptography river has been flowing for quite a while. Um, and I I'm curious about I, like brian said I think encrypt things now, but I'm very dubious about a lot of the claims of quantum's capabilities. I as am I as am I or us of achieving those capabilities. I do believe that that technology could do marvelous things, but I don't necessarily I'm very skeptical or dubious that we will achieve that.

01:59:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But maybe it's prudent I mean, it's certainly harmless to re-encrypt using a better algorithm being prudent that perhaps quantum crypto crackers are on their way. They quote TechCrunch quotes Dario Gil, who's the director of research at IBM, who thinks that we will hit a major inflection point around the end of the decade. That's only six years off, less five and a half. That's when he says IBM will be building a fully error-corrected system. The question is, from that point on, gil says how many years until you have systems capable of breaking RSA? That's open to debate. Suffice to say, we're now in the window where you're starting to say, all right, so somewhere between the end of the decade and 2035, the latest, that's only 10 years off.

02:00:19
But on the other hand, ibm does sell, or is trying to sell, quantum computing.

02:00:24 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
So but the key right there is. What he says is that if you're an adversary, be you a government or a business adversary, you could just download everybody's stuff right now.

02:00:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Collect it now.

02:00:35 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yeah, that's what the NSA is doing.

02:00:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't have to be an adversary. You could be the NSA. That's why they built that big data facility so they could just collect everything.

02:00:44 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
That's I, you know, when I was covering cybersecurity as a reporter, and sometimes I would have pretty good sources and they I'm paraphrasing many people, but they would say the same thing that like, yes, this might be a problem in several years, but I can do it now, right, like the threat is here now. It's not you know, there could be future threats, for sure, but there are present threats too.

02:01:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's true. I guess the question is is there any harm in re-encrypting using a post-quantum technology? And I think not, and I think probably we'll start seeing consumer apps like your password manager offering these algos, I would presume. Why not, if there's?

02:01:32
no, I would hope, right yeah this is a journalism story, but I think it's an interesting story. You probably and I held off on this for a couple of weeks the Trump campaign said that they were hacked by Iranians and now, by the way, the Democrats are also saying they were hacked by Iranian hackers. But unlike last time, unlike four years ago, you may remember that news outlets, when they received the material that the Russian hackers had exfiltrated from the DNC Wikileaks, published it. I don't know, did other news outlets publish it also? Dan?

02:02:13 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, oh for sure, a number of news. I don't have the answer, but I have been thinking about this for a long time. I would. I would like to in. In most broadcast organizations, you have what's called a standards and practices. They're attorneys, but their entire departments and part of their job is just to keep you from getting sued, but the other part of their job is to think about ethical things like this, because you have to walk an ethical line while you're reporting and they set standards and practices for your behavior as a reporter so that you can have good guidance when you report in the field, when you have questions like this, like this is totally ambiguous.

02:02:49
I know that I and many others received some information in 2016. I was covering exactly this. I was covering the data and the hacking and I there were people who received a lot of data, but I know that this was a big part of the conversation and I think that a number of organizations I did not. I didn't have enough to share and I didn't have the correct sourcing to share this but a number of organizations did publish, and sometimes gleefully. I know that there are some schadenfreude with the former president a president uh, we don't have to talk about partisan politics here, but I think that schadenfreude or a dislike of that candidate pushed um or or kind of made ethical leeway to push some of that content um and I think that's the point.

02:03:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The associated press was reporting this week that, even though politico, the washington post, the new y York Times, received information about this most recent hack, but they are not, they're not publishing it.

02:03:45 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Exactly. They've learned their lesson, maybe, but you could say that this is then asymmetrical. Is it partisan? That they wanted to go after the.

02:03:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Democrats, but they don't want to go after the Republicans, apparently. Or that they were july 22nd had received email that included a 271 page campaign document, the vetting information about uh jd vance and a partial vetting report of marco rubio. Like many such vetting documents, the times wrote of the Vance report. They contain past statements with the potential to be embarrassing or damaging. All three organizations, even though they were able to verify the validity of the material, decided not to publish.

02:04:35 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Those are only three organizations acknowledging that they have received this information, or, yes, this information.

02:04:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's my take on it I'm going to take it that we have learned our lesson, that we understand now that these hacks come from foreign adversaries who want to destabilize our government yes and that we are going to be prudent in the release of this information, that it's hacked material even if it's legitimate material, and it even even if it's newsworthy, because that's usually the debate, right, is it? It is the public's right to know in the public's interest.

02:05:09
Yeah, yeah, um, yeah but we don't want foreign adversaries to in any way be receiving encouragement to do this yeah, or to be manipulating news organizations on behalf of a partisan grudge?

02:05:22 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
yeah, that's exactly where I've come down. If I were an editor or, uh, an ep on a show, I would opt not to publish this, but I would have I, I think I would. I would have to think about it for a long time and I think I would want lots of conversations with my journalists and reporters who have diverse opinions it may also be.

02:05:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The ap points out that all of the stuff that was in this vetting document was already known by nonsense. Yeah, it was already, everybody knew about it, and so there was no need to do a story about it. In fact, the stories ended up being uh, we received this information and uh, and the you know that it's probably iranian hackers who are, in fact, trying to um influence the election, right, if, if, right.

02:06:12 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
And we should say everyone is thirsty for a headline. Uh, if you don't want to break news, you're not a journalist and if I, I think that there would be some ethical conversations if there were real headlines in here.

02:06:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There would be ethical conversations about we have to publish uh, jesse essinger eisinger, who is a editor at pro publica and a senior reporter there, said I don't think they handled it properly. They overle the lesson of 2016.

02:06:42 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
So they are some of the best. Yeah, I would use.

02:06:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I agree, propublica is the best, apparently they were not given the information, because it sounds like had they been given that information, they would have published it. I don't, you know. I think it's probably the highest national interest is to discourage these kinds of hacking and foreign influence campaigns.

02:07:05 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I mean, that's what you deal with, right that's every day, yeah, every day, geopolitics. And I mean we have, we have corporate clients that I have nothing to do with, but, and most I mean like I am not in any way able to influence, that I wouldn't talk about things I was able to influence, but yeah, we, we geopolitics is what we do all day, every day yeah, uh, and is it your uh belief that nations, especially nation states that have uh, that our adversaries are using hackers and other means to try to destabilize our oh, for sure, yeah, yeah, that's.

02:07:40
That's uh not controversial, that, and we do that too, and we've done it for a long time in fact we do it, I still yeah we I I still publish for jason heiner over at zdnet.

02:07:49
I write a monthly column about cyber security and this past column I interviewed an old friend of mine, jack rice, who is a former cia agent. He was a journalist, now public defender in minneapolis, and he talked a lot about how well I know, a lot about how how some of our adversaries and mostly when people say the word adversary they mean Russia, but how some of our adversaries behave, because I did that while I worked at the CIA and let me give you a bunch of quotes about how it works. So, anyway, you publish those quotes, I presume oh, for sure.

02:08:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, maybe not the material, though. All right, let's see. I'm getting a little hot in here, and that's probably because my air conditioning is lying to me. Wait a minute, what? Who put this in here? This is a story from the Atlantic by Daniel Engberg. By Daniel Engberg.

02:08:45 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Your air conditioner is lying to you about eco mode. Well, I put this in there, all right. What is it? Why, what?

02:08:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What the hell.

02:08:54 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
If you have a window unit any modern window unit you have, like an eco button or a money saver button. Money saver button. Now, if you've ever tried to use this, I button. Or a money saver button money saver button. Now, if you've ever tried, I would like a money saver button. Can I me?

02:09:07
too, and I turn it on sometimes at night and guess what? I wake up at 3 am and I'm sweating and I'm like, wait, what is this for? Uh, long story short, tldr. Um, this was a I don't know, a 15 years ago government program where it's like well, make it more efficient, and have a button that says it's more efficient. Well, more efficient means it turns off the stuff that's cooling.

02:09:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it's more efficient because you're sweating your pants off.

02:09:37 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
But number two is that there was no. Any manufacturer could say whatever they want, maybe it turns off the fan, maybe it turns off the condenser, maybe it turns on. So there's no sort of like apples to apples sort of thing of what eco means. And then my favorite thing about this is means. And then my favorite thing about this is so. The reporter asks Amanda Stevens, who was then the EPA's product manager for Energy Star Home Appliances, why, if money saver mode really did improve efficiency at little or no cost to thermal comfort, she and the EPA hadn't pushed harder so that it should be the only mode available on air conditioners available.

02:10:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why don't?

02:10:23 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
we just make that the default.

02:10:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She said that's a valid question, so Dan, you got up, were you checking to see if you had a money saver button on your AC?

02:10:32 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I know, I know I do and I push it all the time it doesn't do nothing.

02:10:38 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Well, have you noticed that it makes it hotter, and so then you just turn it off?

02:10:42 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
look my internal rationalization is it cools it down and then it keeps it there.

02:10:46 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Maybe it turns right, the idea is that, okay, I set it at 72 so that it, once it hits 72, it shuts off or at least chills or calms down for a bit.

02:10:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What you did there, yeah, but it doesn't because, or it maybe does, but you have no way of knowing, because one manufacturer versus another does things differently so I have Nest thermostats from Google and we leave them in Eco mode and all that means is it turns up the maximum heat and turns down the maximum cool, and it just you know. So it it's, it's less comfortable.

02:11:26 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Well, yeah, that's obvious it's the old jimmy carter. Uh, sweater mode yeah, sweater mode.

02:11:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now, if they put a sweater mode on there, I'd do that. I like sweaters anyway. That, yes, part of the problem is there's no requirement except that you turn off the fan. That is you. You have to do that. But what else you do, uh is up to the each manufacturer and uh and, and it varies dramatically. But I think it's my guess and I don't know, daniel should probably do a survey, maybe consumer reports could do this that none of them are desirable effects. And if you're running your AC, you're doing it for a reason you want to be, you want to be cooler. If you wanted to save money, you turn the damn thing off, nicholas have you, have you got anything other I don't know if we have.

02:12:17 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I mean I don't know, the air conditioning H back I love. I live near Tucson, arizona, where it gets like 215 in the summer. You have, I see you, if we have, I mean I don't know, uh, the air conditioning, hvac I love. I live near tucson, arizona, where it gets like 115 in the summer. You have to have ac you can't.

02:12:27
I mean, I actually don't mind the heat that much, to be honest with you, but uh, my better half does uh, so she's in charge of the hvac system and we keep it at around 78 during the day and then maybe 68 69 in the evening. Uh, but yeah, I, I think we have. We just got echo bees from from what's it called prime day, and we we do also use the uh eco mode. I don't really I've relinquished control of the thermostat because it doesn't really.

02:12:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It doesn't really bother me, it bothers take off your clothes right yeah, yeah it's a dry heat, and that's the key it is a dry heat, it is and it is.

02:13:06 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
You know, it's cooling down. Uh, it was only 95 degrees today and we can already tell it's cooling down.

02:13:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my god um, let's see what else here. I just thought I love that story. Thank you for putting that in there. Uh, brian, I think. Think that's a. Here's another fun story from Bloomberg. This is a Mark Gurman scoop. Apple is pushing ahead with a tabletop robot in search of new revenue. Executive who oversaw the car project is leading the. This poor guy, you went from the car project to the tabletop robotic arm. By the way, the arm does one thing it tilts the display up and down and makes it move it just doesn't give you a drink or anything.

02:13:55 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
It just if, if you had a portal, one of those meta portals, yes, that had that.

02:14:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's, that's what the yeah the shift into robotics. That's a broad term, for this is part of an effort to boost sales and capitalize on artificial intelligence. Of course, it's envisioned as a smart home command center german writes video conferencing machine and remote controlled, homecontrolled home security tool. It's the portal. It's the Facebook portal. It's exactly what it is.

02:14:30 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
And we've all been asking for Siri to be built into robot arms that move around.

02:14:33 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I'm going to make an argument for the portal because again pulling out my dad card, the fact that I have to be the cinematographer every friggin time we get on a call with people. The portal actually worked, especially during COVID times, where I would just place it in the middle of the room and people would run around and it would follow, and it would follow them.

02:14:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I have an Amazon Echo that does that, but it's yeah, it's gimmicky, I don't know if it's.

02:15:04 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Well, I, I, I did this piece too. The argument is is it's moving into? They want to be more of a smart home hub? I would argue you know cause, as a family that's like hey, let's buy an iMac and put it down in the kitchen and that is the family computer. Like maybe they're getting closer to something that's like that, where it's like okay, this is the thing that you know. Kids come home, drop their backpack off and interact with this thing. They'd be like lock the doors. Hey, mom and dad, I'm home, interact with grandma and grandpa. I don't know.

02:15:40 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
And jokes aside, I mean an iPad or a thing that you can mount different types of iPads and screens on. I mean that could be pretty convenient.

02:15:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you're all in on the robot arm.

02:15:53 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
If I can use.

02:15:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Siri. If you can use Siri, all right. Speaking of AI, nancy Pelosi has actually come out in opposition to the very controversial California AI bill the Senate Bill 1047, which would require a kill switch in AI, but a lot of smaller AI companies say it's going to kill open AI development and really promote AI for only the big companies like Google and OpenAI, et cetera.

02:16:27 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
They just they kind of neutered this bill. Hold on, I did this story. Yeah, they did.

02:16:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it hasn't helped that so many people have come out against it. Zoe Lofgren, anna Eshoo a lot of the national figures in the democratic party in california.

02:16:45 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Ro khanna one of the things that uh, let's see, this was on thursday or friday. Um, it came out a committee and the things that are taken out of it are things like um, uh a I I'm glad anthropic wanted the Things Anthropic wanted, so that AI labs no longer need to submit certifications of safety results under penalty of perjury, right, oh wow.

02:17:10
So like it was very strict. And there was also like you could be sued to death if you, I don't know, blew up the world or something, but at that point I don't know what lawyer is going to enforce that, but anyway, SB 1047 aims to prevent large AI systems from killing lots of people.

02:17:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That seems like a good idea.

02:17:32 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Or causing damage of upwards of $500 billion.

02:17:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, yeah, no, that's not good.

02:17:40
The bill no longer allows the California Attorney General to sue AI companies for negligent safety practices before it kills a lot of people. So afterwards he can sue, but before you can't sue. No pre-suing. This was an anthropic suggestion, by the way. Look, don't let him sue us before we do something really awful. Make him wait till after. However, the AG can seek injunctive relief, saying you know he can go to a court and ask the court to stop or force the company to stop an operation if it's dangerous and, of course, if the model does cause a catastrophic event, he can sue, which really is reassuring to me.

02:18:27 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Again after the apocalypse.

02:18:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sure those courts After the apocalypse, let's sue the Terminator Right, or I guess it's not the Terminator's the good guy. Sorry, let's serve who's? T2?, t-1000?, what is it we're going to sue?

02:18:44 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
It's like what's an unfrozen caveman lawyer?

02:18:45 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
it comes into play here my question is when are these models capable of doing this?

02:18:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, let's find out, would be good to know. You know the fact that anthropic is worried about getting sued if they cause, if they might cause, a catastrophic event ahead of time. Sounds like they think that that might happen.

02:19:04 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Every company should worry about getting sued, though. I mean yeah, like if I'm a catastrophic event liability.

02:19:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah in the first place. Let's not kill millions of humans. The bill creates the board of Frontier models, frontier Models, a new government agency with nine people on it, will set compute thresholds for covered models, issue safety guidance and issue regulations for auditors. See, I understand why AI companies don't like this kind of governmental oversight and I think maybe it's better. I don't know. I mean, I have mixed feelings. I don't think ai is as dangerous as as, uh, senator weiner thinks, but a kill switch doesn't seem like a bad idea either. I'm torn. I think a lot of this go ahead.

02:19:59 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
A lot of this legislation puts very big language into the public discourse. It puts it literally into the legislation, but there still is no evidence that it's capable of that Right? I mean, we've been hearing about this for a long time, as I've talked about this on the show many times. I've interviewed Nick Bostrom for years and these predictions have been happening for for a very long time, and as much as I'm a technologist and I'm excited about the future, even though this was a bill that was shot down I think when language like this is introduced into legislation, all it does is create this hyperbolic effect. It makes these companies seem as though they're very big, very powerful, very, very capable. But all I'm saying is like where's the evidence? There's no evidence.

02:20:47 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Leo, also again, we're not lawyers, but I'm going to read the slide. Parse the difference between this. Now the bill requires developers to provide reasonable care AI models do not pose a significant risk causing catastrophe instead of reasonable assurance. So the difference is reasonable care versus reasonable assurance. I'm not a lawyer. You can't assure anybody of it but you could take precautions. But that's what we're talking about. So, like the AI, industry is happier now because it says care Care instead of yeah, or assurance or whatever.

02:21:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, maybe what they should be looking at is AI companies going around taking all the content to train their AIs without permission. There are now lawsuits against Nvidia and open ai. A youtube creator is suing because he says the company scraped his videos and millions of others to train their generative ai. Uh, david millett does videos. Um, what is it? What does he do? Videos? Uh, science videos. I'm trying to. I don't know. Does anybody know? Uh chat room, what does david malette do? They know all the youtube people. He's a youtube creator. He charges nvidia with unjust enrichment and unfair competition. Seeks class action status. So all the other creators can can sue. All the other youtube content creators can sue nvidia unlawfully scraped youtube videos to train its cosmos ai software. According to the suit, nvidia says we respect the right of all content creators and are confident we're working in full compliance with the letter and spirit of the law.

02:22:40 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Most of these ai companies just say well, it's public but the, the, the cosmos, the nvidia, things that's not out yet, right?

02:22:49 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
yeah am I wrong about that?

02:22:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's not, uh, no yeah millette's open ai lawsuit accuses that company of taking more than 1 million hours of programming from youtube using automated means. Well, we know they're doing that. That's why they wrote Whisper AI, so that they could transcribe all the text from these YouTube videos and ingest them. Nvidia apparently also took video from Netflix, according to 404 Media. Nvidia says anyone is free to learn facts and ideas from publicly available sources. I agree with them that you have a right to read. Creating new and transformative works is not only fair and just, but exactly what our legal system encourages. Thoughts.

02:23:31 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I'm a skeptic, but I can understand that argument.

02:23:37 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I don't know that there's a right to puff it on it.

02:23:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you published a video for human stories. I guess this is the fundamental question is is there something different about a human watching your video, ingesting it, learning from it and using that information than there is from a corporation doing the same thing?

02:23:55 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
It's consumption versus production.

02:23:58 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, exactly that he said it better.

02:24:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, actually I liked yours because money is the key element to this right scale and that's what the way I think about it is scale and and monetization.

02:24:11 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, like anybody has a right to read something I wrote, or watch a video, but you don't necessarily in fact, you explicitly do not have permission to monetize it. That's a license like you do not have a permission to to monetize it, or to build it.

02:24:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Would it be okay with for you, with you, if uh meta, for instance, use that, used it for training. It's llama ai, which is open and can be used by anybody freely.

02:24:35 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Should it be able to read and look at anything on the internet and uh and get smarter and I'm sometimes compelled by your argument too, leo, that like well, if we just give, if, if there's more data, these things become better and we'll all benefit. I think that's a very compelling argument as well. I don't have the answers, I just know that I make content, or at least in the past my living was, was I had to make content to make a living and, um, the companies I worked for and when I worked for myself like it it's yeah, but you know this burning doing you more harm, david Millett and other content creators.

02:25:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is YouTube extracting that information and putting it into a search results so that people don't have to even go to your video? They just get the answer they're looking for and move on. Or isn't that more harm?

02:25:20 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
or the analogy maybe, is like if I pay for uh nfl sunday ticket, uh fine, but if I'm a bar and I charge 200 people to come in, well, that's not fine, right, right. So that's. There are different licenses for bars, like that. That's a thing that exists right exactly the ai isn't is transforming it.

02:25:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The bar attenders, not the bar, is just saying I'm going to take that content and show everybody.

02:25:46 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, the.

02:25:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
AI is transformative use. I think it's fair use because the AI is learning from it. I think that could be transmitting it. You know that was the lawsuit against the New York Times was based on the idea that you wouldn't have to read the New York Times. You would just ask open AI and it would regurgitate the contents of the New York Times. You would just ask OpenAI and it would regurgitate the contents of the New York Times. But in fact it doesn't. This lawsuit required jumping through massive hoops to get OpenAI to print a paragraph from the New York Times. It's not the way it works normally. It's transformative.

02:26:16 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Right, right. I'm a long way from my media law classes, but if it's transformative, it adds additional value, right?

02:26:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it really fundamentally comes down to is it different when a machine does it than when a human does it? I think and yeah, I make the argument the one thing you don't want is an AI that's trained on other AIs or public domain content but nothing useful. That's a useless AI. You don't want that. Who wants that?

02:26:43 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
there. And there is the very compelling geopolitical argument I'm not making this argument, but many people do make this argument that we must stay our adversaries, china and russia and others. They're doing it. We'll do this and the united states can make a choice. We and our companies can make a choice we can compete or we can not compete. I Again, I'm not making that argument, but I think that that is very compelling and I might buy into that.

02:27:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm searching for David Millett's YouTube videos, but I'm having a hard time finding them. I guess it doesn't matter whether it's Marques Brownlee or David Millett suing, I mean, they have the same point. I might be more sympathetic if it was Marques Brownlee, I guess, because I like him Let me throw.

02:27:33 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
This is tangential, but we know that it's cost tens of millions of dollars to do the most recent models, to train the most recent models and the most recent recent models. Hundreds of millions of dollars, and lots of people, including Zuckerberg, including Dario at Anthropic, are saying that the next models will be 100 million dollars and then and then a billion dollars. We're talking about this idea of nation states competing with each other in AI. We could be approaching a point where the only people if every time you train a new model like GPT-5678, it goes from 100 million to a billion, to 10 billion, to 100 billion what if the nation states are the only ones that will have the capital to train the next models and then you give it to your local startups or your your national, and that becomes a thing where it's a, it's a race between nation states to to do this sort of thing yeah that let's pause.

02:28:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then I'm gonna ask you about grok x's ai, which has no safety in it whatsoever, no parameters, right. Google with gemini and uh, anthropic, especially anthropic open ai. They Anthropic, especially Anthropic OpenAI. They all try to keep their generators from doing bad things. Elon says do bad things, let's see what happens. I'm not sure I disagree with him, but I'd love to know what you think. Stand by, you're watching this Week in Tech, nicholas DeLeon, our wonderful fellow from from senior electronics reporter from Consumer Reports. It's great to have you in the 95 degree heat and I am sweating. It's 75 here and I'm sweating more than you. I don't, I don't understand it.

02:29:31 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
You're just that's cold to me, 75.

02:29:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm like the opposite of like you would be freezing here.

02:29:36 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I was freezing when I was there. What was I? May, june, when I visited you? I was cold. I was like oh my god, I'm dying.

02:29:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm dying here I'm schvitz and dan patterson great to have you from blackbird ai, long time friend of the network. It's always wonderful to see you, dan and uh and I actually say the same on all three of you and brian mccullough, also a good friend of the network and host of the tech meme ride home podcast, which you can find right on the front page there at techmemecom. Our show today, brought to you by a product I used for years and then kind of lost track of it, I'm not sure why. And the other day I would talk to them and I said you know we never went anywhere. I said what Exper? What experts exchange? Does that ring a bell? Did you ever use experts exchange?

02:30:24
Well, now more than ever, you need experts exchange, a network of humans, not AIs. Trustworthy, talented tech professionals, people working in the field who can answer your questions, give you industry insights, give, give you advice, people who are actually using the products in your tech stack, instead of getting some AI to hallucinate some answer to a question or, in a way. This is so much worse, paying for expensive enterprise-level tech support, which is often wrong and hugely expensive. Experts Exchange is different, often wrong and hugely expensive. Experts Exchange is different. It's a tech community for people tired of the AI sellout. Experts Exchange is ready to help carry the fight for the future of human intelligence. They give you access to professionals in 400 different fields. I'm talking everything from coding to Azure to DevOps, networking everything you need to know in your job, in your life.

02:31:27
But, unlike some of those other places, you might say, well, yeah, there's sites that answer those questions. Yeah, but they're so full with snark and if you ask a question that they deem dumb, they will tell you dumb question. Or if you ask a question that's been asked once by before by somebody 23 years ago, they say, oh, that's a duplicate question and they'll close the thread down. Not experts exchange. Duplicate questions are encouraged. There are no dumb questions. The contributors love graciously answering your questions. You know. The key to this is the real reward for expertise, for learning, for becoming an expert at something. Is is sharing that expertise with somebody who needs it. That is satisfying, that is, and in fact, in many cases, these experts are getting continuing education points. And and, of course, they also get great karma points from Experts Exchange. They love doing this. They're there to answer your questions. One member said quote I've never had GPT. Stop and ask me a question before. But that happens on EE all the time.

02:32:33
Experts Exchange proudly committed to fostering a community where human collaboration is fundamental. I know many of our audience members are actually experts on Experts Exchange Rodney Bonhart, who listens to Security Now and Twit he's a VMware V expert. Edward Van Bilgen I hope I'm saying your name right, edward Van Biljon. Maybe he's a Microsoft or Bihon Microsoft MVP and ethical hacker who knows more. I mean he's forgotten more than I ever knew. I mean this guy Cisco design professionals are in there executive IT directors. It's not just questions like well, how do I connect a token ring network to my ethernet network? It's that, but it's also hey, I'm trying to run a business here and we're having trouble with suppliers. What do you recommend? There's all sorts of experts on there who can help you with all kinds of questions. And here's the thing you got to know Other platforms I mean you know who I'm talking about betray their contributors by selling the content they have freely put on that platform to train AI models.

02:33:39
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02:34:16
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02:35:51
So what is it? Grok? Is it 2.0, the new Grok? This is Elon Musk's AI. It's a chat bot. It's a generator. It uses an image generation tool called Flux, which is quite good, but also has no qualms about copyright violation. Violence. You can make Taylor Swift and lingerie with it. You can hear. There's Mickey Mouse taking a little cigarette break. You can do anything, uh with it. You have to subscribe to x premium. Uh. People have posted images on x of everything generated by grok, from barack obama doing coke, donald trump with a pregnant kamala, harris har Harris and Trump pointing guns. Dan, is this a?

02:36:52 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
problem, or is it so obviously fake that you don't have to worry about it? I think the most interesting thing here is probably the IP question.

02:36:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, somebody who said Nintendo's not litigious.

02:37:05 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
no, they're not going to sue you for all those mario images you're making yeah, I mean that's, that's like we can talk to, and everybody has, including myself, talk, uh, forever about x and and mr musk. But in this case, the most interesting thing seems to be maybe the training data to maybe like and the business question. You know, this is if he's offering, if you just look at like LLMs price per price, like if you're a consumer and you just want to buy an LLM, maybe this is cheaper than chat, gpt or Claude, and it's right baked into Twitter, and so it's or X and so it's easy for you to do, or X and so it's easy for you to do. Maybe that's the business play, but really to me, the trademarks are going to be interesting to watch how that evolves. I'm trying to use euphemisms that are like this is going to be popcorn.

02:37:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think they'll get sued and do you think such a suit will succeed? I have no idea.

02:38:01 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
It seems like yes. I mean I'm not have no idea I. It seems like it seems like yes, but I, I mean I'm not a lawyer, but it seems like you really can't use disney's trademarks um without their permission the.

02:38:11 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
What I said on the show was, I feel like part of the calculation here is okay, you're gonna sue elon musk have.

02:38:22
Well, not only does he have a, lot of money, he has a huge megaphone and so, like, let's say, Disney or Nintendo does that and he has all the money in the world. He can go to bat with you, but he'll also trash you. So I just feel like that's part of the calculation here. Having said that, you can do anything with this stuff, with these pictures. I mean, how long can you hold the breach against that? Do you know? That's really true?

02:38:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and are you going to sue grok? Are you going to sue the people who disseminate right because leo?

02:38:58 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
yeah, I could. There's. There's the section 230 part of it, but. But also I could put into my Microsoft Word right now. Copyrighted material. Go on a podcast, spew it and not give credit. Are you going to sue Microsoft?

02:39:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, yeah, good point. Or the phone company when you call in a bomb threat. Right, this is the law. That's why it's fascinating, it's why you have to go to law school for four years, I guess. Um, it's just, I feel like that trying to stop this is putting your finger in the in a dike that is about to burst. I mean, it's just, it's, we're going to see a flood of this and and you can't, you're not going to stop it no, it's just going to be interesting.

02:39:45 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
That's like it's going to be interesting and every tech journalist wants that.

02:39:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a good thing. That's good for us. Uh, actually, uh, starlink is in a little bit of trouble at t and verizon have gone to the fcc to thwart starlink's plan to work with T-Mobile. They got initial approval but then they went back saying we want to increase the power we use 900%. At&t said SpaceX's requested increase to the allowable power flux density limits for out-of-band emissions sounds like something out of back to the future, would cause unacceptable harmful interference to encumber terrestrial mobile operations. In other words, if SpaceX gets permission for this, it's going to be bad for mobile carriers. Permission for this. It's going to be bad for mobile carriers. Spacex plans to offer cellular service with T-Mobile. You, even if you're away from a a tower, you'll be able to get uh SpaceX Starlink connectivity and make phone calls or send text messages or whatever it is text messages or whatever it is.

02:41:06 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Verizon, I'll just say phone problems. I hope nothing happens to starlink, because that's the only way I'm pretty rural.

02:41:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, are you on starlink right now?

02:41:11 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I'm on starlink right now whoa dude, yes, I am.

02:41:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did not know that yeah, no, it's, uh, it's.

02:41:17 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I was thinking the other day, like what are the some of the most impressive tech products of you know the past? However many years, I would put Starlink up there. It is really good, it is really fast, the latency is very low. I can play online games. You know, let's just say Fortnite. You know online games. It is very good. I wrote about it for CR a couple months ago and, yeah, if it weren't for Star starling, I would basically not be able to do my job. I certainly wouldn't be able to be here with you guys. Uh, and you know I don't, I don't work for starling, you know. I I pay for it starling.

02:41:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Starling's response is of course these guys hate us. This is, this is undermining their entire business. We're not going to interfere with it, we're just going to interfere with the money they make. That was a reveal nicholas.

02:42:03 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, I was going to say I'm amazed this is the.

02:42:06 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
This is the most, uh, the the biggest um endorsement of that product. Like I'm looking at you these last two and a half hours, and like there's no latency yeah quality it's it is really good.

02:42:18 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
It's maybe 150 a month, I forget Reasonable, it is sufficient. I want to say how fast down. Do I get? Do you know what your speeds? Are Offhand. I think it's more than 100, maybe 200 megabits a second if I'm downloading from Steam or whatever, so not as fast as Verizon. Fios, that's fine, but it's plenty.

02:42:39
It's that level of like yeah, this is good enough, and, but it's plenty. It's that level of like yeah, this is good enough, and could it be faster? Yeah, I've had faster, but at a certain point it's like it's not.

02:42:46 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yeah, but also your wired provider lies to you half the time. Anyway, they tell you what you're getting, but in reality you're not getting that.

02:42:54 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
And I'm in the middle of nowhere. I'm looking at the Catalina Mountains right now. There's no Comcast here right now, like if I didn't have that, like there's no comcast here.

02:43:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If I wanted comcast cable, they're not even picking up the phone. Here's the important thing. Even if you did have comcast, they would be the only choice without starlink. So, yeah, what starlink's doing is is forcing everybody to up their game. We're comcast. I'm on comcast business right now. That's all I can get here or I could get, you know, bad dsl, but I'm not going to do that Now. I have to say Comcast has gone down every once in a while over the last few weeks. So we just ordered a Starlink for the roof, for redundancy, because if I'm in the middle of a show and my bandwidth goes out, that's a problem For redundancy, and thank goodness there's an option.

02:43:43 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I don't remember any. There was one moment of downtime, maybe earlier in the summer, for like maybe five or ten minutes, and I checked, I checked X, and everyone was like what's happened to Starlink? But it was back up, you know, within a few minutes.

02:43:53 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Wait, wait, wait. Do you have? Do you have problems with storms? I, I know this is maybe no naive.

02:43:59 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
No, not at all we get, we get, we're this. We're in the middle of monsoon season, so we get pretty intense thunderstorms almost every afternoon and evening over here. Uh, I've not had any do you have?

02:44:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
do you have the flat one? Do you have a new one? Uh, I'd have to check, I forget I will. I will give people a review of it, because we ordered the business class uh starlink, the business class uh Starlink uh dish, which is flat and um it's, it looks very different, oh there it is um.

02:44:31 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I think ours looks like that, yeah does it look like that?

02:44:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah?

02:44:33 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
and they.

02:44:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're because it's um, it's a business class, it's like, it's like a terabyte a month. They do limit the total amount you bandwidth you can use right no, it's, it's unlimited, like like bandwidth caps.

02:44:46 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
There's no caps to mine. You know I'm I'm a big gamer, so I'm downloading stuff from steam. All the time. I thought it was a bandwidth cap?

02:44:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, not to my knowledge okay, well, I'll let you know. I mean, I got, I was just going to go on comcast, we don't have another option. And I then, when it was getting a little unreliable, I thought, oh no, we're going to have to get something as a backup. And my Ubiquiti system fails over. So in theory, if Comcast drops out, I would be on Starlink, so we'll see, even as a backup, like this is the best endorsement I've seen.

02:45:23 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Like I'm thinking, oh well, well, if I move to north, uh dakota or something, then I'll know you can go somewhere.

02:45:25 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
That was when I was a younger man in new york city. It's like, oh man, it'd be cool to live in like the middle of nowhere, oh, but I need a connection. Yeah, yeah, no, that's that problem has been solved, like I like. It's solved it's.

02:45:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's awesome I love this well, there you go. How about this number for uh consumers? They purchased, in the first quarter of 2024, 3.8 billion dollars on mobile entertainment apps. 3.8 billion dollars this is janko records writing in his low pass newsletter, which by the Janko, you're doing a great job, lowpasscc. This is from AppFigures streaming app report. Consumers spent $3.8 billion On entertainment apps for their mobile devices. This is worldwide.

02:46:14
In the first quarter, $2.1 billion was spent on streaming apps. $0.9 billion spent on short video apps, including TikTok Spending on streaming apps. Up.9 billion spent on short video apps, including TikTok. Spending on streaming apps up 383 percent from this time three years sorry, five years ago. That's the first pre. That's the last pre-pandemic, so it's uh, it's better than it was in the pandemic. Even what else? I think we're coming to the end. Oh hey, this is a big one. I'm very interested in what you think about it. We talked last week about Fox Warner, discovery and Walt Disney joining together to make a streaming sports network called Venu V-E-N-U 43 bucks a month, but it has all the sports. Fubo has taken them to court and a judge has blocked the service. It was about to be launched next week, august 23rd. Fubo said your Honor, they have a monopoly in sports. The three companies exercise, quote near monopolistic control over the ability for a different live sports-only streaming service to exist and compete with them. That by combining those three services. There's no room for anyone else, and the judge agreed.

02:47:39 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Puck has been doing some pretty good reporting on this. The, the license, yeah they're great.

02:47:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, what do?

02:47:45 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
they say, john, around um that this was about the licensing and rights deals and just try, just try to make those same deals. Well, right, but they come back like okay, isn't that a monopoly if you can't make those deals wait, wait.

02:48:03 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
It's the argument that because they made those deals separately, as separate entities, that then when they combine into one, that's the problem there, yeah, there's no one else can have, basically have any sports. You can't make a sports bundle or you can't right, because if you're, if you're mbc and you sign a deal with uh whoever, and and abc whatever, but then when you come together, that's the problem.

02:48:29 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, I think it's. I don't want to say collusion. I was about to say collusion. I realize that's a very loaded term, but I think it is.

02:48:38 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I think it is oh, that actually makes sense because, okay, so if in the marketplace I'm NBC and I bid against Fox, and I bid against ESPN or whatever, and then I get the NBA or whatever, and that's fine because it's an open marketplace, but then if I join forces to create one streaming thing, then that's not a marketplace. I think that makes sense.

02:48:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Fubo argued the trio was using their control of valuable rights to major sporting events to assert control over the market. Fubo claimed they were forcing the. The venue was forcing rivals to license and distribute a big bundle of less popular general entertainment channels if they wanted to carry ESPN and Fox, because these companies own ESPN and Fox and a bunch of other stuff. So this is kind of like the tying that Google was doing with Android. Well, you can use Android, but you've got to include Gmail, Chrome and you can't uninstall them. There's also.

02:49:34 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
The economics of this are also tied into the money pit that has been streaming for many of these major media firms, and it is the only option right now fubo says they're also fighting for their life, that once the new service starts operating, subscribers will abandon fubo, and that's that and the judge apparently agreed.

02:49:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The three companies argued that what would reduce competition is blocking the service by robbing viewers of lower-cost options for watching games and limiting innovation in the marketplace. Fox, warner and Disney argued the joint venture doesn't stop the individual companies from licensing their sports rights to use outside of venue or even for offering them directly to consumers. Fubo is a weak competitor that adds little value to the TV ecosystem and deserves to die also I I think I did this story.

02:50:30 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Uh, it's going to be like 45 a month if this happens 43.

02:50:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, right, it's expensive but that's expensive.

02:50:37 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Now you think that's going to last.

02:50:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Even that right might be more on the other hand, you know, I've asked friends of mine who are sports fans and they say it's going to have all the sports. I said yeah, and they said, okay, sign me up. It basically is if all I watch is sports all the time, 43 bucks is fair, because then I don't have to subscribe to hbo and all these other things. I'm subscribed to watch the sports peacock, all this other. I get it all in one place. Anyway, if you were excited about Venue, it's on hold. It's on hold.

02:51:10
And finally, the big story of the week which I buried all the way at the bottom Microsoft is removing the FAT32 partition size limit in Windows 11. Wait a minute, what, what? So you may remember that if, uh, if you're using fat 32, you were limited to 32 gigabytes. Right of the uh for the partition turns out no, that was just made, we can make it whatever we want. They're going to make it two terabytes for FAT32, starting with the latest Windows 11 Canary build. In other words, the 32 gig limit was made up artificial and Microsoft has decided to increase that number, but the GUI-based Windows disk formatting tool will still think it's 32 gigs. So, and for those of you who don't know what fat 32 is kids these days? I swear to God. All right, I think we, we can. Are you having a storm, dan? Is that what you're saying? Well, I think are.

02:52:22 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, brian and I, so I was just going to say we should both get on Starlink, brian.

02:52:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So is your internet going out because of the storm, not on mine.

02:52:34 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I did for about 15 seconds. Yeah, wow, where are?

02:52:37 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
you guys.

02:52:38 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
We're in Brooklyn, both of us Different sides of the Gowanus Canal.

02:52:43 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yes, yeah, yeah, yes, yeah, yeah, for sure, um, but we should, we should, we should starlink right now I've said all I can, that's the story of the day, I mean the story of the week. That's really fantastic me too.

02:52:57 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I you know I I grew up.

02:52:59 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I went to college in south dakota, in the middle of nowhere. It was a great little college town. It was fantastic. I'm being a little hyperbolic, but I would always backpack with my dad and with my friends into the wilderness and often you know there's a cabin and you're like man, that cabin had internet. Yeah. I would never leave.

02:53:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you can have internet never leave. Well, you can have internet, and this was always the thing I loved about the idea of Starlink was that you are going to put internet in every corner of the planet. I didn't realize it was going to cost so much. There were going to be issues about blocking out the sky for astronomers.

02:53:34 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I don't like that. I don't like the light pollution.

02:53:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's pretty cool and I and I had no idea. Have you always been in Starlink, Nicholas, since you moved? Yes, for the past.

02:53:46 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Yeah, no, I've been in Starlink since I don't know March.

02:53:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I'll tell you, we'll do a test. I will randomly flip back and forth between Comcast and Starlink. I think I'm getting it installed next week. And also he's clearly getting better connection than I am right now because, there's lightning you guys are getting all blurry, nicholas is getting clearer, seems fine here. So yeah, nicholas de leon, I hope you write an article about this for consumer I did?

02:54:14 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I did, uh, in the springtime I wrote it my first experience, because I was, honestly, I was a little skeptical. I was like, oh geez, this satellite thing I had some experience with. I had an uncle who lived in kind of rural upstate new york yeah, the old shoes and direct tv and you know that was.

02:54:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was great, bad, and so they had big uh bandwidth caps and things yeah, it was not a good exp so I was a little bit skeptical.

02:54:38 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
But then I'm like, oh okay, this is you know, and as I played games, okay so I can like do email, I could do zoom, but can I play halo?

02:54:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
can I play, whatever latency would be the concern because you've got you're, you're up in the, you've got to bounce up to the satellite. The satellite has to bounce it to a some sort of ISP terrestrial station. Get it back, bounce it back to you. That should have lots of latency but it somehow, magically there.

02:55:01 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Elon's done some I have no idea, but yeah thing, it works it definitely works.

02:55:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Catch nicholas's work at consumer reports. When are you getting them to do a podcast?

02:55:12 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
oh, my god, I will give you the email the person asked, because, yeah, I'll say no more. I want you to do it.

02:55:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nicholas DeLeon, senior electronics reporter. Consumer Reports. A pleasure having you on. Thank you for being here. Thanks, Leo, I see you have one wolf howling at the moon.

02:55:30 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Yeah, I'm redoing the room. Maybe the next time I'm on it's going to look way more. I like the Santa Fe-style architecture of Pueblo Revival, so it's going to be adobe, white walls Good, it's going to look very cozy and cool.

02:55:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're replacing our former Southwest reporter, Ed Bott, who lived in Tucson, I think, or Santa Fe I never can remember Albuquerque maybe and he moved. For some reason he moved to North Carolina. So you are now our official Southwest reporter. Awesome, Thank you, Nicholas. Dan Patterson, I love you. It's always great to have you on you are such a great friend of the network. You too, Dan, is just I, you know behind the scenes so supportive. I really appreciate it. Now he's a proud Papa.

02:56:15 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yeah, it's the best job.

02:56:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've ever had. How old is she? How old?

02:56:19 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
yeah yeah, yeah two uh and she's, yeah, jabbering up a storm and, oh yeah, running all over.

02:56:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's, oh, just enjoy every minute of it. It goes so fast. My kids are 30 and 32 now, oh good heavens. And I look at pictures of them at that age and I go, oh man, I wish I get that back. That was it is pretty magical.

02:56:39 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I loved it uh, that was brian. That was it. Like I like it, brian, that was it. I felt it and that was it. I didn't mean to bring too much up. That was private at the beginning, but I just felt it.

02:56:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, thank you for bringing it up.

02:56:50 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
That was a great story.

02:56:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's great. Thank you, dan Blackbird AI. What's the website? Blackbirdai, blackbirdai. Okay. And his yeah, okay, yeah, and his blog is it blogdanpattersoncom? So there, newsdanpattersoncom news.

02:57:06 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Oh, we've had it wrong the whole time. That's all good. I'm sure I gave the wrong information. I'm I'm sure it was on me benito, fix that now.

02:57:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's too late. It doesn't matter now it should be and, of course, brian mccullough. You can listen to him every day. You actually sometimes seven days a week. He's a glutton for punishment. Well, aren't you too? No, I'm down to five shows a week.

02:57:28 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I'm like uh, I'm, I'm coasting okay, I'm approaching what's what's on our chart. I'm approaching my 2000th episode. So that's way ahead of me, that's amazingsomething. So at some point we're going to hit 2,000 episodes Tech meme right home, 15 minutes every day. Tech news in and out super quick Nice.

02:57:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's great to have you. Thank you, brian. Thanks to all of you who watch the show Now from the beautiful confines of the twit attic, thanks to Benito Gonzalez, who is at home doing the show. But you know, show the uh, show the reverse shot. So people said, well, what does it look like from your point of view? I am looking at one, two, three, four, five, six, seven monitors and uh, and trying to figure out what goes where and how it works. But uh, I have to. The attic has become a great place to hang, thanks to you, benito, making it possible, burke McQuinn, who hung the lights, anthony Nielsen, our creative director, who also worked on the look and feel of the attic. He did a great job. I really appreciate it. And, most of all, thanks to our club Twit Members. Your $7 a month makes it all possible. If you're not yet a member, twittv, slash club twit.

02:58:49
This week we did a special event for the club a little coffee show on Friday with Mark Prince, the coffee geek. It had so much fun. He talked me off a ledge. I was going to buy a really expensive espresso machine and he told me about one that was a quarter of the price and he convinced me and I can't wait till it comes. So maybe we'll have a little, a little a cafe clutch later. We're going to do more of this kind of thing, kind of ad hoc stuff, where it's just stuff I'm interested in. Maybe you're interested in too. So stay tuned, join the club for the information about that.

02:59:22
We do Twit every Sunday, 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. You could tell what the UTC time Somebody's saying why don't you have a 24-hour clock? I do, it's my Nixie clock. It's on UTC, so we know it's now 0 dark, 09 or something. What is that? How do you say that? When it's zero, zeros midnight is how we say it in the in the real world, but I don't know how you say it in utc. It's zero, zero ten. So go to bed.

02:59:54
If you want to watch this live. We're on seven locations. Of course, club twit members get their very own stream and discord twit is on youtubecom, twitchtv live, twitchtv, twitchtv kick, facebook linkedin and xcom. You can watch us in any of those places. 2 to 5 pm pacific time on a sunday afternoon. After the fact, on demand versions of the show at the website twittv Zero hundred, but yeah, but how do you say zero hundred ten, oh dark ten, I don't know. Anyway, it's five o'clock somewhere, says guy. Yes it is, it's five o'clock here actually. You can also watch a YouTube channel dedicated to twit the video and after the fact you can always download a copy. Get your favorite podcast player and subscribe, then you'll get it automatically the minutes of it. Thank you everybody for being here. 993rd time I'm going to say another Twit is in the can See you next week. Bye-bye, this is amazing. Next week, bye-bye.