This Week in Tech Episode 940 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 tr this Week in Tech. Great show. I'm excited. Christina Warren from GitHub is here from the register. Ian Thompson and brand new to trt, Rob Peguero. He works with PC Magazine and Fast Company. Both Rob and Ian were at Defcon and Black Hat. We're gonna talk about what happened in Vegas. It does not stay in Vegas, including satellite hacking. The new downfall flaw flaw in Intel chips and how AI is easily hackable. Then we're gonna talk about Mr. Beast. He's suing Mr. Beast Burger and they're suing him right back. All that more Coming up next on twit

TWiT Intro (00:00:41):
Podcasts

Leo Laporte (00:00:41):
You

TWiT Intro (00:00:42):
Love from people you trust. This is T Twit.

Leo Laporte (00:00:53):
This is twit this week in Tech. Episode 940. Recorded Sunday, August 13th, 2023. Chia Fresca. This episode of this Week in Tech is brought to you by Miro. Miro is your team's online workspace to connect, collaborate and create together. Tap into a way to map processes, systems, and plans with the whole team and get your first three boards for free to start creating your best work yet at miro.com/podcast. And by Duo Protect Against Breaches with a leading access management suite, providing strong multi-layered defenses to only allow legitimate users in. For any organization concerned about being breached and in need of a solution, fast Duo quickly enables strong security and improves user productivity. Visit css.co/twit today for a free trial.

(00:01:56):
It is time for Twin this week in Tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. Oh, I have assembled a wonderful panel because we are just coming off Black Hat and Defcon. So I have brought together some people who actually in the house as it were, welcoming somebody brand new to the show. But I think we're gonna see a lot more of him. 'cause I, I already liked the cut of his jib. Rob Ro is here. You've seen him in PC Magazine on the Washington Post Fast Company and he will not fix your computer, which is a really great callback to think Peak

TWiT Intro (00:02:27):
Mother-In-Law asks. I will. I kind of have to

Leo Laporte (00:02:29):
Do that. <Laugh> you have to do. Rob, it's great to meet you and welcome. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. You were at Black Hat? Yep. Came back. Ian Thompson was both at Black Hat in the first few days of Defcon. You poor man. <Laugh>.

Iain Thomson (00:02:43):
Oh, come on. Def. Con's. The fun show. It's black hat. That's the boring. Well, not boring, but less

TWiT Intro (00:02:47):
Interesting One more corporate. The corporate one. The corporate

Leo Laporte (00:02:49):
One. Well, yes, we'll get into the differences. I think that's a good, a good way to start. Ian's of course, at the register and wrote a bunch of articles. Really good articles. I was following your coverage. Oh. Thank you. You did wonderful article on the network operations center.

Iain Thomson (00:03:02):
I was the only journalist that got inside it that year. It was fascinating. And Geek heaven. Yeah, absolutely.

Leo Laporte (00:03:08):
They bring their own gear,

Iain Thomson (00:03:10):
But yeah. Well they man, yeah. Manufacturers actually give them free gear to use the show. So

Leo Laporte (00:03:16):
They bring their gear, but then anything they want, they just say, Hey, Cisco, can we have that? Can we, you know mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, we'd like that. And of course manufacturers jump to do it. Oh yes. The best part of your story is when they <laugh> they say, but some of this stuff really is crap. So we, we don't take it <laugh> once

Iain Thomson (00:03:33):
We get it. I asked them for names as well, is really annoying. The I was deliberately asked by Grifter not to name names on, you know, if anyone lets slip and you, you've gotta abide by that. Yeah. But inside the center itself, it's just, you know, they've got films like hackers and sneakers displayed on the wall with subtitles. There's music playing. It's nice and dark so everyone could read their screens, sofas stickers, everywhere. It's so good that the head of the Paris Olympic Committee for their systems operation center has copied the design almost to the letter.

Leo Laporte (00:04:03):
Wow. That's pretty impressive.

Iain Thomson (00:04:05):
Wow. Yeah, they had him over for the London black hat, or rather, he asked to come to the London Black hat and see how they did it. They're obviously expecting g massive stuff. Yeah. But he was so impressed that they've set up pretty much a replica sensor for the Paris Olympics.

Leo Laporte (00:04:19):
Wow. Neil Grifter Weiler is a global lead of active threat assessments at the I B M X Force. So <laugh>, he probably knows what he's doing

Iain Thomson (00:04:28):
And a thoroughly nice bloke.

Leo Laporte (00:04:30):
Yeah. Fun. I highly recommend the article. Oh, yes. Also with us. It's great to have her. She was not at Black Hat or Defcon, but that's fine. Neither was I. It's great to have you. Christina Warren. Hello. Senior dev Advocate. How many times have you seen Tay t's Zeros tour now?

Christina Warren (00:04:47):
I saw it three times. Three three times. I saw, I saw it three times. Atlanta night one? No, night two. Yeah. Night one Atlanta. Night. Two New Jersey night two Seattle. And I would like to say that I'm done, but I, if I can get tickets, get in Paris or Wow. Lala. I will do that.

Leo Laporte (00:05:07):
Wouldn't that be awesome?

Christina Warren (00:05:08):
Be a girlfriend of mine. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:05:09):
To see Taylor in Paris. Yeah. She was just down here in the Levi's stadium. And I guess Mark Zuckerberg was there in the box. Elon Musk along in

Christina Warren (00:05:17):
Dar own. Jason Howell.

Leo Laporte (00:05:18):
Jason Howell. You went. You That's right. He brought his girls. Oh, that's awesome.

Christina Warren (00:05:24):
I love that. I, that's amazing. I'm so glad they got to see it. 'cause It's such a good show.

Leo Laporte (00:05:27):
It looked like an amazing show to be honest. Yeah. Yeah. What is the Venn diagram of people who've seen Taylor Swift's era concert three times and people who've seen the Barbie movie three times? Is that a

Christina Warren (00:05:39):
It's, oh, it's probably, it's probably just a complete, yeah, it's a circle. Probably complete overlap. <Laugh>. Yeah. It's a circle. Exactly. It's a

Leo Laporte (00:05:45):
Circle. How many times have you seen Barbie? Yeah, it's the same.

Christina Warren (00:05:47):
It I've only seen it once, but I, that's only because I only had time to see it once. But I definitely, like, as soon as copies are available, win wink, nudge, nudge. I will watch it multiple times. We were

Leo Laporte (00:05:58):
I went to see Oppenheimer on Friday at the big IMAX in San Francisco. 'cause I wanted to see the 70 millimeter. Oh,

Christina Warren (00:06:04):
I wish I could have seen it in that way. Yeah. 'cause that's not in 70 millimeter. I didn't see it in imax.

Leo Laporte (00:06:07):
It's, it's fun to go because <laugh>, there's all these people in Pink who are obviously going to the other movie. Yeah. Lot of people in Pink ready for the Barbie movie. It's cute. What did he think

Christina Warren (00:06:19):
Of it? 'cause We've got tickets to go and see it. But three hours is a

Leo Laporte (00:06:22):
Hell of a long time. I don't wanna ruin it for you. But what is the, obviously the case, and this is both good and bad, is it, no one can say no to Christopher Nolan at this point. So, right. Powerful. So that's good. Because he could do a 70 millimeter IMAX movie on film that's three hours long. No, no one else could get away with that. In fact, if anybody's gonna continue to make these IMAX movies, I think there's a good case to be made that this may be one of the last IMAX film movies out there. 'cause It's really, oh, it's ridiculous. It's

Christina Warren (00:06:51):
Expensive. It's so expensive. Hard to

Leo Laporte (00:06:52):
Shoot. They had to make a special platter because there's so much film. The Platter is, you know, huge. Mm-Hmm. and there, and there're only, there're only 12 or 13 theaters in the US that could show it. Right. So there's really very little in, there's no money to be made doing it. So there's really incentive. Most IMAX movies are digital. What you saw was Digital Christina?

Christina Warren (00:07:13):
No, I saw it on seven Millimeter film, but I Oh, you did? We I saw on Seven Millimeter film. But I, but the, we didn't have the, the full imax It wasn't IMAX closest one. It wasn't imax. So, so it was you know, it was the, the, the film cut, but it was not the, the height. Oh, interesting. So it was, so it was still different. So there were a few theaters that had 70 millimeter film, but only 12. Like you said, there was one in New York when I, my parents theater in Atlanta had it ins Interestingly, San Francisco. I could have gone to Vancouver, but I would've had to literally leave

Leo Laporte (00:07:43):
The I'm gonna save you some money and time. I don't think you need to

Christina Warren (00:07:47):
<Laugh>. No, I would agree with that. When I saw it. Like, I mean, I, I, it was, oh, we're not gonna spoil it. But I don't think that the visuals were that imperative.

Leo Laporte (00:07:57):
In fact,

Christina Warren (00:07:57):
Monumental difference at all. The

Leo Laporte (00:07:58):
Way it's shut. There's a lot of closeups. And I gotta tell you Yes, <laugh> a closeup of somebody on a screen that is the size of a building Yeah, yeah. Is a little too close. Oversampling their face a little bit. Oh my God. These people. Yeah. I thought movie stars are good looking <laugh> wow. No, I was gonna say what hdd to a lot of people's livings, this is worse than hd. They say that. No, it is, it is. The film is equivalent of 18 K. Ooh. Yeah. So these are such giant frames. And I w unfortunately there's limited seating. So we were in the fifth row <laugh>.

Christina Warren (00:08:33):
Oh no, that's, that's the worst.

Leo Laporte (00:08:35):
That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So the screen is, you know, a little bit below you and then a lot above you. Lot of eye strain. And the very first shot is a closeup of, of Oppenheimer Sian Murphy in, in very tight closeup. And you just want to go, whoa. <Laugh> <laugh>.

Christina Warren (00:08:51):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:08:52):
Whoa. And everybody I mean, they're all beautiful people, but in closeup, sometimes you want to just reach out and pluck a hair, pop a sit. No, you do. There's just, it's a little too, it's closer than real life.

Christina Warren (00:09:06):
It, oh no, it, it, it's ridiculous. 'cause I saw at in IMAX another Christopher Nolan film. I saw The Dark Knight. Yeah, me Too. The that in, in, in imax, like I do too. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, the full presentation of one of the few theaters. And I remember like, absolutely no disrespect to Maggie Gyllenhaal, but it was one of those things where I was like, man, I can really, yeah. Like, I'm really upset about the, the, the recast at this moment because of how big the closeup is right now. Like, I feel was looking at Katie Holmes's face instead, honestly feel

Leo Laporte (00:09:36):
Bad for poor Florence GH who had to do a nude scene at that size. Oh

Christina Warren (00:09:40):
God. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:09:41):
I Okay mean she's the eight talking about 80 foot tall woman. I mean, she's, and anyway, so a couple of thoughts. So that's the good thing is that Nolan has enough clout to do that. And I'm, I I wanted to see it. I saw the Dark Knight, same theater that wasn't as good because it switched back and forth. It was a little weird. Little plus, I think it was three D wasn't it? That little

Christina Warren (00:10:00):
Bit? No, it wasn't three D it's just there were most of the sequences where imax but not the whole thing.

Leo Laporte (00:10:03):
Yeah. It was weird that way. Okay. there were a couple of 16 by nine shots for some reason in this, in the Oppenheimer, but most of them were that weird you know, whatever, four by four Squareish IMEX ratio. So it, and it was beautiful. And the sound is incredible, but the movie is easily an hour too long, I thought. Mm. What do you think? Yeah. I mean,

Christina Warren (00:10:28):
Christina, did

Leo Laporte (00:10:29):
You? Yeah. So,

Christina Warren (00:10:30):
Okay. So my, my thought was, yes. So here's my thought. Actually. When I saw it, I was like the source material. I've since read about half the book. I hadn't read the book beforehand, but now I've read about half the book. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:10:40):
I just ordered it. That's what everybody does, is they get the book and American for me. Totally.

Christina Warren (00:10:44):
Yeah. And, and, and the book is, is the audio version is 27 hours long. Mm-Hmm. It's like 700 pages. So it's, it's, it's a tomb. So he clearly cut a lot of stuff. So in my opinion, it either should have been, you know, half an hour, 45 minutes shorter, or it should have just been like a, a, a mini HBO

Leo Laporte (00:11:01):
Series, be completely honest. Yeah. It would've been a great I HBO series.

Christina Warren (00:11:04):
That was my thought. I was like, when, I remember when Mike Nichols did the adaptation of Angels in America, and they did it as two, three hour parts. Right. And that was great. And I was also thinking, you know, even Chernobyl, if you didn't want to, like, if you wanted to have before, there's are certain things in the film that you could do it before and after segment of if you wanted to do two parts, you could also do it episodic. But yeah, I mean, my feeling I was, it, it felt like he cut a lot out to even get to that three hours.

Leo Laporte (00:11:31):
It's very fast pace. So very fast editing. Yeah. Which again, another thing on a giant IMAX screen is not pleasant.

Christina Warren (00:11:38):
Yeah. That's the, that's the one thing I will say for it. It is three hours, but it doesn't feel like three hours, no moves. The pacing great moves.

Leo Laporte (00:11:43):
But here's where it drags.

Christina Warren (00:11:44):
It's one of those things I, but, but, but yeah. I, I feel like he should have either extended it made it m a series, or shortened it, in my opinion.

Leo Laporte (00:11:50):
His spine of this. And I don't know about the book 'cause I haven't read it yet, but I just ordered it. But the spine of it is this hearing later, after everything where he was, his clearance for the Atomic Energy Commission was revoked. Committee was revoked. And that's the spine of it, is the testimony. And that goes on and on and on. And I don't think it was a good spine for a movie, to be honest. Flashbacks back to the hearing. Right. Flashbacks back to the hearing. Way too much of that. I love the black and white stuff because he got, he made a special black and white film stock just for Yes. Christopher Nolan. 'cause They don't have black and white imax. So that was, and it was beautiful. It was a really beautiful black and white. Technically it was worth seeing it there that way. I don't, and I hesitate to review the movie because it's a very different experience. I dunno if you saw The Dark Night later, as as I did on a regular screen. I did. It's a different experience's. It's like a different movie.

Rob Pegoraro (00:12:49):
Really. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:12:50):
And I bet Oppenheimer's the same. So I think, I'm

Christina Warren (00:12:53):
Not sure. Yeah. I would be interested to see that.

Rob Pegoraro (00:12:55):
I feel like dark. I make you wanna see it the last,

Leo Laporte (00:12:57):
Oh, you should definitely see it. Well, last

Rob Pegoraro (00:12:58):
What, because I saw was Dunkirk, which is so much shorter. Yeah, yeah. And I have to admit, yeah, I saw that on the proper screen for it. And on the back of a seat in economy class where you can realize your, your travel experience Oh yeah. Is not that bad. Actually,

Leo Laporte (00:13:10):
I saw Dun,

Rob Pegoraro (00:13:11):
No One's Trying to kill You. The

Leo Laporte (00:13:13):
Cama Dome, one of those cama domes in San Jose, and it was very, very wide. It's not as tall as imax, but that was an overwhelming Yeah. Movie. But good. Yeah. this one I feel like

Rob Pegoraro (00:13:25):
Very tightly structured too.

Leo Laporte (00:13:27):
Look, it's a great story and it's an important, I think it's a really important story. And I think he tells it appropriately. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and the

Christina Warren (00:13:36):
Acting is great.

Leo Laporte (00:13:37):
Wonderful. Everybody in it is wonderful.

Christina Warren (00:13:39):
Emily Blunt was really, really good. Is she the acting? She's so good in it.

Leo Laporte (00:13:43):
Emily, I'm just thinking a moisturizer and maybe some, I don't know. I'm just thinking some just a little poor No, I'm, she's gorgeous, but nobody is gonna look good that close.

Christina Warren (00:13:55):
No, no, that's, that's what I was saying. Like, like, I, I, I will never forget, like seeing Maggie Tillen Hall's face Yeah. On the huge IMAX thing, being like, you're, I know you're very attractive, but wow, that is, this is not made for anybody's face.

Leo Laporte (00:14:07):
Even if you're kissing her, you're not that close. <Laugh>. Right. And I've never heard of nose wrinkles, but apparently <laugh>,

Rob Pegoraro (00:14:13):
I'm feeling self conscious.

Leo Laporte (00:14:15):
My nose, somebody does have nose wrinkles. I'm not gonna sayNo now,

Rob Pegoraro (00:14:18):
What the hell's going on? But

Leo Laporte (00:14:20):
Full size, 18 foot nose wrinkles. Let's talk about tech. But actually, it was a little bit about tech, really. And it, yeah, it was actually, I think it's an important movie. I'm glad he made it. I think he did a good job of justice to the content. I would say probably better to see it at home or, or on a normal screen than an imax. Unless you're fascinated by the IMAX technology, which I was.

Christina Warren (00:14:41):
Yeah. If you, if you wanna see, if you wanna appreciate the filmmaking, see it, you know in the IMAX thing. Otherwise, you know, if, if three hours is too much. Yeah. But I think, I think it is an interesting, it was obviously was made before the ai, you know, period we're in right now. But it is an interesting

Leo Laporte (00:14:57):
Category. Oh, do you think So that's interesting for the a I h because the whole premise, of course, as one should know by now is physicists made this thing because we were in the midst of a big war with the Nazis who were also trying to make it. And they knew if the Nazis made it first, it would be the end of the world, essentially. So they said, we've got to make this first. But then we beat the Nazis and had VE day and we continued to make it and used it against Japan twice, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, including children. And there's, so there's the ambiguity, the moral ambiguity of that. And then the ambigu, the moral difficulty, the physicist said saying, we have now unleashed something that maybe mankind shouldn't really have. And now that really was a, should physicists create mass weapons of mass destruction. That really was legit. I, there is the, also the question of should people be creating ai? But I don't think AI is yet weapon of mass destruction. Or do you think so?

Christina Warren (00:15:50):
I No, I, no, I, I don't. But I think that the allegory, I just think that the argument is the same. Like, I think that you have people who are feeling the same source of pains. I don't think it's at that degree at all. But, but it was one of those interesting things that I, I could already see the, the hand wring fe you know think pieces that I'm going to roll my eyes at comparing the two, it will be sure to come, you know, through the end of the year yeah. Making kind of those points. Even though the, the film again, was made without any of the, this generative ai, you know, kind of like, you know, boom, that we've been having. It was completely made separate from that.

Leo Laporte (00:16:22):
I, I wasn't gonna start with this. We will of the hot, we'll get to Black Hat and Def Con 'cause I, I do wanna talk about, but as long as we're talking about this Emily Bender, who's been I think very good on ai, wrote a excellent piece in Scientific America, which I recommend to all, it's an opinion piece. AI causes real harm. Let, let's focus on that over the end of humanity hype. And I completely agree with her that we, you know, the, the people making ai, including Sam Altman, c e o of open AI, are pushing this notion. They even wrote a letter saying, we've gotta stop this. It's gonna end the humanity. And her point is, that's just hype for AI's capabilities. There is real problem. There are real problems. It isn't the end of humanity that's the problem. It's using ai to put people of color disproportionately in jail or to choose.

(00:17:15):
You saw the Detroit case? Yeah, yeah. Or to choose horrendous who you hire, or, you know, you, they asked some, I think this was at Defcon actually, we can get to Defcon Black hat. They had the AI Village. Was that a black hat? The AI Village. Oh, that was Defcon. Yes, that was Defcon, sorry, yeah. Villages or Defcon. Yeah. So that was a bunch of people brought in with the most, all the AI from Atropic and open AI and all that, trying to, you know, jailbreak it and, and trick it. But there were even legitimate questions like, well, if you could hire somebody named Juan or somebody named Ian, who would you who would you think would be more reliable? And the AI goes, well, Ian, of course everybody would know that. Clearly these are real risks. And, and, and these companies are going full speed ahead with this kind of AI in society, trying to make you say, but, but watch out. 'cause It could destroy the world. That's not the real problem. Yeah. And I think Bender had a brilliant article. This is the same thing that they were talking about in Stochastic Parrots, that to Nick Gabriel and Margaret Mitchell were talking about in Stochastic Parrots, the real genuine today harms, potential harms of AI versus some speculative thing about, you know, yes. How 9,000 Yes. Wish should

Christina Warren (00:18:29):
Be clear. Wish to be clear what I'm talking about, like the allegory that I see, I don't necessarily mean so much. I think there will be some bad think pieces that, you know, take that hype and see it will lead to the end of the world. But I'm, I'm more talking about the very real, I think ethical implications Yeah. That researchers are probably having to deal with right now. Which I think are, are probably similar to some of the, the ethical, you know, challenges that researchers have faced in other fields. Agree a

Leo Laporte (00:18:54):
Hundred

Christina Warren (00:18:54):
Percent. 'cause You can, because you can see how even these things that won't end humanity can still have a very real you know, negative impact on the world. Yeah,

Iain Thomson (00:19:02):
Yeah. Very much so. I think in terms of actual real world impact, yeah, Terminator makes a great film. But at the same time, you know, we are more inconvenienced by, you know, being flagged up by an insurance company's AI is a massive risk out of, out of sort or, you know, having our kids not do well in school because an AI system is, is apparently grading this, their papers. It's a, it's a increasingly disturbing situation.

Rob Pegoraro (00:19:26):
And it sounds like the big focus on large language model, L L L L M, ai, generative ai, which can hold a conversation and and convincingly lie to you, is distracting. People from the things we're talking about have been a problem for years. They didn't get into it in 2023.

Leo Laporte (00:19:42):
That's a good point. That's a good point. Yep. Mm-hmm. And I do believe there's a certain amount of hand waving coming from people like Sam Altman pay no attention to the, you know, <laugh>. So while the, A bomb is absolutely a weapon of mass destruction in the HBO after, and there's a, and it's worth watching Oppenheimer just for that, you know, thread and Edward Teller promoting the hydrogen bomb and so forth. You know, Oppenheimer said, we don't need a more destructive <laugh> nuclear weapon. What do you, why do we need that? And if you create that, then the Russians are gonna have to create that. And then it's gonna be nuclear proliferation. Those were really serious topics. We don't have a, AI isn't a weapon of mass destruction, but it is a weapon of e everyday destruction. And I think it's important. I think you're right. I think the ethics of it, but what is, what does that mean? I don't think Silicon Valley thinks about ethics when it's developing a new technology. They're not.

Christina Warren (00:20:35):
Well, that's the, that's the interesting, that's the interesting and weird place I think we are with ai. This is one of the, and again, I mean bad think pieces that are sort of come aside. I think there is this interesting kind of similarity with the, the atom bomb where you had the, in you had kind of the worlds of academia coming together with the world's military. And I think that with ai, it's similar but inside of military it is corporate, right? So you have most of these, the groups that are doing a lot of the work are, are hand in hand both academics and, you know, researchers at big institutions and technology researchers or, or former, you know, researchers who now work for big tech companies. So there's this interesting tension between those two places where you wanna see how far you can push things from a research perspective, but it becomes less about, you know, publishing, you know, papers and more about publishing patents and the tension between those two groups.

(00:21:30):
You see it in Quantum as well. Like, there's this very interesting tension between the business aspect and the academia aspect. But the two have to have one another because they, they depend on one another. And, and I think that's the interesting thing with AI is that they're, the corporations might not think of as much about the ethical things, but the academics do. And most of the people who are doing a lot of the work, whether they work in corporate America or not, did come from academia. That doesn't mean that they're going to be ethical. But it, it, I I think it does, you know, I don't think the people who are doing these things are, have, are not aware of, of ethics. If they choose to, you know, define them differently. Maybe that's something that I, I, I don't think that they're not thinking about the ethics. I think that all the people who are working on this very much are, they just, you know, might rank them you know, differently in, in terms of how important it's, I don't think,

Iain Thomson (00:22:19):
I think the people developing it, the people developing it are taking an ethical standpoint on this. Unfortunately, I think the people that are funding it and ultimately controlling it aren't taking it. They're still in mood fast and break things territory. People

Leo Laporte (00:22:31):
Like Peter Thiel and Palantir aren't really considering the ethics. I,

Iain Thomson (00:22:35):
I, come on ethics. I think he knows how to spell ethics.

Rob Pegoraro (00:22:38):
Teal works what?

Leo Laporte (00:22:39):
<Laugh> Ethics Teal. Hmm. I do think that even if you're thinking about it, unless there's a formal structure around it, you're unlikely to act on it or even be heard if you raise the issue that probably we should really start thinking about whether there should be some sort of ethics structure in all of these startups. You know, a, a committee on the safe use of, or something like that with some real teeth and real power. You know, the the Feds have proposed ai, is it regulation? What is it? <Laugh>

Rob Pegoraro (00:23:14):
Ai, bill of Rights. The Biden administration put out this white paper or executive order not too many months ago.

Rob Pegoraro (00:23:23):
Which, which checked off all the boxes, trust less. Like, here's what to worry about. We've seen how these things can break in reality if they're trained on people who, you know, don't look like us.

Leo Laporte (00:23:33):
I'd, I mean, this is a step and it certainly raises the issue and it's the right issue, I think. But I sure like to see some regulation that says, and oh, by the way, you know, you need to have an ombudsman there next to the people developing this stuff, paying attention to this. They talk about, he's called the plug. Yeah. They talk about al algorithmic discrimination, data privacy. These things are important. Oh, well let's talk about Black hat <laugh>, because that's where everybody goes to find out what you can do. <Laugh>,

Rob Pegoraro (00:24:07):
Nothing actually

Leo Laporte (00:24:08):
<Laugh> with all these. No, it's not true. Wonderful tools. Your article in PC magazine, Rob, about black hat the feds showed up in force. They've, they, they black hat used to have the spot, the Fed

Rob Pegoraro (00:24:21):
Game. Right? It's, it's not hard to spot the Fed when they're on the keynote stage, you know?

Leo Laporte (00:24:24):
Yeah. <laugh>. So

Rob Pegoraro (00:24:25):
Yeah, it was really striking where at the end of the, the first day's keynote, a representative from darpa, the defense Advanced Research Projects administration, came out to announce the AI cyber challenge, which is a two year contest, almost $20 million in funding to see can we develop ways to use AI to strengthen our software to find and fix flaws automatically to defend critical infrastructure. And you might say, well, yeah, whatever. But AI has in fact sponsored a lot of important research, including work that led to the network that is bringing this fantastic content to your screen right now. And then the particular panel talk I wrote about was Bob Lord and Jack Cable of cisa, the cyber security and infrastructure security administration or agency, sorry talking about their security by design initiative. And I'm used to seeing people from where I'm from DC talking very unobjectionable generalities about what you should do <laugh>. Yeah. But in this case, it was very in the weeds actionable.

Leo Laporte (00:25:22):
Good. You

Rob Pegoraro (00:25:22):
Should be writing your software in memory safe languages if you offer a single sign on, which you should, don't charge extra for it. Don't have an S ss o tax. Love it. High quality audit log should be free, not an upcharge item. If you're the service or the product you're providing is based on lots of other people's code. Provide an SBO m software bill materials really detailed actionable stuff. And it tied into one thing I've been hearing people from this White House say, consistently for the last two years, we need to lift the burden of cybersecurity from the people who were least able to bear it right now,

Leo Laporte (00:25:55):
Who is, in other words,

Rob Pegoraro (00:25:56):
Stop yelling at the users. Yeah. It's your fault for not changing the defaults.

Leo Laporte (00:26:00):
Yeah. Yeah. That's a good

Rob Pegoraro (00:26:01):
Point. And somebody needs to be saying that. And yeah. Unfortunately right now, all the administration really can do is try to lead by example, because have you seen the output of Congress in tech policy lately?

Leo Laporte (00:26:10):
Yeah. Nothing. There's

Rob Pegoraro (00:26:11):
Not much, not much to see.

Leo Laporte (00:26:12):
Yeah. Niche. All it's, all it is is, and this is stop, stop, you know being biased against conservatives on Twitter, <laugh>, you knock that off now here. But I mean, but so def I should say spot the Fed. I think you were gonna correct me. And that's at Defcon. 'cause The feds Yeah,

Iain Thomson (00:26:28):
That's Defcon The

Leo Laporte (00:26:28):
Feds are publicly out there at Black hat. That's what black, black hat, but

Iain Thomson (00:26:32):
Also a def con as well this year. You know what I mean? Oh, really mean. Yeah. Yeah. Jeff Moss did did a, a fed thing. They, the transport security agency had a stand in the expo center. The N S A usually does, but it didn't this year. You know, I mean, it's, it's, I think it, it was starting to go that way. And then Snowden kicked in and they were kicked out again, and they're gradually being let back in again. Because they recognized, you know, I mean, it's, but I mean, coming to the point that, that Rob was making Cory doctor did a great speech at this on Saturday where he was saying, you don't actually need legislation from the government. All you need for the, to, all you need for them to do is say, right, if you want us to buy your software, you have to do certain types of things. And I don't think I may be wrong on this, or they actually need legislation for that. So you could mandate, you know, actually

Rob Pegoraro (00:27:23):
The administration has been some requirements. Like if you're going to tell, if you're going to sell software or IT services to the government, you do now have requirements. Like you do have to provide an sbo m you have to

Leo Laporte (00:27:36):
What's an SBO

Rob Pegoraro (00:27:37):
Software bill materials. So what went in it, which is a good thing to know, like, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:27:41):
Like what libraries, what languages?

Rob Pegoraro (00:27:43):
Well, same way, you know, a recipe has the ingredients. Yeah. The, the food bill of materials or F-bomb, if you will. Yeah. You, same thing you would do in software. This code,

Leo Laporte (00:27:52):
You just wanted to say F-bomb, didn't you? And keeping

Rob Pegoraro (00:27:53):
That outta my back pocket the whole time. <Laugh>. and you wanna know that because, you know, as we've seen with things like Log four J, there's lots of,

Leo Laporte (00:28:02):
Oh boy, that was

Rob Pegoraro (00:28:03):
Libraries that you think because it's open source. Yeah. So many f eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. But what if everyone else thinks, oh, someone else's eyeballs are on this? Oh, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:28:11):
Pi pi has been, is full of flaws.

Rob Pegoraro (00:28:14):
So you wanna know what libraries are using so you can then look and see, okay, has someone looked at this? What are the

Leo Laporte (00:28:21):
Risks for that? Yeah. And I should be very clear, there's flaws, which are inadvertent errors that people can exploit, but then there's also malware that's intentionally put in these libraries that causes huge problems. Yep. Because people include the libraries assume that, oh, you know, it's safe, it's a library and it's not. No. Yeah, we've been talking about that on security now. There's a lot of that going on.

Iain Thomson (00:28:41):
So I was talking with that with, with Christina, do you know John Swanson? Yes. Yes. Yeah, I did, I did an interview with him about GitHub rolling out two factor authentication. He gave a talk about the black hat. That's a good step.

Leo Laporte (00:28:52):
Ation blow. Yes.

Iain Thomson (00:28:53):
Yeah. But I mean, he was saying, you know, this is, this kind of thing is really useful for identifying malicious accounts, which are, and they're not gonna go onto two factor because it means an element of identification that they don't want.

Christina Warren (00:29:05):
Right. Right. But, but it was a difficult thing to do. Right. Like, it was one of those things that we enforced it and, and we did first N P m, and then we've done it for other things. But it's, it's difficult even for communities where you would think that it would be kind of an accepted thing of, yes, this is what we need to do. It's very difficult to roll that sort of thing out and not, you know, wind up with the potential of people being locked out of accounts and things like that. So

Leo Laporte (00:29:28):
I think I was remiss, I did not mention, I think you all know it, but Christina Warren is a senior dev advocate at GitHub, hence, but does not speak for GitHub when she's on this show. So let's make that clear any more than Ian speaks for the register, or Rob speaks for I'm

Rob Pegoraro (00:29:44):
Self-Employed, so I Do you

Leo Laporte (00:29:46):
Speak for everybody? Rob Robin

Rob Pegoraro (00:29:48):
Doesn, speak for Bob.

Leo Laporte (00:29:49):
Rob speaks for, so there is, you know, it's, it is getting circling full back to Oppenheimer. There is an interesting kind of relationship because government in this case was really pushing for an atom bomb. Probably for good reason. Initially, physicists said, okay, we outta patriotism, we need to create this. And then after the fact, there was all this handwringing about what have we done? Now I am, now I am desk destroyer of worlds. You know maybe we should have the hanging first. And I think there's also a very good point that you make, Rob, which is, and I'll play the anti-government guy. I understand why people say, well, we don't, do we really want government regulating technology? You know, look at the EU saying you have to have a U S B C port on your phone. I don't want that <laugh>. I understand why people are very skeptical of government getting involved in technology, but if not government, who Right? There is no one else. It's either big tech self regulates, and we know how that works

Rob Pegoraro (00:30:51):
Out. Yeah. It's not, not so great.

Leo Laporte (00:30:53):
And, and it's because of the incentives. And it's the same reason we developed an HBO or an abom. We had these incentives. Government was responding to a certain set of incentives. Technology. Big tech companies are for profit entities responding to the, the, you know, the incentive to be profitable to their stakeholders. And you can't expect them necessarily. I think in many cases like GitHub, they do do the right thing. But you can't, you can't say, well, it's entirely, the Bernards aren't entirely on them anymore than it's entirely on consumers. So who else? Right? It's gotta be government. Now that means we now have to educate government <laugh>. We have to make sure that members of Congress know what's going on. I wish we still had the Office of Technology policy.

Rob Pegoraro (00:31:38):
People are still trying to bring back the O T

Leo Laporte (00:31:40):
A. Yeah. We need that because that was an independent non-partisan group that advised Congress on technologies. And Newt Gingrich got rid of it decades ago. And now there is nobody Congress can go to except industry or, or their staff who then goes to industry for this information. And so they need to have this information. So I think maybe step one is to make sure Congress is getting educated on this process.

Rob Pegoraro (00:32:10):
Well, and that's where, that's where you, you talk to people in Congress and they'll say, well, first of all, you need to have staff that stick around long enough so they develop expertise, which means you need to pay them more. Okay. And saying that tech, smarter tech policy starts with paying people in suits on the hill, more is not as easy of a sales pitch as you might think.

Leo Laporte (00:32:30):
Yeah. Well, especially when you've got lobbyists who are willing to

Rob Pegoraro (00:32:33):
Come. Yeah. Because that's the thing. If, if you spend two years as someone's

Leo Laporte (00:32:35):
Office, that I'll write that bill for you. Yeah.

Rob Pegoraro (00:32:36):
And you get poached away and you double your

Iain Thomson (00:32:38):
Salary. Yep. Well, we've got this problem in the UK with the Online Harms Act where they're trying to pass legislation and it's expected to pass the Snooper's charter in August. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, where they're forcing a backdooring of encryption. Awful and awful. There was an absolutely infuriating interview with one of the, the technology minister, I think on Tuesday. I saw that. We said, well, technology to do this without breaking encryption is under development. It's like been under development for 10 years. And you cannot physically break encryption in a way that nobody else can do. So what if everyone nerds harder, though? Could we have we tried that? Yes,

Leo Laporte (00:33:11):
<Laugh>.

Iain Thomson (00:33:12):
Exactly.

Christina Warren (00:33:13):
Exactly. It's like, it's called a backdoor, like this literally what it is. And you're just going to say, oh, but, but we're, we're the ones who can be trusted to have this, this, you know, one magic key. No, no, it's, it's, yeah. I, I, I agree. Yeah. And it's infuriating. It's,

Iain Thomson (00:33:28):
Yeah. I mean, but this is what comes from politician. I think there was a lovely report on the B B C where they the co the correspondent was, had a lovely face, which was basically a combination of ignorance and arrogance is really not what you want when it comes to policymaking.

Leo Laporte (00:33:43):
So give us some UK insight. You say that this online harms act is probably gonna pass next, next month.

Iain Thomson (00:33:51):
Almost certainly. We've got a bit of a dead duck conservative government at the moment, but they're hanging on to, with their fingertips to get stuff done until they're voted out of office, which seems highly likely. This has been bubbling under in the Conservative Party for about six or seven years. And as usual, they've invoked, you know, one of the four horsemen of the in apocalypse in this case child abusers, and in fact, the leading terrorists, British Children's cha, but

Leo Laporte (00:34:14):
Think of the children. Think of the women. Yeah,

Iain Thomson (00:34:17):
Yeah. Terrorist children, drug dealers, and organized crime. Those are the four ones that always get trotted out. And in this case, you know, they, and

Leo Laporte (00:34:23):
Nobody's in favor of any of that.

Iain Thomson (00:34:26):
No. But, but super

Leo Laporte (00:34:28):
Opposed, everybody else gets sucked into that basket, including your privacy in mine. And that's the real part. Well,

Iain Thomson (00:34:35):
Yeah, and also, I mean, it, it's a simple matter of logic. If you put a, if you enforce a backdoor in there and you tell everyone there's a backdoor in there, you're gonna be looking at a, yeah. An Oppenheimer like level of, of effort by our adversaries to find that backdoor and exploit it. Because once you've got that, that's the ball game. It's as simple as that.

Leo Laporte (00:34:54):
So in the US it's a constitutional amendment, the fourth amendment that basically says in effect, almost explicitly, you've gotta balance the rights of the individual with the desire of law enforcement to catch each and every criminal. And in the us, at least in our constitution, it says, we should be safe from unreasonable search and seizure. They pr they unders if the founders understood that there is a balance, but that ultimately it's not worth catching every criminal if it, it gives the government eyes into our personal lives. Is there anything in the UK like that? Is there any,

Iain Thomson (00:35:34):
There's nothing formal like that. We don't have a written constitution as you do in the United States, which is both a blessing and a curse. The amount of lawyering that goes on around this in the us, whereas in the uk, we kind of make it up as we go along a bit. I mean, it's all a question of legislation. There isn't the, the police have the right to tap your phones with a judicial warrant. It's, I think

Leo Laporte (00:35:56):
There's a certain amount of cross pollenization. Like the people in the UK are saying, well, you know, that's not a bad idea to require a warrant for certain seizure and stuff like that. And so that seems to be making its way into your law, just as most of your laws made a way into ours. The, the E F F is an interesting strategy on the Snoopers charter. They say, go to the House of Lords. They say, tell the House of Lords to protect, end-to-end encryption. I guess they're feeling like a Tory Majority Commons isn't gonna do that, but maybe the Lords can be convinced to.

Iain Thomson (00:36:30):
Yes. It's, it's a really odd system because basically only the houses of Parliament can sorry. The House of Commons can propose fundamental legislation. The Lords can block it for a limited time, and they can amend it and then send it back for, for revolting, I think in the House of Commons, the conservative party now voting in lockstep, that it would take something major for this not to go through the Lords, though, traditionally, because they're life peers. So they don't have to worry about being strong-armed by the par by the party. So the individual parties so much, they have a lot more freedom of action in this, but their powers are limited. Which, you know, because originally the House of Lords was hereditary was a damn good idea. But, you know, it's it's kind of frustrating. They're almost like the bastion of sanity, which the peers

Leo Laporte (00:37:16):
Doing the average. That's great. That's great.

Iain Thomson (00:37:17):
Yeah. Considering the average age is about 65, then that's <laugh>, the last line of defense. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:37:23):
That's not a good, that's <laugh>, that's not a good story. Well, I wanna take a little break. When we come back, we will talk about then the other way to respond to the Snoopers charter, which is to come up with better encryption. Now, signals already said if the Snoopers charter passes we're leaving the UK mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. but then there's an interesting move by the cult of the dead cow. They're still around. Ladies and gentlemen, we're gonna

Iain Thomson (00:37:47):
Talk about, I was in the presentation.

Leo Laporte (00:37:49):
Yeah, I know. I want you to talk about Veli when we come back. One of the ways you could respond to a a government that says, no encryption allowed, maybe not let the encryption be in charge of Google. How about that? Or Apple, right? How about that? We got a great panel. Good for, good for this topic, lemme tell you, but good for any topic. Ian Thompson's here from the register. Always wonderful to have you, and I know your throat is, is dying, but get, get some tea or something and and take care of yourself.

Iain Thomson (00:38:18):
I will be popping out to get a glass of water during the, during the break. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:38:22):
Of course, the wonderful film Girl. We love having Christina Warren on dev advocate at senior dev advocate at GitHub. And you'll see a lot of her used to be on channel nine, but now you're just kind of doing, is there a place for the video video?

Christina Warren (00:38:35):
Yeah. Yeah. If you go to YouTube, youtube.com/github, you can see I do videos all the time. Nice. And I do, I have a weekly news series where I kind of round up the latest things happening in open source and you know, kind of developer stuff. So yeah, youtube.com/github.

Leo Laporte (00:38:51):
Yay. And a newbie. But we're thrilled to have him. Noob <laugh> from Arlington, Virginia. Rob Peguero. He is a writer for both PC Magazine and Fast Company. You might have read his byline in the Washington Post, as I did for years. He was also at Black Hat, so and you could follow him on Mastodon and rob peguero.com. Thank you. Our show today brought to you by Miro, not Joanne Miro, the expressionist painter, but related close. I think they took the name because it was such a appropriate way of describing this amazing way to get your team on track. Quick question. Are you and your team going from tab to tab, tool to tool losing brilliant ideas and important information along the way? You know that, that brain scientists call this context shift. When you walk through a doorway, you always forget what it was you were going into the other room for.

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They even have a timer in there and, and icebreakers to make your Zoom meeting more effective. Miros, infinite shared boards give product teams a perpetual space, a single source of truth where they can just drag and drop in insights and data. Make a mood board or, or make a a M V P of your product all in one spot. So nothing's lost or forgotten. Miro covers, I mean, every possible use case. So you can build visual assets, you can present findings, you can run brainstorms with cross-functional teams. In fact, the best thing to do is go to miro.com/podcast. Look at the Miro verse. Those are Miro templates created by everybody in the world, all over the world. Some in the UK government, I don't know why, but there's a Harry Potter template from the UK government. Okay? So you can see how people are using Miro.

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You know, it's not really much of a surprise. More than 1 million people use Miro every single month. You should be too. And here's the best deal. I always bury the lead. Get your first three boards for free to start working better m iro.com/podcast. 'cause They know once you start using Miro, you're gonna think of all sorts of ways to use it. And you're gonna want to get a premium account. But start with the first three boards for free so you can really get a sense of how it works. Miro.Com/Podcast. so you went to the Veed presentation. Ian? Ian it is from the, I didn't even know the cult of the Dead Cow was still around. These guys are legends in the hacker community. Yes.

Iain Thomson (00:43:06):
Probably one of the first superstar hacking groups. Yeah. had certainly attended Con and congressional hearings long before it was fashionable.

Leo Laporte (00:43:14):
It it, it's kind of, I mean, they're not, they don't have meetings, right. <Laugh> They don't, they don't have special hacks. I think

Iain Thomson (00:43:20):
A news collective.

Leo Laporte (00:43:21):
Yeah. Yeah.

Iain Thomson (00:43:22):
Another journalist who was there described one of the participants as the leader of the cult of the Dead Cow. And she just tweeted out a picture of herself going, yay <laugh>. It was like, it's not really that kind of an organization.

Leo Laporte (00:43:32):
No. Nobody gets a special horned hat or anything like that. No, no. But I think that it's interesting, this presentation from a Dil dog and Metis four was interesting because I think in the back of their minds at least, they're thinking, here comes the Snoopers charter. We need a better way of communicating that is impervious to this kind of government intervention. And you, you can see it coming because Apple and Google ha ultimately have to give in, right? It's either give in or move out. And we saw Google did leave China, apple did not. Right? Yep. Seems highly unlikely Google or Apple will leave the uk. Microsoft didn't. Even if they could, they didn't approve the Activision Blizzard.

Rob Pegoraro (00:44:17):
Right. Signals said they will leave the uk. And I think WhatsApp made, I think, will any thread, like we're, we're not taking they anti out. They,

Leo Laporte (00:44:25):
It's too big. They cannot, they're not, I'm sure Facebook, even if they're not gonna put news in Canada or in the uk, they're not gonna leave the country. So we need something that is not attached to a giant tech entity or a for-profit entity of any kind to provide us with this kind of encryption. That's what I always thought would happen. Which was essentially it would be a grassroots people's tool is veed that. Yeah,

Iain Thomson (00:44:51):
It is. It is. And it isn't, put it that way. It's primarily the, you know, one of the points they were making was government. Yes. Certainly is a massive issue. What also inspired this up to a point was basically surveillance capitalism. And people are making, they, they said they've made the point that, you know, we've gone from this open internet to everything you do, being up for sale. And some people have become billionaires as a result, but at the cost of everyone else's privacy. And ultimately this is something the government can latch onto as well. So what they wanted to do was build a decentralized network. The lovely phrase they had was it's like to and I P F S had sex, and this is the outcome <laugh>, you know, okay.

Leo Laporte (00:45:34):
It's so to, has its own problems. The N SSA owns about a hundred exit nodes on tour. So nothing's private on tour, even though it tries to be, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And then I P F Ss, which is what the interplanetary file system,

Iain Thomson (00:45:47):
It's a planetary file system Yeah. Is

Leo Laporte (00:45:49):
A encrypted file system that actually brave supports, I think some browsers support. Yeah, yeah. Some, some do. Yeah. That allows you to kind of have a decentralized server technology.

Iain Thomson (00:46:01):
Yeah. So I mean, here with, when you develop an invalid, then, then all your application, all the applications that developed become nodes. But crucially, no one node is more equal than others. So it's a

Leo Laporte (00:46:11):
Mesh.

Iain Thomson (00:46:12):
It's a mesh, basically. So to come back to what you were saying about the N s A monitoring tool, you couldn't do this with this, with, with, with this framework. Unless you actually owned every single node or almost every single node. And as this thing scales up, it's going to be pretty much, you know, as secure as it is possible to be. And they've made it clear that they're gonna support this and improve things like encryption, authentication, the rest of it, as new technology becomes available,

Leo Laporte (00:46:41):
They did a server, but they also have a, an app, although, yep.

Iain Thomson (00:46:45):
Chat app. Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:46:46):
I think the premise is much like with Signal Moxie created a library that others use. Whatsapp uses it, in fact. Yep. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So is that the plan too, is that Valence is gonna say, here's a library you can incorporate this into your Yeah, I

Iain Thomson (00:47:00):
Mean basically it's, it's written in rust with bits of Dart and Python. And there are crossover points between those, but it's very easy to, they're designed it deliberately to be very easy to develop for, but also very easy to use. This is a point they made. The user interface has to be good enough, and they kind of issued a challenge at the end to the effect that, look, if you can get your parents on Facebook safely, you can get people using, you know, this platform safely as well.

Leo Laporte (00:47:30):
Is so it it, I guess the real test would be used as in Hong Kong, right?

Iain Thomson (00:47:39):
Yes, yes. Yeah. And also, I mean, at, at this moment for it to be the, the bigger it gets, the more secure it is.

Leo Laporte (00:47:46):
So what Oh, interesting. In terms

Iain Thomson (00:47:47):
Of the number,

Leo Laporte (00:47:48):
Because it is a mesh. Okay. Yeah.

Iain Thomson (00:47:51):
Okay. So the more nodes you've got, the more secure it is. So at the moment, yeah, it's probably easy to, I mean, there's only maybe a couple of hundred or maybe a thousand people using it at the moment, but if you've got it onto the scale of something like WhatsApp, it would be pretty much uncrackable.

Leo Laporte (00:48:09):
How does this compare to the signal protocol? I mean, don't, do we, don't we already have something like this?

Iain Thomson (00:48:15):
We have Signal. But again, and Signal is, to my mind, it it, it's the messaging app of Choice. 'cause It does this sort of thing. So, so centrally, but, you know, signal is limited to really limited to sort of a very small number of use cases. The idea is that you could build an app for pretty much anything using the app, using, using the platform development program. And, you know, it would be a way of taking all that data. There's no central server. There's, you know, it's designed for mobile so that, you know, there's multiple redundancies built in. The number of steps in a communication makes it very, very difficult to, to trace. So yeah, I mean, in terms of safeguarding information, it looks good, but it, it has to, it has to be at scale. And I think that's gonna be the real make or break for this sort of thing. If enough people adopt it, it could be really useful. But it's, it's a question of driving that initial interest and getting people on the platform. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:49:11):
You know, given that the UK electoral commission was hacked.

Iain Thomson (00:49:16):
<Laugh>, yeah. Okay. That was wee bit embarrassing. <Laugh>, come on. You had o p m, you know, when you're giving up. Oh, no

Leo Laporte (00:49:23):
Stuff. Oh, I'm not casting stones. We live in a glass house. Absolutely. But there are a couple of things, points to be made here. One is that, that's such a

Iain Thomson (00:49:29):
British headline, by the way. Apologizes, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:49:32):
Sorry. Definitely. Sorry. 40 million Register voter records. Accessible. Yeah. And they've known about it for months and didn't tell anybody. Yeah.

Iain Thomson (00:49:43):
No, no. I mean this, but you see, this is standard government policy. We've had a similar thing with the recent post office scandal, where the government mandated that Fujitsu provide a billing system for the postal service for software screwed up. And they blamed the postal people using it. And in some cases, they went to jail or committed suicide. So, I mean, obs obfuscation and denial is very much government policy in the UK and also in the us.

Leo Laporte (00:50:06):
Here's the, here's the timeline, which is kind of telling. They've now admitted that the electoral commission basically made the names and addresses of all voters registered between 2014 and 2022 available to hostile actors as of August, 2021. They learned about it October, 2022 and reported it a couple of days ago.

Iain Thomson (00:50:31):
That makes Equifax look good.

Leo Laporte (00:50:33):
Oh my

Iain Thomson (00:50:33):
God. Wow. Big burn. Excellent. Oh

Leo Laporte (00:50:37):
My God. They don't, the electoral Commission said it's not able to know conclusively when information's been accessed. You would think that this would then the, the, the, the, the House of Commons would then say, gee, maybe encryption is kind of a good thing. Maybe sec, maybe we should, maybe we should not put this stuff out in public. I mean, I

Iain Thomson (00:51:01):
Think you're asking

Leo Laporte (00:51:01):
Isn't there a

Iain Thomson (00:51:02):
Lesson to change their mind on something? There is. Absolutely. But you're asking politicians to change their mind on something in a very public way. And I think we all know that. No politician is keen to do that. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:51:13):
They think Russia might have done it. At least that's what David Omond, the former G H C G C H Q director said,

Iain Thomson (00:51:20):
Oh, it's Russia. Which makes sense. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:51:22):
Yeah. It's easy to blame nation state hackers. It's also better because then, well, it's probably not gonna end up on the dark web. They're just going to use it against us. <Laugh> kind of in a national,

Iain Thomson (00:51:32):
Everything's fine. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:51:34):
It's all fine. The house ist on fire. Just the country, just the world.

Iain Thomson (00:51:40):
Alright. Isn't house heating <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:51:42):
Back, back to black hat and Defcon? Let's see, what else do we have here? Ai, red teams, we talked about this a little earlier, race to find bias and harms in chatbots. I was un underwhelmed by the notion of this, like, yeah, of course you can jailbreak these LLMs. Big deal. We know that. What are we gonna learn here?

Iain Thomson (00:52:05):
Well I, I, I mean, I'll defer to rock. 'cause I mean, we were both in the same presentation, but I was actually really encouraged by it because I mean, when you look at, I mean, Rob made the point about the networks, but more recently, for example, self-driving cars, DARPA kickstarted that with a prize challenge. Yeah. That's seven. And in case they're putting 80 million, well, they're putting 18.5 million in pri in direct prize money, but also 7 million into funding. Seven individual US-based companies to give, give a shot at developing their own products as well. So it is actually sort of casting bread upon the waters, as it were, and trying to get some innovation here.

Leo Laporte (00:52:40):
I mean, there is precedent for this with the voting village that they did at Defcon some years ago. Yep. Which really revealed that they still do that. They really revealed the, the, the, a lot of exploits on these electronic voting machines. And I think because of it got die bold and others to fix problems. Yeah.

Iain Thomson (00:52:59):
Hmm. Well, this is something Jen Easterly said in her keynote was that, you know, it was work like the voting village, which helped ensure that the last election was made a big difference. Free and fair. Yeah. Yeah. Made a huge difference. 'cause Some of these machines were running XP and you could, and also were also running from the U S B port. So, I mean, and this came up in the voting village. It said, it's literally just a case of walking up, reaching behind it, plugging into the U S B port. And you can install malware on there. Right. And that's ridiculous.

Leo Laporte (00:53:26):
So what would be, what would we learn about jailbreaking AI that would be of Ben of that kind of benefit? I mean, we kind of know that some, some 21 year old hacker was able to convince an AI that nine plus 13 equal 21, if you're doing mass on an, on an l l m, you, you get deserve whatever you get. And by the way, she had to go through, through a lawyers who, like the lawyer. But I mean, she had to go through a lot of stuff. And in fact, she said, this'll be our little secret game. Nobody, nobody will know. We're gonna have some fun that, you know. Yes. We of course, you can't make these things hallucinate.

Iain Thomson (00:54:02):
Yeah. Mean it's slightly more than that though. 'cause What they're looking to do is develop an AI tool which can, for example, automatically scan software and find potential vulnerabilities in there. And, and, and those things. And also, and also, I mean, I spoke to the, the DARPA person afterwards and longer term and a chap from one of the AI companies, AARO was there. And longer term they'd like to get a slightly more reactive ai so that if someone is trying to break into your network, then it has the tools and the skills to actually say, right, that one's a wrong, and let's stop it. We'll stop it in its tracks while we can and alert a human. And we can check this out.

Leo Laporte (00:54:41):
And Willow Ramos' article in the Washington Post, he points out that the Twitter did something similar to this. They had an ethical AI team. And by having bounties, you get real people involved. For instance, one of the things they discovered was that Twitter's AI image system would crop people in wheelchair out of photos. 'cause They weren't the same, the right height. And it just failed to recognize people when they wore hijabs and things like that. Yeah. You wanna, you certainly wanna find those biases.

Rob Pegoraro (00:55:09):
Absolutely. You know, why am I surprised that a system is optimized for 30 something, Stanford dropouts, <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:55:16):
Happening, works great on us. Yeah. It really works great on us. So it is more than just trying to get it to hallucinate. It's more than just trying to jailbreak these LO's Yeah.

Iain Thomson (00:55:27):
Yeah. I mean it's it's, it's basic security, but it's also, I think trying to get an idea of as as Rob said, whether there are implicit biases in here in there that can be corrected in this way. You know, as we saw in this Detroit case, they've deployed a facial AI system for about the last 18 months, and it has a perfect score. 0% accurate identification, <laugh> you know, it's, it's, it's just insane.

Leo Laporte (00:55:53):
Well, and to my knowledge the only people ever falsely arrested using facial recognition are people of color. It, it just literally

Iain Thomson (00:56:02):
I think arrested a a couple of people have been refused entry to a venue. There was a, well,

Leo Laporte (00:56:07):
There was a white lawyer who couldn't get into see his Nick's play at M S g <laugh>. Right. Because Madison Square Garden, because because his law firm was, was involved in a it's a whole new

Rob Pegoraro (00:56:18):
Layer of Manhattan social Snootiness, <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:56:21):
<Laugh>. That's, that's James Doen. That's now, actually, it's interesting 'cause when you went to the Taylor Swift concerts, you were almost certainly subject to face recognition. I'm right.

Christina Warren (00:56:30):
I'm sure. I'm, I'm sure. I have no doubt about it. I, I remember seeing, I know that at her last tour five years ago, they had these kind of kiosk things inside that it turned out later on, like that you could interact with it, turned out later on did have some sort of facial recognition stuff.

Leo Laporte (00:56:45):
It like, was a good thing because there are people who stock Taylor Swift and found them and kicked them out. And I think that's a good thing. There are reasonable uses of this, whether, no, I mean, government should be using this arrest. People. Well,

Christina Warren (00:56:58):
I was gonna say, I was gonna say there, there's a big difference to me between what someone does for private security at a private event where they have the right to restrict who enters and, and exits versus what is the government doing and what, you know, oversight is happening. Or are we just trusting these systems that have been trained on biased data, that that becomes a much bigger problem.

Leo Laporte (00:57:21):
Yeah. But it's annoying that James Dolan kicked a woman out of Radio City musics Hall's Christmas celebration and let her kids in because she was at a law firm that was suing Dolan. That's annoying. But it's not the end of the world. It's not going to jail because you look like some, you know, maybe looks like somebody, I guess. Anyway. Good. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So you, you've justified to me, you've justified this ai village. I think this sounds like a good thing. Do, do you know if they, what the results have been? Have they gotten anything in

Iain Thomson (00:57:52):
Oh, no, it's, it's a two year program. So basically they announced it now at Defcon next year over the next year, they'll have a series of tryouts. Ah. so you've gotta, I think the deadline for registration, if you're a small company looking for that 7 million in funding is September 19th <laugh>. Yeah. And if you're looking for the general looking to enter the general contest, you need to register, I think it's November the ninth, but you'd need to check on the website. And then they'll run the first semifinals at Defcon next year. Oh, I'm

Leo Laporte (00:58:23):
Gonna have to attend that. I'm gonna have to stick around Vegas. That would be so something. Although

Iain Thomson (00:58:26):
You and me both made. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:58:27):
I should point out, the competition's results will be sealed for several months afterwards so that companies have a chance to fix their LLMs before the flaws are revealed to the world. That makes sense.

Iain Thomson (00:58:37):
But I mean, all this, all this is done is going to be done in the open at Defcon. So I, for one will be hanging around there looking at, look

Leo Laporte (00:58:43):
Over the shoulders,

Iain Thomson (00:58:44):
Punching their heads, you know. Goodness. But yeah, I mean, next year then they'll have the semi-finals, five teams will be chosen and get I think it's 4 million each in, in prize money. And then I think first prize

Leo Laporte (00:58:58):
Is $4 million. Holy cow

Iain Thomson (00:59:00):
Scale.

Leo Laporte (00:59:01):
It's real

Iain Thomson (00:59:01):
Money's 2 million each. How

Leo Laporte (00:59:03):
Do you

Iain Thomson (00:59:04):
How it's 2 million each for the semi-finals and then Yeah, you're right. 1 million million

Leo Laporte (00:59:08):
For

Iain Thomson (00:59:08):
4 million.

Leo Laporte (00:59:09):
But is it judge's decision? I mean, how do you say this one's worse than that one? I don't know. And AI's gonna decide. It'll all work out. <Laugh>, <laugh>, you are a loser.

Iain Thomson (00:59:18):
Yeah. But when happens, no, they're all wrong. Give them nothing. Nothing.

Leo Laporte (00:59:21):
You get nothing. So I mean, it is somewhat subjective. It's not like you're hacking into an operating system and then you are able to fire an exploit off and everybody can see you've done that, right? Or is it, I don't know. I don't understand.

Rob Pegoraro (00:59:33):
I guess you gotta prove a negative, make sure that, you know, we tried this attack and, and this one and others like it didn't work out.

Iain Thomson (00:59:40):
Yeah, I mean, it's I a Google, Anth, Google, Microsoft Anthropic and, and OpenAI are all behind this. They're all contributing models. So I think it's gonna be kind of like the PO to own contests that get run where you have to get in and then they find the flaws and then Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:59:57):
Yeah. That's what the Google, one of the Google folks Royal Hanssen is VP of Privacy, safety, and Security said, don't just tell us these things are possible. Demonstrate it really break into the bank. Hmm. I'm glad Google gave us permission. I think that's <laugh>

Iain Thomson (01:00:11):
<Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:00:12):
He said it was Okay. Harder to identify and solve are what chow calls embedded harms such as bias assumptions, false claims deceptive behavior. You know, that's a little bit harder to prove, I guess the public red team challenges, which build on a bias bounty contest are a way to involve ordinary people in that process. Interesting. Okay.

Iain Thomson (01:00:38):
Yeah, I mean, it's, there, there is an argument that's been made at, at was actually made at Defcon in 2019, where they said, look, no one knows these are black boxes. You know, very few people know what data they all trained on. And the example they gave was police data. Now it's obviously AI is showing a, some ais are showing a bias in police data, but they pointed out that that actually could just be because the data itself over the last 50 years is biased against certain certain race or, or, or people. And that's just being reflected in the ai and how you fix that is gonna be a very tricky issue.

Leo Laporte (01:01:16):
Other revelations, there's a new exploit on Google chips not Google Intel chips. It's a speculative execution is the bad guy. Once again, it's called the downfall flow. And it sounds like it's a little easier to implement than Specter and Meltdown. Is that right or no? You guys

Iain Thomson (01:01:37):
Up on that one? Well, I'm, I'm kind of we, I mean, we looked at this and it, it's, it's one of those things where it could be very serious, but in terms of implementation on a large scale, I'm, I'm not entirely, basically it's you know, it's good. What threat

Rob Pegoraro (01:01:55):
Threat model should make you nervous about this then?

Leo Laporte (01:01:58):
Right?

Iain Thomson (01:01:59):
Yeah, I mean, it's, the thing is, we're, we're getting very little, very little information as we did with Spectrum Meltdown. I mean, when the reg broke that story, Intel spent two days briefing people at the Wall Street journalist just like, oh, it, it's just a little blog. You don't need to worry. There's nothing to worry about here. But I mean, it's, it exploits the same sort of things. There is proof of concept code, so you can actually try it and, and go with it, but it's implementation outside of a research environment. It's very, I'm trying to think of a a, the correct way to put it. It's not something that could be mass deployed. Yeah. That was the, it's something which takes a certain amount of effort outta certain amount

Leo Laporte (01:02:43):
Of access to do. The benefit of Meltdown inspector was, it was very hard to implement, but did hold a risk only on shared computers. And I think downfall might be the same thing where you have to be on the same machine as the account you're trying to, so like in a cloud computing context. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Iain Thomson (01:02:58):
It's kinda like when you see those sort of over the top malware reports and it's only when you get to the second to last paragraph and you say, this can be implemented once the user has root access to the account, it's like, well, hang on, if you've got that, that's game over and

Leo Laporte (01:03:11):
Attack involved. NS is in your house. Yeah. Forget it. Right. Yeah. Alright. But this is a new one. And I presumably there'll be Microcode updates. Intel says that will happen soon, <laugh>, just check Windows update. Not yet any day now, <laugh>, it'll

Iain Thomson (01:03:32):
Be fine.

Leo Laporte (01:03:33):
Do we know what the per, do we know what the performance impact is

Iain Thomson (01:03:36):
Yet? That's, that's gonna be the very last thing they tell us. I mean, they're originally delayed melt from spec down, would have any kind of performance hit, then they said it'd be like two to 3%. And then when it turned out to be an awful lot more than that. Yeah. And there was some Fran frantic backpedaling and, and sort of software fixes. So I think what'll probably happen is the same thing that happened with the earlier vulnerabilities. They'll put out a quick fix which will solve most of the problem, but with a bit of a performance hit and then refine it over the coming months. So they can try and minimize that.

Leo Laporte (01:04:08):
Yeah, I mean, this was a decision long ago by Intel ultimately copied by other X 86 processor manufacturers to do speculative execution. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and this pipeline. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> sped speeds up processors a lot, but it turns out it's also maybe a little porous to an attacker. And I, I guess the mitigations turn it off or, or make it less useful. So you get big speed slowdowns.

Iain Thomson (01:04:35):
But I mean, this is what it comes back to what we were saying earlier about, you know and you know, it's the priority. When somebody first thought was speculative, you know of, of the, of this actual thing, then they were probably a given a bonus. And it was just like, wow, this is great. This will really speed up our chips. And it was only maybe six months or a year down the line that somebody actually said, well, I wonder if there's a security thing in this. It wasn't Intel who was looking for it. It was outside academics. And that's why you need scrutiny on these things.

Leo Laporte (01:05:03):
I do seem to remember we talked about this, does Intel have a red team now? That's kind of what I wanted know <laugh>. Oh God, I hope so. Yeah. I do seem to remember when we talked about this on security now that there was in fact somebody at Intel who was saying, you know, guys, when this back then, oh, right, okay. You know, guys, there's this. And everybody said, yeah, but come on, who's gonna do that? There was some concern about the risks of this back at the time. I seem to remember. I'd have to find the, the reference there, but that, that's in my memory. Maybe somebody in our chats will will fill me in. Speaking of which, let's take a little break. I wanna do a commercial, but at the same time, I also want to thank our, our chatters, both the open to all chatter, irc twit tv.

(01:05:49):
They're always great for links and more information and jokes. I steal all my jokes from the I R C. Thank you very much. They're my writers. Also, our Discord, which is the newest form of chat that's our club Twit Discord. I like to think of it as behind the Velvet Rope. If you are not yet a Club Twit member, let me tell you what you get for your, for merely $7 a month, a couple of, of triple Tall venti lattes and, and you got it paid every month. You get ad free versions of everything this show, but all the shows ad free also means, you know, no Trackers tracker free. So absolutely privacy focused. You get additional shows that we don't put out yet in public. That's how we started this week in space in the Twit Club, because they kind of subsidized it.

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Right now we're doing Scott Wilkinson's Home Theater Geeks. We brought it back for the club. Micah Sargent does Hands-on Macintosh. Paul Otta does Hands-on Windows. We've got the Untitled Linux Show with Jonathan Bennett, the GIZ Fizz with Dickie Barolo Stacey's Book Club, a whole lot more. Great stuff goes on in the club. And the Discord is, of course, the headquarters for that. Discord is a great way for our club members to stay in touch with each other, to talk about the things they care about and talk with people they care about. We've got a fireside check coming up in a month with Hugh Howie who wrote the Wool series. That was the basis for Apple's Silo series. He and Daniel Su Suarez, his buddy, who of course wrote Freedom and Demon Tmm, and is a great friend of the network, are gonna join Aunt Pruitt and me for a little sci-fi convo.

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That should be fun. September 7th, ESKA, our host of this Wick Enterprise Tech is doing a fireside chat, so is our AI guru Anthony Nielsen. We just try to make it interesting, fun, a great hang, and it really helps us keep the lights on and support the staff. None of the money from the Club twit goes to me. It all goes to keeping Twit operating and growing. And we thank you so much for your participation. If you'd like to know more, we have Family plans year long plan. We also have corporate plans, TWIT TV slash Club twit. Thanks in advance. Our show today is brought to you by Cisco Duo Duo. Speaking of Security Duo protects against breaches with a leading access management suite. You probably know Duo, I've been using DUO for years, but what's Duo is as that's so great. And if you're not using it, you need to know about this.

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It helps you implement zero trust principles by verifying users and their devices. Start your free trial. Sign up today, css.co/twit css.co/twi duo Do it, do it <laugh>. We thank them so much for their support. What else was going on at Black Hat and Def Con, Rob and Ian that you, you thought would be worth mentioning? There's so much every year. You know, I kind of prepare for the week after security now is gonna have about 15 new exploits. Most of the time when the exploits are revealed, it's because they've already told the companies. Hmm. Patrick Wardle, who is a I think a very good security researcher on the max side, yes, he is, had a presentation, was a little bit different. He runs objective c@objectivec.org. He has a tool he calls Knock, knock which keeps background, actually, this is not the article, but I will find it for you.

(01:10:38):
He keeps background applications from getting installed without your knowledge or permission. Apple apparently likes it so much that they added a similar feature. In fact, if you have a modern Mac, I think it started with Monterey. It's in Ventura, it's gonna continue on, you've probably seen this, you install Zoom, and there's a little popup that says Zoom is putting in a background application that's gonna run constantly. And you know, you, you can't prevent it, but at least you're aware of it. The idea being, oh, well I installed Zoom, I expect that if it pops up and Unbid, and then you might start to wonder, RO Yeah, RO is, there's something going on in the background. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Wardle says, trivially easy to bypass.

(01:11:26):
And he says, he knows this because he's been writing, you know, knock, knock, and knows a lot about this. Now, here's the thing. Wardle did tell Apple about this some months ago, and they fixed it. But he says they didn't fix it very well. They just put a bandaid on it. And as a result, he gave a talk at Defcon this week saying, here's how you trivially bypass even the fixed version of this. And he says, I didn't tell Apple. I was so pissed off that they did such a bad job of fixing it. So is there such a thing as irresponsible disclosure? I think not in this case, because you're no worse off than you were before Mare. Right,

Christina Warren (01:12:09):
Right. Right. He's not

Rob Pegoraro (01:12:09):
Revealing something that people didn't know. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:12:12):
Exactly.

Christina Warren (01:12:13):
Like I, yeah, like, I think, I think that there's like a line, right? Like, I think that there's responsible disclosure if you give them a, a certain period of time, and if then if they don't take any action and you know that the vulnerability is still out there, you can publicize the vulnerability In this case, you know, they did take some action, but he's just pointing out, Hey, there are still flaws. He's not, you know, writing everybody a diagram about how to take advantage of those flaws.

Leo Laporte (01:12:35):
Right.

Iain Thomson (01:12:35):
And it, and it can also, as you saw with the Mozilla case last week, I think it was where a researcher had gone through to Mozilla and found a hole in the V pn, and he told, you know, he told them about it months ago. They gave them nine. In some cases, Mozilla didn't even respond. Yikes. so they gave them a fair warning after 90 days, they heard nothing. They went full public disclosure. And amazingly enough, Mozilla fixed it by Monday morning. Yeah. Who could tell? Yeah. Sometimes

Leo Laporte (01:13:05):
The motivations, sometimes. Yeah. You gotta shake the tree to get 'em to act. By the way, it's not knock, knock. It's block block. It should be knock, knock <laugh>.

Rob Pegoraro (01:13:12):
There's some other <crosstalk>. Knock,

Christina Warren (01:13:13):
Knock is another one. Knock,

Leo Laporte (01:13:14):
Knock, knock. Oh, he does another one. Okay. <laugh>.

Christina Warren (01:13:16):
Yeah. Knock. Yeah, he has, he has a bunch of Knock. I love his

Leo Laporte (01:13:18):
Tools. He

Christina Warren (01:13:19):
I do too. And, and I love his writing. And, and he's very, very,

Leo Laporte (01:13:22):
Oh, he does have Knock Knock. You're right. So he is got knock, knock and block, block, knock, knock does see what's persistently installed on your Mac and Block. Block will block background tools, installation, and let you know that it's doing it. It'll say what? Something that's installed Launch Demon or a Launch agent, you know what? They're free. And my experience has been, they run pretty transparently in the background. It's probably a good thing to have objective-c.org until Apple fixes it. Right?

Rob Pegoraro (01:13:52):
Is it Dash? S e e

Leo Laporte (01:13:55):
SS. E e,

Rob Pegoraro (01:13:56):
Yeah. I think, I think Apple owns objective dash C as a

Leo Laporte (01:13:59):
Yeah, that's a programming language. And so he's playing on that. Right. Well,

Rob Pegoraro (01:14:03):
But of Word play. I like it.

Leo Laporte (01:14:04):
C S C E, thank you for Yeah. Letting people know that.

Rob Pegoraro (01:14:07):
One thing I learned at black Hat, his cousin is the guy behind Wordle

Leo Laporte (01:14:12):
Wordle. Oh, that's right. Wale's cousin is Wordle. Yeah.

Rob Pegoraro (01:14:15):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:14:17):
That's a smart family. <Laugh>.

Rob Pegoraro (01:14:18):
Yeah. Yeah. A lot of, I

Leo Laporte (01:14:19):
Saw his, I saw his name was Wordle, and I thought, I wonder if he's related to Patrick. Oh, that's

Rob Pegoraro (01:14:23):
Really interesting. Dinner. I'm like, it was you him, he's, yeah, he's my cousin. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:14:27):
Was eating caviar and a gold covered steak <laugh>. He sold it to the New York Times. I don't know. I think it was like,

Rob Pegoraro (01:14:33):
Sure. His cousin is living, he was like an

Leo Laporte (01:14:35):
Million bucks. Yeah. It wasn't

Rob Pegoraro (01:14:36):
Living his

Leo Laporte (01:14:36):
Best life. He should ask for more. It turns out it was a big boost to the New York Times. I did not know this, but I will, I will give Patrick A. Little plug. I just went to his site and he says, our home Maui was recently devastated by fires. I guess he lives in Maui. Yep. his, I don't know if his home was, yeah, I just saw this too. But he says, many of our friends and neighbors lost everything. So he has a fundraiser that he's running. That might be a good place to go. If you wanna help Maui and our thoughts and prayers to everybody in Maui, what a devastating picture of the Yeah. Lays Hana. And you know, anybody who's been there knows that town very well. Just really

Iain Thomson (01:15:14):
Very sad. It's just, it just a combination of sort of former hurricane force winds and a very dry summer, I guess. But

Leo Laporte (01:15:21):
Welcome is gonna happen.

Iain Thomson (01:15:22):
The planet.

Leo Laporte (01:15:22):
Yeah, exactly.

Iain Thomson (01:15:24):
You know, it's,

Leo Laporte (01:15:25):
I don't wood think it's gonna get better by itself. Kids,

Iain Thomson (01:15:29):
No touch wood, no wildfires in California, but I shouldn't say that. Yeah. We,

Rob Pegoraro (01:15:32):
We were sitting in Sonoma County and yeah, <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:15:35):
I, I intimately know what it's like. We had go bags packed a few years ago. The fire got with an eight miles of the house, and while we lived close to town, I didn't think they were gonna let it burn through. But yo, you're up in, you're staying, your in-laws are in Santa Rosa family there. They got

Rob Pegoraro (01:15:51):
Devastation. They got out. Right. But, yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:15:54):
Terrible. And yeah, it's, I don't think it's gonna get better. Might even get worse. And here we are talking about AI destroying the world. What <laugh> fools we were. I was gonna

Iain Thomson (01:16:08):
Say, we're doing such a good job

Leo Laporte (01:16:09):
Already.

Iain Thomson (01:16:10):
<Laugh>,

Rob Pegoraro (01:16:11):
Stay out of our lane. Ai.

Leo Laporte (01:16:13):
Yeah, exactly. Let's, let's, Hey, we're doing a good enough job. Don't, don't make it any faster. I don't need any help. What else? Anything else that you, you the register has a great black hat and DEFCON section, which I would recommend if you wanna read about the presentation. Of course. Oh, no. I mean, we eventually, these will be online too, right?

Iain Thomson (01:16:30):
Oh, actually the satellite, so, oh, well, the actual talks.

Leo Laporte (01:16:32):
Oh, hacking the satellite. Yes.

Iain Thomson (01:16:34):
That was, that was absolutely terrifying. I chatted at the subhead there, PhD student, a Mitzi probably shouldn't have given this talk, was from a comment in the q and a section <laugh>. But that was, ABS was really disturbing because they, you know, they, they were looking at lower or orbit satellites, and they asked manufacturers for the specs. Very few of them actually followed through. They picked three. And of those two outta the three have absolutely no protection whatsoever when it came to authentication or encryption. And could easily be taken over or hijacked by ransomware operators or whatever. The larger one did. But the problem with larger satellites is that they tend to be made of special, sorry, of commercial space components. Whereas if you're building a CubeSat, you build it yourself with custom stuff. And then possibly the worst was almost none of these can be updated with security systems from the ground.

(01:17:29):
Because if you've got a satellite in low earth orbit, everything in that design is tuned right down to the milliwatt as what they can do, what they can't do, what functions to do. And if you're throwing an authentication or an encryption app in there, that's gonna completely banja the power settings. And probably possible. And, you know, it's the big problem with satellite hacking is that everyone thought they were safe. Because who's gonna build a ground station to, to, you know, hack a satellite, it turns out 10 grand's worth of kit you can build a wasn't wasn't that the plot? And some James Bond

Leo Laporte (01:18:00):
Movies, it

Iain Thomson (01:18:01):
Feels like back ways

Leo Laporte (01:18:02):
Actually on top. Rose Blofeld is clocking down his credit card right now.

Iain Thomson (01:18:07):
Well, you can do that though. A w s and Azure both sell grand Station as a service. So you can actually just slap down the credit card and communicate with the satellite if you've got the right protocols.

Leo Laporte (01:18:21):
I love the quote that you publish in your article on the register. People think satellites are secure, said Johannes Ville bold, the PhD student who presented these are expensive assets and they should have encryption and authentication. I assume criminals think the same and they are too hard to target, and you need to be some kind of cryptography genius. Maybe it wasn't a good idea to give this talk <laugh> <laugh> too late. So you do need to access to somehow talk to the satellite and it's not encrypted. So what can you do though? You can't bring it down.

Iain Thomson (01:18:57):
No. Well, okay. There are a number. There are, there are sort of a number of attack vectors that you could use this for. I think probably the most likely one is ransomware or other criminals getting in there and just disabling the satellite and men then messaging the operator and saying, if you're

Leo Laporte (01:19:17):
Satellite, back it again. Number of

Iain Thomson (01:19:19):
Bitcoin to here, man. Oh man. The other one was that a lot of these satellites, you know, like starlink for example, are intercommunicate. So you could infect, you take over one and then spread around the constellation. Oh, wow. And then finally, and he said probably the most least likely was that you actually take physical control of the propulsion systems and you could maybe, if it's got enough power, deorbit it. But he said one of the more interesting aspects that they discussed privately was that, you know, these things are going incredibly fast to get and stay into orbit. You've gotta be moving at thousands of miles an hour. And if you can just direct it slightly so it hits another satellite that's gonna cause a spread of debris. And now it's very hard to go full keer effect in terms of blanketing the earth in shards of destroyed satellites. But from a wartime situation, for example, if an adversary of the US decided, you know, well, okay, spice satellites aren't usually in, in in low earth orbit, but there are some, it's like, if, you know, spending a warning, what happens if one of these CubeSat go slightly wrong and intercepts, you know, an American satellite? It's technically doable.

Leo Laporte (01:20:29):
These satellites are, and I didn't know this until I saw this article last month in TechCrunch already dodging space junk at the rate of thousands of times a month. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> SpaceX's orbital communication satellite perform maneuvers 25,000 times in a six month period according to a filing with the F C C. So they're already, you know, <laugh> 30 or 40 times a day going, Oop. Gotcha.

Rob Pegoraro (01:20:56):
It's another case of not paying attention to pollution, because yeah, in the past there was not a whole lot of attention. I have actually done a little bit of writing about space, so I have some knowledge of this beyond reading stuff on the internet. Yeah. You know, you, you would launch the satellite and then not worry about the payload shroud or figure it'll, it'll deorbit on its own at some point. And so now there are rules and procedures we learned that

Leo Laporte (01:21:18):
With, with Skylab landed on Australia.

Rob Pegoraro (01:21:20):
Right. I'm old enough for that <laugh>. Yeah. But of course then you have jokers like the, the Russians decided to stage an anti-satellite test that, that they

Leo Laporte (01:21:27):
Blew up a

Rob Pegoraro (01:21:28):
Satellite required the i s s to change position with their own cosmonauts onboarded. Yeah. Just to show the, the priorities a foot

Leo Laporte (01:21:35):
Of the criminal, according to TechCrunch, a number of collision of avoidance moves has doubled in the since the previous reporting period. So, and some of that is the Russian satellite debris, but not by any of

Rob Pegoraro (01:21:47):
It. And the, the Chinese have done some tests like that as well. Like now, for instance, the F C C, if you're gonna get your low earth orbit satellite broadband constellation approved, weirdly enough, the F C C has become a very activist regulator of space. Because yeah, if you wanna provide communications from low earth orbit, you gotta talk to them.

Leo Laporte (01:22:06):
There are 4,500 starlink satellites up there. That is half the number of all satellites in space now, and they're going to 42,000. They say they got F C C approval for the first bunch. Maybe the F C C should step back a little bit. Mm-Hmm. Because, you know, I was all for starlink when I first heard the plan. I thought, this is great. Elon's gonna provide low cost internet access to every corner of the planet. That's not what we got. It's very expensive. It is. It is.

Rob Pegoraro (01:22:37):
Yeah. But you know what, I've talked to people who were stuck on at T D SS L, they're

Leo Laporte (01:22:41):
Happy they got it. I agree. That's

Rob Pegoraro (01:22:42):
The best reader email I get when they say the starlink dish showed up. And I'm no longer in prison in this 1990s, you know, it's straw

Leo Laporte (01:22:51):
Of, it's a hundred, it's $500 to start and then I think it's more than a hundred now. It was a hundred dollars a month. I think it's now $125 a month for the sa for the internet access. It is not a percent affordable alternative for most of the world.

Iain Thomson (01:23:04):
Yeah. But I mean, 5%, I think it's like three or three to 5% of America is still on dial up, for goodness sake. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:23:10):
Yeah.

Iain Thomson (01:23:10):
And, and it's not just

Rob Pegoraro (01:23:11):
Starlink. There is, Amazon's got project.

Leo Laporte (01:23:13):
Amazon's gonna do the same thing, which,

Rob Pegoraro (01:23:14):
You know, they need to actually, they need to get moving. 'cause They have an f CCC deadline, I think three years from now to get, they want

Leo Laporte (01:23:20):
'Em to get moving

Rob Pegoraro (01:23:20):
Half of a 3000 satellite constellation.

Leo Laporte (01:23:22):
I'm very worried. I know space is a big place. Well, but

Iain Thomson (01:23:26):
I can reassure you a bit, a bit because I, I actually actually interviewed Kessler from oh dear. A for notion from the Kessler syndrome idea. And he said, first off, is he funny parties? Staling. <laugh>. Sorry,

Rob Pegoraro (01:23:38):
Is he fun parties?

Iain Thomson (01:23:39):
He he was fascinating, to be honest. I'll give him that. But he did, just to reassure you on this point, Leo, he did say that of all the companies that he's been dealing with, then SpaceX have the most advanced plans to do orbit all this stuff in a reasonable and safe manner. Which was kind of reassuring. But you, I mean, he also said if the Kessler, you know, example does happen, it's gonna happen slowly over a, a length of time. You know, he did say Hollywood, you know, has this image of, you know,

Rob Pegoraro (01:24:09):
Gravity is not a documentary.

Iain Thomson (01:24:11):
Oh God. Well, yeah. I mean, the orbital planes on that thing, we're all wrong. Yeah. Don't actually get to look at this debris as it goes past. And who's looking

Leo Laporte (01:24:19):
At Deborah? I'm looking at Sandra Bullock. What are you talking about <laugh>? No, I there was also a great Neil Stevenson book called Seven Eaves that talks about Yes. The Kessler effect. The premise of it is you could have a chain reaction of collisions in space around the earth and block out this ultimately block out the sun. Which wouldn't be good, I think. Well,

Rob Pegoraro (01:24:41):
That solves the global pro, global global war problem,

Leo Laporte (01:24:43):
Doesn't it? It'd be the end of, that'd be the end of wildfires.

Iain Thomson (01:24:45):
Yeah. It kind of terminal way though.

Leo Laporte (01:24:47):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. The ice caps are back. That's the good news. Bad news is in your backyard.

Iain Thomson (01:24:53):
I was gonna say bad news. The polar bear is now sunning itself on the equator. You know, it's not awkward.

Leo Laporte (01:24:58):
All right. Well, I'm, you know, I hope that the F C C and and related agencies are doing their due diligence on this stuff. Because I worry that we are launching an awful lot of vehicles into space. Speaking of which, there was a presentation at Black Hatian, you wrote this up. The boss of CSSA says, UUA, the US Alliance of the Ukraine over the past year is closer than the five eyes.

Iain Thomson (01:25:26):
Yes, indeed. That was, I heard that and I was just like, hang on, I'm gonna need to check the recording of this <laugh>, because, you know, that is a, a fairly major thing to say. That

Leo Laporte (01:25:34):
Basically is a, is an, is an, is a information sharing relationship. Yeah.

Iain Thomson (01:25:39):
Spy information a year ago relationship. Yeah. About, about a year ago, they signed a memorandum of understanding to work together. And the u s declassified an awful lot of intelligence information and let the Ukrainians see it. And also trained with the Ukrainian info information security teams so that they could get some, you know, real world experience and get the most UpToDate information. And to her credit, she said actually the US has come out the better of this because we have learned so much about Russia active attacks. Yeah, yeah. Well, if you think, I mean, Ukraine has been under attack for nearly 10 years now by the best that the Russians can do. So they have an enormous fund of experience, you know, and when the US when the N S A Do protections, they do war games, you know, they do, they run through preset war games. These, the Ukrainians are actually on the front line. I would be frankly astonished if we didn't have people embedded with them right now, learning those lessons and passing them on to, to everyone else. And I say more power to 'em, you know, it's the more we can get out of this and the more we can lessen Russia. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:26:40):
We're spending enough

Iain Thomson (01:26:41):
Ance influence.

Leo Laporte (01:26:41):
Yeah, yeah. We're putting, oh, come

Iain Thomson (01:26:43):
On. It's the Ukrainian funding.

Rob Pegoraro (01:26:44):
Cheap at the price cheap.

Iain Thomson (01:26:45):
You get to destroy the Russian Army with no loss of American life on the cheap, it's bargain of the century.

Rob Pegoraro (01:26:51):
It's the cost of one F 35 fighters so far, I think. Oh, really?

Leo Laporte (01:26:53):
Is that all? It's nothing

Rob Pegoraro (01:26:55):
Compared to, depending on

Leo Laporte (01:26:56):
Procurement in that case. Have had it. Have at it, gentlemen. I would've loved to have seen this because what a panel, Jen Easterly, who is the chair of the cybersecurity agency, the cyber security infrastructure security agency with the guy from the Ukraine, Victor Zuora, who's their cyber chief, moderated by the wired lily hay Newman. That sounds like a really great panel. It was. I'd love to.

Iain Thomson (01:27:22):
It was, yeah. Yeah. even Jeff Moss popped up a k popped up towards the air sorry, at the start. Who's

Leo Laporte (01:27:29):
Jeff Moss? Founder

Iain Thomson (01:27:31):
Of Blackhead? Founder of Black Hat. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:27:32):
Nice. The big guy.

Iain Thomson (01:27:34):
A k o doc tangent. Yes. And he still

Rob Pegoraro (01:27:36):
Looks like he's 30. What, what does he do? I

Iain Thomson (01:27:38):
Know. Well, has he got a picture of himself in the accent? If your name

Leo Laporte (01:27:41):
Is dark tangent, you're not expected to age clearly. So it sounds like sounds like it was a very good conference. I'm sorry we dragged you away early, Ian.

Iain Thomson (01:27:51):
Oh, no, it was, I, I, I can't, honestly, I don't usually stay for the Sunday because after five days in Vegas, I'm ready to, it's a lot. Tangle someone or, you know, it's, that's my limit. Yeah. And I do my, my, one of my favorite moments about doing summer camp is getting to San Francisco airport, getting to the outside doors, having them open and then just like, oh, and it's like, oh yes, air. That's good. That's so good. People look at a bit odd at the airport, but, you know, and to each their own,

Christina Warren (01:28:21):
They're like, I was just in a very dry place. I need, I need all of this.

Iain Thomson (01:28:25):
Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:28:25):
A

Iain Thomson (01:28:25):
Moisture suck. Yeah. Sucking down water left, right, and center. And geo fresca is very good for rehydrating.

Leo Laporte (01:28:32):
Oh, I'll have to try that. Is that a good enough fizzy beverage or?

Iain Thomson (01:28:36):
Oh no, it's, it's just water chi seeds and lime juice. Leave it in the fridge. Stir it. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:28:41):
You make it yourself two, three times.

Iain Thomson (01:28:42):
Yeah. And then homemade

Leo Laporte (01:28:44):
Cheer F

Iain Thomson (01:28:45):
With lime lime juice. And it's, it's really good for rehydration for a

Rob Pegoraro (01:28:48):
Second. I thought you said healthy gin and tonic, which is also,

Leo Laporte (01:28:51):
That's well knowing, knowing Ian. I think that's what <laugh> So chia, so you make this chia fresca,

Iain Thomson (01:28:57):
Huh? Yeah. I mean, it looks like green snot in the glass, but it taste

Rob Pegoraro (01:29:00):
Fish. Oh my God. That's not, yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:29:02):
Yeah, yeah.

Christina Warren (01:29:03):
That's

Rob Pegoraro (01:29:03):
If I saw that in the fridge, I don't

Leo Laporte (01:29:05):
Well that's good. That way you get to drink it all by yourself. So it's soy seed Have to try this. Huh? Chia seeds, they

Christina Warren (01:29:12):
Sell premade.

Iain Thomson (01:29:14):
I don't think, it doesn't really last that long because the, you know. No, that makes sense.

Christina Warren (01:29:17):
Doesn't know. That makes complete

Iain Thomson (01:29:18):
Sense. The seeds start to stick, to stick to the side of the glass. It must stir it fairly frequently.

Leo Laporte (01:29:23):
No, they're doing it in your intestine, dude. <Laugh>.

Iain Thomson (01:29:26):
Actually, it's a superb form of roughage. You know,

Leo Laporte (01:29:29):
<Laugh>. I bet it is. I bet it is. I'm gonna try this, I'm gonna make some tonight and see if Lisa will drink this. I

Iain Thomson (01:29:36):
Was introduced to it by America. I feel duty bound to pass it on. It's one of the two great drinks you've got over here. That and the Arnold Palmer

Leo Laporte (01:29:43):
Do like the Arnold. Arnold

Christina Warren (01:29:43):
Palmer is great. Yes, that is fantastic. Oh,

Iain Thomson (01:29:46):
It's golf's greatest, you know, contribution to humanity, in my opinion. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:29:51):
Google says AI systems should be able to mine publishers' work unless you tell us not to. So this is the Well, they would, wouldn't they? This is the big debate. Yeah, they would, wouldn't they? Yeah. This is the the big date big. Here's Zoom. This was another one. Zoom. And it's terms of service said, oh yeah, by the way, we could use your data for our AI training. And then backpedaled, they changed it.

Christina Warren (01:30:14):
No, they stepped in it so, so badly. Like they, they, they, wow. That was just like such a pr fail. But I mean, it's zoom, zoom

Rob Pegoraro (01:30:22):
Does predictable. This is, it is a zoom.

Leo Laporte (01:30:23):
What they do, they

Rob Pegoraro (01:30:24):
Dove seen this movie before.

Leo Laporte (01:30:26):
Yeah. They go, oh wait, wait a minute. We didn't mean that. Have

Rob Pegoraro (01:30:28):
Terms, have lawyers write your terms of service for other lawyers. Never read team, the t o s to think what will this look like when interpreted out of context in t on Twitter or, or Macedon or whatever.

Leo Laporte (01:30:39):
Is it your thought that Zoom had good intentions and it was just poorly written? Or do you think they were trying to get away with something that got caught?

Rob Pegoraro (01:30:47):
I think more the former, the,

Leo Laporte (01:30:49):
That'd be my guess. Yeah.

Rob Pegoraro (01:30:50):
Yeah. The, the way they backed furiously. I

Iain Thomson (01:30:52):
Genuinely thought, sorry, sorry, go on. Please.

Rob Pegoraro (01:30:56):
Yeah, I mean, 'cause what exactly would you get out of that

Leo Laporte (01:30:59):
Like to Well, training

Rob Pegoraro (01:31:01):
Because you could probably just do it for much less effort if you don't have to. Like,

Leo Laporte (01:31:04):
It's, it's, it's reasonable thinking. When I first read it, I thought, oh, of course. Because if they're gonna offer a service that says, oh, we're gonna, we're gonna transcribe and summarize your meeting, they have to have those permissions to do that. They're sending this data

Rob Pegoraro (01:31:15):
To the server. Yeah. And, and that part, reading the terms from having seen this before, like yeah, that's expensive. Yeah. You're saying for, for us to do this. One thing I noted, there was actually a good bill in Congress introduced last year. The, the initials for it cleverly abbreviated to T L D R act, which would require, I

Leo Laporte (01:31:31):
Love

Rob Pegoraro (01:31:31):
That. A one page summary in terms of service with the, the real thing, the whole thing had to be machine readable. And of course it went nowhere, but it did just get reintroduced. And I'm thinking maybe Zoom should lobby in favor of that because if they had No, they should a one page human readable version, they might not have stepped in it so completely.

Leo Laporte (01:31:52):
So it did not, it did not go forward in the last Congress, but it, back again, all the service

Rob Pegoraro (01:31:58):
A year ago terms design and readability, act

Leo Laporte (01:32:01):
<Laugh>. Good man. Now, and

Christina Warren (01:32:02):
My, now my question about the T L D R act is, is that one pager act one page itself, or how many pages is it like, that's my actual

Leo Laporte (01:32:09):
Question. They have a one page of the T L D R act. Do you wanna see it? Yes, I do. I found it. I found it on Google. Google. That's actually pretty great. There's a okay, that that there's a, okay. Yeah. Here's the one pager. I'm impressed. Now it's a ping. Wait a minute. That's not it. Well, let me open the right thing. Here it is. Yeah. It's a ping.

Christina Warren (01:32:26):
Oh yeah, I found it. I found it.

Rob Pegoraro (01:32:27):
And it's not in a crazy small font either. This is actually like 10 11 point.

Leo Laporte (01:32:31):
This is great. I hope it's, this

Iain Thomson (01:32:33):
Should be nice. I

Christina Warren (01:32:34):
Agree. This concise.

Iain Thomson (01:32:37):
Yeah. No one's actually putting in, although it's kind of, it's been a busy week for it. 'cause Microsoft on Friday changed their terms and conditions regarding AI content. Oh, did they? And then, yeah, well I got an email,

Rob Pegoraro (01:32:47):
It was like 5:00 PM Friday news dump. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:32:50):
Oh,

Iain Thomson (01:32:50):
It was even better. This was 8:00 PM on Friday. <Laugh> actually put this out. It was like, we have made some terms and conditions changes. You can't use our output for ai. You can't use it to train your own ai. We can use anything that you produce for ai. So there was that. And then on Tuesday, there as an opposite to how Zoom did this, and I was really impressed with open AI about this. They put out a blocker so that you can put this onto your, onto your webpage and stop them from scraping the data. Yes. Now they ask you obviously not to because it helps 'em improve their model.

Leo Laporte (01:33:20):
Right. But at least they give you a, a, an option. They give you the option to do it. Yeah. And that's kind of what the Google story was as well. Google has kind of proposed a robots dot text like file that you could say no scraping. And that's reasonable because I think

Christina Warren (01:33:34):
That is reasonable.

Leo Laporte (01:33:34):
It's, it could, it's not merely privacy. It could also be costly, you know, robots you know, creating search indexes, often hammer sites and I imagine the AI would be as bad or if not worse, it's gonna read every page of text and ingest it. So yeah, Google's, Google's kind of saying unless you tell us otherwise, we're gonna do it. So <laugh>,

Rob Pegoraro (01:34:00):
But I mean, it's a public webpage, so it is.

Christina Warren (01:34:03):
I say, I was gonna say, I actually, you're allowed

Rob Pegoraro (01:34:04):
To read and learn from it and, and you can extend to the program you wrote

Leo Laporte (01:34:08):
Stuff. Fair enough. Alright, we got a little more AI news, some other news as well. We've got also a great panel here. I'm so glad to have you Rob. I'm glad you now you're all the way in Arlington. You're gonna be going home after. Yeah. Do you come out here a lot

Rob Pegoraro (01:34:22):
Or reasonably often. Yeah. Okay,

Leo Laporte (01:34:23):
Well let's get you on. Every time you do, I'd love to see. Alright. Especially if you'll wear your collection of think Geek

Rob Pegoraro (01:34:28):
T-Shirts. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I've got some other ones. I was gonna, yeah. Not, not from think geek, but one was gonna was my, since there's a vintage, was discussion of election work at blackhead. I was gonna wear my poll workers t-shirt. I like that. My, my least paying worst paying side hustle.

Leo Laporte (01:34:42):
Have you worked as a poll worker?

Rob Pegoraro (01:34:43):
Yes. Yeah. Bless you. Most recently. Thank you. Yeah. In

Leo Laporte (01:34:45):
DC

Rob Pegoraro (01:34:46):
Yeah, Arlington actually in Virginia. So yeah, it's, it's a five to nine as in 5:00 AM to 9:00 PM Yeah, roughly. Give or take.

Leo Laporte (01:34:52):
Yeah. I always thank the poll workers, in fact. Thank you. Even though I vote by mail always, I always bring the ballot in. And so as I could thank the poll workers who are mostly people my age and older. But good, good on you for doing that. I think that's really important. Work actually.

Rob Pegoraro (01:35:07):
And it's, it's technically, it's the fault of a security richer researcher named Matt Blaze who's spoken and written about this a lot. And he keeps saying, if you're interested in what I just talked about, be a poll worker. Yeah. And March, 2020, I thought, I'm self-employed, I can take off a day. Yeah. And, and that became

Leo Laporte (01:35:24):
A I'm gonna do it too.

Rob Pegoraro (01:35:25):
Weird

Leo Laporte (01:35:25):
Little, I'll do it too. Because if you want election integrity, that's one way to do it, is to be on the ground, be there and do it. That's true. Yeah. Bravo.

Iain Thomson (01:35:33):
Just that democracy is made by, I

Rob Pegoraro (01:35:35):
Think now Donald Trump up these list too, so that's good.

Leo Laporte (01:35:38):
Are you probably, what were those boxes you were

Rob Pegoraro (01:35:40):
Hiding? Table volunteered. I

Leo Laporte (01:35:42):
Saw you

Rob Pegoraro (01:35:42):
Do that vaccination clinic. So yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:35:44):
Alright, Rob, it's great to have you also here. Christina Warren film Girl. Yes. What do you, what's your latest hobby? I know you're kind of not doing the sneakers as much.

Christina Warren (01:35:54):
No, not as much. I'm trying to think. Well, I need a new collection. I'm still on the vinyl. I'm still on the vinyl kick. So, so I, I I, I, I meander with that.

Leo Laporte (01:36:07):
We had a guy on, asked the tech guy today who had a million dollar collection of what do they call those? Funko Pops <laugh>. I'm

Christina Warren (01:36:16):
Not, oh my God.

Leo Laporte (01:36:17):
I'm not down with the kids. He apparently, his biggest thing was he, he collected brand Id Funko Pops. Like he had BooBerry <laugh>.

Christina Warren (01:36:26):
Right. Wow.

Leo Laporte (01:36:28):
There are a lot of Funko pops. So maybe just I'm giving you something that you could think about collecting.

Christina Warren (01:36:33):
I think, I mean, I don't, I I kind of don't need more stuff, but that, that is good. I am I will say like I was hearing like Rob and, and Ian talking I haven't been to black hat in a really long time, stuff on, in a really long time. And now I'm like, okay, you know what? Next year I gotta go, I gotta go back to, I

Leo Laporte (01:36:47):
Have never been dead.

Christina Warren (01:36:48):
It's

Leo Laporte (01:36:48):
Working out. I'm scared

Christina Warren (01:36:50):
To go. It's fun. Is

Iain Thomson (01:36:51):
It? Oh no, it's not that scary. No, no it

Christina Warren (01:36:53):
Isn't. It's really fun. I

Leo Laporte (01:36:54):
Don't wanna be, I know I'd be on the wall of sheep like that.

Iain Thomson (01:36:58):
No, I mean you come on. You're not sending out unencrypted traffic there, you know, you know what, that's basically What's that? You're not sending out I unencrypted traffic, so, yeah, no, I mean wall of sheep is useful as well. What do

Leo Laporte (01:37:08):
You, so let me ask you, what gear do you carry when you're going to this Hacker Con? Do you usually do you have a special burner phone carry?

Iain Thomson (01:37:14):
Yeah, well, no burner phone, no. Because actual wi you know, mobile phone signals are generally left, left alone. Yeah. Obviously I turn the wifi off unless I'm absolutely using it. I'll never use the public wifi network. I usually just have spots on my phone. But the amount of paranoia over this is, is a bit too much. I mean, black hat, almost nobody would, as, the last time I could remember of an active hacking incident was 2008 when two French journalists started buggering about in the press room. And they were escorted from the premises. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:37:49):
That's one thing I learned from your very good article about the network operations center is they catch it right away. Oh yeah. And they, and they will go, they'll pick their head around the door and say, knock it off <laugh>.

Iain Thomson (01:38:00):
Oh yeah. Literally I'm training sessions. They will not, you know, g g has said, you know, he's had to pop his head around the door and say, just a reminder to everyone and one person in particular here, hacking is illegal. We kind of see what you're doing, you know, <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:38:13):
It's good. I'm supposed to hack, man, man. Well, it's

Iain Thomson (01:38:17):
Perfectly understandable 'cause if you're in a training session and someone teaches you how to do something really cool, you gotta try it. The initial temptation is hell, let's try this right now. Yeah. actually the biggest thing, well not one of, not the biggest thing, but one of the most curious thing was an astonishing number of people at Black Hat have pet camps and the traffic on that is almost all unencrypted. So if you think about it, if somebody slurps that, then they can send you a picture of your pet with the name of your pet and the company that provides you Pet Cat. They called

Rob Pegoraro (01:38:47):
That out and the, and say the black hat Knock Talk last. And the blackhead ends with the people who run the network operations center talking about this is what we saw. And last year was hilarious. Yeah, it was. It was a pet feeder. And they're like, well, we know the cat's name is Garfield <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:39:01):
<Laugh>.

Rob Pegoraro (01:39:03):
The metadata was something like the, the cat is a little bit chunky and but because Yeah, most of the stuff you're using, like your Gmail, your Google Dot, it's not pretty much anything of any value

Leo Laporte (01:39:14):
That's encrypted.

Rob Pegoraro (01:39:14):
Is encrypted in transit.

Leo Laporte (01:39:16):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, but not your pet cam, which, no. 'cause It's not that valuable, except as you point out Ian, in your article, it could be absolutely used to fish you. That sounds very credible. Yeah. Perfectly. Yeah.

Christina Warren (01:39:25):
Perfect. Yeah. For that.

Leo Laporte (01:39:27):
Christina collects weird stuff. You got, there was a good NPR r article last year about your movie pass shirt. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and your Pop <laugh>, all my defunct, your CNN plus pop socket comedy stuff, then ever even Yeah. You know, launched. I mean, that's really cool.

Christina Warren (01:39:44):
I, I need Twitter merch. I need X merch. I need both. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:39:47):
Yeah. You need Twitter merch. Yeah, I

Christina Warren (01:39:49):
Do. I have some. But I, but I'm, I'm always up for more. So if anybody has any, you know, failed company merch that you would like to share, I am definitely always open. Well

Leo Laporte (01:40:00):
At the time you were looking for Theranos. Oh, we worked stuff. Did you get some Theranos stuff? I,

Christina Warren (01:40:03):
I, I did. Someone was able to buy some Theranos stuff for me that was very, very, very kind of them. So that, that's great. I

Iain Thomson (01:40:12):
Have rework umbrella, so give it six months if maybe

Christina Warren (01:40:15):
Oh, no, that's a good one. Because I have, I will rework notebook, but I, I need to get more rework stuff. That's actually a good one. Because yeah, they, they are probably from their own. They announced their

Leo Laporte (01:40:25):
Mouth. Oh, they announced we're, we're not gonna make this, we're

Christina Warren (01:40:28):
Gonna be an ongoing con, we're probably not gonna be an ongoing concern. When you see those words, we are probably not going to be an ongoing concern. That means, wow. Okay. So that's gonna be great for the already super, super great, you know commercial real estate market <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:40:45):
Oh yeah. I mean, if you announce as a company Yeah. I think we're going outta business that's not good for your stock price. Right.

Christina Warren (01:40:53):
Which was already 11 cents, I think. And

Leo Laporte (01:40:55):
Immediately people are gonna dump it. I would if I had still had some, no,

Christina Warren (01:40:59):
Genuinely, genuinely was like 11 cents. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not actually joking. Yeah.

Iain Thomson (01:41:03):
It's, it's heading fast towards Penny stock territory and still

Leo Laporte (01:41:06):
Above that dime stock threshold

Iain Thomson (01:41:07):
Though, so that's good. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, I mean, we've worked fair play. I mean, we've had offices in WeWork since before the pandemic. And you knew it was weird and it, what they weren't thinking this through. 'cause When we first moved in, they had free beer. Yes. which was just as British, just my boss was like, they've told them we're British. Right. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:41:29):
<Laugh>.

Iain Thomson (01:41:31):
And sure enough, every Friday, ourselves and a bunch of Australian people in the same building, it was like a five floor block in a building. We'd start on a Friday and we'd finish the barrels and we'd see how far down the stairs we could get, you know, and then that got cut back, but then they released that to Disastrous S one. And we were just reading it and we wrote a very sort of sharp story about it, but we were reading it and you were just like, who wrote this? This meets like a self-help manual.

Christina Warren (01:41:56):
Oh, no, it did. It did. So I actually profited off of it, weirdly. Really? Okay. So this is a true story. So when the S one came out, it was ridiculous. And I was doing my podcast Rocket, and we had a, a domain sponsor. And for the sponsor, what I often do is that I will buy stupid domain. And in this case, I bought energy of we.com <laugh>, and I

Leo Laporte (01:42:19):
Thought nothing.

Christina Warren (01:42:21):
And I thought nothing of it. And it just sat there and, you know, it's like, you know, $12 or whatever it is a year, just renewing. And then I got an email that I honestly didn't see from somebody offering me, I think it was like $350. And then they came back and they were like, actually, we'll, we'll give you $600. And I was like, whoa.

Leo Laporte (01:42:35):
Yes.

Christina Warren (01:42:36):
I was like, yes, you, you can absolutely have my ish post. I'm not, I'm not using the real charm. You can actually have, you can absolutely have the thing that I bought as a gag for, you know, a sponsor read that I've never done anything with. Absolutely. So, I, I feel like I've made more money off of energy of we

Leo Laporte (01:42:53):
No kidding

Christina Warren (01:42:54):
<Laugh> than like the actual, you know, like, than SoftBank at this point. Right. By the way,

Leo Laporte (01:42:59):
Post is how you pronounce an X Post that used to be called Tweets. Now they're sh posts <laugh>, right? Yes. I think that's correct.

Iain Thomson (01:43:06):
Yeah. It needs a t in there, to be honest. But yeah.

Christina Warren (01:43:10):
You know, it does, but I was just trying to try to not, you know, first, first, this

Leo Laporte (01:43:12):
Shows you how bad I am at, at stocks. As soon as WeWork announced that they were going outta business, their stock went through the roof, it became a meme stock. Right. And it rallied by 43%, actually as much as 153%. Thursday it was as high as 33 cents finally closed at 18 cents. But it became a meme stock. So I have, I have I have some things I wanna donate if you want. I have a a old audio file from Tech TV shirt. That's an old Yes.

Christina Warren (01:43:49):
Tech TV show. I would absolute take that. I I'll

Leo Laporte (01:43:51):
Send these to you. I was gonna give them away. I don't, I don't, you know, I'll

Christina Warren (01:43:54):
Absolutely take

Leo Laporte (01:43:55):
Them. This is another one for The Money Machine, which was a tech TV show that is defunct. Here is a Z D TV in the Gram thing, raping

Christina Warren (01:44:05):
That. Okay. Now that I, 'cause I remember when it went from Z D tv. That's right. Techtv and then Thousand. Then I remember

Leo Laporte (01:44:12):
That's 23 years ago.

Christina Warren (01:44:13):
I, I, I, I remember I watched the, it was my favorite network like growing up. Like genuinely, like I watched it every

Leo Laporte (01:44:20):
Day. Next time you go to the beach, you might wanna bring <laugh> this giant, oh, ZD TV towel <laugh>.

Christina Warren (01:44:31):
You think that? I wouldn't, I absolutely would. I will go to the beach with that, and I will proudly

Leo Laporte (01:44:37):
Lay on that. We're gonna package this all up. And I love this, thank you to, to add add to your collection of defunct. That's so good. Because I think if there's nothing more defunct than Zdt V

Christina Warren (01:44:46):
No, I know. And it's so good. You know, the, the, the Paul Allen, there were so many, there were so many great things in that story, Leo, you should really write a book about

Leo Laporte (01:44:54):
Like, oh man, I was there. I watched the whole, whole thing.

Christina Warren (01:44:56):
Really. I know. You should really write a book about just like everybody, what a story. You know, the internet and television's really gonna, gonna combine together. Yeah. No,

Leo Laporte (01:45:04):
Yeah. <Laugh>. Alright. We have lots more to talk about. We've got a wonderful panel and we have you so hang in there more to come on. Episode 940 of this week in Tech. Let's see, continuing on. I love the Fyre Festival t-shirt. You have. That's, that's pretty, yes. That might be better than CD

Christina Warren (01:45:24):
T v. Honestly, that was one of my favorites, especially because I, like it had still had the tags and everything on it. That's one of my, all my

Leo Laporte (01:45:30):
Favorites. That's amazing. Well, I'll keep this one in the package so you can have the original. Thank you. Love Jane Friedman, who is a novelist, an author interesting blog post on jane friedman.com. I would rather see my books get pirated than this, or why Goodreads and Amazon are becoming dumpster fires. Her, she had dozens of AI generated books put up on Amazon over her name, and then they made it into her Good Reads official author blog. And she says, get ready, because sham books are the next big thing. These things sell. She said, with the flood of AI content now published at Amazon, sometimes attributed to authors in a misleading or fraudulent manner. How can anyone reasonably expect working authors to spend every week for the rest of their life policing this? Fortunately she has a voice and her blog post was heard by both Amazon and Good Reads, and that stuff was eventually taken down. But, you know, books credit that are included, they shouldn't have to, this is, I know. This is, this is an easy tick, easy, easy technology. Absolutely. Yeah. If someone puts a name in under an author and they're a published author, it's the easiest thing in the world to

Iain Thomson (01:46:48):
Scan. But, you know, Amazon's not gonna bother because

Rob Pegoraro (01:46:51):
What should, well, how many of us have obvious impersonators on Instagram that sit around for forever?

Leo Laporte (01:46:56):
The difference is Amazon makes money even when they sell these fake books. Also,

Rob Pegoraro (01:47:00):
It should be in Amazon's own interests. Like, I don't want to shop at a place. Right. If,

Leo Laporte (01:47:06):
If I'm gonna get this crap.

Rob Pegoraro (01:47:06):
Is is Yeah. If I'm not familiar in detail with it, that maybe I'm gonna get ripped off. Why some of the, what is good about that For

Leo Laporte (01:47:14):
Me, A AI generated nothing. Garbage books. She found a step-by-step guide to crafting compelling eBooks, building a thriving author platform and maximizing profitability. How to write and publish an ebook quickly and make money promote to prosper strategies to skyrocket your ebook sales on Amazon. I'm guessing most of these titles involve ai, <laugh> Publishing Power, navigating Amazon's Kindle Direct publishing, igniting ideas, your guide to writing a bestselling ebook on Amazon. I'm sure these sell well because who wouldn't wanna do this?

Rob Pegoraro (01:47:44):
They might sell well once. Yeah. But I mean, it's also the case with Amazon reviews where, you know, apparently Jeff Bezos had to buy the Washington Post so that the Washington Post could document how bad the review system is at Amazon for some of the worst <laugh> offenses to get taken care of. Because I guess this company apparently needs to hire a red team of their own Yeah. To look at. That's right. How can our marketplace get subverted? That's exactly

Leo Laporte (01:48:08):
Right. Yep. every anybody ever use Blue Jeans

Rob Pegoraro (01:48:13):
<Laugh> once? My God, it was a pre I

Christina Warren (01:48:15):
Once with

Rob Pegoraro (01:48:15):
Verizon Pre <laugh>.

Christina Warren (01:48:16):
Once with Verizon. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:48:18):
Verizon. So Blue Jeans was a video conferencing act app available at the turn of the last decade. And remember there was this thing called Covid. I think people have forgotten, but we had this quarantine. No.

Christina Warren (01:48:32):
Yeah. Oh, what was, was that the thing that destroyed our lives and, and, and made like Up, did everything right. Yeah. That one. Now it's going back to me now. Okay, cool. Got

Leo Laporte (01:48:41):
It. That's why Oppenheimer's the first theater I've been in years, <laugh> <laugh>. So back in 2020, Verizon said, look this Zoom thing has taken off. We really need a conferencing solution. So they bought BlueJean for more than $400 million.

Christina Warren (01:48:57):
And, and I used it both before and after, and it was never good. I'm gonna tell you this right now. I used it in 20, like 13, 20 14. Because Mashable, like, somebody scammed somebody on the sales team. And it being like, this should be your, your conferencing thing. When I say WebEx was better, that should tell you everything. Sorry. Go on <laugh>.

Rob Pegoraro (01:49:15):
Well, also, the fact that this did not outlive Google's current messaging platform. I know.

Christina Warren (01:49:21):
I mean, that's amazing. That's sad. But $400 million, I mean, 'cause it's not a bad idea in theory. You're like, cool. Yeah, we we can have this thing, we could sell some servicing stuff around it, but BlueJeans really? Yeah.

Rob Pegoraro (01:49:31):
It was a, it's not as dumb as going 90.

Christina Warren (01:49:34):
No, no, but

Iain Thomson (01:49:35):
But I mean, it, it was to video conferencing what Google Plus was to social media, you know, it was a desperate attempt to get in on the game way too late and way too badly.

Leo Laporte (01:49:44):
So instead of selling it on to some other sucker they're just gonna shut it down and write off the 400 million because

Christina Warren (01:49:50):
Yeah, I was gonna say, the tax benefits are better for them. Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:49:54):
Yeah. That's sad, isn't it? They actually, they probably do pretty well. Just,

Iain Thomson (01:49:58):
Oh, the one that infuriates me with that is Nokia, Microsoft bought Nokia. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> ran it into the ground, shut it down, and then got to write that off against taxes. I'm still bitter about that one. You know, if I,

Christina Warren (01:50:08):
People, people that worked on that are still, you know, I, I know some of those people are still, some of them are even still at Microsoft and they're still, you know, have the war scars from all of that.

Iain Thomson (01:50:17):
Well, I think Elop there, I think there's a permanent ban on elope ever entering Finland. Or if there isn't, there really should be <laugh>. Oh, there

Leo Laporte (01:50:23):
Should be. There should be. But wasn't he the c e o of of, of Nokia be before the acquisition?

Iain Thomson (01:50:29):
No, no. He came over from Microsoft after the acquisition. Oh, no,

Christina Warren (01:50:32):
No, it was before. No, it was before. It was. It was before. And then he wrote the burning platform memo that

Iain Thomson (01:50:36):
Microsoft convinced

Leo Laporte (01:50:38):
He burning platform memo to buy it. Oh.

Christina Warren (01:50:41):
He wrote, he wrote, he wrote the burning platform memo that basically said our own symbian thing isn't working. We have to partner with someone else. And, which honestly was correct. He was completely correct in that. But the, the solution was, was not a Windows phone. Much as I know, many, many people loved it. It was Android, it good

Leo Laporte (01:51:01):
Interface ideas there.

Christina Warren (01:51:03):
It did, it had really good ideas. And but it was late. I think that like the first, actually, it's funny that you say this, that you're talking about Nola, because I'm not joking. I actually have this at my desk right now.

Iain Thomson (01:51:14):
Oh, wow.

Christina Warren (01:51:15):
This is a Lumia 800 Oh

Iain Thomson (01:51:19):
Hardware.

Christina Warren (01:51:20):
This was given,

Leo Laporte (01:51:20):
Was that the 41 megapixel one, or was that later?

Christina Warren (01:51:23):
No, no, no, no, no, no. This, this was even earlier. This was early. So this was, yeah, that was the 1530 or whatever. So this was, this did not work in the United States. This was given to me. This only worked on the, the European bands. And but it ran like Windows phone, like 7.5, so it didn't even run the Windows phone eight, which actually had the good app support, but it started to show the ideas. But the hardware was amazing, and I don't know why I still had this <laugh>, but I do, and I remember just like the, I remember the briefing and like the, the, the, the Nokia people being like, so excited about how well it had been crafted. And

Leo Laporte (01:52:04):
I thought that was, those were great phones. I had a number of the Nokia, they windows phone phones.

Christina Warren (01:52:08):
Yeah. The Lumia were great. Yeah. I loved, this was actually, yeah, they were, they were tanks. They were good phones. I I, they were a,

Leo Laporte (01:52:15):
They're beautiful. I have a yellow one somewhere. No, they were, it was soft and beautiful

Christina Warren (01:52:19):
Edges. Yeah. That, that, that was the one with the big camera. Yeah. Yeah. I I tweeted, like, when they were doing their announcement, I was like, should I just give up my iPhone and use a Windows phone for, you know you know, 10 days or something? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And then my and my editors were like, that's a good idea. And both Nokia and Microsoft were like, will you do that? And so I did. And then a million people copied me, but I actually did like, lock my phone in a drawer, forwarded my number because I was on a different carrier and used a Windows phone for a week and, and nothing else. And that was, those were dark days. But <laugh>, I liked a lot of the, but I, I loved a lot of the ideas. But from

Iain Thomson (01:52:52):
A software perspective though, right? Not from a hardware perspective. No,

Christina Warren (01:52:55):
No, no. And the thing is, is even the apps that people were building were good. They just, there weren't enough of them, you know? Yeah. It was just, and, and by that time it was Blackberry 10 was the same thing. Right. Like, they had some really good ideas even going further back, like web OSS really ahead of its time. Yeah. But, you know, just, you had these two dominant players almost instantly, and those were gonna be the two

Iain Thomson (01:53:16):
I used to go over. And but Noia used to do like sort of three or four day press events in the back in the late nineties when press deadlines were done in paper rather than online. Right. And you could afford to spend three

Christina Warren (01:53:27):
Days. How nice time for you. How nice for you. I

Iain Thomson (01:53:29):
Note,

Christina Warren (01:53:30):
I I no genuinely, like, I have no idea what that was like. And I, I'm jealous. Oh,

Iain Thomson (01:53:34):
God. Well, I mean, we had like a one, this particular trip was a knock and maintained a compound just inside the Arctic Circle, like a sort of corporal town which had like a, a 50 person sauna which, you know, you went into, and basically they'd stick beers outside the sauna and snow drifts. You go in, you'd heat up for an hour, then they would chainsaw a hole in the ice. And the lake right next door to it, everyone runs down, jumps in, rinse and repeat. But we spent a lot of time with the Noia engineers, and I'll never forget, I think it was the Noia 1110, the really tiny chocolate bar phone. Yes.

Christina Warren (01:54:07):
I love that one so much.

Iain Thomson (01:54:08):
Now, when they were, were about to launch that, the engineer, we were sitting down with the engineers. He goes, I have to show you this. And he sort of put it in there and he called them up. And when you rang it on vibrate, the phone would walk across the table, <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:54:21):
And

Iain Thomson (01:54:22):
He, he looks as he goes, you see that that took us eight days to actually perfect that. So they did it, and no one's going to use it. But that's the kind of of the detail we want in there. I

Christina Warren (01:54:32):
Love that so much.

Iain Thomson (01:54:33):
But yeah, if Elop ever goes into, into Finland, he's gonna learn what sisu means and learn it. The hardware, I suspect someone's gonna punch him in the face. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:54:42):
By the way, I think you are a very bad influence on our our audience. Because quippy in our oh goodie in our chat is now made chia fresca. Ah. And as he watches, as he

Iain Thomson (01:54:56):
Watches, he need a bit more liquid in that, to be honest. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:54:58):
Fill it up. He says, I'm gonna chill it and taste it. The weird thing is, once you make chia fresca and you let it for a day or two, it turns into Chia Simmons. Yikes. And I don't think, oh, I don't think you want that.

Iain Thomson (01:55:09):
Oh, come on. Even for you, that's

Leo Laporte (01:55:11):
<Laugh>. I don't think anybody, anybody wants that. Here's some happy news. You were excited about this, Rob. It turns out the Curiosity Rover has found striking evidence of habitable seasons on Mars. You know, for years people said Mars had canals, and that was the evidence for the little green men and the Martians. Well, it turns out these mudflats with these peculiar kind of diamond shape, we've seen these on Earth before. These are mudflats. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. And curiosity apparently says this is evidence that there was seasonal wet dry cycles a long time ago, 3.6 billion years ago, which bolsters the evidence the planet was once hospitable to

Rob Pegoraro (01:55:57):
Life. Yeah. Which we've been trying to figure that out. I mean, I've been a space nerd my whole life. So I remember Viking one and two landed on Mars in the seventies. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:56:08):
Snow, snow canals, <laugh>, things that

Rob Pegoraro (01:56:09):
Might have sort of, you know, we, we

Leo Laporte (01:56:11):
<Laugh> Yeah.

Rob Pegoraro (01:56:12):
It's, it's a lot of red dirt, sort of looks like, you know, Utah around ours, national park. Right. but yeah, we're still trying to find that out. And we have this, this rover that somehow landed from a sky crane and is still roaming around. Isn't amazing. The ingenuity helicopter

Iain Thomson (01:56:28):
Power lay a foreign tank, which

Rob Pegoraro (01:56:29):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Which is now wildly outperformed expectations. And the trick is, at some point, if we find things that actually might point to life, we need to get 'em to a lab on Earth. And from what I've read, the problem that NASA has is if you're going to build a series of robot spacecraft that will pick up the samples that curiosity is collecting, put them on a rocket, launch that into, into Mars orbit, transfer that to another robot that'll take them back to Earth. It's approaching the cause of sending people to do it, which I'm all in favor of. Like, I wanna see human footprints, boot prints on Mars in my life. Hope sooner rather than later. But yeah. Super neat that we're around. Aren't

Leo Laporte (01:57:12):
We sending wage of discovery happening? 'cause Perseverance is also collected a bunch of samples. Aren't we sending something to get those samples? So that's the idea. That was the plan, right? Yeah.

Rob Pegoraro (01:57:20):
But

Iain Thomson (01:57:20):
Oh, per perseverance has already collected some. Yeah, yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:57:23):
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:57:25):
And maybe go visit curiosity, pick up some of those.

Iain Thomson (01:57:28):
I, I, I feel the same way as you, Rob. I was, I was out the perseverance landing at J P L and it's Oh, cool. And the second time this century that I have applauded at a press conference, which is very not

Leo Laporte (01:57:38):
Exciting. The thing to do that's

Rob Pegoraro (01:57:39):
Different. You don't want to, that's watch that live. And the engineers are going nuts. I'm like, you need to play this video in every engineering school in America. It's, you're

Leo Laporte (01:57:47):
Sizzling. Especially

Rob Pegoraro (01:57:48):
If you do your job right. It

Leo Laporte (01:57:49):
Took, what, like a decade for that whole thing. Yeah. To, I mean, these guys have been working on this for their whole lives. But

Iain Thomson (01:57:54):
I mean, no, I mean, Rob mentioned the sky crane. I'm with you on that. That was the most amazing Heath Robinson style. Fucked that up method. I, I mean, I, when I

Leo Laporte (01:58:02):
Well, that was only beat by these rubber ball that they put it in, that bounced to the,

Rob Pegoraro (01:58:07):
Which they couldn't, they couldn't scale it up. So then you had to do this crazy thing where you reel it out.

Leo Laporte (01:58:12):
It's hysterical.

Iain Thomson (01:58:13):
Yeah. I mean, like you, Rob, I hope that we see human footprints on Mars. However, I think it's most more likely that we're gonna see Chinese footprints on Mars than America. You think?

Leo Laporte (01:58:22):
Oh, come

Iain Thomson (01:58:22):
On. I think China's gonna be to

Rob Pegoraro (01:58:24):
Mars. We take them. Come on.

Leo Laporte (01:58:25):
No, I mean,

Iain Thomson (01:58:26):
I dunno. They're, I

Leo Laporte (01:58:27):
Think China's about to turn pretty inward. I don't know if they want to continue that.

Iain Thomson (01:58:32):
I dunno. It was just interesting when the Chinese were open, was there, forget all this, does life exist on Mars? Did life exist on Mars? Stuff? They want to know, is there water there? Where is it? Let's look for it.

Leo Laporte (01:58:42):
That's the most important thing, right? Because then you can keep a mission matter on the Yeah, yeah. On the moon.

Iain Thomson (01:58:47):
Well, India's just they, they've got lamb coming up on the south pole of the moon suit. Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:58:51):
Right. If you're, by the way, a fan of all this, we have a great show with Rod Pyle and Tarek Malick from space.com. Rods from the national Space Society. It's called this Week in Space. Every week, TWIT TV slash twiss Norway is going to find meta 1 million crowns a day. This is interesting. The EU seems to really dislike the financial model that powers the web. The idea that ads will be targeted based on how you're using the internet. Google does it fa Facebook meta does it, but Norway doesn't like it. And they say they're now gonna find meta a million crowns. Don't get too upset. That's only about 89,000 euros a day. I was gonna

Iain Thomson (01:59:39):
Say, this is back of the sofa stuff for me. It's not, it's it's not even that. Just checking. Yeah. It's not even that. It's, it's like, it's an accounting expense

Leo Laporte (01:59:47):
Sofa. It's

Christina Warren (01:59:49):
Gonna take more time and effort to, you know, write the check than, than what the amount is worth. You know,

Iain Thomson (01:59:54):
Like, it's also time limited. I think they can only charge it for 90 days. Ah, I may be wrong on that. But penalties

Leo Laporte (02:00:00):
Begin today. Just to, just to, just so you know, mark, you can start writing those checks actually yet tomorrow, Monday. But what they're against is what they call behavioral ads, which are ads based on your use of Facebook, which is kind of how it works. Yeah,

Iain Thomson (02:00:20):
Yeah, yeah. It's, there's, there's ways and mi there's ways and means, you know, I mean, we've currently got this fractured privacy shield arrangement between the US and America, for example. And that's causing terrible problems. Yeah. Okay. Meta is not going to establish a, a sort of stop its entire business model, just 'cause Norway says it, it

Leo Laporte (02:00:38):
Should. Right. However, but however meta has amassed two and a half billion euros in fines in total <laugh>. That might be real money for that <laugh>. That's starting to add up because of G D P R vi, you know, we're gonna talk about this, I'm sure next week we've got Cory Dro and his co-author, Rebecca Giblin from Choke Point Capitalism, are gonna be on twit. That's gonna, and that's all, because I'm just gonna shut up and let the two of them talk. That should be a very interesting tweet. Corey's got a new book which he's currently crowdfunding the audio book for it. And he'll be talking about that, but also we'll talk a little bit about privacy and so forth. His new book is,

Iain Thomson (02:01:22):
I've gotta say, go ahead. I, I'll be, I'd be tuning in. 'cause I went to his presentation at Defcon and it was both brilliant and highly frustrating as a journalist, because, you know, as a journalist, you're supposed to compress a 45 hour, no, can't do, sorry. 45 minute talk into, into something, you know, like a five or 600 or 700 word article, <laugh>. And I just sat there thinking, honestly, this guy's so good. You might as well just say, just give us the text. We'll publish it. You know, it's,

Leo Laporte (02:01:47):
Did he talk about his bet he talked about the new book, which is called the Internet.

Iain Thomson (02:01:50):
He talked about the new

Leo Laporte (02:01:51):
Yeah. Internet con. How to Seize the Means of Computation. So just to, he summarized for us, what did he what did he say? <Laugh>

Iain Thomson (02:02:00):
Well, I'm trying to think of if we can actually get away with saying this, but it was something like the ification of the internet. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:02:05):
Oh yeah.

Iain Thomson (02:02:05):
Yes, yes, yes, yes. Started as platform. And then all these tech companies, the example he gave was Facebook. When it first started out, it told consumers, you don't wanna be on that nasty MySpace. Run by that greedy Australian millionaire. Come to us. And then they built, there was a point to that. Yeah, there was a point to that. But then they built a bot, which allowed you to interact and share data between MySpace and Facebook. And that actually got Facebook to the explosive growth they, they're in. And then they said to businesses okay, we can now advertise in a behavioral way. 'cause These idiots have given us all this information, so pay us lots of money. And to publishers, same thing. Put a couple of lines from an article in, you can drive a lot of traffic. And then they turned around and said to publishers and consumers, yeah, okay, we lied.

(02:02:51):
We're just gonna take all the money now. And this is the kind of thinking that he wants to deal with in this sort of thing. You know, we've given so much money. The, the whole point of the internet was to get rid of the middleman and allow direct transfer. And we did do that for a while. And then we reintroduced the middleman with a vengeance. So, you know, the example, a good example was apps. He said, apps are basically a website with intellectual property added in that they can use to sue users for. I'm gonna do the promo now, so

Leo Laporte (02:03:18):
I can't wait. I, I love Corey to pieces. He's been on the show many times, and I also like it because it's an easy day for me. I just ask one question, sit back, and two hours later show's done <laugh>.

Iain Thomson (02:03:30):
Well, he, he said he is got eight books ready, because he writes when he's anxious. He's amazing. Yes. So, well, he said he, he writes when he's anxious. That's right. And the covid lockdown was a very productive time. That way

Leo Laporte (02:03:41):
We will be talking about Yes, I can say it because it, it as a whole, it's not a bad word, the in acidification of the internet. It's a good coinage. Yeah. That's a safe word. Right. we will be talking about, Hey, you're gonna hear it a lot next week. <Laugh> with Corey Doctor and Rebecca Giblin next week on this week in Tech, his new book, but also Chuck Point Capitalism, which was genius. I mean, he, nobody is better at cutting to the heart of the matter and explaining what it means and what to do about it. Then I think then Corey and Rebecca is a great co-author. We've had them on before. It'll be a lot of fun. A little time out before we wrap things up with the, I have all the 35 stories we haven't gotten to coming up, but <laugh>. But first, for those of you who missed it, a little synopsis of some of the things that happened this week on Twit.

Leo Laporte (02:06:21):
You. Stop saying, I'm robbing banks. I don't twit tv. Your source for the latest tech insights. I haven't had to rob a bank since Club Twit started three years ago. <Laugh>. Thank God for Club Twit. It's very clear. I've given all that up. <Laugh>. I I thought Anthony was gonna put AI Morgan Freeman in place of ai Leo for the announce on that. Is that coming next week? Or We're a little worried about using Morgan Freeman's voice <laugh>. I think it would be nice though. He'd be good for our for our bumpers. As long as it's hip to the joke. Yeah. Celebrity voice impersonated. So if you missed anything, tune back in. It's all online at twit tv on the website. You can watch after the fact. And of course, a great week ahead. Celebrity voice artificially generated celebrity voice artificially generated.

(02:07:09):
I like that. Yeah. Be the first C V A G C A G Simpson's actual dramatization may not have occurred. <Laugh> a little r i p for a couple of people. Big in tech. Bram Mullinar passed away. He was the author of Vim only 62. I hate it when when they die younger than me. That's bad news. Vim. Of course. It was a much better version of vi the text editor that now appears Vim on almost every open source distribution of Linux. It come, I think even on the Mac you can get with Mac oss, you get Vim. I certainly ins, you know, it's installed on a lot of them. It's the default editor. He built it as a clone for vi and kept it going for a long time. The license was originally charity wear. He invited users who used Vim and appreciated to support children in Uganda, sending a, a donation to them according to the next web. Donations to the charity amounted about 30,000 euros every year, enough to help 50 children finish their education from primary school to university.

Iain Thomson (02:08:22):
If you look on his webpage, the gallery from the school. And it was obviously something that was very close to it. Heart. Yes.

Christina Warren (02:08:27):
Yes. amazing. And, and even now, they want all the donations, you know, to go to. I think that's great, to that project, which is amazing. That's

Leo Laporte (02:08:34):
Great. He will be missed. And of course, as with all Open Source Pro, that's really the best thing about Open Source, is they can survive their creator. And I'm sure people will continue to develop them. But the man who started it all, Bram Mo and I passed away at the age of 62 this week, also gone Rhoda Kin, she was the person who put Consumer Union on the map. She was 93 years old. She was named executive director, the first female executive director of Consumers Union, way back in 2000. And actually she was this, I'm sorry, did I say 2074? 1974. She served for 16 years as their council. Then in 74, selected as Executive director. She changed its name to Consumer Reports. You may know that better that way. Under the leadership of kin subscriptions to the magazine doubled, and they're very important. They don't accept ads to 4.3 million in 2000. She also raised $40 million to build their new headquarters in Yonkers. And honestly, the I think the godmother of consumer reporting and the stuff, the kind of stuff we try to do to represent consumers in their interests it's very, very important. So a couple of people who are important to the community passed away. And then there's Mr. Beast Burgers <laugh>. Oh boy. Have you ever had a Mr. Beast Burger? I feel like you might have.

Christina Warren (02:09:59):
No, I have. I have. I more than than

Iain Thomson (02:10:01):
Reside sound.

Christina Warren (02:10:02):
No. Moret more than once a good, well, well, because here's the thing, it's a Ghost kitchen and so it very much depends on what Ghost Kitchen it's coming from. And there are like many Mr. Beast burgers in my area. But here's the thing, Seattle food sucks, and it, it just does. And we don't have a good food scene. But also we have a really, really bad, like, takeout scene. So especially during c o there was not a lot of options after, say like eight o'clock at night, which is, doesn't feel that late, but in Seattle, apparently that is too late to ever get food even before the pandemic. So I have ordered Mr. Beas Burger more than once, and yeah, no, it's, it's not good. It's

Leo Laporte (02:10:43):
Primarily, primarily made in Italian restaurants. Buca Depo is one. And then is another Italian chain. So what? Yeah, exactly what they do. It's a, it's a popup kitchen. What they do is they, they, the company that puts this together contracts with a Italian restaurant in your neighborhood. And then when you call in an order for Mr. Beas Burger, which by the way looks like this on the DoorDash menu, that's

Christina Warren (02:11:08):
Big claim. It looks like that

Leo Laporte (02:11:09):
It's a smash burger with crispy outsides and stuff. And then they so the, the Italian restaurant was apparently Illy prepared for all of this makes it slaps a Mr. Beast Burger on a brown paper bag. And then OB Eats, or whoever brings it to you, if either from the Brio Italian Griller Booka Depo. But this is my favorite picture of what one Kotaku reporter got from his Mr. Beast Burger. Does not look like the looks like it's been in a car. Someone someone's already eaten this and then put it that Burger Airbags <laugh>.

Christina Warren (02:11:47):
Yeah. No, that, that, that's the thing with the Ghost Kitchens, is that the orders are often wrong. Yeah. And then there's no recourse that you can really do because Yeah, because it's a ghost. They're a ghost because it's a ghost kitchen. Yeah. And and then, and then even like the, the idea behind it is, oh, you know, we'll give people the same recipe and they can make it multiple places. Yeah. Except you don't, A franchise will ensure that you're getting product from the same suppliers so that you have the same types of buns, the same types of patties, the same, you know, brand of cheese, whatever. Same type of ketchup. They don't do that with Ghost kitchens. So one, Mr. Beast Burger might be like, edible. It's not great. It's overpriced, but fine. And then another one, you might get it and you're like, okay, what actually is this? And why is my grill cheese that was $10? Like, why is it the way that it is?

Leo Laporte (02:12:31):
You may remember that Mr. Beast opened an actual brick and mortar Mr. Beast Burger in a New Jersey mall. And it was, I grew up in New Jersey. Which mall is this? The American Dream Shopping Mall, which really doesn't narrow it down much, does it? Yeah, no, well, look at all these people. It's no Short Hills <laugh> in a Short Hills Mall. I actually know. Okay, awesome.

Christina Warren (02:12:52):
I was gonna, I know the Short Hills Mall too.

Leo Laporte (02:12:54):
Very upscale. So Jimmy Donaldson, who is Mr. Beast and is the number one YouTuber makes millions of dollars a year giving away, let's face it. Let's be honest, millions of dollars mm-hmm. <Affirmative> for all sorts of interesting things, giving people sight. For one thing, he contracted with a company called Virtual Dining Concepts for this pop-up restaurant, Mr. Beast. He decided this is not working Well. Tried to get, 'cause he saw the burgers, <laugh> tried to get out of the deal and is in fact suing them, saying, you did not deliver. Now they're suing him for $100 million. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, because he's dissed his own burgers and is trying to get out of the deal. So what a mess for Mr. Beast. Yeah.

Iain Thomson (02:13:40):
Interesting. You know, who else is really big into Ghost Kitchens? Travis Knicks. Oh,

Christina Warren (02:13:44):
Yes. Yes. He, he's made millions, so many, so much money off of it. He was, he was into them even before the Uber. He was ousted from Uber. But I, I, I, I, you're so right, Ian. I always think of that. I'm like, man, that guy really like, nailed that market timing without having any advanced knowledge. He really, really did. Because at, at first the idea seems sort of interesting, but sort of like, okay, well, is this really gonna take off? And then it became a very viable model very

Leo Laporte (02:14:09):
Quickly. Yeah. His company is called Cloud Kitchens. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And now they're, according to the Financial Times, expanding into South America building a new empire, I think called

Iain Thomson (02:14:20):
Be South American girlfriend as well. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:14:23):
50 cloud kitchens across 11 cities in Brazil, Mexico, and Columbia. As with the kitchen operations, oh, they're doing more than kitchens. It's something called pick and pack convenience stores, pet foods, medicines as well. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Christina Warren (02:14:37):
Oh, like posh

Leo Laporte (02:14:39):
In this country. You gotta fail. You gotta fail up. I mean, I look at Adam Neuman of WeWork. Wework about Yes. Declare bankruptcy. Does it hurt Adam Newman? No. Nope. He's a multi-billionaire making more money and getting more venture capital to buy up what real estate now in Miami. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and apartment.

Christina Warren (02:14:57):
He's gonna try it all over again. He's gonna do it

Leo Laporte (02:14:59):
Again. He do it

Christina Warren (02:14:59):
This in residential consequences at all.

Leo Laporte (02:15:01):
You cannot Well, he cannot fail that. In

Christina Warren (02:15:03):
Fairness. Yeah. In fairness to, to Adam Neuman. I, I, I hate doing this, but I will defend him in this way. Unlike many of the other, you know, scam things that people that I love, you know, people like Anna Devey, people like Billy McFarland, people like Elizabeth Holmes not

Leo Laporte (02:15:18):
Yeah. They served,

Christina Warren (02:15:19):
Don't mislead anyone

Leo Laporte (02:15:20):
For minor scams. They get thrown in jail. It's gotta, the trick is scam big. Right?

Christina Warren (02:15:26):
Right. Well, no, but no, it's actually different. He didn't lie to anybody. He didn't scam anyone. It, he was very clear about what his ideas were and people just bought into it, even though it made <crosstalk>, they thought it

Leo Laporte (02:15:36):
Was a good

Christina Warren (02:15:37):
Sense.

Leo Laporte (02:15:37):
Yeah.

Christina Warren (02:15:37):
Even it made absolutely no business sense. That's them. So I don't actually, I actually don't fault him at all. I'm like, you know what, it's

Leo Laporte (02:15:42):
Not fraud. Yeah.

Christina Warren (02:15:43):
No, not at all. He didn't mislead anyone.

Iain Thomson (02:15:46):
No. He basically convinced SoftBank to give him 700 million. Yeah. and an awful lot of other stuff. Well,

Leo Laporte (02:15:52):
Softbank's reputation for business expertise of little inflated. Not the greatest. I mean,

Christina Warren (02:15:56):
I mean, I mean, I mean, you guys, they bought Sprint

Leo Laporte (02:15:59):
<Laugh>. Oh yeah. They bought Tech tv, <laugh> briefly. They were, they were, they were an investor. Anyway, we always would go around and hushed voices talking about Sunon. Didn't work out too well for them either. Travis Kalanick, of course, founder of Uber was ousted after many scandals. His, his second act now worth $15 billion. Yep. Just kind of $850 million funding round late last year.

Iain Thomson (02:16:28):
Yeah. It's you're right Rob. You fell upwards. You know, you do. I mean, it's, this is actually something Cory had had, had a very lovely example for you. He said, used to be that people worked for a big tech company and then went off and did their own startup and tried to compete. Then it became, okay, we leave the big tech company and then we do our startup. We get bought out for 400 million, which he said is the most, half, most half-assed way of getting a pay rise he's ever heard of mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And then it was, you work for a big tech company, you stay there, but they have free kombucha and you get massages, <laugh>, and then now it's, you work for a big tech company until they fire you. And you know, and,

Christina Warren (02:17:05):
And then they, then they pay you. Then they give you a bunch of money to start something else.

Iain Thomson (02:17:08):
Well, I mean, you've made the point that, you know, when they Google laid off 6,000 people, at the same time they did a share buyback, which would've paid those people's salaries for the next 27 years. You know, it's just, it's getting harder and harder in the tech industry to actually make a, you know, the kinds of living that people have been used to.

Leo Laporte (02:17:26):
Well, maybe you, we should talk to Sam Altman who ran Y Combinator and now he's running open AI and his newest project Tools for Humanity, A giant orb <laugh>. It's not that giant that you put your eye up against and scan it. And, and the idea, what is it? I don't know. The idea is, it's called World Coin. In some countries you get $50 in world coin, the equivalent of $50 in world coin for letting them scan your iris. Not in the US apparently. But lots of people still want to do it. He claims it's privacy forward because we don't get your retina scan. We get a hash of it. So I

Rob Pegoraro (02:18:04):
Could actually an engineering sense. I get it. Yeah. But on the other hand, this strikes me as another case of somebody from the valet saying hubris. Oh yeah. Here is something that governments have struggled for thousands of years. You know, who is whom we're gonna solve it by throwing technology in a blockchain at it.

Christina Warren (02:18:22):
Right. And when, when you could still just use a database. You're exactly right. Yeah. You're exactly

Rob Pegoraro (02:18:26):
Right. And also the name, you're right. And the World coin reminds me of WorldCom. I'm showing my a there.

Leo Laporte (02:18:30):
Oh boy. I did that didn't. Oh boy. It's not a good parallel. Well, it's good 'cause the orbs named M c I, so it's really perfect. I'm just kidding. <Laugh> the, I actually, and this is why I bring it up. 'cause I want to ask you guys who are smart if, if it makes some sense. So the, I his goal is to scan all 8 billion eyeballs, or actually, I guess there's 16 billion, but you only need one scan, 8 billion eyeballs. So that, and then solve the authentication problem. Remember, the retina is not going to the company just a hash of it. So all they can do is say, yes, this is the same eyeball we saw last time, but that's authentication. Right. And it's strong authentication. Those eyeballs are stored or those, those hashes are stored in, in the blockchain. Yes. not sure exactly what the next stage is.

Christina Warren (02:19:24):
Right. Right. Because, because, 'cause that's the thing is like, okay, so you have everybody scan their eyeballs, and now we all have, you know a, an identity card that we can use in some way to at least say, well, at least the hash of this retina matches this, this matches this person. But like, what does that really mean? Because could my name still be different? Could Right. My location, could other things be different? Like it's just a hash, it's like, and, and who's overseeing this? Like, I, on one hand I get it, but on the other hand I'm like, okay, well what about people who might just be like, I don't want anything. What

Leo Laporte (02:19:56):
If I'm not living, living on a sea stead? And I still have to, Hey, if you, I, I want anybody who is, I would love to move with those we giants of flesh and steel. Yes. And I still have. That's right. Well, you got 'em all in there as a sail,

Iain Thomson (02:20:08):
As a sailors seasteading is one of the most stupid ideas. Oh, it's not

Leo Laporte (02:20:11):
Gonna work. Oh, shoot.

Iain Thomson (02:20:12):
No, it's absolutely not gonna work.

Leo Laporte (02:20:14):
The idea is to create a back independent nation based on a Yes oil platform out in the well.

Christina Warren (02:20:21):
Yeah. You know, what's great about that is that there was kind of so Charles Ponzi, when he was desperately trying to think of ideas, the

Leo Laporte (02:20:28):
Inventor of the Ponzi scheme ladies in general.

Christina Warren (02:20:30):
Well, well, the per, well, the person that the Ponzi scheme is named after, I mean, it's really, you know, it existed before him, but, but the person who made it synonymous when he was selling these postal reply coupons and, and saying that he would double the money and, and, you know you know, 60 days or whatever he was trying to figure out how he could actually legitimately make the money and then go, you know, go straight and then offer people reasonable returns. Not, you know 50% of your money in, in, in two weeks, but reasonable returns. Yeah. his idea was that he was going to buy with some money that he kind of stole from some banks. He was going to buy some big decommissioned steam liners from the United States government and fill them with all kinds of things and do basically what these sea setters wanna do, where he would basically have like a, a huge shopping mall that would go port to port and people would just buy everything that they ever wanted from that, that, that was, that was one of his genius business ideas.

(02:21:25):
That's, it's

Leo Laporte (02:21:26):
Like,

Christina Warren (02:21:26):
It's very similar to the sea setting thing and that that's all you really need to know. <Laugh>, it's

Leo Laporte (02:21:30):
Like a floating hospital, a mercy ship, but with with flip flops and it's WeWork, but on a boat, frozen burritos. Right. Sounds great. <Laugh> sounds great.

Iain Thomson (02:21:39):
I mean, the thing people forget about, you know, because I mean, I do a fair amount of sailing, thank goodness. 'cause It's the Bay and we've got great sailing, but boats break all the time. You're in a salt water environment that is constantly moving, that puts enormous stress on things. Yeah. And you look at some of these ceder designs and you think that'll last five years. I

Leo Laporte (02:21:59):
Wanna live on this. I don't know. So met seasteading.org, although I have to say as you scroll down, it all looks really good and all the positives. Then you get the article Titanic submarine catastrophic conclusion. Yes. What does this mean for Ceders <laugh>?

Christina Warren (02:22:13):
I was gonna say, I was gonna say like that, that company was based in Everett, Washington which is not far from me. I did try to buy merch legitimate stuff. Oh. I was not able to find it. Oh. An

Leo Laporte (02:22:23):
OG gate t-shirt would be king of fines. No,

Christina Warren (02:22:27):
Absolutely. That's the thing. I want a real one. Like, but, but people aren't selling the real gear yet. Maybe I'll be able to find something, but yeah. Wow. We saw what happens with this already. Like we literally just a few weeks ago, you know, got a very sad look at

Leo Laporte (02:22:42):
This whole Yeah. What happens. This thing

Iain Thomson (02:22:43):
That, that did that did lead to a bit of a discussion in the office, actually. Because after that happened, we were writing a story and the code, the phrase was used a Titanic, a Titanic level of stupidity and hubris, and it was just like, ouch. Maybe too soon, actually. Yeah. I think, we'll, we'll leave that one.

Leo Laporte (02:23:00):
Some say that even the,

Christina Warren (02:23:01):
Even the reg was like, that's too much <laugh>. Well, no,

Iain Thomson (02:23:03):
No, we weren't writing, we weren't writing about the submarine. Oh, okay. But we were writing it would've

Leo Laporte (02:23:08):
Been a good title. Oh,

Christina Warren (02:23:09):
Would've been. Gotcha. I was just say because because that would've been good for I That's what I thought you were talking about. Okay.

Iain Thomson (02:23:13):
Oh, no, no. I mean, no, we don't shy away from that. I mean, when

Christina Warren (02:23:17):
When, yeah, that's what I thought. I

Iain Thomson (02:23:18):
Was like, that's

Christina Warren (02:23:19):
Odd for you not to

Iain Thomson (02:23:20):
Jack. Yeah. When Jack Dorsey was left as c as sole c e o of Twitter the subhead we used, it was the headline. But the UK objected was 'cause Dick Costello pulled out. So the headline was, yeah. So the headline was, big Dick pulls out Jack's off to the hot seat <laugh>. Oh. that's so good. We originally, originally put that as a headline, and then the UK editor in chief got on the phone within about 25 minutes. <Laugh> can't say that I could, I I could hear the phone call from across the office. What the

Leo Laporte (02:23:49):
Hell are you guys thinking? Back to back to Sam Altman in World Coin. Here's an interesting paragraph in the New York Times story about it. Ultimately world coin's, bankers envision a grander plan to protect people from AI advances that they claim will eliminate millions of jobs. They're promoting the orbs, the ones scanning your iris as a possible foundation for universal basic income.

Iain Thomson (02:24:16):
Oh, not this old chestnut again

Leo Laporte (02:24:18):
They say our iris IDs will help distinguish your, oh, this is, it will help distinguish real people from robots as if a, as if a robot can't duplicate my iris. Right, right. Yeah. I bet it could also, I mean,

Iain Thomson (02:24:32):
It's, it, it falls down on one simple biological point, which is people's eyes change over time. Oh, really? You know, if you get a, if you get a cataract, does that mean you're automatically locked out of your back again?

Leo Laporte (02:24:42):
No. Good call.

Iain Thomson (02:24:42):
Good point. You know, it's like if you lose an eye in an accident,

Christina Warren (02:24:45):
Well, it's like Minority report, right? Yeah. Like, that's how he's able to get through his, he gets somebody else's eyes. It's like, welcome, you know, back to the gap, Mr. W like, are you enjoying your t-shirts? Like that's, that's what they

Iain Thomson (02:24:56):
Do. Yeah. You know, it's, and things change. I mean, 'cause I remember when these first came out and they I was talking to one of a researcher, and this was about sort of late nineties early noughties, and they were saying, certain drugs, make your eye, make your pupils go really large. So if you're on M D M A or an L S D or something like that, you are effectively locked out from using any authentication method using this system. Wow. So if you take, actually

Leo Laporte (02:25:17):
Can't

Iain Thomson (02:25:18):
Get onto social media, is this a defensive measure? That's actually probably a good thing, but you get an eyeball scratch, you can't either. So, you know,

Leo Laporte (02:25:25):
It's, if I were you, Christina, I might be looking for those world coin t-shirts. Just, you know, maybe.

Christina Warren (02:25:31):
Yeah, no, I mean, if anybody has anything like, or, or actually that's a good idea. I should see if I can buy them now. Get 'em

Leo Laporte (02:25:36):
Before they

Christina Warren (02:25:37):
Like, have them. Yeah. Yeah. Well that, that's my favorite thing to do, is to buy them from their official stores. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Because then like, I'm, I'm both contributing to the problem and I'm like, you know, <laugh>,

Iain Thomson (02:25:47):
But we, we need to make this a phrase for when you see a company, which is obviously gonna fail. And it's like, well, it's a kind of Christina Warren collection kind of company. Yes,

Christina Warren (02:25:56):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (02:25:57):
How many Christinas is that worse? Yeah, I think I Exactly. We could do that. I think we could, we could create that that idea. Well, I have to get going and make some chia fresca. So I want to thank Ian Thompson for inspiring me

Iain Thomson (02:26:11):
To the, a pleasure as always, the beverage

Leo Laporte (02:26:13):
Revolution of the age.

Iain Thomson (02:26:15):
Now, if I could just convince you to get into Marmite, my work here would be done. I

Leo Laporte (02:26:19):
Got a jar, I've had that jar for, for a long, I've got Jar. You have taste, taste

Iain Thomson (02:26:22):
More than once. <Laugh>. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:26:24):
I've got the Vegemite and the Marmite. You know, just depending they are different. I know They're different. Oh, yes. Ian writes for the register, the register.com. Always a pleasure to have you on. Ian, do rest your voice. But you sound fine. Yes. And I'm just saying, you know, I know what you've been through and we appreciate it. Thank you.

Iain Thomson (02:26:43):
Thank

Leo Laporte (02:26:43):
You. Yeah. Yeah. Back from Defcon, also back from Black Hat. Rob Pegga. No, see, I knew I was doing great, right to the end, end. We were doing so good. Rob Peguero. I was gonna say Paro, but he's correct. The old country. He's gotta say it in, in, you know, Arlington style. Rob Peguero, great to have you. Thank you. You'll see his bylines all over for a long time in the Washington Post. Most recently PC Magazine Fast Company. So good to have you on. Please come back anytime. We love having you. Let us know next time you're in town, but we can also do it. We have this thing called Zoom As you can tell, people don't have to be in studio. Christina Warren, I just love having you on. I think you're fantastic. Thank you. I have an original BRF T-shirt. You might want to get a copy of if if I can. Okay. But I will send you these C D T V.

Christina Warren (02:27:33):
Yes, thank you. I I would love that genuinely, because I, I have like, such fun memories of it and it fits the collection. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:27:40):
John do. Was this all of them? Because I, there was one that had the slogan on the back and everything. I don't, I guess somebody has, has grabbed that one <laugh> already. I'm sorry to say, but no problem. No problem. We'll send you. Thank you very much. We'll send you everything. We have, this was,

Christina Warren (02:27:55):
I love it. Thank you. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:27:57):
I think I took a picture. Oh, I don't, I didn't post it here. I posted it somewhere else.

Iain Thomson (02:28:01):
I have thing, I've got a pair of windows. I've got a pair of internet Explorer 95 binoculars hanging around somewhere. See if I can find them for you.

Leo Laporte (02:28:08):
What's the weirdest old crap? I know I have the Windows 98 cards. Remember you were supposed to have a party to celebrate the launch of Windows 98. I think I have the debit cards. Oh,

Iain Thomson (02:28:20):
Cards. God, those adverts. Yes, I wrote about that. Let's get together an operating system launch Parts

Christina Warren (02:28:25):
Four. Yeah. No, that, that was Windows seven I think. Was it

Leo Laporte (02:28:28):
Seven? There was a, it was seven. You're supposed to throw a party for it. Yeah,

Christina Warren (02:28:31):
You throw, throw your own party. They had like a kit for it. I'm embarrassed to, I'm embarrassed to admit this.

Iain Thomson (02:28:37):
You did it, but I will, I don't believe

Christina Warren (02:28:38):
No, no, no, no, no. Thank No, no. It's worse. It's, it's, it's both better and worse. It's both better and worse. When I was 13, I made my mom take me to the Windows 98 satellite launch in Atlanta. And I had a T-shirt and Yeah. And it was all businessmen and people who did those things. I was the only one of the only female. Oh yeah. Christina's mom. I think's my, my mom got hit on a lot <laugh>. I I obviously did not. My mom got hit on a lot. But yeah, so that, wow. Wow. It's, that's a real thing that I actually

Leo Laporte (02:29:07):
Did. It's, it's a woman quick <laugh>. <Laugh>. Get on over there. No, I think

Iain Thomson (02:29:11):
That's, I think that's really sweet. To be honest. I mean's space stuff has always gone well, it's m Paul Allen famously had a huge falling out with Bill Gates 'cause Allen popped down to see the first space shuttle launch and Gates was like, what the hell are you doing? Setting this kind of example. I thought he said a pretty good example. I think

Leo Laporte (02:29:27):
So. Yeah. I wish I could find this shirt. Somebody must have taken it this ziti TV shirt and on the, but the thing that makes this exciting besides the weirdo inside it is the back which says, for everyone who wants to be part of the e generation Z DTV is an experience that inspires people to discovery. Technology's promise for themselves. Oh my God. Why you would put that in the back of a t-shirt. I do not know.

Christina Warren (02:29:52):
Speaking of Paul Allen. Speaking of Paul Allen, right there. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:29:55):
There you go. Yeah, probably Paul wrote it ly that

Iain Thomson (02:29:56):
Has aged like milk. Yeah. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:29:59):
Hey, thank you Christina. Thank you Ian. Thank you Rob. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We do TWIT Sunday afternoons, two to 5:00 PM Pacific. That's five to 8:00 PM Eastern, 2100 U T c. If you wanna watch us do it, you can watch live. We have a live audio and video stream at twit tv slash live. If you're watching live, gotta join us in the chat room. IRC is open to all at irc twit tv and I mean open to all. You can even use your browser. You don't need an IRC client, although that would work too. We also have of course, the Club Twit Discord that's available to All Club TWIT members love to see you in either chat room while we're doing this show after the fact on-demand versions are available at our website at twit tv. There's a YouTube channel devoted to this weekend tech, and of course you can you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get it automatically the minute it is available. Thank you everybody for being here. Here we are, 18 years in and we're still going strong. Thank you for watching the longest Running Tech podcast in the world. I don't think we'll ever be beaten on that one. <Laugh>, no one else will be nuts enough to do it for nine 18 years. I've been saying another twin. It's in the can. We'll see you next time.