This Week in Tech Episode 917 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for TWITthis week in Tech. Three great panelists this week. Father Robert Ballas here, the Digital Jesuit on the line. From the Vatican City from back east. It's our own lumm host of this week. Weekend Enterprise Tech. Lu Meeska joins us and Dan Moore, novelist and Mack Expert. We will talk about a ai. I started the show thinking it was just a parlor trick. Now I'm worried that the singularity is near. We'll also talk about that Florida bill that makes bloggers register before they write about the governor. The last pass hack, and the end of TikTok in the us. It's all coming up. Next, podcasts you love

TWiT Intro (00:00:42):
From people you trust. This is Twitch is twit.

Leo Laporte (00:00:53):
This is twit this week in Tech. Episode 917 recorded Sunday, March 5th, 2023. Oh, not phone. This week at Tech is brought to you by Collide. Collide is a device trust solution that ensures that if a device isn't secure, it can't access your apps. It's zero trust for Okta. Visit collide.com/TWITand book a demo today. And by decisions, don't let complexity block your company's growth decisions. No code rules driven process automation software provides every tool you need to build custom workflows, empowering you to modernize legacy systems, ensure regulatory compliance, and renew the customer experience. Visit decisions.com/twi. Learn how automating anything can change everything. And by express vpn, protect your data and identity every time you go online with a number one rated VPN provider today. Visit express vpn.com/TWITto get three months free on a one year package. It's time for twt this week in Tech, the show Wake cover of the week's Tech News. And joining us this week, father Robert Baller from back in the Vatican, the Digital Jesuit. Hello, Robert.

Padre (00:02:22):
Good to see you. Great to be back.

Leo Laporte (00:02:23):
Saw the Vacas before in the pre-show

Padre (00:02:27):
<Laugh>. Yeah, I take care of 'em.

Leo Laporte (00:02:29):
Robert feeds are they strays? They're wild cats. Yeah,

Padre (00:02:34):
They are Ferals that just happened to wander into our campus around the start of the pandemic. And at any given time, there's between five and nine of them five of them are really friendly. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:02:46):
They never left because somebody was feeding them.

Padre (00:02:49):
They're not stupid <laugh>, you

Leo Laporte (00:02:50):
Know,

Padre (00:02:51):
Three warms a day and and a place to sleep that's not that's not gonna kill them. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I, I think that's it's very attractive.

Leo Laporte (00:02:56):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> also with it. It's great to have you father, thanks for joining us also here. We're from Father Robert's Old Show this week in enterprise tech. Tw. It's Lou Meeska. Lou m m, principal engineering manager, Microsoft. Hi Lou.

Padre (00:03:10):
Hey Leo. Great to be here.

Leo Laporte (00:03:12):
Joining us from the East coast of the United's states. This, this time. How many, how many children do you have now?

Padre (00:03:19):
I <laugh> eight. No, I have five kids now. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:03:23):
Trying to keep up. That's all.

Padre (00:03:24):
Well, youngest one's two. Two.

Leo Laporte (00:03:25):
Not too bad. Yes. Well, you could share some parenting advice with this new proud Papa Dan Morin from Six Colors is here with a brand new baby. Hello, Dan.

Dan Moren (00:03:35):
Hello, Leon. Good to be here.

Leo Laporte (00:03:37):
Nice to have you back. We were here we were together on the Super Bowl and now Yeah.

Dan Moren (00:03:43):
Did not

Leo Laporte (00:03:44):
Quick Weekly. Now we're here on the on the launch of the F1 season. So it's perfect.

Dan Moren (00:03:50):
Perfect timing is everything.

Leo Laporte (00:03:51):
Yes. Father Robert, did you I guess you didn't have to get up. You could watch the F1 at a normal hour. I got up up

Padre (00:03:58):
Two things I think are important. One is, I, I do not have a baby, so I'm the panelist without the baby <laugh>. And second, that is

Leo Laporte (00:04:04):
Fairly important. I kind of, yes,

Padre (00:04:06):
<Laugh>, I kind of gave up on F1 after that debacle. Oh, two

Leo Laporte (00:04:10):
Years ago. That was terrible. They stole Louis Hamilton's title. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's interesting. All right. Speaking of, I,

Padre (00:04:17):
I want to watch it, but I won't.

Leo Laporte (00:04:19):
Oh, wow. Okay. Okay. I, you know, I'm sympathetic. I stopped watching baseball after the strike. You know, it was hard for me to stay, but I'm thinking this year, maybe, you know, I'm, what I'm trying to do is work my way up into retirement. I'm gonna take up golf, start, start going to baseball games, wearing a, wearing one of those little hats with a open hole in the top and start scoring and wear headphones at the game. And are,

Dan Moren (00:04:45):
Are you turning into my dad? Is that what's

Leo Laporte (00:04:46):
Happening? Yes, <laugh>. Exactly. Exactly. All

Padre (00:04:51):
Right. Bocci Ball. Leo, bci.

Leo Laporte (00:04:53):
Oh, bci. I can't, well, I'm gonna work, I'm gonna work my way up to Bachi Pickleball Ball. I think I'll start with pickleball, and then after a couple of years, I

Dan Moren (00:05:00):
Think the Shuffle Board comes at the end there, right

Padre (00:05:03):
At the end. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:05:03):
I think so. <Laugh>. Yeah.

Dan Moren (00:05:05):
All right. Literally

Leo Laporte (00:05:06):
The last it's time for our ai, our weekly AI segment Never stops, never Ends. I'm, I'm actually more curious rather than talking about the events in ai and there's, there's a few, quite a few, you know, chat, G P t Microsoft's AI is now available to almost everybody. I think. Everybody's been playing with it and discovering all new things. Lawrence Abrams over at Bleeping Computer said he's found some hidden celebrity modes. <Laugh>, Chad, G P T will respond in the voice of your favorite celebrity, whether it be The Rock or Barack. And and it's so stupid. I can't even believe that he wrote an article about it. Yeah. Everybody in the IRCs going, I, I wonder is now look, you, you, you can recuse yourself. You work for Microsoft, but I'm kind of thinking this is, this is starting to look like a party trick more than an actual transformative technology. What's your thought, Lou?

Lou Maresca (00:06:06):
It's a good question. I think I see a lot of implementations of it. Like, oh, look, people who show it online, they have through YouTube videos or whatnot, of course, they're gonna show the parlor tricks. They're gonna show the into stuff that's really interesting. They're gonna generate a, a picture that, you know, from, you know, a mid guard and they're gonna go and, or Dolly, and then they're gonna go feed it into a video so they can generate their own video and they're gonna generate text. So like, it, it becomes a parlor trick after you see all those things. But I'll tell you, I've, you know, obviously I can't talk about a lot of the stuff that we're working on, but I can say that a lot of the things that will be coming out in the next, you know, few or so, are things that will directly impact everybody's lives, whether it be business or, and I'm talking about like productivity to you know, to safety, to you know, whatever you want to think about. Now, the, the things that are showing right now, sure. Parlor tricks because it's the way that they, you know, they get it out there, they get people interested or they get people thinking about it. But the reality is this stuff is, is really gonna be interesting what people are gonna utilize it for.

Leo Laporte (00:07:07):
You agree. Dan Warren?

Dan Moren (00:07:10):
I think, I think there's something to that. I mean, I think that the, the flash is gonna to wear off, like the novelty aspect, right? That's what comes outta the gate. Strong people are really interested. It generates a lot of a attention, but it's not the stuff that ultimately long term is really gonna be as useful when it comes to ai. I mean, I think despite all the fears that people are gonna use this to like, write their papers for college or replace human workers, I mean, I've heard of this happening on very small scales in a couple places, but I think ultimately the more interesting stuff that it can do, just sort of generally when you throw it at a problem, I've seen a lot of, like, the, the best sort of examples I've seen of, of the utility of this is thing, like, honestly writing code, like it just, or being like an age or writing code.

(00:07:54):
Cuz like, I, I work on code sometimes and I get stuck because I'm not like a program, it's not my main job. And I'm like, man, I need an algorithm that does X and I am, like, I could bang my head and spend all my time Google searching and try to like reconstruct it if nobody's done exactly what I've done. Or I could ask an AI like, Hey, do you have an algorithm that does this? And even if it's like 90% of the way there, that's pretty good and it saves me a lot of time. So I think there's a lot of cases like that where it's gonna be super useful for people trying to cut through all the noise. Especially when it comes to like, search. I think that's one of the reasons that Google has felt very threatened by this, is that if you can just ask a chap out and get a pretty good answer, along with like a source, it really solves, like, I feel like Google these days. I type in search queries and I have to like, just scroll through a lot of things and there's like, oh, there's like 20 different sites, and they all have their own opinion about the answer. And like, sometimes you just wanna cut through the noise. And I think that's interesting. One of the things AI seems good at

Leo Laporte (00:08:49):
Do Father Robert, do you think Google is going, oh, we gotta hurry up and get this barred out? Or going, who dodged a bullet? Let's wait and see what happens.

Padre (00:08:58):
Yeah. I, I think that they are taking the, the cautious approach, which is good because hopefully somebody over there has looked at the trend and realized this is just an advanced version. Maybe the final version of big data analytics that we had in 2013. In 2013 ba data analytics came out. And it was this idea of taking these huge data sets and building the tools to do predictive analysis based on the correlation between those data sets. That's essentially what today's AI does. It just uses these enormous data sets to be able to predict what human speech would be like, or what the next bit of code should be like. So there should be someone looking at that and saying, this is useful. This will be something that we can monetize. This will be something that we can commercialize in these sectors, but it ain't ai and we gotta stop calling it AI because we're scaring the people who are thinking that it's Skynet when really it's the next version of Siri

Leo Laporte (00:09:56):
<Laugh>. There's, yeah, I actually think it's kind of more like autocorrect in your, in your iPhones. You know, it's, and it kind of fundamentally is the way it works. And there was a great article we've mentioned before by Stephen Wolfrem on his Wolf from Alpha Blog, in which he des actually explained how these large language model works. And essentially it is, you know, picking the next word and then it, and it ranks them, and then it mixes it up a little bit. So it gives you a different result each time, but it's really kind of autocorrect on steroids. On the other hand, it does come up with some funny things. Thanks to our chat room for passing this tweet along from Ethan Molik, Bing write the first chapter of Genesis as a corporate memo to all employees from God, c e o subject creation project status report.

(00:10:45):
Dear team, I'm pleased to share with you the progress of our creation project for the past week. Here's a summary of what we've accomplished so far. On day one, we initiated the light and darkness differentiation process. We've branded the light as day and the night as darkness as night. This was a major milestone for our project as it established the basic framework for our work environment and, and on and on. And I think it's, it's actually a very interesting summary of Genesis <laugh> in a corporate memo. Therefore, I hereby declare that tomorrow will be day seven of our project cycle. It will be a day of rest for all of us. So

Padre (00:11:21):
Congratulations. We've just created artificially intelligent madlibs

Leo Laporte (00:11:25):
<Laugh>. It's, yes, and I guess that's my point. It's essentially, it's, it's, it's madlibs, isn't it? It's, it's smart madlibs based on a very large corpus of, of information, the internet as a whole. But it's not much more than madlibs and it's certainly not intelligence. It's not thinking. It's for for sure not sentient as Blake Lamoin thought it was. Right. thanks to Matt Ryder in our discourse or discord Rather, who asked chat G p t to write Leo Laport, a podcast about the latest snus and AI <laugh>, how AI is changing the world from chat G P T to meta. In this episode, Leo LaPorte shares some of the recent developments and trends in artificial intelligence that are shaping our future. He talks to experts and researchers about the hype and controversy surrounding chat, G p t, an AI system that can generate realistic text. Well, that's a really telling phrase, a realistic text on almost any topic. How is chat g p t being used for good and evil? What are the ethical and social implications of such a powerful technology? This

Dan Moren (00:12:34):
Really steals the punchline from the Wait. Did an AI write this? No, wait. That it did. Dang

Leo Laporte (00:12:39):
It. Dang it.

Dan Moren (00:12:40):
It's not even a good joke anymore.

Leo Laporte (00:12:41):
<Laugh> did you watch? So last Sunday this, this came to mind because last Sunday John Oliver on his, this week, tonight, the main segment was ai. And he mocked, first of all, he mocked all the news reporters who are doing exactly that, reading their, you know, their piece. And then saying, and by the way, this was written by Judge e B d, haha. I did not do that. You notice, Dan? I <laugh>, I did. I flipped.

Padre (00:13:08):
Well, I mean, the joke is on them. Everyone fell for that because we are expecting them not to have good copy <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:13:14):
We

Padre (00:13:14):
Know that what we did on social media news Exactly what is a

Leo Laporte (00:13:16):
Bad copy. Yeah, that's exactly what we expected from local news. But I, I was and Lisa will testify cuz we were, we were watching this together and I was kind of yelling at the tv because he, he made some fundamental errors. One was confusing algorithms with ai. Lou, you probably know more than anything as a programmer, that's, they're two different things, aren't they?

Lou Maresca (00:13:40):
I mean, you gotta use you know, linear math and, and particular algorithms and formulas within that to be able to produce the, the models and train the models that you are actually using. So

Leo Laporte (00:13:49):
Yeah, you write a

Lou Maresca (00:13:49):
Program, it's not a fundamental algorithm,

Leo Laporte (00:13:51):
Right? Yeah. You write a program algorithmically to create these models. But what the computer is doing once it's it's running is not algorithmic. Or is it? That's a, I've stumped him. Let's ask chat. G p t <laugh> in,

Padre (00:14:10):
In the sense that it's math. Yeah. It's algorithmic. Yeah. But what we think of when we hear algorithmic is we think of the one that Google is using to rank search, or Twitter's using to remove trollish content.

Leo Laporte (00:14:23):
Or even as a coder that's much more

Padre (00:14:24):
Linear,

Leo Laporte (00:14:25):
Even as a coder, I think. Yeah, linear algebra, that's algorithms, you know dykstras pathfinding algorithm you know two plus two algorithmic. If then else algorithmic. I always, I think of AI as something kind of beyond algorithms in this, in the, and this is another thing John Oliver brought up. Oh my God, people don't know what the, what the check why AI does what it does, right? It's a black box, isn't it? It's not exact. It's not exactly algorithmic to

Lou Maresca (00:14:57):
Who? To who though. I mean, it's, it's to the consumer. It's a black box. But I,

Leo Laporte (00:15:00):
But even to the coder, it's a black box. You can't look at, if you look at alpha go, the, the machine that learned to play chess better than humans by teach, by the way, all they did was teach at the rules of chess. And then it played billions of games against itself over a period of four hours, then became really good at chess, better than any human at chess. We don't, we can't look inside of that model and, and understand what the, we can't in a way that humans can understand state what the rules are, right? I mean, that is a black box from that point of view, isn't it? It

Lou Maresca (00:15:33):
Trained, it trained essentially trained itself. So it fed its own training data. Right? And so I would say, yeah, you could go in and look at the training data that it's using to actually produce the, the output that it's actually, you know, cuz it's running through these specific translation models, transformation models in order to produce it. So I would say, yeah, you could go and look inside the, look at the data

Leo Laporte (00:15:51):
That it's using. All right. Well, you're the coder here, so I'll, I'll I'll defer to your expertise. I always and, and I guess Oliver did get this part wrong. I assumed that once you come up with these models, you can, I mean, you don't, you can't look at them and say, oh, yeah, I could see what it's doing here. Or can you, I guess you can, you're saying you can't,

Lou Maresca (00:16:14):
I mean, you can, you can in, you can can in real time, but you can in like, as, as it, as it builds it out, you can look inside and look at, okay. Because all these things are, I mean, again, you said it's algorithm, but yeah, I mean, it's machine learning in general is these large deep learning models that are algorithmic in nature. And so they are definitive. They're, they're not, they're not, they're not redefining themselves as they move along. They're the same unless you go, somebody goes and reads, define the model for themselves.

Leo Laporte (00:16:39):
They're deterministic.

Lou Maresca (00:16:41):
Right. Deterministic. Correct.

Leo Laporte (00:16:44):
Yeah. Although in order to produce different results every time they've, they add a little fuzzing Right. They had little probabilities to it.

Lou Maresca (00:16:55):
Right, right.

Leo Laporte (00:16:57):
But yeah. Okay. I'll, I'll have you, have you done some of this coding, this large language model stuff

Lou Maresca (00:17:04):
For me? Yeah. Yeah. I think the really <laugh> the interesting thing that, you know, that's happening at Microsoft is it's like probably the most fun I've had in, in a long time. And it's because it's a complete culture shift. It's, you know, people, a lot of the experts in the company who know a lot about this stuff, who've done it for years in research, and they're teaching everybody else who might not be a data scientist or computer, you know, you know it, that really understands this stuff deeply. And so we're going, I'm going through trainings and I'm, I'm feel like I'm taking exciting classes and Oh, that's great. So it's really, it's actually really exciting even for somebody who hasn't, you know, done that stuff before. And I've learned a lot, like in a very short time. So

Leo Laporte (00:17:39):
Now, okay. You are our expert. <Laugh>, you are our ai.

Lou Maresca (00:17:43):
Congratulations. I should've said anything. Now,

Leo Laporte (00:17:45):
<Laugh>, you're our AI expert

Lou Maresca (00:17:47):
Enough to be dangerous.

Leo Laporte (00:17:49):
But

Padre (00:17:49):
I mean, Lou, this should, this is write up Dynamics Alley, right? I mean, I, if you're talking about a, a feature set that would be beneficial to a product Dynamics is one of those where it would be great. It does exactly what you would ex expect a, a cr r m to do. Yes.

Lou Maresca (00:18:06):
Oh, yeah. I mean, I could see lots of applications applied to CRMs to, to, to you know, to ERPs, to power apps to, I mean, there's just an endless set of features that can happen. And I can promise you there will be an Endo endless set of features that will come out that will go with those things. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:18:23):
Is that what you're working on, Lou now as Dynamics?

Lou Maresca (00:18:26):
No, I, I work in, still work in the office. Still in office Microsoft Office. Yep. but I, I work in the developer side of things, so the extensibility side of things, and there's, again, just like Dan was saying, there's endless opportunities there as well to, to be able to use these things to help you kind of bridge the gap and have an, an easier jumpstart and a lower barrier for you to get in and, and develop stuff

Leo Laporte (00:18:47):
As a developer. And of course, Microsoft has said that they're going to include chat G p T capabilities in office. So is is so, and co-pilot, which is GitHub's version of this also Microsoft product is aimed at, at developers. In fact, co-pilot has now a brush mode, right? Where you <laugh>, I don't understand quite how it works, is like a paintbrush mode. Is that, is that how it works? <Laugh>?

Lou Maresca (00:19:14):
I don't know. I actually don't know that picture. Oh, okay. You know more than me on

Leo Laporte (00:19:16):
That one. Yeah. <laugh>, they announced it. I read it. I don't understand it. So

Lou Maresca (00:19:19):
There's somebody coming out,

Dan Moren (00:19:20):
Like it's just hard to keep Dragon. But

Leo Laporte (00:19:22):
The idea was in using co-pilot is, you know, you'd, you'd start writing some login code and much like Clippy mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, it could, it could finish it for you. You wouldn't, it would not be prudent. Although people paste stuff in from Stack Overflow all the time. <Laugh>. But it would, I would think it would not be prudent to just accept it and say fine, and move on. Even if it compiles, it's not necessarily correct. This is one thing we're learning about these big language models is they're not, they're not

Dan Moren (00:19:55):
Too tuned for correctness makes, they make, they make stuff up. I mean, they make stuff up. Hallucination,

Lou Maresca (00:19:59):
Hallucinations.

Dan Moren (00:20:00):
Yeah. I was telling this story, I think when we talked to Mac Break Leo, about how I, I basically asked it to summarize the plot of one of my novels and it just made up stuff, but it was no way related to the plot. I was like, was it any good or <laugh>? No, I'm gonna say no.

Padre (00:20:19):
An alternate ending.

Dan Moren (00:20:20):
Yeah. Yeah. This on Maan, my Powell Chris Breen, who used to be one of my colleagues at Macworld he, a friend of his asked it about him and it told his friend that he had died and it provided, yes, I saw that. A link. Yes. It provided a link to an obituary on Macworld. And like, I was reading this and like, man, the title reads like, if Chris had died, <laugh>, this is what the title of his obituary would be. But it was like a U r l like gave a u r url that went nowhere. But I was like, that was just disturbing and weird.

Leo Laporte (00:20:49):
Right? It is made up like,

Dan Moren (00:20:51):
Oh no, he's, he's definitely dead. And he is like, no he isn't.

Leo Laporte (00:20:54):
That's gotta be so weird you to leave us. See that and think, lemme see if I can find it, cuz Yeah. Here's the here Christopher Bream, who is Christopher Breen from McWell. We know Chris cuz he's been on our shows many times. Christopher Breen was a, was a longtime editor and columnist at Mac World, well known figure in the Apple community, wrote extensively on a wide range of topics. Sadly Breen passed away in 2018, but his contributions to the tech journalism world and his legacy as a trusted source of information and insight live on. Yeah. Cuz he's still alive. <Laugh>. That is, I don't know how you get there from, I mean, wow.

Padre (00:21:32):
This is the next generation of trolling. People are gonna figure out how to poison the data wells. That's right. That these, these AI models are drawing on and they're gonna make just little tweaks so that when you make these, these very popular G P T searches, you're gonna come up with the information you want them to find. But

Dan Moren (00:21:47):
It's the same thing back to Leo talking about autocorrect too. Right? How many of the times have you ended up with autocorrect telling you to change something? That's right. Right. It gives you, like it insists on writing. Oh yes. Absolutely. We, you know, w e apostrophe ll when you're trying to type the word well you know, and, and it's just, you can type something wrong enough times and it'll be like, well, you keep typing it. So it's, it's probably right. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:22:10):
It's ducking right here. This Chris Chris was responding to another MAs on too, from a professor at the University of Illinois Urban in Information Sciences in English. And this bing said, hello, this is Bing. I see you're interested in Ted Underwood, professor blogger Twitter, user studies, literary imagination and machine learning. Unfortunately, he passed away at August 28th at his home. And it, he's

Dan Moren (00:22:36):
Not, he's creepy to have an AI tell you a machine learning expert is dead. Cause it feels like, yeah. You're being like, oh no, I'm gonna go ask an expert. It's like, oh, no, no, that, that guy's dead. No, you shouldn't ask him about machine learning. To

Leo Laporte (00:22:48):
Which Ted Toots terribly said. And I have to say, I'm angry that I wasn't informed. <Laugh> <laugh> like Bruce Willis in the sixth sense, I'm always the last to know. Mm-Hmm. wow. Wow. I by the way, immediately tried to figure out if I was dead, but chat G P T says I'm still alive, unfortunately. So, but maybe if I keep keep working at it, you can make these things loose.

Padre (00:23:13):
How to do that.

Leo Laporte (00:23:14):
Yeah. Damn. You can make, have you been, okay, so you have a little bit of a hacker in you Father Robert? I

Padre (00:23:19):
Do, I

Leo Laporte (00:23:20):
Do. Have you tried to hack mischievous this a little bit?

Padre (00:23:24):
Not tried. I have, that's why I'm predicting that it's gonna be the next frontier for trolling. I mean, it's, it's not that hard. Once you start realizing, especially with obscure topics where it's finding the information and, and my life, my professional life is obscure topics. So, you know, I can, I can very quickly find out where they have decided to, to train their models. And then just a couple of tweaks and you can start

Leo Laporte (00:23:49):
Changing some, some pretty big things. So it's helpful if you know what they're trained on.

Padre (00:23:54):
Correct. Oh, no. If you know what they're trained on you, you have total control. I mean, if you can change that data set, you can completely bone a model.

Leo Laporte (00:24:00):
Yeah. Boone not Bone, that's another thing.

Dan Moren (00:24:05):
<Laugh> <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:24:07):
Sorry,

Padre (00:24:08):
That's show title. Just wanted to model. Just

Leo Laporte (00:24:10):
Wanna be clear.

Dan Moren (00:24:13):
<Laugh>. Oh no. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:24:15):
Oh, there's so many questions I wanna ask, but I'm gonna, in the interest of good taste, just stop, stop right there. Yeah. And people, of course, this is what Trolls live for is owning the Libs and other people. Right. And so this is giving them a tool. There's a lot of schools worried about students using it. We, we had the story last week of the Science fiction magazine, Clark's World that had to stop accepting open submissions because so many people were trying to get in their magazine with science fiction stories written by chat e p t.

Dan Moren (00:24:52):
Yeah. Let, let me say, as a science fiction author that's not like a, like a route to a lot of money. <Laugh>, let's just be clear, this is not a lucrative business. You might wanna recalibrate your expectations a bit. So Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:25:07):
The editor said the reason this happened was because ev a lot of people wanna get published, maybe not make money in it. Yeah, right. But, but they want,

Dan Moren (00:25:13):
And they do pay, well, Clark's World is one of the few venues left that actually pays like a pretty good rate. Yeah. So like, there is an option, but it is, yeah. The flooding it is really gonna cause some problems. And it's gonna cause problems for a lot of people who wanna like legitimately try to get their foot in the door and they cannot sift through that many submissions. Right. That's the problem. If they now have to go through an extra step of like, trying to figure out like, okay, is this written by an AI or is this legitimate? So

Leo Laporte (00:25:38):
How hard

Padre (00:25:38):
Is, DEFCON has sci-fi every year, and I guarantee you there's gonna be more than a few chat G p d generated stories in there.

Leo Laporte (00:25:45):
We one, the, the one of the people who moderates my our forums said that one of our users is starting to put posts in there that are auto generated by chat. G P T. Is there, how do you, how can you tell, is there an easy lie? Is there some way to tell that something is AI written versus human written? I don't think so. I

Lou Maresca (00:26:09):
Mean, just at the, and it's, it's face value. Absolutely not. I mean, that's why I'm actually worried that, you know, phishing emails are gonna get better. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Cause you're not gonna really know that it's ever generated. I don't think there's a way to first service to really sometimes know the difference between a real

Dan Moren (00:26:21):
Thing than another. There, there was a tool going around, but people were saying it's not Right. More than, you know, coin flip, basically. Yeah.

Lou Maresca (00:26:26):
GPT zero is, yeah. It's not, it's from Princeton. I don't think it's that great of a service yet.

Dan Moren (00:26:31):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:26:31):
You can't ask. And I've seen people do this chat. G P T did you write this? But you can't trust the answer.

Dan Moren (00:26:37):
Right, right.

Leo Laporte (00:26:40):
Yeah. I

Padre (00:26:40):
Wrote it. This has actually been one of my projects because I've been working with Jesuits who work in universities, and one Jesuit in particular has asked me a lot of his sub, his work is reading submissions from his students. And he's, he was panicked because when he heard about this tool, he is like, is there a good way for me to figure out if something is written by chat G p T? And about three weeks into the semester he wrote me, he said, nevermind, it's super easy if suddenly I can understand what the writing is is not down.

Leo Laporte (00:27:07):
If it's coherent, the commas are in the right place. Exactly. They, it's done, you know, in the proper format of, of subject, you know, proposal and proofs it. Oh, well. My students didn't write that. No, no.

Padre (00:27:21):
If they go from an essence too logical to an asa Yeah, that's probably not them. Wow. And

Dan Moren (00:27:26):
There's a certain degree of formulaic too. I mean, in the stuff that I've read, at least in chat G p t, if you start asking eight questions, it often phrases stuff and builds its arguments in the same way. I mean, not dissimilar from how you're taught to write an essay, for example, in in school like Maker, you know, opening thesis and they're supporting statements and then have your like, conclusion that draws it all together. But it's a little too pat. Right. You know, it's a little too right on target. Every single time It

Leo Laporte (00:27:51):
Strikes me, I realized we actually put together a perfect panel for this. We've got a, a fiction writer, a coder, and a priest who better

Dan Moren (00:28:01):
We, we've walked into a bar and

Leo Laporte (00:28:03):
Better to judge this topic. 

Padre (00:28:08):
Chat. G p T has no soul.

Dan Moren (00:28:11):
<Laugh> and Chat. G p T has no soul. No.

Padre (00:28:14):
See, there we go.

Dan Moren (00:28:15):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:28:17):
Soul.

Padre (00:28:17):
And Luke can say chat. T p t is sold Soul. It's sold.

Leo Laporte (00:28:22):
So a few weeks ago when CNET got in trouble because a lot of their articles in the personal finance space were written by their own ai, which I think they call Wordsmith. We had Connie Guglielmo, the editor-in-chief of CNET on the show. It was kind of coincidental. We'd planned on having her on. But she had just written a blog post explaining, and, you know, not apologizing. CNET has not said, oh, that was a mistake. They backed down on doing it, but I think they're gonna do more of it this week. CNET file fi fired a significant number of its reporters. And Connie well, the Verge who's been really hard on CNET says, Connie Guo cnet, editor chief will step down down. I don't think it's a step down, frankly. She's now she has a a VP role in charge of machine learning strategy at Red Ventures, the private equity company that owns cnet.

(00:29:19):
I feel like she's actually, that's kind of a promotion and I doubt we'll ever see Connie on our show again, <laugh> she was e iic at at CNET for nine years. She wrote that blog post somewhat defending it. She was defensive of it on our show. She said, you know, it's writing the articles that reporters don't wanna write. They're really dumb stories, explainers and stuff. So we have the, the AI write it, and then we have an editor review it for accuracy. Turns out quite a few stories on cnet were AI written. So now Connie is moved, I don't think down, I think up to be in charge. She's a senior vice president of AI content strategy and an editor in LAR at large.

Dan Moren (00:30:08):
There's a certain degree of like a burs happening here, right? Yes. Because I feel like so many of those pieces that are written was like, oh, these are dumb. And, and reporters don't wanna write them and they're explainers. But the reason, and I speak from this as a freelance tech writer who has written these before, the reason we write this in the first place is SEO <laugh>, which is another algorithm that's determining what is get surfaced at the top. So it's like we're feeding the algorithm by Right. Having the algorithm, other algorithms write more stuff to surface at the top of Google, which feels like basically unsustainable. Because at a certain point you're just gonna be like, well, I don't, none of this is relevant to me anymore.

Leo Laporte (00:30:44):
<Laugh>. Well, and there's some algorithms,

Padre (00:30:46):
Gaming algorithms.

Leo Laporte (00:30:47):
Yeah. Because the algorithm is based on a, you know, the dataset from the internet. If, if half of the stuff it's reading in is stuff it wrote, they're gonna have talk about snake eating its own tale. You're gonna have this

Dan Moren (00:30:59):
Vicious, we

Lou Maresca (00:31:00):
Define our history essentially. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I feel like we, we should just like enclave or, or section off the, you know, our history at this point. Like our actual data that re that belongs to real history so that we eventually will have to, we start recycling history generated from ai and we have to decipher the, the real between the, the regeneration. Would

Dan Moren (00:31:18):
It be a

Leo Laporte (00:31:18):
Reasonable legal, it seems to me this would be a good legal strategy, something Congress could do to say all AI generated content has to be watermarked in some way. Indelibly, watermarked. You can do it

Dan Moren (00:31:31):
With text though, right? Like how do you deal with it just like straight up text. Like somebody can just, there's loopholes. You can copy and paste it. Like Yeah, you can get around it. There doesn't really exists

Lou Maresca (00:31:40):
Words and you're done. You know, give it

Leo Laporte (00:31:41):
A secret word, you know, rutabaga. And if, if rutabaga shows up, then we know it's an ai.

Dan Moren (00:31:47):
I What if it's an article about rutabagas lu <laugh>? Oh no. And what about what? Yeah. What Then I guess you

Leo Laporte (00:31:54):
Can't, can you

Dan Moren (00:31:55):
Well, I ca you know, I thought Loose Point was really good about the history. I mean, like, it makes me wonder, like, is an AI version of Wikipedia around the corner where it's like, but then would, you know Right. Like, and, and

Leo Laporte (00:32:04):
Would you trust and

Dan Moren (00:32:05):
You shouldn't trust it? No, absolutely not. But how would you know, right? Like if it seemed like it's all written and it seems logical and it's, look, it's got all these footnotes and sources. They may not be real if you actually take the time to click through them, but how many people do that on Wikipedia in the

Leo Laporte (00:32:18):
First place? This Wikipedia, Chris Spreen is really dead.

Dan Moren (00:32:21):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:32:23):
Oh, this is not a good,

Padre (00:32:24):
I guarantee, I guarantee you someone right now is toying around with a bot, a chat G p t bot that they created that interfaces with Wikipedia. Oh yeah.

Dan Moren (00:32:32):
Who's doing edits? Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:32:33):
It's

Padre (00:32:33):
Probably getting, edits are probably getting rejected. It's trivial to do that. Right. But at some point we're gonna look back and go, how long have these been running? How many are running? What has been changed? What's real?

Leo Laporte (00:32:44):
This is exactly what the Russian propaganda arm has been trying to do, was just fill, fill the world with bs, right? Yeah. And then you don't know what to trust. And we, I mean, Putin probably just needs a few AI bots and he is done.

Dan Moren (00:33:05):
Well, I mean, it is just basically spam at that point. Right? Right. Effectively it's just doesn't, but we

Leo Laporte (00:33:10):
Can tell Doesn't matter spam, we look at spam and we know it's spam for

Dan Moren (00:33:13):
Now. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:33:13):
Because it's cuz it's saying buy something or click this link. But this is, this is this the motive of this is much more subterranean. We don't, the motive is to fill and your point, the world ru to Vegas,

Dan Moren (00:33:24):
You Yeah, exactly. It doesn't need to be well thought out. It doesn't need to be, you know, backed up. It doesn't need to even be convincing. It just needs zone be enough to sow doubt. Yeah.

Padre (00:33:33):
You just have to poison the, we you poison a well once a well is poisoned, no one knows which wells are poisoned. Oh

Leo Laporte (00:33:39):
Wow.

Padre (00:33:40):
Yeah. Once you've got a little bit of doubt, there's doubt everywhere. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's, it is insidious once it gets into the base knowledge and, and you can't tell what might be right and what might be created. So I, I mean, are

Leo Laporte (00:33:53):
We gonna look

Padre (00:33:54):
Back that we should look at,

Leo Laporte (00:33:55):
Are we gonna look back at the year 2023 and say there's before AI and there's after ai and this was the year, the dividing year. Are we at that? Are we at that elbow in the in the curb? Are we really, this is singularity in a way.

Padre (00:34:14):
Maybe the real threat from AI isn't killer robots that traveled through time. The real threat from AI is it's just changing all the knowledge that we thought we had. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:34:22):
Yeah. The year punter Jono chat saying the year truth died the year I mean we look at, this is something this, some politicians would, you know, we're in a post fact world, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> this is something some politicians want. It doesn't have to be politicians. It could be four chan. It's, it's of equal authority. None.

Padre (00:34:48):
The dry heat in the chat room is asking if we're techno panicking. And I don't think we are because

Leo Laporte (00:34:53):
Now I feel like we're not. I was, I was saying this is all a parlor trick now I'm terrified.

Padre (00:34:59):
Well, no, it's still a parlor trick, but it's a terrible parlor trick because generationally, generationally, our knowledge base changes every decade or so. Right. When you have a new generation and that's all they've ever known, then they just assume that that's gonna be true. That's, that's, that's human

Leo Laporte (00:35:15):
Nature in a hundred years it's all new people, as Annie Lamont said. And in a hundred years there'll be nobody none of us to be around to say, oh yeah, there used to be, you could read Wikipedia and if, and you would know it was accurate cuz humans were working on it.

Padre (00:35:31):
<Laugh>, I

Lou Maresca (00:35:31):
You could bet yourself that you're gonna start seeing emergency technologies, but we'll start to verify like Da Vinci, da Vinci struck, like are new technologies that will start to determine how correct things are, reduce the amount of hallucination, like, and be able to let customer do people, users and, and you know, people like verify that things are not correct or, or correct enough. So I think like, I think the, and people enough people are scared enough. People are worried. And again, the parlor tricks are also kind of driving this a little bit, which is like, you know, making sure things are correct. And so that's why, you know, use you being used using AI more responsibly, like around very specific tasks, you know, where you can guarantee that the output that you're gonna get is gonna really, like, for instance like, you know, I'm gonna design a new slideshow or a new video and I'm gonna use some of the designs that the AI gives me or something like that. Like those are things that you can do. You have to worry about fact checking, you know, but telling it how much of a medicine I need to take or, or you know, what medicines I should be taking. That kind of thing. I'm not sure you should be trusting that right now. Like, I think you should be going to a doctor obviously.

Dan Moren (00:36:32):
Right? Well it's, it's the open-endedness of some of the tools, right? I think that's what it comes down to, especially with the art and chat G P T and stuff like that. Like where it's like you can ask it anything or you can ask it to make anything. Right? That's the kind of stuff where I think it gets a lot riskier than like an AI-based tool that's built into another piece of software that's gonna help you do something, a particular task and is therefore sort of on guard has guardrails and is kind of specified to like, we want to do this thing. But the fact that in order to get to that point, we have to, and that these like sort of technologies that are so wide open that it's like it can do whatever you ask it to do. It's, it's really, you know, the, and the other part of that is you can't put the genie back in the bottle, right? I mean, it's, it's out, it's here. It's a thing that people are using. And at that point the question is how do you sort of deal with it or at least build up structures around it, whether it's technological or just sort of cultural to be able to know that it's there and sort of understand it.

Leo Laporte (00:37:28):
Verner Vge, you'll start for whose name you will know. Yeah. Verner Vge, right? Or is it Venji? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Venge vi science Science fiction author said within 30 years we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence shortly after the human era will be ended. Do you want to guess when he said that? Exactly? 30 years ago. 1993. Okay. 1993. maybe he was right. Somebody saying in our chat room that Ray Kurzwell thinks, who has been saying for years the singularity is just a few decades off. He wrote a book called The Singularity is near. He thought it would happen by 2045. He's now saying it's a few months off. What is, maybe we should explain what the singularity is. What is the singularity who wants to, Robert, you probably can give us a good definition of that.

Padre (00:38:20):
This, okay, so a nice science fiction definition of singularity is the creation of an artificial consciousness that can then give rise to other consciousness. The minute that you have a, an entity that you have created that can change itself, can be self-reflective and can procreate into other self-reflective beings, you have a singularity. I think that's like the most layman dumb down version I've got. I

Leo Laporte (00:38:47):
Think, I think KSW said it was when we developed, I, I think you're right Robert, that that's really the real singularity. But didn't he say it was when we can't, we can't distinguish machines from human. But I think you're right, Robert, the thing that's really scary is if those machines can design the next generation of machines. Cuz then it accelerates at al you know geometric or maybe even ex It goes

Lou Maresca (00:39:11):
Back to what you're saying. It goes back to what you're saying, Leo, is that, you know, not being able to predict is singularity is the, is that point where you can no longer predict the output of this thing. And, and it will just continue to grow and, and learn on itself and, and re retrain itself and, and redo its things over and over again. And it just never stops. And you can't stop it. There's no going back. There's no reversing it. That's singularity.

Leo Laporte (00:39:33):
Are we close?

Dan Moren (00:39:37):
It's always hard to tell when you're in it, right? I mean, yeah. Would

Leo Laporte (00:39:39):
We know <laugh>, would we know you know, how and how would we know,

Dan Moren (00:39:45):
Man, this is, this is gonna be a great idea for a science fiction story about the singularity taking over and then solving climate change for itself. Yeah. Oh, maybe this can force all the other apocalypse.

Padre (00:39:55):
Yeah,

Dan Moren (00:39:56):
You gotta fight an apocalypse with an apocalypse.

Padre (00:39:59):
I I I was part of a panel here in the Vatican. We were talking about the singularity. And there was an interesting point. I think I think I made after too much grandpapa there, it was an evening session. We were drinking a little bit. Is

Dan Moren (00:40:11):
That any grandpapa?

Padre (00:40:13):
<Laugh>? No, this is pretty Any

Leo Laporte (00:40:14):
Was too much gra I agree with you. A hundred percent. Nope. Did they throw the three coffee, coffee beans in it and then set it on fire? Or that's, that's <inaudible>.

Padre (00:40:22):
No, no, no. This had a very special herb from the mountains of somewhere. And I, I don't, you know, it was, it was just very smooth. It was very smooth. It didn't snuck up on me, but Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:40:31):
But stay away from open

Padre (00:40:32):
Flame venting around. Yeah. Yes. Oh gosh, yes. No, it's, it's very flammable is this idea that the singularity is actually, it's not a creation of technology. It's more of a zeitgeist. Once you have human society rewriting its own history in this ever recursive loop of what is and is not true, you've, you've essentially created the singularity. It it has become its own self-aware entity that is then rewriting what we believe to be true. And again, I could have been too much grpa, but when, when we woke up the next morning, we're like, oh, that's a, okay, let's put that down on the, on the worksheet. That, that sounds interesting.

Leo Laporte (00:41:14):
Lou, you're a a coder. You, you're a solid <laugh>, mathematically inclined, not airy fairy guy. And you're right on the forefront of this cuz you work at Microsoft. What do you think? Are we, are we approaching the singularity?

Lou Maresca (00:41:34):
I don't think so. I think that we're way, I think we're far away from this. Oh, thank God. I think that, yeah, I, I think that from what I've seen and what I know that's being worked on, I think it's far from that. But you know, I think again, these are just, you gotta think about now people are worried because of the polar tricks. I think that's the key is like, I think Dan brought it up a bunch of times is like these, those are the things that are really worrying people. And I think you know, hopefully those will probably be reigned in a little bit more as, as time on, you see Bing's probably not doing some of the things they used to do before and Yeah. Yeah. There's chat GPTs or perplexed ai. These are all places that are like ra like really reigned it in so that people can't go down these.

Leo Laporte (00:42:11):
I I have to say though, it's not reassuring cuz the way they reigned in Bing chat was to say, you can only ask it five questions. The implication being any more than that, it's gonna hallucinate <laugh> and you're gonna get weird answers.

Dan Moren (00:42:24):
You have three wishes.

Leo Laporte (00:42:25):
I don't know if that makes me feel better. It's more like, we're just not gonna let you see behind the curtain. We won't let you. But there's

Dan Moren (00:42:32):
Push, there's, there's refinement happening too, right? I mean, like, you know, I feel like that's a good stop gap for trying to figure out like, okay, well how do we improve the model so that we don't see this performance in the future? And for the moment we're gonna limit it so they can do that. But I agree. I agree, Lou, I don't think it's no necessarily imminent. I think that the, the, I don't know, perhaps misplaced. I have a lot of faith in humanity and I think that there's a lot of, of, you know, stuff that, again, pe this people seize on the sort of the flashy, the obvious parts of that. I think there's a lot of other stuff that's similar that is more worrying in some ways too. I mean, I think about like the rise of deep fakes. The r like the fact that you can fake a lot of video. Like the fact that technology has really allowed us to do all this stuff, and this is high comparison, I think much less something that's going to a chatbot is not gonna cause the singularity. Sorry, I don't think it's happening.

Leo Laporte (00:43:23):
Yeah. I mean, in a way we are living in the, in if you'd asked somebody 50 years ago if you'd said, oh yeah, I have something in my pocket that I could find the answer to any question within a second. Right? that would be pretty amazing and maybe would be from them spooky and, and potentially dangerous. Now if you say and, and you'll never know if the answer's right <laugh>, that's really

Dan Moren (00:43:49):
<Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:43:50):
That's really getting a little, that's a little more scary.

Dan Moren (00:43:52):
Monkey monkey's paw situation. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:43:54):
Be careful what you wish for. All right, let's take a little break. I came into this show, you know, really believing it was a parlor trick. It's nothing big. No big deal. Lou, you, you started me on this down this road of maybe it is now. I'm scared, I'm worried. Thanks Lou. Yeah. Done their job. I gotta send somebody back in time to kill the machines before they get this point. Lu Lu Meeska is here. Lum, we love him from Twit. He's our host, principal engineering manager at Microsoft developer par Exelon. And you could tell by the number of screens behind him, <laugh>. That's, that's the given.

Lou Maresca (00:44:34):
You don't see what's in front of me. That's <laugh> four right here too.

Dan Moren (00:44:38):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:44:38):
Is that your PC with all the lights and the fans and the LEDs? So

Lou Maresca (00:44:42):
Yeah, this is, this is my, basically my VM machine. It doesn't do anything else but run VMs. The actual machine is in my office upstairs that Oh wow. That's that's the machine. Yeah. Wow. Oh wow. That's, that's the 32 core Big nine, you know, the big GTX machine. Yeah. That's

Leo Laporte (00:44:56):
Pretty high. You know, that's pretty high end you say. Yeah. I have a machine just runs VMs. That's all it does. That's all it does. Yeah. Kyle Reese is gonna, you're the first one Kyle Reese is gonna hit. Also with us from the Vatican <laugh> Father Robert Baller, the digital Jesuits. Great to see you, Robert. Sorry that you're, you're back in Italy, but I'm on my way over. I'll be, I'll be there in a month. Yeah,

Padre (00:45:18):
Absolutely. Yeah. I, I also have a machine back here, but it runs on water wheels,

Leo Laporte (00:45:22):
<Laugh> and ham.

Padre (00:45:25):
You know,

Dan Moren (00:45:25):
It's

Lou Maresca (00:45:26):
Amazing Wire, a little bit

Leo Laporte (00:45:27):
Amazing what you can do with water wheels and science fiction. Author novelist, Dan Morin. He is also a podcaster and columnist at Macworld in six colors.

Dan Moren (00:45:37):
Great man. I don't have any screens behind me, but I have some books. So books.

Leo Laporte (00:45:40):
Look at that. There we go. Talk about retro. Wow.

Dan Moren (00:45:42):
Yeah. Paper

Leo Laporte (00:45:44):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Mostly now I just use books for soundproofing. I don't <laugh>.

Dan Moren (00:45:49):
I got a stack over here. I could probably build myself a nice little Thieve.

Leo Laporte (00:45:53):
<Laugh>. Yes. What he has, actually, I should run and get it, is his new book which is the third in the series. What's, what's the I have 'em all. This

Dan Moren (00:46:02):
Is the, the Nova, the Nova incident. I'll have to roll back.

Leo Laporte (00:46:06):
There it is. Beautiful blue

Dan Moren (00:46:07):
Cover. We'll grab one. There we go. We can hold it up in Nova Incident. No.

Leo Laporte (00:46:10):
Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. I always have your stack of books right here so I can show 'em off. And I just, the Galactic Cold War trilogy so far, soon to come. More. More and more. More. And if you haven't read them, can they start with a Nova? I've

Padre (00:46:25):
Been looking for a new audio book. Oh

Dan Moren (00:46:28):
Yes there are. Yep. We're available. I got audio books of all of them. Yeah, I, I wouldn't start with no incident. I would start with the first one either. Yeah. I would start with the first one. Always Just buy 'em all, first of all,

Padre (00:46:38):
Be clear. Yeah, of course. Naturally. So

Dan Moren (00:46:40):
You're prepared beginning and go from there.

Leo Laporte (00:46:41):
Get the Alfa Extract extraction, then the Bayer an agenda. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> the, is the Caledonia gambit in there too?

Dan Moren (00:46:48):
It is technically. It's sort of a weird thing cuz it was different publisher, but it's in the same universe, so Yeah. Nice. It's,

Leo Laporte (00:46:53):
It's, I like world building, you know? I like it. When you have a universe, I like Brian's Brandon Sanderson cuz you can read all these books in the same world and you kind of get to Yeah. Know that

Dan Moren (00:47:03):
World. Brandon and I have the same agent.

Leo Laporte (00:47:05):
Nice.

Padre (00:47:06):
Yeah. I have three fiction universes that I follow right now. So The Expanse Universe. Yeah, the Baba verse Universe. Love the Baba verse. And then my, my guilty pleasure is the expeditionary first universe. So I I'll make yours the fourth.

Dan Moren (00:47:18):
Yeah. Oh, thank you. Is

Leo Laporte (00:47:19):
Dennis E. Taylor writing another Baba verse? Are we getting one soon? I hope.

Padre (00:47:23):
He's, I I just read the fourth one. It was o okay. I he's branched out.

Leo Laporte (00:47:28):
He's, yeah, he's decorated something different than the next one. But I really love the first one, Evans River. The premise is kind of fitting in our story. Von Neman probe. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. all right, well you got, you got some reading to do kids. Meanwhile, while you're reading, I'm gonna tell you about Collide. K O L I D E. We need now more than ever, we need collide. Collide is a well best way to put it, be a device trusts solution so that unsecured devices cannot access your apps. Collide has some big news. If you're an Okta user, and I know many of you are collide, can get your entire fleet to 100% compliance. Collide Patch is one of the major holes in zero trust architecture, which is device compliance. Think about it, your identity provider, if it's doing its job only let's known devices log into apps.

(00:48:25):
But just because a device is known doesn't mean it's in a secure state. Right? Who learned this lately? What big password company learned this lately? Just cuz you know that that device doesn't mean it's secure. In fact, plenty of the devices in your fleet probably shouldn't be trusted. Maybe they're running on out of data os versions. Maybe they've got unencrypted credentials lying around. Maybe they've been compromised. If a device isn't compliant or isn't running the Collide agent, well, it's easy. You just, it can't access the organization's SaaS, apps or other resources. The device user can't log into your company's cloud apps until they fix the problem on their end. It's that simple. So, as an example, a device will be blocked if an employee doesn't have an up-to-date browser or using end user remediation. You can have them fix that, right? And then they can get in.

(00:49:20):
It drives your fleet to a hundred percent compliance and you, your IT guys and gals don't have to worry about it. The users do the remediation without Collide. IT teams have no way to solve these compliance issues or stop insecure devices from logging in. With Collide, you can set and enforce compliance across your entire fleet. Yes, it's truly cross-platform. Mac, windows, and Linux Collide is unique it in that it makes device compliance part of the authentication process. If it users logging in without, with Okta collide alerts them to compliance issues and prevents unsecured devices from logging in. It's security you could feel good about because Collide puts transparency and respect for users at the center of their product. To sum it up, collide method means fewer support tickets for you, less frustration for your users, and most importantly, 100% fleet compliance. Collide, K O L I D E.

(00:50:17):
Visit collide.com/twit. Learn more. Book a demo collide.com/twit. If you're using Okta, ya need collide. We thank 'em so much for supporting this week in tech. You support us right back by using that special address so they know you saw it to your collide.com/twitter. As long as we're talking about last pass, we've learned a little bit more about the last pass breach. Oh my mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I mean, okay. I'm, you know what, one takeaway, not to defend them exactly, but they were clearly very specifically targeted, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, this was mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And this was not a naive attack. What we found out in a more recent blog post from a last pass is that there were four DevOps guys who had the keys to the S3 buckets, the keys to all those data backups. One of the guys was working from home, I'm reading between the lines.

(00:51:19):
He had a media client, I think it was Plex. Cause Plex had a known flaw. He was Plex. Yeah. Yeah. He had a media compli client. So they, they had already hacked last passes, you know, enterprise stuff. And they knew who these four people were. Then they targeted the four people they got in through Plex Co and, and co-opted this DevOps machine and got the keys. This is a highly targeted attack. So, to some degree, I think, I'm glad last pass revealed this. They also revealed that the backups came from last December, which was a relief for me, cuz I deleted my vault before then <laugh>. But is information we all needed because those are the vaults that were exfiltrated. Robert, you're, you're, you're good at this kind of red teaming. Did you, did you read the post and, and, and, and understand what went on?

Padre (00:52:13):
I did. So yes, definitely targeted. This is a, a lot different than some of the other breaches that we read about, where someone happens across an unsecured S3 bucket or someone's credentials just get swept up into a list that gets sold. And it, it happened to land in the hands of someone who was able to use it to, to, to further their exploit. This was someone who was specifically looking for access to the Holy of Holies at LastPass. They knew what they wanted.

Leo Laporte (00:52:41):
So, I mean,

Padre (00:52:41):
Exactly. They knew what they wanted. The first thing that I went to was insider. I mean it, someone with some inside information about the company. A disgruntled employee, someone who was fired by them, or a contractor that lost their contract. Because I mean, just the, the, the, the, the per op that you'd need to get past it precludes just a group on the internet deciding to take down LastPass.

Leo Laporte (00:53:07):
That's interesting. So they say a software engineer's corporate laptop was compromised. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> allowing the unauthorized threat actor to gain access to a cloud-based development environment and steel source code, technical information and internal secret. So that was the first incident. So you're thinking that first incident was actually an insider?

Padre (00:53:28):
It it's gotta be. I mean, I mean on either it's an inside information type deal, or someone got extremely lucky. Right? Someone just spearfished the heck out of that company. And if they had, I think last pass would've told us there was an attempt to spearfish the company back in so-and-so, and one of them was successful. That's not what they wrote.

Leo Laporte (00:53:48):
No. This is all passive, passive voice. It was compromised. But we don't know exactly how. But that first compromise, which I think happened in June or July, was then what allowed the second compromise. Because once they had that information, the threat actor targeted a senior DevOps engineer exploiting a vulnerable third party program. I think Plex leveraged the, the threat actor to leverage the vulnerability to deliver malware onto that DevOps engineer's laptop, bypassing existing controls, and then ultimately gaming unauthorized access to the s3 buckets. Yeah.

Padre (00:54:23):
That's too many levels for to be a random red attack. Yeah. I mean, you would see so much attack traffic, right? And they, that network really on, yeah. They would've learned. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:54:33):
So in a way that's bad news because it means they were actively going after the vaults. It wasn't that they stumbled upon the vaults and Oh, they have this, now what do we do? Right? You only go after the vaults if you're, if you prepared to do what's next to compromise them.

Padre (00:54:48):
So it has, it was someone who had intimate knowledge of the inner workings of last pass. It has someone who had inner knowledge of their code base. I mean, honestly. And, and that's, that's proprietary. So if I were last pass, I'd be looking down, who did we fire in the last two years?

Leo Laporte (00:55:06):
They got DevOps secrets, restricted secrets that were used to gain access to the cloud-based backup storage. They, they got cloud-based information con configuration data, API secrets, third party integrations, third party integration secrets, customer metadata, backups of all customer vault data. That's, that's the phrase we finally, we were waiting to hear. They kind of danced around it in their last blog post. They got it all. They got all customer vault data, all sensitive vault data other than URL's file paths to installed LastPass Windows or MAC OS software. And certain use cases involving email addresses were encrypted using zero knowledge and can only be decrypted with a unique encryption key. But we know, you know, people don't use strong master passwords cuz they need to remember them. And we also know that the key derivative function last pass used was often set to a far too low number for modern attack vectors.

Padre (00:56:08):
Now there's a bellweather here, Leo. If we start to see a lot of random incursions on millions of accounts, then it's possible that this, this was someone who maybe they had some infor insider information, but they really intended to sell this information if we don't see that. And instead this just really is the death nail for last pass. That's a pretty good indicator of what the intent of the attack was. It was, oh, you

Leo Laporte (00:56:39):
So

Padre (00:56:39):
That I can sell information or was an attack to kill the

Leo Laporte (00:56:42):
Company. Oh, interesting. I hadn't even thought of that. Yeah. Cuz we, as far as we know, there was only one case with somebody suing last pass saying their crypto keys were stolen. And you know how it is with crypto that <laugh>, there's so many other ways that could happen. We haven't seen any, as far as I know, we've, nobody's said, oh yeah, they must have gotten my vault because I've been attacked. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So maybe that led credence to your second scenario that it wasn't about getting the vault, it was about putting last pass out of business.

Padre (00:57:10):
Destroying trust in the company. Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:57:12):
Holy cow. A competitor

Padre (00:57:20):
<Laugh>. I mean, when you look at w who the competitors are out there bit warden bit. No, don't

Leo Laporte (00:57:27):
See, I don't see one

Lou Maresca (00:57:28):
Password. Taking

Leo Laporte (00:57:29):
One password took them down.

Padre (00:57:31):
Kinda hard

Lou Maresca (00:57:32):
To imagine. No,

Leo Laporte (00:57:34):
But, but would have to be somebody who had a business. If it's that, I, boy, that's a, that's an interesting thesis, but you're right. We have not seen any evidence that those, those passwords are being used.

Padre (00:57:50):
Never underestimate the ego of a hacker who has been shunned, embarrassed, what they will go to. So

Leo Laporte (00:57:58):
It doesn't have to be a competitor. It could be a disgruntled former employee.

Padre (00:58:01):
Really could. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:58:04):
Holy cow.

Padre (00:58:05):
I I didn't do it. I just put that out there right now. No, not involved. I

Leo Laporte (00:58:10):
Know a lot of people obviously LastPass was a sponsor for a long time, and I know a lot of people there, including its founder Joe Siegrist, who is not at LastPass and hasn't been there for years. There's some very, very good people there. But that would be tragic if it were somebody who was trying to kill that company. We, because LastPass was a sponsor for so long, so many of our listeners and our LastPass customers, we still use LastPass Enterprise here at twit. We're trying to move, trying to move off to bit warden, but it's a non-trivial process. Bit warden's a sponsor now. Boy, wow.

Padre (00:58:51):
But I mean, isn't this a death now, if you are a company, it's, it's bad. And the one thing you do is this and it's gone. Now how do you recover from that?

Leo Laporte (00:59:02):
Yeah.

Lou Maresca (00:59:03):
Right. Yeah. Winter's, your date is gone. You're, it's gone. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, people need to be trust you, right? Yeah. Need to change the narrative to be able to, to people to trust you. Again, I don't think that's possible for them.

Leo Laporte (00:59:17):
Yeah, I don't wish any ill to last pass and now been a little scathing about their practices, but now that we know more details, it, this could ha this could happened to anybody

Lou Maresca (00:59:28):
Really? Well, I mean, we, we gotta be a little bit hard on them though. I mean, there's some of the things that they've published that they've made bad choices speculated Yeah. They've made bad choices. Like letting people with devices access their, their most prized secrets without, you know, locking these things down on you know, they did say work laptops or devices, but the reality is these machines that they're allowed to access this type of data should be a lot more locked down than even a work laptop. Right? Yeah. So I think that there's stuff like that, that I really lack security practices, I think in my eyes for a lot of things they were

Leo Laporte (00:59:58):
Doing. I also blame them for not encrypting things like URLs. There's a lot of metadata that other companies encrypt that LastPass did not encrypt, but you know, I mean, they, they were following best practices with the, with the password vault as far as we know. Wow. Okay. You came, you just, you just gave us a <laugh>, something to think about there, Robert. Very interesting. I think you might be right now that we know a little more about what happened. I think you might be right. You'll be glad to know that if you're a Xbox fan, that Microsoft is a set to win approval from the EU on their merger with Activision. Now they still have to get it through the US regulatory body. In fact, the ftc has has sued them. And I think it's August before we'll see an administrative judge weigh in on this.

(01:00:54):
But according to Reuters, Microsoft is expected to secure EU trust approval for its acquisition of Activision with, and the, and the reason is Microsoft offered a licensing deal to rivals. This, you know, honestly, let's face it, let's be honest, this was Sony complaining about the acquisition, worried that Call of Duty would know, would become an exclusive and no longer be available on the PS five. Microsoft did everything they could to reassure Sony, but Sony really <laugh> went for the jugular. So Microsoft is apparent, I would bet, making licensing deals. They already offered it to to Sony. They offered them to Nintendo. In addition to licensing deal for rivals, Microsoft, it's writer says, may also have to offer other behavioral remedies to allay concerns of other parties in Sony. Their sources said such remedies typically refer to the future conduct of the merged company. Is it just exclusives? I think it's just exclusives that, that Sony's worried about.

Padre (01:02:01):
Well, okay. The best part about this story, it is not just that they're going, this approval's gonna go through. It's the fact that the EU Commission has now turned around and asked Sony Good that they could provide some information about their exclusivity.

Leo Laporte (01:02:15):
Horrible about exclusives, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Far worse than Microsoft.

Padre (01:02:20):
Yeah, they, they 17 gaming studios under their wing, right? At this point, the exclusivity on, on PlayStation. If I, if I,

Dan Moren (01:02:27):
But it's, it's also one of those tricky, like, I mean, it's essentially a two company market, right? I mean, I'm gonna set Nintendo aside, they're here for a moment cuz Nintendo is great, but is kind of their own thing. And people buying a console are not comparing a switch to a PlayStation or an Xbox, really. So you're

Leo Laporte (01:02:44):
Saying it's really Xbox versus PS five or Ps and PlayStation, and that's really

Dan Moren (01:02:49):
The in, in the high end console market. Absolutely. That's the

Leo Laporte (01:02:51):
Bottom, because Microsoft, it is said, wanted Activision, not so much for that, but before mobile that they wanted to get into mobile gaming. And if you include that, then you've got Tencent, you've got a bunch of other companies. Microsoft is only sure they by, you know, their calculations. This would only make them the third largest gaming company in the world. Okay. Interesting. Well, we'll see, we'll see what the US does. We, are we rooting Are we rooting for this merger or not?

Padre (01:03:23):
I am, yeah. I mean, at, at this point, just because Sony has pissed me off so much. I know I really wanted to go through

Leo Laporte (01:03:29):
No love loss for Sony. I I agree with

Dan Moren (01:03:31):
You on that. I, I feel like I'm generally just against most of the consolidation in all of these industries. And so from a principal standpoint, I feel like these companies just keep getting so big. And I feel like despite, despite the like, you know, behavioral remedies and the stuff, oh yeah, I promise that you're gonna do this down the road. Those things always end up getting broken. Like that's just, I feel like in a lot of those cases, they just get ignored. Yes. For like 5, 10, 5 years, 10 years maybe they'll be like, yeah, yeah, it's fine. And then like they move on something else. But,

Padre (01:04:00):
But if you look at what Microsoft did with Minecraft, I

Leo Laporte (01:04:03):
Mean, they were a good steward. They are a good steward of Minecraft. Yeah. It was a

Padre (01:04:06):
Very good stewardship.

Dan Moren (01:04:06):
Yeah. Yeah. Yep. And I mean the, they what, bungee two or 3 43 when they took over Halo and all that stuff. I mean, that's sort of a weird situation too, but I mean, there's a lot of, so then didn't they buy, didn't they just buy Bethesda too, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, there's a lot of high end gaming studios as well that were, like, previously, I'm

Leo Laporte (01:04:26):
Kind of with you. I'm against consolidation, but is it, maybe it's the case that gaming requires so much capital nowadays and takes so long that you have to be a big Yeah. You don't see small indie certainly not triple A titles from small indie companies anymore. Right. Or maybe you need a

Padre (01:04:40):
Movie studio. AAA Studios.

Leo Laporte (01:04:42):
It's like a movie studio movies. Yeah, yeah,

Dan Moren (01:04:44):
Yeah. Yeah. And one would hope at least if nothing else, Microsoft could do better by the employees. I feel like that's, that's the place where a lot of these game companies are really running a foul and should be looked into is, is the amount of, you know, the use of crunch, all this stuff where it's just, they work these people to the bone and they have really many of them really awful environments, really toxic workplaces. And I'd like to see, you know, Microsoft, if they are going to end up acquiring Activision, make more proactive. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:05:12):
Activisions was the worst, wasn't it? You know? Yeah.

Dan Moren (01:05:14):
Activision has,

Padre (01:05:15):
You're basically gonna have to turn upside down and dump them,

Dan Moren (01:05:18):
Shake it to, to

Padre (01:05:19):
Fix that.

Leo Laporte (01:05:20):
Although, I tell you what Starbucks, Amazon, a lot of companies now under investigation by the N L R B for really mistreating employees in their attempts to unionize mm-hmm. <Affirmative> I mean, I get is, are big companies just inherently terrible to their, to their people? Amazon.

Dan Moren (01:05:42):
Yeah. That's, that's literally how capitalism works. Oh, yeah.

Padre (01:05:45):
That's their directive. That's what they do. The maximize shareholder value means I'm gonna screw the worker every chance I get.

Dan Moren (01:05:52):
Right. I mean, this is the reason why unions were so, you know, gained in so much power in the earlier parts of this century and stuff, is to push back against that because you need a counterbalancing weight, and then they just sort of got stomped out to a large degree. So, I mean, now you're seeing the pendulum swing. Let's start to swing a little bit back in that direction, which I hope so. It, it needs to, and honestly,

Leo Laporte (01:06:11):
Amazon illegally fired a union organizer in New York City according to the N L R B nlrb accuses the National Labor Relations Board, accuses managers of acting against the organizer. Yeah. Okay. So

Padre (01:06:29):
That's how far the pendulum has swung right now, where Amazon, they're not stupid. They know they're gonna get sued for that, right. But mm-hmm. <Affirmative> in their calculus, they've said, this lawsuit is gonna take so long that by the time we pay whatever fine it is that we have to pay, it's gonna have killed that movement to unionize. So therefore it's worth it to

Dan Moren (01:06:47):
Us. Why? And that fine is not gonna, is gonna be a drop in the bucket of their overall assets. Exactly. Nothing. You can't, you can't find these companies enough.

Leo Laporte (01:06:53):
Right. Tesla as being accused of firing workers after a union push at the Buffalo Plant <laugh> complaint filed with the nlrb. Yeah. I guess it's just the way it is, isn't it? And they're, but what's weird is they're not hiding it. They're not attempting to hide it.

Dan Moren (01:07:10):
No, they're not. They don't feel they need to. Not anymore. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

Padre (01:07:13):
Are, are we at the eat the rich stage of capitalism? I think Cause it feels like we're getting

Leo Laporte (01:07:18):
There. I'm all for it. I don't know how they taste though. I don't know how

Dan Moren (01:07:22):
Taste and also how rich, quick, quick question. How rich do they have to be? Yeah,

Padre (01:07:25):
Right. Exactly. Yeah, there's, well, let's set that, let's set that right now. We're talking about like upper 1%, right? Yeah,

Dan Moren (01:07:30):
Sure. That's fine. That's

Leo Laporte (01:07:31):
Good. Wait, a wait 1%.

Dan Moren (01:07:34):
Lot, lot of meat on them. Bones, <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:07:38):
All right, let's take a little break. Well actually no, let's do a few more a few more stories. I I don't want to have too many commercials back to back here. I do wanna celebrate though, a 50th anniversary 50 years ago, the Xerox Alto, this story from i e e Spectrum. We're still living in the alto's world. It said the Alto transformed computer. Listen to the lead. I'm sitting in front of a computer looking at its graphical user interface with overlapping windows on a high resolution screen. I interact with a computer by pointing and clicking with a mouse, typing on a keyboard. I'm using a word processor with the core features and functions of Word or Google Docs or Libra office's writer, along with an email client that could be mistaken for a simplified version of Apple Mail or Outlook or Thunderbird. This computer runs other software written using object-oriented programming. It's networking capabilities can link me to other computers and high quality laser printers. You're thinking So what? My computer has all that too. But the computer he's sitting in front of is a 50 year old meticulously restored Xerox Alto at the Computer History Museum. It actually is running. That's pretty awesome.

Padre (01:08:52):
I, you know, I'm sorry, go ahead.

Dan Moren (01:08:55):
I was gonna say, I have to laugh at this because when I was born I was born in 1980, and when I was born, my, my grandfather gave, like, one of the things he bought for me as an investment was like shares of Xerox <laugh>. And had this world gone in a very different direction, it could've been worth something

Padre (01:09:11):
I would've been

Dan Moren (01:09:11):
Eaten by now, is what I'm saying. Shouldn't have

Leo Laporte (01:09:13):
Given you Apple. Yeah. You'd we'd be eaten you.

Dan Moren (01:09:16):
Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, it did not turn out that way. And that's who new few hundred bucks

Padre (01:09:22):
<Laugh>. I, I was just gonna say, I'm looking at that article and you know what it makes me think of Leo? It must have been about 40 years ago, like mid eighties. I read in either Computer Currents or the San Francisco examiner, there was an article by Devork and he was describing the first McIntosh. And I remember there was some history about the, where, you know, it came from Xerox and so and so forth. But there was a quote from Dvorak where he said, I don't see these taking off because it uses this thing they call a mouse. And I don't, don't see anyone ever wanting to use a mouse. You know,

Leo Laporte (01:09:53):
You make a hundred accurate predictions, you make

Padre (01:09:56):
One

Leo Laporte (01:09:57):
Bad prediction. They all remember that. Yeah. He didn't like the mouse so much. He was wrong, obviously. 40 years ago. Yeah. Ooh. There's a famous book you should probably read maybe. Do you still have those shares? Fumbling the Future? How Xerox Invented then Ignored the first personal Computer.

Dan Moren (01:10:16):
I don't need to rub salt in those wounds. Leo <laugh>

Padre (01:10:20):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:10:21):
The Alto, I think was the thing that Steve Jobs saw, saw in a tour of Xerox Park Park. He certainly saw, you know, all of the concepts, the overlapping windows, the mice and stuff. And, and went back. He actually it's according to folklore.org, which is Andy Hertzfeld wonderful sight about the early days of Apple. Steve misinterpreted something he saw, he thought he saw overlapping windows. And he went back to the Macintosh team, or I guess it was the Lisa team at the time, and said, they can do it. We should be we should be doing this. And it turned out that he misunderstood what he was seeing <laugh>. In fact, they weren't, they weren't doing it. But weirdly enough, the amazing talented team, Andy Hertzfeld, bill Atkinson did create overlapping windows, even though Xerox didn't do it at the time. They did tiled windows. So sometimes misinterpreting the future <laugh>, it's maybe even better.

Padre (01:11:25):
Was, wasn't it just like a glitch, like a screen redraw? Yeah. Didn't that didn't completely clear the screen or something.

Leo Laporte (01:11:31):
Yeah. Yeah. And he's, he came away with a completely wrong idea. So if you enjoy your gooey and your mouse and your laser printers, God, I remember those W Wigg editor. Wait, your Wizzywig editor. Remember when the first laser writers came out from Apple? I think they were, they were, thousands of dollars are very expensive.

Padre (01:11:51):
Those fought cartridges. Ah, those, that's where the money was.

Leo Laporte (01:11:55):
<Laugh>. They were, those were really, so I remember a friend of mine, Tom Santos, who owned at the time, a Macintosh or a Apple store. It wasn't a Macintosh store in San Francisco. Mac Adam, I guess it wasn't Mac Store. Mac Adam had a van with a laser writer in it and went drive around and do portable desktop publishing. He would come to you and you'd say, I want my newsletter to have three fonts, <laugh>. He could do it all.

Padre (01:12:22):
What was the speed on Apple talk? The Apple

Leo Laporte (01:12:24):
Talk? Oh, I don't know. Forget the very slow. Yeah. Yeah. Very slow. Yeah. It was, I think the thing that's interesting is that it, apple was doing something that wasn't in the mainstream of computing at the time. And so as a result a lot of the things Apple were doing, it wasn't so much like, this is the future. It was like, this is Soci, this is like the Amiga, this is over in a corner somewhere. Cuz cuz you know, the, the PC came out that was mainstream computing. But I think over time apple has kind of, I mean, shifted the Overton window,

Dan Moren (01:12:59):
You know? Well, I mean, yeah. I mean, hugely influential. Obviously you look at Windows 95 and the, you know, hard to say that the cues were not taken for the Mac. True. These things always inform each other, right? Like they go back and forth. Yeah. Everybody sort of learns from what everybody else is doing, and they drive the state today. I mean, if you look at the stuff today, despite, you know, I'm a Mac user. I've been a Mac user for 35 years. I've used Windows. I've supported Windows in my previous career as an IT guy. When you get down to it, the details between the two are pretty small in terms of like, yeah, I can go use a Windows computer. I'm not gonna have a problem with it. Like these days, the blink, I think that is all Yeah. Pretty universal. And it's just the implementation details.

Leo Laporte (01:13:38):
I think that's absolutely. It's

Padre (01:13:39):
Not a religion. It

Leo Laporte (01:13:40):
Really isn't. Yeah. Yeah.

Padre (01:13:42):
By the way, pew holder in the Discord has told me that the speed of Apple talk was 230.4 kilobits, which is actually a lot faster than I thought it was. I thought it was it faster? Yeah. Down in the, the 60 or so, but All

Leo Laporte (01:13:55):
Right. You could trust P Holder. He knows his stuff. <Laugh>. He knows he knows his stuff. A lot of people thought that Jobs stole what he saw at Park and, and made the Macintosh or the Lisa happen. But I think it's now understood that they licensed it, right? It was okay. They didn't steal it. But they had some good ideas. And thank goodness, because Xerox never did capitalize on the Alto. But here we are, 50 years later on the 50th anniversary of the of the machine that changed everything. Aren't you glad we don't still, we're not still sitting at a, a green screen with a blinking cursor on the command line.

Padre (01:14:36):
I don't know. It had a, had a charm. I I kind of do it sometimes. I still work in terminal. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:14:41):
<Laugh>. Oh, I love emax. So don't I'm the wrong guy to ask. Yeah. But, but we're very

Padre (01:14:45):
Mary Jo Foley writes all their articles and notepad

Leo Laporte (01:14:47):
No bad. We're very retro people. We're very retro, you know. All right. Now we'll take that break that I was promising you No need to fear. We have more to come in just a little bit with our wonderful panel, Lou. Mm. From this weekend, enterprise tech is here in studio with his VM machine. You didn't have to make a VM machine glow or anything, you know, it could have just been a box. You gotta have it glow. All right. Okay. <laugh> <laugh>, Dan Warren, science fiction author, also here and from the Vatican Father Robert Baller, digital Jesuit. What is that?

Padre (01:15:25):
This is a Nabu tag, which is a company that's long gone out of business, but it's, remember this here of the rabbit? So I'm,

Leo Laporte (01:15:31):
Oh, the ears would move. Like it's in some informational way, or they would dance, or,

Padre (01:15:39):
So you could link right, your nabu tag to the nabu tag of a significant other end. Like when you move the ear on yours, it moved

Leo Laporte (01:15:46):
Ear on that one. <Laugh>. Who's moving the ear on the on, on the other one? Is

Padre (01:15:50):
It just the other, the other one is in Pope Francis's room.

Leo Laporte (01:15:53):
So, okay. There we go. A little wave. A little wave. Hello. Just saying hi from the Holy Father. Great to have all three of you on the show today. Our show today brought to you by Decisions. Decisions is a software platform, a no-code, low-code platform. That's awesome. It gives it and business experts the tools they need to automate anything in the company within one no code platform. You can, you can take your business rules and, and make 'em into an app. It could fix any business process. Prepare you to withstand economic uncertainty. Everybody needs decisions in their tool belt recession around the corner, perhaps recession resilience requires, you know, some thought of deliberate management of resources and the flexibility to adapt at a moment's notice the decision's. No-Code environment makes it easy for your team to collaborate, to build and adjust workflows, dynamic forms and decisioning processes that fit your unique and ever-changing business needs is especially important because, you know, the Lou mms of the world are few and far between.

(01:17:02):
There's a real shortage of it talent, but decisions means the, even the decision makers can create their own software decisions. I actually got a tour of this and I was blown away. It's so cool. Decisions process automation software is a complete toolkit. So if you're a developer, you'll love it. But even business users will love it without development experience, cuz they can build applications and automations and there's no coding required. The no code platform so powerful. It includes robust rules and workflow engines. A host of pre-built integrations that connect to any legacy system via their api. So you can actually talk to all the parts of your enterprise. And, and it's easy to set this up within a simple drag and drop visual interface. Design decisions can be deployed in the cloud, but you can also deploy it on-prem. You know, I'll give you an example.

(01:17:55):
You may remember at the beginning of the pandemic, the government said, all right, we're gonna fund these p p loans, right? And it was very quick. It was almost overnight. One of the country's largest private banks was able to jump on this. They built an entire p p loan application process for small businesses in two days. And because they were first to market, this all happened so quick, they issued a billion dollars in loans even before the competitors could get started. That's what no code can do for you. Decisions let you customize workflows to automate the small decisions, producing faster results with greater accuracy. Scale your business to better serve your customers, reduce operational costs, save your team valuable time. Another example, one decisions customers. Otis Elevator. You know, Otis, every time you get an elevator, you see the words, Otis, right? They actually have 2 million elevators.

(01:18:50):
And here's the problem. They're all over the world, and they often have different software systems running each of them. Otis Elevator took decisions and they implemented a single code base to do daily pulse checks on every single one of those elevators all over the world, every day in seconds by finding potential problems before they occur. You know, that's important in the elevator business. You avoid downtime. You don't have people stuck in your elevators. You can manage your service technicians effectively. It's actually really good news. If you're riding a notice elevator, you're safe because they are keeping an eye on it. But only because decisions allowed them to write a tool that could cross all of those platforms all over the world and get those pulse checks in every single day. The durability of your businesses foundation will directly impact your performance. Your ability to survive.

(01:19:43):
You need to be nimble. You need to be able to make sure your business processes operate accurately. You need to be able to encode what's in your brain, those business rules, and get them out there into software. You need a foundation. You need decisions. The decisions Automation platform provides a solution to any business challenge. Automating anything, changing everything to improve your company's speed to market, to improve your financial growth, your operational success just to survive in today's business climate. You need to be smarter than the other guys. Decisions is your tool. They help industry leaders alleviate bottlenecks and automate pain points in their business so you can do what you do best, change the world, make your business sing while decisions can run in the background and get all that busy work done. To learn more about decisions, no Code automation platform, you scope your free proof of concept, go to decisions.com/twit, D E C I S I O N S decisions like a decision. This make the decision. Go to decisions.com/twit. We thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. This, when I got the demo, I was blown away. It's amazing what they can do. A whole app like that. Drag and drop decisions.com/twit.

(01:21:02):
 I don't know if this is a story, <laugh> or a press release. Biden's, national Cybersecurity Strategy, advocates, tech Reg Regulation and Software Liability Reform. Yeah, good idea. <Laugh>, I mean, is it just an idea or is it gonna happen? It was released on Thursday. This is a apparently been long awaited the White House's strategy for improving the security of computer systems. Yeah. according to Cyber Scoop, this represents a shift in how Washington approaches cybersecurity veering from the government's longstanding emphasis on information sharing and collaboration towards a more strictly regulated approach. I guess, so remember under Obama, it was all about openness and getting the agencies to talk with one another. And I'm not against that. Is it, is it mutually exclusive security and information sharing?

Padre (01:22:04):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:22:05):
Oh all right. <Laugh>,

Padre (01:22:07):
Unfortunately well in, in the way that it's set up because, so the way rewind back to the Obama administration, and there was this big push and there was a lot of excitement that they were trying to get software companies to consider security during the development process and not as an add-on afterwards when

Leo Laporte (01:22:24):
They found experts. I remember that. Yep.

Padre (01:22:26):
Which was a great, it's a great idea. I mean, that's, that's what they should aim for. That's a philosophy that every developer should have in the back of their mind as they're starting a new project. Unfortunately, the way that they did that was by compliance. So they created a lot of regulations that said, well, if you don't do this and you don't do this, and you don't do this, we're gonna find you or you won't be able to develop your project. That would work. Except for the fact that a lot of these companies still put out products that didn't work. And then if it didn't work out, they just went bankrupt. So what they're trying to do now, they're, they're trying to say, okay, stop with the compliance. We're gonna make it easier for you to develop, but we want to be in partnership. Yeah. So we can share with you the best practices. These are the things that other manufacturers and other vendors that have created solutions for us have run into. You should be considering them. So in that sense, I like it because it's not just saying, build a secure project. It's build a secure project. Oh, and here are 10 things that you really should be designing in at the start. So better, maybe, maybe I, I think you get more with the carrot than the stick in this in this particular circumstance.

Leo Laporte (01:23:33):
Yeah. And certainly we know our infrastructure well, and we just talked about last pass. I mean, that's, that's a private business. But our infrastructure is in many cases not very well defended and secured. Your ICU nodding Lou.

Lou Maresca (01:23:47):
Yeah, I think, I think the biggest thing is the fact that you have a lot of infrastructure being run on, you know, the big four or five cloud service companies that are out there today. And I think one thing this will definitely do, and it did in back in 2021 with the executive orders that came out, was it pushes these companies to think more about security. And they wanna be compliant. Just like Audrey said, they wanna be compliant. They want to keep their contracts, they wanna keep getting new ones, and they want to keep main maintaining that. And then of course, that also trickles down to the, you know, to enterprise. It's a small medium businesses as well. And so I would say they're gonna, they're gonna wanna be compliant. They're gonna follow the rules and they're gonna try to do what's best. And, you know, but the interesting thing is you don't hear a lot about, you know, you hear a lot about, a little bit of Google, you know, Microsoft, you don't hear a lot about Amazon doing these things. You don't hear a lot about them following the executive order rules or whatever. They, they don't really publicize themselves as being like the super cyber secure infrastructure. But the reality is, my guess is they're definitely doing it under the covers. And, and I, I think it will definitely, everyone will follow suit. I think at this point. Now, will everyone do it like the last passes of the world? That's the, that's the question. And maybe if they don't, if they have regulation, they might, if they have fines, they might, well,

Leo Laporte (01:24:55):
Here's how, if it's just, here's how the Biden administration seems to wanna implement this. They said companies that make software must have the freedom to innovate. But, and this is, this is cyber Scoop calls us the third rail of cybersecurity, but they must also be held liable when they fail to live up to the duty of care. They owe consumers, businesses or critical infrastructure providers, they want software. Ma, it's kind of amazing that they haven't been liable. But, but, but they wanna make software makers liable for failures in cybersecurity, which opens them up, of course, to lawsuits and fines. And the industry is not too happy about that. But you take one look at LastPass the potential danger of, of what happened in LastPass if, I'm sure it's used in government. I mean, I don't know what what government uses for password managers, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear last passes in there. Certainly somebody is being used. Are they liable if they screw up like that by coming?

Padre (01:25:57):
Sometimes it's not a screw up.

Leo Laporte (01:25:59):
Yeah, that's true too. That's true too.

Padre (01:26:01):
Here's a scenario. I'm a startup and I've got a service that a lot of people really enjoy using. It gets very popular, but I find out that it's unsustainable. The amount of money that I have to put into the infrastructure will never, never be recovered. And so I have to start shutting down the business at, at first, I start laying off people. Maybe security gets a bit less. I start having a couple of breaches. I lose trust, and now my company is dead. It's worthless except for the customer information that I have. And I can sell that.

Leo Laporte (01:26:29):
Oh, that's not so good.

Padre (01:26:30):
How you, how do you find me if my company no longer exists? All

Leo Laporte (01:26:34):
Right? Right. Brian Harrell, former assistant secretary for infrastructure protection at DHS says exactly this. It's not possible to eliminate all defects, but right now there's little incentive beyond just general market reputation to invest in a dramatic reduction of cyber vulnerabilities. Companies aren't being incentive to keep their stuff secure.

Dan Moren (01:27:00):
And it's overall a risk too, because there's so much more stuff. There's so much more data, there's so much more thing. There's so many more things we keep in our digital life, right? Like our phones contain our banking information and our pictures and all this stuff that's just so irreplaceable or damaging if it gets breached. And what is the incentive if it's just like, leave it up to the market to decide and you'll pick the most secure solution? Well, that hasn't necessarily panned out. Cause you don't even

Leo Laporte (01:27:26):
Know if, if it's secure too, right? I

Dan Moren (01:27:28):
Mean, how you, how you know? Yeah. Until it gets breached. No. Yeah. Everything is, everything is secure until it isn't.

Leo Laporte (01:27:33):
So apparently this document basically says it's up to Congress, and of course, this is very hot, hot potato in Congress. It among the challenges according to Cyber Scoop, how to define the circumstances in which a company be held liable for vulnerable code and of course, house of Representatives controlled by Republicans who are historically against any, any regulatory regime. So this might not be, this may be an, frankly, a political non-starter, but it is. It's, I don't know, Lou, where do you sit? Should companies be liable for the security of their software?

Padre (01:28:12):
I think

Lou Maresca (01:28:12):
One of the biggest things that I've really seen seen a shift in the enterprise and in the, in all the different markets is gdpr. Like, this has been something that has really been a huge, if you're a global company, you've shifted your processes and your, you know, and how you handle data. You know, and, and of course, the, the European Data Protection Board is also part of this, as well as how they regulate stuff like these have really pushed things in the right direction, I think. And I think you need some set of regulation and some to be able to be fined and feel like you're gonna, you're gonna be, you're gonna hit rock bottom unless you go and follow these rules. And I think there needs to be some regulation there that helps manage that.

Leo Laporte (01:28:48):
Yeah. I mean, it's a shame that we sometimes, and it seems more and more have to rely on Europe to make those rules because we don't have the will the political will to do so. Michael Daniels, CEO of Cyber Threat Alliance said, I don't think we should just sort of throw up our hands and say, Congress is dysfunctional and therefore we can't do anything. There are things where you need Congress to act. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, he says, do I have any illusions that it'll be simple or easy or fast? Of course not <laugh> but at least the White House is pushing for this. Right. <affirmative> historically the software industry has, has not been a fan of liability reform. Victoria Espel, president and CEO o of the Business Software Alliance are good friends at the bsa, said the document is thoughtful <laugh>, but, and oh, and makers of enterprise software take seriously their responsibilities to customers and the public. But we look forward to working with the administration to advance shared priorities that will produce the greatest benefit. I don't think the BSA is really all full behind this. I'm sure their member companies are saying that's a burden. We don't wanna have to, we don't wanna be on the hook.

Padre (01:30:02):
I mean, it's start with small steps. Something that the EU did back in 2018 was they gave this grace period for the reporting of breaches. If you report a breach within 72 hours of you being, acknowledging, knowing that there's a breach, then you're basically covered. I, I mean that's, that's something that we, we desperately need to be the norm, not, not this outlier that you do when you're dealing with EU companies. Yeah. you know, I, I want Google to know that it's got three days maximum to, to disclose that there was a breach and start talking about what they're doing to remediate it. Not asking the person who found the exploit or found the breach to hold off until they can fix it, and maybe they'll get back to you in six months. It's little things like that that that I think can actually make a difference versus letting Congress sit there and say, tech is good. Tech is bad.

Leo Laporte (01:30:56):
Yeah. I'll tell you where government is very forward thinking, or at least very active in the state of Florida. <Laugh>

Dan Moren (01:31:13):
Can I, I'm sorry, my, my headphones must be acting out. Be <laugh>. You read that back? 

Leo Laporte (01:31:19):
I, there's no way this passes. But in the Florida state legislators, Senator Jason bro, has proposed a bill that would require bloggers who write about Governor DeSantis, the Attorney General, or any members of the Florida Executive Cabinet or legislature to register with the state. You're gonna write about us. You gotta register with the state.

Dan Moren (01:31:44):
I think there's a little thing. It's the little, it's the small, a small thing called the First Amendment that is gonna have some words with that one. So is this like

Leo Laporte (01:31:53):
What they do in China? Influence, right, right. You gotta register if you're a blogger.

Dan Moren (01:31:57):
No, it's, that's, that's that would, no. Okay, so not going anywhere.

Padre (01:32:02):
The people who are trying to defend this, they're saying, oh, no, no, no. It only applies if you're being paid. So this is going after the people who are writing hit pieces. The problem is, if you actually look at the text of the bill, specifically, look at what they mean by compensation. So they put it in quotations, compensation, and the definition, I'm outta memory here, is anything <laugh>. So you get anything of value for what you write, you are now a paid blocker.

Leo Laporte (01:32:29):
Wow. I guess we're, we're paid. Are we bloggers? No, but I mean, I mean, but is

Dan Moren (01:32:35):
A blogger, what's a blogger? A Please tell me what a, yeah. What, what does that mean right now? Do I have to be on blogger.com that still exist? <Laugh>? Do I have to be using WordPress? Like what, what does a blogger, what even mean point? What if I'm, what if I'm tweeting about her? I've got a medium or a second. I

Padre (01:32:50):
Think it only, it only it only applies if you're on Geo Cities. If you have a GeoCities page then,

Leo Laporte (01:32:54):
Or live

Dan Moren (01:32:55):
Journals animated fair gifts, so Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure

Leo Laporte (01:32:59):
Failure to disclose would lead to daily fines for the bloggers with a maximum amount per report, not per writer of $2,500. The per day fine is $25 per report for each day that most people,

Dan Moren (01:33:13):
I'm guessing most of these people couldn't afford that. There's more than they're getting paid.

Leo Laporte (01:33:16):
Right. but, but this, even if this passes, of course, any appeal would, it would mean be casted out. Yeah. I mean that is, this is exactly what the First Amendment prohibits.

Padre (01:33:28):
The, the problem is, I'm, we're seeing more and more, and not just this space, but across the country where you've got these bills, these laws, these policies that go into effect. They're unconstitutional. They're obviously unconstitutional, but until it gets all the way to the Supreme Court, yeah. It can still be in action. Right. Unless there's an injunction against it. So this is, this is supreme chilling effecting, again, this is, this is like corporations not caring that they know they're gonna get sued for anti-us. Do

Leo Laporte (01:33:55):
You think that's the point of this

Padre (01:33:56):
Legislature?

Leo Laporte (01:33:57):
Certainly the Senator Rodger knows that this isn't gonna hold up. It's, you know, it's clearly a violation of the constitution, but the chilling effect is what he's hoping for. Just think twice before you right. About us guys

Padre (01:34:10):
For the three weeks that it's, that it's in effect, he's gonna be able to go after a dozen people who he really doesn't like, cuz they wrote negative stories about the Republicans and they're gonna be in legal hell for the next five years.

Leo Laporte (01:34:21):
Unbelievable.

Dan Moren (01:34:22):
I also appreciate that it's a Florida Senator writing. It's specifically about the executive, right? So it feels like, right. I mean, speaking of things with like, you know, transparent influences kind of feels like the executive is like, Hey, can you can you make this bill for us <laugh>?

Leo Laporte (01:34:38):
Well, I mean, isn't Florida the place where Walt Disney has to submit to a, a panel before they can do anything? I mean,

Padre (01:34:48):
And the latest addition to the panel is a Christian evangelist preacher who

Leo Laporte (01:34:54):
Pour the water

Padre (01:34:55):
Theory that

Leo Laporte (01:34:56):
Yeah. Estrogen is in the water sounds. It's in the water. You're gay cuz you drink water <laugh>. Ah, what a, what a it's I just, it's amazing. I mean, I, I, yeah. All right. Just a mind boggling. Let's take a little break then we're gonna talk about, speaking of mind boggling, banning TikTok, cuz that seems to be getting closer and closer, bit by bit, inch by inch. Our show today brought to you by Express VPN n maybe that someday you'll have to use a VPN n to use TikTok. Wow. Wow. There's se there's three reasons people use a virtual private network. Security is one, you're at open access hotspot or at a hotel or at a cruise ship. Everybody, you're on the same network as everybody else. A a a a VPN is really the only way to make sure that nobody is snooping on your traffic.

(01:35:47):
Can't that, that nobody can see you there. They can't run a wifi pineapple to attempt to attack your machine. So that's one security. Number two is privacy. Because every internet service provider, every carrier, every open wifi hotspot sees everything you do. And they can sell that. It's completely legal for them to collect it and sell it. So it's a complete, I mean, privacy wise, this is a nightmare. Then there's a third reason that maybe you wanna be coming out. Maybe you're a Florida blogger, but you'd like to be writing in Milan, Italy, <laugh> maybe you're living in California, but you wanna watch anime on Netflix, Japan. Well, that's another thing a VPN can do. It can put you anywhere in the world that the VPN has servers. Now, having said all that, very important that you choose the right vpn because you're in a way just kicking those security and privacy concerns down the road.

(01:36:42):
The VPN provider has to protect your privacy. Well, that's why I only use, and I only recommend Express vpn n when you're, when you're using the internet, your public IP addresses out there, right? And they could be matched to your other visits. They can do all sorts of stuff with that. They can associate it with the sites you visit. If you're using Express V P N, your IP address isn't yours. It's Express VPNs. It hides your IP address, it gives you the secure IP from whatever country you want to be in. It also encrypts all your data so it's protected in transit from hackers and anyone else trying to see what you're up to. And the beauty of Express VPN is they really care about your privacy Express, VPN's trusted server technology. They invented, it runs in Ram Sandboxed, so it cannot keep track of your visit it.

(01:37:34):
And as soon as you close the VPN n server, it's gone with no trace of your visit. We know this because there are countries where they don't have, they don't have, you know, they have no knock warrants. They don't even have warrants. In some cases, they just burst in, take the server. And every time that's happened at Express vpn, there's nothing on that. Server Express VPN doesn't keep track of you. They, they go to the, the extent of using a secure special distribution of Debbie that wipes the drive every time, every day it starts fresh. It's pretty amazing. They go the extra mile. You read the privacy policy, you read about Trusted Server, and you can believe it because they go undergo independent third party security audits on a regular basis that say, yep, they do what they say they're gonna do. That works the way they say it does.

(01:38:22):
I'll tell you, I love Express vpn. You will too. Express vpn.com/twitter. Put it on your Mac, your pc, your Linux box on your Android or iOS. You can even sell routers. You put it on the routers or, or runs on a variety of routers. One that you might have already. Express vpn.com/twit. Protect your data with the number one rated VPN provider today. And by the way, it's so easy to use. Hey, got I got on my phone and press the button. Boom, I'm protected. Visit express vpn.com/twit. In fact, right now, if you go, you get three months free on a one year package, express vpn.com/twit xp, r e s s vpn.com/twit. We thank 'em so much for their support. We thank 'em for our great service I've been using for years, encourage you to try it, but if you do, please use that address so they know you saw it here. Express vpn.com/twi. We had a very fun week this week on twit, but you know what? I don't have to tell you about it because we've made this little mini movie for you to enjoy. Watch

Leo Laporte (01:40:57):
Educational purposes. I can do it. Whoa, uhoh.

Padre (01:41:00):
It's almost like the the human overseer saw what was happening.

Leo Laporte (01:41:04):
You can't, that

Padre (01:41:05):
Twit, Hey, what

Leo Laporte (01:41:06):
That on Bing. I'm dressed for funeral. I just thought I'd ask you in the middle of the search result, it just bombed out. I said, no, no, no. We're not gonna tell you how to bury dead body <laugh>. By the way, if you get a chance, that triangulation with George Church, very interesting. I had forgotten that mark Peche and I had interviewed George 12 years ago on Futures in biotech, a show we used to do brought him back 12 years later. And the guy is amazing, the stuff he is doing 150 patents. He's started more than 20 companies but but not for profit. He's really out there to change the world there. He's, it's a little Jurassic Park. One of the things he wants to, and he looks like, by the way, he looks like David Attenborough or whatever, Richard er, he's got the big beer. One of the things he wants to do is take mammoth, wooly mammoth jeans. We've got 'em, I guess Amber, I don't know. We've got 'em frozen tundra and and insert them into elephants to make cold resistant elephants to trample the grass and knock down the trees in Siberia to help fix global warming. So there's an example. Okay. Okay. That's true. It's a choice. It makes sense when you, when you <laugh> when you read about

Padre (01:42:20):
It. That's a thing. That's a thing that I heard.

Leo Laporte (01:42:23):
Well, it turns out that these herbivores, these massive herbivores used to roam the earth up there, but they don't anymore. And as a result, the trees have overgrown the albedo of the Arctic is, is reduced. And the, and the tundra, the permafrost is melting. And oh, by the way, contains far more methane than anything humans put out. We put out, I think nine gigatons a year of of global warming gases. There's 1500 gigatons stored in the permafrost, and it's melting. Oh, of

Padre (01:42:56):
Course. Yeah, yeah. All that rotting material. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:42:58):
Yeah. And it's melting. So, you know, get the mammoths up there, the wooly mammoths plus they're damn good eating. No, actually he didn't say that. He's a vegan. He's a vegan.

Padre (01:43:08):
You know, that notwithstanding, I am very happy that you brought back triangulation. I I, it's fun

Leo Laporte (01:43:13):
To do tweet that. You know what the whole idea is? I don't, I, we can't do it every week or I don't need to do it every week, but when there's somebody I really want to talk to, and you know what, Robert, I extend the invitation to all of you, to Lou, Robert, even Dan, if there's somebody you really want to interview, we'll do a special, we'll do a triangulation. You know, if you've got somebody,

Padre (01:43:31):
I can get the guy in the building. If you can get the

Leo Laporte (01:43:33):
Guy away from me, if you can get the guy with the rabbit ears we'd love that. That'd be good for us.

Padre (01:43:39):
I mean, that used to be a joke, but we just did that for one of the other podcast networks that I work with.

Leo Laporte (01:43:44):
You got, wait a minute, you got an interview with, with, with the big guy.

Padre (01:43:49):
Yeah. It was amazing too because he basically said, yeah, let's do it without my communications people. Holy cow. He was like, whoa, okay. What? We'll do that,

Leo Laporte (01:43:59):
What was it? A Jesuit podcast network or something? I mean, was it a friendly Yes. Was it friendly? Okay.

Padre (01:44:06):
That's why it was friendly. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:44:07):
It was friendly. Yeah. I don't think he'd want to talk to me. You know, how tough I can be,

Padre (01:44:11):
<Laugh> <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:44:14):
I'm the morally surfer of twi. You

Padre (01:44:16):
Know windows are Mac. Yeah. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:44:19):
Emax or Vim? Where, where do you

Padre (01:44:20):
Stand on here? Let's talk about the real religious debate. Theor spaces.

Leo Laporte (01:44:24):
<Laugh>. Oh, there's a religious debate. Don't get me started. Don't get me started. I

Padre (01:44:30):
Mean, look, look, that's not a real religious debate because obviously you go with tabs. I mean, what

Leo Laporte (01:44:35):
Spaces, what

Padre (01:44:36):
Are you Talk, whatcha are you

Leo Laporte (01:44:37):
Talking

Padre (01:44:38):
About We're gonna be here for a while. Are you in insane? You're going straight

Leo Laporte (01:44:42):
To, you're not. No, do not passco. The United States House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday voted along party lines to give President Biden the power to ban TikTok, ban it entirely in the United States, not just for government workers, for everybody. 24 to 16 would grant the administration new powers to ban the bite dance owned app used by over a hundred million Americans, including my son, who is making a living on TikTok. Representative Michael McCall, the chair of the committee who sponsored the bill says, TikTok is a national security threat. It's time to act. Anyone with TikTok downloaded on the devices, given the Chinese Communist Party a back door to all their personal information, it's a spy balloon into their phone. Oh Lord, wait. Timely. Oh Lord.

Padre (01:45:42):
100%. Absolutely true. Let me tweet about that on this Huawei phone. <Laugh> from China. I'm sure you know, they'll, they'll fix it. They

Leo Laporte (01:45:50):
Know. You know, it's ironic cuz often the people, including the FCC commissioners said TikTok should be banned. Who say this are people who also said to the nation's telecom companies, take all the info you want. Sell it to data brokers. Right. Go right ahead. In fact, as some have pointed out, if the Chinese really wanted to know about us, all they'd have to do is go to those data brokers and buy the information. It's all out there. Right. But no, they don't, they're not interested. So where, okay, I shouldn't look, I'm gonna zip it. Obviously I have a dog in this hunt. I should recuse it. Although my son is smart, he's moved to Instagram. Pretty much. <Laugh> another, another privacy protecting group. You might mm-hmm. <Affirmative>,

Padre (01:46:33):
You might mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Yeah. Good thing that they don't do any data

Leo Laporte (01:46:35):
Collection. No data collection on instant Uhuh

Padre (01:46:37):
Meta is very straightforward. No.

Leo Laporte (01:46:40):
What do you think <laugh>, Dan Warren, I mean, <laugh>, what, what do

Padre (01:46:45):
You think? Well, two, two things can be true simultaneously,

Dan Moren (01:46:48):
Right? Is this performative? Totally. But as Robert said, you know it's also true that it's an national security risk, right? Like both of these things are true at the same time. And it's certainly true that it, you know, there are plenty of other companies, including American-based companies that are just as bad with our data or are willing to sell it or let it be compromised. All of that is true. So it seems weird to single out TikTok that feels very much you know, national Security Theater. But perhaps, yes, the answer would be to make a more broad piece of legislation that actually affects all of these companies and what they can do with our data. But there, there clearly isn't an appetite for that because people want to g up, you know, publicity for, we're hard on, you know, we're hard on China, right? Like, we are taking China to task by making, so that nobody can watch your funny videos <laugh>, and that'll show 'em,

Leo Laporte (01:47:43):
That'll show 'em No more of this dancing thing.

Dan Moren (01:47:46):
No, we don't like that. 

Leo Laporte (01:47:48):
They didn't mention WeChat, which is, you know, also a Chinese company and also widely used in the United States, mostly by Chinese ex expats, but still also we know used by the Chinese government to, to virtually extort these exp

Dan Moren (01:48:05):
Exports or, or for that matter, American companies that do business in China, which have to abide by the rules. Yeah. In China, right? Yeah. I mean, that's also a problem.

Leo Laporte (01:48:17):
How about you Lou? Ban?

Lou Maresca (01:48:22):
I, I, I'm not on TikTok platform, so I don't really don't, I care for Le very less, but I, I would say that the, the fact is, I think I agree with Dan, like there's so many other things they should be targeting and worrying about. Like, are they gonna protect our data? Are they gonna stop things from people spreading harmful information, misinformation? No. Like they, they're just stopping one company from operating in the states that impacts a specific demographic and a specific type of thing. Like, I, I don't, I don't, I don't think we need to war spend our time or our money on it.

Leo Laporte (01:48:48):
I don't, the White House has also told federal agencies, you have 30 days to remove TikTok from all government owned devices. So that's already happening both nationally.

Padre (01:48:58):
Why by state? Why is TikTok on any government owned devices?

Dan Moren (01:49:01):
Yeah. Right? Yep. That is a, that is question number one

Lou Maresca (01:49:04):
Needs something to do while you're

Padre (01:49:05):
Okay. Yeah. That's a different problem that we've got then. Cause that's, that ain't a TikTok thing. That's a what the, you

Leo Laporte (01:49:10):
Doing. Aren't there any government agencies though, that have TikTok accounts that they use, you know righteously to spread the word about their mission? I, I wonder. I mean, maybe not, not now. Anyway,

Padre (01:49:21):
Yes, I can see employees at FEMA when they're responding to a disaster. They're doing a quick dance. You know, these, a couple of points with some, some titles popping up on say

Dan Moren (01:49:29):
That. But is it, which is it the consumer product safety agency that has like, that Twitter account that is always posting like these like bizarre images. Like it's great, there's a great use of social media for something that is act like, you know, it's the, it's the Thanksgiving. Don't deep fry your Turkey cuz you set your house on fire kind of thing. Oh, okay.

Padre (01:49:47):
That I

Dan Moren (01:49:47):
Could see. Yeah. I mean, that's great. But like, yeah, I don't know, and maybe that's, that's TikTok is how you need to reach that demographic of people. But I don't know. Again, you could have that like firewalled on like one phone or something <laugh> that you don't use for anything else.

Padre (01:50:02):
The, the only regulation that I want for TikTok is to have a law where they stop copying every TikTok video and putting it on YouTube, because I'm tired of that being 90% of the content that get showed to me on YouTube.

Leo Laporte (01:50:14):
Yeah. Yeah. I'm just curious, I'm, somebody said the IRS has a TikTok account. I'm just looking for it. <Laugh>.

Dan Moren (01:50:24):
Oh, man. And how

Padre (01:50:27):
Do you do something funny with the I r s?

Dan Moren (01:50:29):
It says musical audits

Leo Laporte (01:50:30):
Big thing. Yeah. Yeah. It says no bio yet. 9,696 followers. But I don't see any videos. So

Dan Moren (01:50:39):
IRS underscore, underscore, that's yeah, that's

Leo Laporte (01:50:41):
Real. That's the government, right? That's the real deal. Private account. <Laugh> is the irs not only fans, maybe. I don't know. All right. So

Dan Moren (01:50:53):
You have to report that income though. What,

Leo Laporte (01:50:55):
You know, what will the reaction be though, among the nation's Utes if they actually ban? I mean, I think they could ban TikTok, right?

Dan Moren (01:51:02):
You know, there is a positive spin to this, right? Which is if you want to get young people politically active, <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:51:10):
You wanna get 'em vote,

Dan Moren (01:51:11):
Maybe that's

Leo Laporte (01:51:12):
Take away their

Dan Moren (01:51:13):
Dick. Yeah. Maybe that's the way to do

Leo Laporte (01:51:14):
It. Yeah. there has been circulating, it's all over Twitter. It's everywhere. A a graph of young women mental health. And what's interesting is that the this, this survey's, national Survey of mental health shows this big jump in mental health issues among young women in 2011. I mean, like a big jump. And more and more people I see are, are kind of jumping to the conclusion Oh yeah. Social, social media. Do you think that's that's

Padre (01:51:54):
What's going on rising?

Dan Moren (01:51:55):
Yeah, actually, it's certainly a big factor. If nothing else, if it's not the only thing, it's a big chunk of it. I mean, I have, I have teenage you know, cousins who are on all the social media stuff, and I can't, it just doesn't, the the ex things they're exposed to at, at such a you know, formative age and just in terms of like, you know, peer pressure bullying, you know, all this stuff. It is, it is real. Yeah. And

Padre (01:52:23):
Peer pressure, bullying, body shaming. Yeah. Stalking. I mean, these are all things that maybe one sex might take a bit more personally than the other.

Leo Laporte (01:52:32):
You think it's worse for girls? It's not a

Padre (01:52:33):
Great thing.

Dan Moren (01:52:34):
Yeah. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:52:35):
Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Moren (01:52:36):
100%.

Padre (01:52:37):
And I don't, I don't think anyone's gonna take their safety as, as a, a small thing. I mean, there, there's some really sick people in social media, right. Who are using social media to, to go after women. And, and I mean, it's, it's not just the, the big names. It's not just the Tates, it's, it's people who realize that they have power that we would probably prefer they not have. Yeah.

Dan Moren (01:52:59):
And it's, it's also the, the more insidious, less overt stuff, right? It's the, the likes and the, you know, trying to see all your friends posting the perfect videos and trying to live up to that. And, you know, it's, it's sort of the, the keeping up with the Jones' aspect of like having to constantly present a performative outward experience. I mean, I think those aspects are not new, but they're amplified, right? I mean, it used to be 30 years ago, you, yeah. You had your cliques at school and you had, you try to impress the cool kids maybe or something. Or you try to, you know, build yourself up or you had to deal with peer pressure. But now it's like anybody anywhere could influence you in that way. Or, or to, you know, you're exposed to people from all over and, and it's just, it's, it's made it that much more of a problem.

Leo Laporte (01:53:54):
Well, maybe they'll ban TikTok and everything will be right with the world. That's all I can say.

Padre (01:54:00):
You know, when I step away from social media every once in a while, I do like these mth long step aways. Do you? I do. Is

Leo Laporte (01:54:07):
You very active on this social

Padre (01:54:08):
Media? We don't miss it. I'm super active when I'm active, but like, I stepped away all of Dec all of December up to ces. How was that? I'm probably gonna do it again. Oh my gosh. It was wonderful. <Laugh>. It was really, really nice. And it, it gives you perspective of, wow, I'm, I'm a lot happier. I'm less anxious. I don't argue over stuff I really don't care about. And I don't have to perform anything. And when I came back, I, my, my pres, I, I was just looking at some old posts on the various social media sites. The content that I used to put up is not like the content I'm putting up now both in frequency and in ingest intensity of the posting. So I think that might be a good thing is turn off social media for a month and see what happens.

Leo Laporte (01:54:56):
Yeah. You know who I'd wish would do that. <Laugh>. Take a wild guess. <Laugh> <laugh> I'll let you fill in that blank. Father Robert Ballas, the Digital Jesuit's. So great to have you. Next time I see you I'll probably be in Rome. I look forward to that.

Padre (01:55:15):
August. We will. We'll go for a coffee.

Leo Laporte (01:55:17):
Coffee. Yep. I told him, I said I want to go out to eat at your favorite restaurant.

Padre (01:55:24):
I mean, you've got McDonald's over there,

Leo Laporte (01:55:27):
Right? <Laugh> did jesuit.com at Padre sj, both on the Twitter and on Masin. On he's active on TWITsocial, our Masin, on instance. Great to have you. Thank you so much for being here. Have a good night. I know it's getting late. It's almost, it's after midnight. It's a little late. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much. Lou. M all five children remained quiet during this episode. That's a good thing. Lou is we're running

Lou Maresca (01:55:54):
Past too. It's funny, they, they looked in, they peer in like for like a glass bowl. They like, that's, they look in there like, see what's going on? On The lights

Leo Laporte (01:56:00):
Are on me. What's going on? They know Lou's busy. He's daddy's doing a show principal, engineering manager. I'm waving him off. Host of our fabulous this weekend Enterprise tech beloved friend and a member of the Twit family. It's great to have you too. Thank you, Leo. As, as his father, Robert and Dan is rapidly becoming one six colors. Mac World, the incomparable podcast. And of course science fiction author. Make sure you check out his latest. It's on Amazon, it's on Audible. It's everywhere, right? Just search for,

Dan Moren (01:56:30):
I always, I always recommend checking your, your local independent bookstore too.

Leo Laporte (01:56:34):
Oh, get you. Nice. I

Dan Moren (01:56:35):
Like support them. Go to indiebound.org. They, they let you search and you can find local bookshops near you that may carry it already, or I'm sure would be happy to order it for you.

Leo Laporte (01:56:46):
Get the Galactic Cold War at a bookstore near you. Thank you, Dan, for being here. We thank all of our club Twit members for making this show possible. Blessings to you. A quick plug for Club Twit. It helps us keep the lights on. Helps us keep a Steph employed. Advertising in the podcast sphere is, is is Wibbling away, dwindling away or Wibbling, but <laugh>. But you can help make up the difference by joining Club Twitter. It's a mere seven bucks a month. You could add free versions of all of our shows. You get special shows. We don't put out anywhere but the Club like HandsOn Macintosh with Micah Sergeant and Hands on Windows with Ball Throt, the Untitled Linnux Show with Jonathan Bennett, the GIZ Fizz with Dick d Bartolo. You also get special access to events that we put on in our Discord.

(01:57:38):
The Discord is frankly, to me, the most fun part of <laugh> of Club to it because it's a great hang anytime, not just during during our shows. You go to the Discord and <laugh>, you can participate in animated gift galore, but but we have subjects more than just the shows. You can talk about other things that geeks are interested in. Everything from security to anime. We just started in the AI section that's full of exciting stuff. Comics, fitness, yeah. Geeks are into fitness, gaming and hacking and hardware, pets and travel. All of the above. Seven bucks a month. Twit TV slash club twit. It, it makes a big difference to us, and I think you'll make a difference in your life. I think you'll enjoy it. We thank you in advance. We do this show every Sunday, right after. Ask the tech guys about 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern, 2200 utc.

(01:58:36):
If you wanna watch us live, you can live.twit.tv. If you're watching live, you can chat in our open to all irc, irc twit Do tv. Yeah, you can use a browser. You don't need a IRC client. You can also chat with us in our Discord. If you're a member of Club Twit after the fact on-demand versions of all of our shows available at the website, twit.tv, there's a YouTube channel dedicated to twit, but also to the show this week in Tech. But if you go to youtube.com/twit, you'll see links to all the show channels, and of course you can. And probably this is the best way to do it. Subscribe in your favorite podcast client and that way you'll get it automatically the minute it's done, which is now because we're done. Thank you for being here. Thanks, father Robert Lou m Dan Mor, thanks to all of you. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can.