This Week in Tech 1008: Internet Legal

Summary

All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio) – Episode 1008: Internet Legal
Release Date: December 2, 2024

Host: Leo Laporte
Guests:

• Devindra Hardawar, Senior Editor at Engadget
• Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, Home Automation Expert at The Verge
• Doc Rock, Director of Strategic Partnerships at ecamm

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1. Introduction

In this milestone episode of This Week in Tech, host Leo Laporte engages in a spirited discussion with renowned technology journalists Devindra Hardawar and Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, alongside Doc Rock from Hawaii. The panel delves into pressing issues surrounding internet legality, the evolving landscape of social media regulations, and advancements in smart home technology.

2. Australia’s Ban on Social Media for Minors

Overview: Australia has introduced a plan to ban social media usage for individuals under 16 years old, set to take effect next year. This bold move aims to protect the mental health and well-being of children from the adverse effects of online interactions, such as cyberbullying.

Panel Insights:

• Leo Laporte highlights the legislative process:
  “It sailed through the parliament in the lower house on Wednesday, passed the Senate on Thursday.” [03:36]

• Devindra Hardawar expresses skepticism about the feasibility of enforcing age restrictions without infringing on privacy:
  “I don’t really think so... it is kind of impossible to do that without infringing on other rights.” [05:21]

• Jennifer Pattison Tuohy views the ban as a “warning shot” to social media companies to improve their platforms rather than a practical solution:
  “This is all designed to penalize the companies. So... it's a sort of needle in the haystack.” [04:29]

Key Takeaways:

• The ban is seen as a regulatory pressure on social media firms to enhance age verification systems.
• Concerns exist regarding the practicality of enforcing such bans and the potential for children to bypass restrictions.
• The panel agrees that while well-intentioned, the ban may not effectively address the root issues of online safety for minors.

3. Age Verification Technologies

Yachty’s AI Estimation: A company named Yachty has developed an AI-based tool that estimates user age by analyzing facial features. Platforms like OnlyFans and TikTok are incorporating this technology to enforce age restrictions.

• Leo Laporte questions the accuracy and ethical implications:
  “Facebook is using Yachty. TikTok is using Yachty... would it then be okay if we could do this in a privacy-forward way?” [13:07]

• Devindra Hardawar points out significant biases and inaccuracies:
  “They admit they don't work very well on Asian people... just depending on the type of person, depending on how wealthy you are, you may look younger.” [13:15]

Challenges Identified:

• Accuracy across diverse demographics remains questionable.
• Potential privacy violations and ethical concerns surrounding biometric data usage.

4. Parenting and Managing Kids’ Social Media Use

Tools and Strategies:

• Jennifer Pattison Tuohy emphasizes the importance of parental education and the use of monitoring tools:
  “I use a program called Bark... it sends me alerts when it comes across potentially concerning content.” [17:00]

• Doc Rock advocates for open communication and fostering self-esteem in children to mitigate bullying:
  “Kids with good self-esteem don’t get bullied.” [11:08]

Parental Control Features:

• Platforms like TikTok are enhancing parental controls, allowing parents to manage and monitor their children’s online activities more effectively.
• The necessity for parents to stay proactive in educating themselves about the tools available to safeguard their children online.

5. Comparison to Past Media Concerns

Analogies to Television:

• Leo Laporte draws parallels between current social media concerns and past worries about the impact of television on children:
  “Imagine if Australia had announced a ban for television for kids under 16 in 1967. Yeah, no.” [08:52]

• Jennifer Pattison Tuohy compares the pervasive nature of social media to the influence of TV and rock 'n' roll on previous generations:
  “This social media is a little bit more intense and pervasive than TV or rock and roll.” [06:35]

Generational Differences:

• Unlike television, social media offers individualized and isolating interactions, making regulation and parental oversight more complex.
• The panel acknowledges that each generation faces unique challenges with emerging media technologies.

6. Smart Homes and Matter Protocol

Current Status and Challenges: The Matter protocol, designed to unify smart home device compatibility, has yet to deliver on its promises fully. Despite two years of development, significant progress is still underway, with consumer benefits not yet realized.

• Jennifer Pattison Tuohy explains Matter’s role:
  “Matter is a protocol... it's a software layer over Thread and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.” [44:19]

• Devindra Hardawar expresses frustration over the slow adoption and interoperability issues:
  “This whole conversation feels like... putting the cart before the horse.” [04:00]

Future Prospects:

• Expectations are set for Matter to become more practical over the next five years, enhancing local connectivity and device interoperability in smart homes.
• Current limitations include incomplete standards adoption and ongoing compatibility issues among devices.

7. CES 2024 Expectations

Advancements in TVs: The panel anticipates significant price drops and advancements in OLED technology, making large-screen TVs more accessible than ever.

• Devindra Hardawar shares excitement about affordable high-quality OLEDs:
  “A 77-inch OLED from both Samsung and LG under $1,500.” [61:36]

Smart Home Innovations: Expectations for smarter, more integrated home automation systems that offer energy management and enhanced security features.

• Jennifer Pattison Tuohy highlights the potential benefits:
  “Energy management is going to be the killer feature.” [54:10]

Key Takeaways:

• CES continues to be a pivotal event showcasing the latest in consumer electronics, particularly in smart home technology.
• The focus remains on making advanced technology more affordable and user-friendly for the average consumer.

8. Conclusion

Episode 1008 of This Week in Tech provides a comprehensive discussion on the intersection of internet legality, social media regulation, and smart home technology advancements. The panelists offer insightful perspectives on the challenges of implementing age restrictions, the shortcomings of current verification technologies, and the ongoing evolution of smart home standards. As Australia takes a bold step towards regulating social media for minors, the conversation underscores the need for balanced approaches that protect young users without stifling innovation or infringing on privacy rights.

Notable Quotes:

• “This is all designed to penalize the companies. So... it's a sort of needle in the haystack.” – Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [04:29]
• “Kids with good self-esteem don’t get bullied.” – Doc Rock [11:08]
• “Matter as a whole still has a lot of building to do before it's really ready for primetime.” – Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [44:35]

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Disclaimer: This summary is based on the provided transcript of This Week in Tech Episode 1008: Internet Legal. Timestamps correspond to the positions in the transcript and are used to attribute quotes accurately.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. What a great panel. It's going to be kind of conversational day because it's so much fun to talk to Devindra Hardawar, senior editor from Engadget, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, who is a home automation expert at the Verge, and of course, Doc Rock, our aloha man from Hawaii. Jennifer and Devindra are getting excited about ces. We'll take a look at what they expect, including matter updates. Does matter. Really matter. Big screen TVs less expensive than ever before. We'll also talk about Australia's plan to ban social networks for people under 16. Could that possibly work? It's all coming up next on this Week in Tech. Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT this Week in Tech. Episode 1008, recorded Sunday, December 1st, 2024. Internet Legal. It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech, the show. We get together with the week's best journalists to talk about the week's best news. Actually, you guys have been the best journalist for more than a week. Let's say hello.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Hope so.

[Leo Laporte]

It was a slip. Say hello to Jennifer Patasatui. She works at the Verge, where she's the home automation mama. Smart home mama.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Hi, Jennifer.

[Leo Laporte]

Welcome back.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Jennifer's a regular on Tech News Weekly and we somehow managed to lose her number and couldn't get you back on Twitter. We got it. Thanks to Micah. So great to have you. Doc Rock is also here. The doctor of the Rock. He's director of strategic partnerships at ecamm, which has nothing to do with why he's on. He's on because, man, you did something good.

[Doc Rock]

Yeah, we did. We actually won a game.

[Leo Laporte]

They won a game. Ladies and gentlemen, congratulations. Okay. And no, you're on because we love you. We do use eCamm. We're using eCamm right now in. In the cloud, but that's a complete coincidence. Good to see you.

[Doc Rock]

I love what you guys did. It's so. I'm trying to explain it to people and they're head blown because they don't. They don't understand. But I'm like, it's kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

So we run ECAM on a Macintosh in the cloud at Mac Stadium and splash top into it. And then there's something to do with restream that I don't understand that streams it to eight different platforms. It's crazy. Anyway, before we get into that, Devendra Hardware is also here. We Love, Devendra, senior editor in Gadget. Hello, Devendra. Good to see you.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Good to see you. Happy to be back.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, a lot of times you're on when I'm not here because you're kind of one of my regular esteemed fill in people. So it's not always fun.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, I can, I can really just like phone it in now. Right. I could just relax. You should relax the conversation.

[Leo Laporte]

That's. God knows I've been doing that for 20 years. Nothing wrong with that. Biggest story of the week is that Australia has done what everybody else has been waiting and wondering. They've banned social media for everyone. Banned it for everyone under 16. It doesn't go into effect until next year. I mean, next. Next year, like it's a year away, but still, that's a big deal. I'm sorry, this New York Times has decided to keep me out of here.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Every news site does this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I am a subscriber, by the way. I just, I'll sign in and then we'll be able to see the story. Unclear. Even, even the Australian parliament or whatever they've got there says, I'm not sure how this is going to be enforced, but it's up, it's up to the social media networks to figure it out. Is this a good idea?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

It feels a lot like a kind of. This is a warning. You guys need to sort this out. It's going to get. Or we're going to, we're going to really crack down because there's no penalties for the people that sign up. This is all designed to penalize the companies. So if this feels, it feels a bit like grandstanding to some extent, like a warning, like you need to, you need to shape up or ship out. Very straightforward Australian people, they like, you know, they don't pussy foot around.

[Leo Laporte]

It sailed, according to the New York Times, sailed through the parliament in the lower house on Wednesday, passed the Senate on Thursday. Prime minister has said it puts Australia at the vanguard of efforts to protect the mental health and well being of children from the detrimental effects of social media such as online hate or bullying. They have to be bullied again. They'll never be bullied again. They have to take reasonable steps or the corporations will be fined about $32 million for systemic failures to implement age requirements. You know, these guys make so much money that 32 million isn't. They might just say, yeah, fine, whatever, we'll pay the fine. Devendra, is it possible. This is the real question. We talked about this a little bit last week. Is it Possible to do age checks without violating the privacy of everyone who uses the medium?

[Devindra Hardawar]

I don't, I don't really think so. Like we've been, you know, seeing this, reports of this happening for a while, but also this same conversation happens around like limiting porn access in the US in some states too. And it is, it is from what I've seen from the researchers, like it is kind of impossible to do that without infringing on other rights or making the experience more complicated. And also I think this whole thing kind of just misses the point, right? Like, because kids have had access to this stuff for a while, it's really hard to just say no, this is impossible now, especially when you're not putting any restrictions on it. And I feel like it misses the point of what they really need is to just really push these companies to be better rather than limiting it altogether. I think it's just like an easy fix to assume like, okay, you're making the Internet safer. These kids, kids are going to find a way around this stuff. They want to talk to their friends in other countries. So this is not really much of a fix. But it'll make the adults and the politicians in Australia feel better about themselves, I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember when I was a kid that it was generally considered really horrendously damaging to kids that they would watch hours of tv.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

This is what it feels like to me. It feels like our generations television, it's rock and roll in your brain, the previous generations music.

[Doc Rock]

Yeah, it's prior to that.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

This is rotten your brain to be fair. So you know, this social media is a little bit more intense and pervasive than TV or rock and roll. But it does feel like it has a similar kind of this generation, this is what we're dealing with. And I think, you know, my point about this being sort of, you know, a warning shot is I think Australia knows and companies, the countries that have explored this know that there isn't really anything you can legislate here. But you do need to create this sort of a sense of we need to fix what's broken about these platforms. Because there are so many benefits. I mean, when I was last on leo, we talked about this. I think we were talking about TikTok because there was something similar was happening. But there are so many benefits to social media and the Internet and having allowing children online. But there are obviously significant downsides and things that have to be policed and managed by either parents or communities or the government in this case. But you know how you do it and what the detriment also is of some kind of law like this. Like, are you going to, like you say people have friends and connections that they may lose and that could, that can have a negative benefit on people just as much as cutting them off, you know, cutting them offline. And it's not just social media too. I mean this, I think YouTube is not included in this. Messaging groups are not included in this. So it feels like a sort of needle in the haystack to some extent. We're going to target this one area and say it's bad. You have, you're not allowed on it until you're 16. And then, you know, but you can go to YouTube and you can, you know, online message with your friends. So it's, it's sort of putting the, you know, I feel like putting the cart before the horse. You know, let's come up with. There's plenty of great analogies that we could come up with. But it, in some, in some sense, I'm, as a parent with a 16 and 13 year old children, I appreciate that people are making an effort here to address some problems and call, bring attention to problems that social media is creating. But this type of blanket ban isn't going to fix, is not a solution, but it creates conversation.

[Leo Laporte]

Imagine if Australia had announced a ban for television for kids under 16 in 1967. Yeah, no. Television for kids under 16. The difference this time is that it's technology and there's something a certain group of people feel technology have this kind of attitude towards it, like it's dangerous magic. But it's, I don't think it's any different than TV or radio or.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, you know what the big difference is though here is that it is isolating and it is individual. So you are on a phone, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Think watching Gilligan's island wasn't isolating, but.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

You would maybe watch with your friends or your family where. Whereas social media, it's this, it's this, isn't it. It's the, the generation that is just.

[Leo Laporte]

This, this generation though says I am socializing. This is where my friends are, are on Instagram. That's who I'm talking to. Much more so than somebody sitting next to me on the couch being a couch potato. I'm sorry, go ahead, Doc. Rock.

[Doc Rock]

No, I was saying like, okay, back then when Gilligan's island was a thing and Batman and all of those shows, I was the only male in my household. So I watched it in the basement by myself and I spent a lot of time look what happened to him? Yeah. So I, I do feel that, yes, I understand why people think the tech is scary, but a lot of that has to do with, in the US at least it's our education system. Because when we had opportunity, when dope, when like people like Leo and I dove into tech when we were young, everybody else thought we were absolutely insane. This is crazy. The Internet's a dangerous place, whatever. And in the us, honestly, the media treated it as dangerous. Treated it, treated it as dangerous up until they all got their own sites and became part owners of these media companies. And then they stopped saying how scary it was. And everything on the news about at the end was go to our website, go to our social media accounts. So the parents, a lot of them still have that. It's a dangerous place, Heavily, heavily mired in their brain because that's the way it was up until about early 2000s. So there's that. And then, well, all I do for my niece, I personally don't have any kids, but for my niece, we just tell her we protect her self esteem and we teach her to have some self worth. And kids with good self esteem don't get bullied.

[Leo Laporte]

Does it change your attitude if you know that Rupert Murdoch is the guy behind this, as he is the guy behind every damn thing that happens?

[Doc Rock]

Terrible in Australia, 100% because he has a, he has a monetary investment to get you back his forms of watch. Fox.

[Leo Laporte]

You could argue Fox does more to harm your brain than Instagram.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

In May, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. The country's Australia's biggest newspaper publisher, began an editorial campaign to ban children under 16 from social media. This came straight from them called Let Them Be Kids. Through the middle of this year, News Corp. Mastheads in the parliamentary inquiry aired emotional accounts from parents. My child has lost their life due to bullying. This is scandalously wrong. Now on Wednesday, Paris Martineau, who writes for the Information, brought up the article she wrote for the Information last weekend about a company called Yachty, which uses AI to estimate age. And this is something that certainly Yadi would very much like to have happen in the US as well as in Australia. OnlyFans uses yachty. TikTok uses yachty. The idea is when it looks at you, it says, oh, you're under 16, no more for you. By the way, LA is doing this. They have age verification. I think it's for porn specifically. But let's say that this technology existed, that you somehow, and I'm skeptical, could accurately identify somebody's age by looking at them. Like, to the precision that you could say, okay, you're under 16, you can't use this. Would it then be okay if we could do this in a privacy, forward way?

[Devindra Hardawar]

I would, I would really wonder about where that data is coming from. You know, there's just. There's just so much else involved when you're making these considerations. I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

They admit they don't work very well on Asian people.

[Devindra Hardawar]

There's a. There's gonna be a lot of gaps. Yeah, there's gonna be a lot of things. Your data set is not looking at it. Just depending on the type of person, depending on how wealthy you are, you may look younger than you know somebody else. So, no, I would not have faith that this would.

[Leo Laporte]

Facebook is using Yachty. TikTok is using Yachty. It's gonna be everywhere.

[Devindra Hardawar]

This all just feels like a distraction.

[Doc Rock]

I get quoted 8 to 10 years younger than I am, which is good.

[Leo Laporte]

I'd say you're 37.

[Doc Rock]

See, that's why I'm saying, Yahtzee. That's. Somebody put in the chat, Yahtzee.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I've always been quoted older because I've had, like, gray hair since I was a teenager. So I'm gonna, like, mess up all these AI filters, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Jennifer, you're the one with kids this age. You're. You're the one with one kid who would pass and one kid who wouldn't pass.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, and my. My want. My youngest has just become technically Internet legal, right? Because we, in theory, 13 is the youngest. You're allowed to be Internet legal. Internet legal. It's funny, I get little things keep popping up, like meta quest. Like, I get things saying, oh, now that Your child is 13, they're allowed access to this, this, and this. And so my whole sort of Internet landscape for her has suddenly opened wide up. Not that she wasn't already on a lot of these things, although I've never let her have an Instagram account. I'm not a fan of Instagram.

[Leo Laporte]

She doesn't currently have an Instagram account.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

No, but she. And my. So my son does use Tick Tock, but he doesn't post. She's not been allowed. He just looks at it. Yes, he says he's the scroller. That's what I do, by the way. And I've, you know, one thing I had. My daughter's very creative and we just got a kitten. And I had sort of said to her, well, if you're interested in using social media, let's maybe do something creative. So we Wanted to, yeah, create an account, you know, because the main thing she likes to look at Tick tock. When she looks with me is at the cat videos.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what, Jennifer, that's kind of brilliant because she gets to do it, she gets to participate. But. But anonymously as a kitty.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Not putting it and be creative and all that.

[Doc Rock]

Yeah, and that's the thing, she puts that spin right. I teach my niece and nephew. They're both Internet legal. That's funny, I never heard that before.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a great phrase.

[Doc Rock]

You have to create more than you consume. Now that's easy coming from a creator. And I'm the Funko. So I'm like, yeah, you guys can be on the platform, but you have to create more than you consume. So my nephew makes beats and dance videos because he's a professional dancer. He's been on TV the whole nine yards. And my niece, she just, she's not ready yet.

[Leo Laporte]

So aren't we glad that Tipper Gore did not ban video games for people under 16?

[Devindra Hardawar]

I lived through that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we went through that. We thought that was going to ruin that generation.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I was, I lived in Connecticut in the 90s. Who was it? Was it Lieberman? Like one of Lieberman always about the video games and how evil video games are and I don't know, spending a lot of time on the Internet and playing games got me where I am today.

[Leo Laporte]

So it feels like demonizing technology and demonizing the Internet is really for political game, not because they really care. That's what it feels like to me. Yeah, I mean, out of sync in our discord.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

That's very true. Except for, you know, as a parent, I have seen where there can be harms and you know, there are downsides to every technology. Those downsides to rock and roll. There was downsides to television and you know, I think it's always important to keep that dialog open and to be looking for solutions when problems arise. I agree. A blanket plan, a blanket ban here is not one achievable or two really going to help because kids find the way around very easily.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Australia, the Australian government says we understand that we don't care, we don't care.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But you know, social media has, you know, we went through the pandemic too, which sort of hyper, hyper realization for social media because everyone, that was the only way people could communicate. So for my children's generation, they've grown up with social media and it became the primary way they communicate. My son doesn't text message his friends. He Snapchats them. You know, my.

[Leo Laporte]

This is his social. This is how he's social.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah. So it. But, but also the flip side, I think the danger and I haven't seen it with my son because he's social in real life, but is when social is just digital and you don't go out and you don't, you know, you use that as the crutch because it's so easy for children especially. You know, we seem to have. I saw a comment in the chat that there's been no proof that social media has any negative effect on people's emotions. I mean and there's research on both sides. But I think it's so much easier to create Personas on social media and be who you want to be. It's so much easier.

[Leo Laporte]

You think kids don't do that in high school.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But the point is it's a lot easier.

[Leo Laporte]

I was a drama kid. I had a Persona, believe me.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But when you're in, you know, it's a lot easier to hide behind the screen than it. And then when you go into real life be a completely different person or be shy and not. And so I. The healthy balance is the important thing. But I don't think that's the banning it and you do to this is really down to the parents and the education of the parents, not so much the children because we did not grow up with this. You know, the generation that grew up with social media will be having children in the next 10, 15 years and maybe sooner. And that we have not had. We don't have the tools as parents to really understand the impact it's having because we haven't seen the long term effect. We just see these awful stories about terrible accidents or terrible things that happen to people who, you know, that people connect to social media when in fact there could be many other extenuating circumstances. And you know, but the Internet loves a good headline about that and that's sad. So we see this a lot and I find that, you know, as a parent when you see someone saying, well I. My son was driven to do this because of being bullied on social media, you can see why they're going to the social media was the problem, not the people. And that's. And the parents have to be educated and they have to learn how to manage these types of things. I mean one of the things I do is I use a program called Bark which monitors my children's social media accounts and their messages and other things and sends me alerts when it comes across what it can Consider as potentially concerning content. It, what it tells me can be quite often pretty useless, but sometimes it'll come out with, you know, something that was like, okay, now I need to go talk to my daughter about this and, or my son about this. And those types of tools are useful. You kind of have to fight technology with technology. But I just don't think a lot of parents know about these things and are using these tools. So yes, it's about, it's about educating the parents. And this is what I was saying about earlier on. This is opening that dialogue.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you remember Stranger Danger?

[Doc Rock]

Oh, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like there's a whole generation that grew up never playing outside because they were con. Their parents were convinced that there was a stranger looking around every corner to ready to kidnap and abuse their child. Well, I think that did more isolate kids and create weird kids than the Internet did. And it was bs. The biggest danger to kids then and now is people they know, relatives and parents. And so this, to me, this is, this. It's tragic because we have invented something very powerful with technology. And I think that the problem is it scares some people and these people are playing upon our fears and their own fears to damage something that could be incredibly useful.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I don't, I mean, I don't want to take social media aside on this. Yeah, there, there are some benefits to as well. I use it every day. This stuff is scary. Like we should be aware of what we're doing and how we're using it and how our kids are doing. I think that's the important line to toe here because there has been a lot of research, you know, in the past saying like, oh yeah, Instagram has affected teen girls in some ways or other kids in some way. And then there's counter research saying that that's, that's overblown too. And it's like, clearly something is happening and you just need to be aware as a parent. But the problem, I think they should.

[Leo Laporte]

Ban mean girls in high school. That's what they should ban.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I mean, ban me in general. Yeah, ban, ban. Basically. I mean we, we are currently building a new administration of just meanies and jerks. So you know, get ready. Who knows? Who knows? Ban everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Jennifer, use this Bark app, which is cool. Bark us. How much is it expensive?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, I think I want to say it's like $12 a month.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's a little pricey. So some. Oh, and they have a watch some people won't be able to watch.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Quite frustrating because the iPhone has very. It doesn't work well with the iPhone. So see it's my opinion, so I might be grandfathered in and it, it covers any device that they use. So phones, watches, computers. As I said, it's difficult. The iPhone's restrictions make it hard for it to examine some platforms. But yeah, it can act. It's got this weird thing. They have to enter their passcode to allow it to access. So every sort of 10 minutes or 20 minutes their phones will be like, enter your passcode. And my kids are like, this is really annoying. I was like, okay, it's this or an Android phone.

[Leo Laporte]

So is it also.

[Doc Rock]

That would be child abuse.

[Leo Laporte]

So I think that that's really the solution, not governmental regulation, but that these social media apps and the platforms are running on the iPhone and Android phones should do a better job of giving.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Parents control parental controls. And that's, I think that's what we were talking about Last time is TikTok had just come out with some more robust parental controls because some of the platforms really do have very poor restrictions that you can implement. Like I can actually control my, my son's TikTok account and control his feed in as much as you can control a TikTok feed, you know, like refresh it to get rid of certain things. And those are all new features that you can get so many of. So Instagram does not have great parental controls. I think they just recently announced new ones that they were bringing.

[Leo Laporte]

They now have a teenager account.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah. So that's what we need to see more of. We need to see better parental controls and parents need to be able to be able to go in and change settings and like also you know you have parental controls on the iPhone so you can limit time, time restrictions on apps and Android has something similar again kids get round them so you have to always be on top of it, which is a full time job. But it's. You're sitting, it's important.

[Leo Laporte]

Jennifer, with three people who probably would be the kids who would have gotten around. Oh absolutely 100% didn't hurt us. In fact in a way maybe it taught us how to use computers.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I am taking that learning towards my like my oldest child is just 6 years old now. So this is a 10 year from now problem for me or so. But to what you were saying Leo, like I don't think it's just government regulation for a lot of things for dangerous things has been helpful on the whole for society.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm in favor of seat belts. Yeah.

[Devindra Hardawar]

The danger is but the companies weren't, you know, if we left it up to the car companies, we'd be flying through windows left and right. But it is like over regulation. I think something like a full on ban of an entire suite of apps and software just seems a bit overblown. Like this is not going to last in Australia. But hopefully they and we all come up with some sort of solution because I think these companies, I look at Mark Zuckerberg now and his new glow up and I'm like, you just don't care. You actually, your solution to living a better life is just to stop caring about Facebook and Instagram, what's actually happening. He's all about Metaverse and AR and everything. His whole new life philosophy is essentially like, just don't bother with all the negativity that people are saying.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Don't apologize.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Don't apologize. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

There's actually a creepy strain among the Silicon Valley billionaires of Jeff Jarvis calls it TESS creal. That's the acronym. But the point of it is primarily this generation doesn't matter. What really matters is we get to the stars and that the generations down the road so they're willing to sacrifice everything in order to create AGI go explanatory and all of that is for the future generations. It doesn't. And in order to get there, by the way, it's very close to eugenics. Maybe it's not a bad thing if we prune out some of the current people.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's absolutely eugenics.

[Leo Laporte]

It's eugenics. That's why Elon Musk says have more kids, but not if you're, you know, not in the approved categories. And so it's creepy as hell. The other thing I would say is important is that kids are growing up in a world with social media. They're going to grow up in this world. Is, isn't it a disadvantage, a little bit of disadvantage. If they don't get access to it till they're 16, they're not learning the skills. Wouldn't it be better if they learned the skills of how to manage it, how not to overuse it, how to use it appropriately?

[Doc Rock]

Leo, I want to chop on this one. As a hood kid, you know why I don't use terminologies like sketchy neighborhoods? First of all, I hate that because it's a little bit. I'm gonna just call it racist when people say this neighborhood.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You know what they mean? I know what they mean when they say sketchy.

[Doc Rock]

As a hood kid, I can go into any neighborhood in anywhere in any country and I'm Good. Why? My neck's on the swivel. I know how to hold myself, I know how to carry myself. I am pretty much not in any danger. Why? Because I was exposed to it and learned how to mitigate these circumstances as opposed to be fearful of it and hide from it.

[Leo Laporte]

So not that I would ever advocate any kid be brought up in those kind of rough circumstances.

[Doc Rock]

It was the 80s in D.C. and New York. Not for the weak of heart. Okay. But what that has allowed me to do as an adult is I live a primarily fearless life. And living a primarily fearless life has allowed me to succeed in many other categories where everybody was afraid to go into. I was always able to go into stuff that other people would be scared of, including us staying in tech. Honestly, back then when everybody was scared of tech, we were fearless of tech. So we went in and we learned all of these things and now we're able to mitigate these things. So I, this is a catch 22 because I have friends who are super, super tight lipped about stuff around their kids and I have the friends that they like. I'm not going to hide swearing in front of my kids. They're going to hear it in the real world, but they will never say that to me. Right. They would never address me or insult any other adult. I find the kids who raised in the house where that's not taken away from them. They're very respectful. The kids where it's taken away from them when they get a chance to. They want to try and they want to explore.

[Leo Laporte]

Get the opposite.

[Doc Rock]

They want to try things that were taken away from them.

[Leo Laporte]

My wife was raised in a household where she wasn't allowed to listen to Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath as a result. And it drives me crazy. She's still a big fan of hair metal bands and it's driving me crazy.

[Doc Rock]

I can just see her with her hair teased out. Don't tell her I said that. I tried.

[Leo Laporte]

So there's an unintended consequence.

[Doc Rock]

And honestly, we're not talking about sugar, we're not talking about fat. We're not talking about the horrible things that are really bad. We're sidetracked by this stuff. So I even believe, like if you check the studies, as Dev said, they're ballot. They're on both sides. Who paid for the study? When you read a study, always go to the back and see who paid for the study before you go all in on what they say.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, simple. I agree with you. Thank you, doctor. You're not a doctor for Nothing. Actually, for people who don't know you, you kind of were a doctor, weren't you? In the army?

[Doc Rock]

Yeah, no, I didn't go to. I was in Kuwait. I didn't go to Kuwait. I was at that point old.

[Leo Laporte]

You are older than you look.

[Doc Rock]

Okay, that's what I'm saying. I'm gonna just keep the 37. Go. Keep it down, Leo. Privacy.

[Leo Laporte]

I celebrated a birthday on Friday and it wasn't.

[Doc Rock]

Friday. Was Happy birthday.

[Leo Laporte]

Wasn't a happy.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Oh, you're a Thanksgiving niche baby.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Thanksgiving.

[Doc Rock]

Ish.

[Leo Laporte]

That's me.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Moving around Thanksgiving.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Anyway, good conversation. I think there are a lot of issues here. I think you're right. We got to protect kids from sugar too. But I think that's the parents job. Right. And I hate to see the Australian government say, no, no social media for you. Maybe, though, maybe Jennifer, you're right in a way that this isn't intended to become a law because look at you see TikTok and Instagram and others already kind of making some progress in parental controls. Maybe it's just to scare them a little and get them to do the right thing.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I hope that's what it will do because I honestly don't see that this would be feasible. I mean, you know, there's so many bans on so many things, but people get around. And this is, as we've said, has benefits, has negatives. But if, you know, the fear of regulation generally is what creates the sort of incentive in companies to fix the problems that they've identified. You know, there's no doubt that there are problems with social media that need to be addressed. And hopefully this type of legislation coming from countries and laws that we may see in other countries too. I don't think Australia is alone. And I know Britain has sort of looked quite seriously into regulation and law for social media and we already, we have it here and you have to be 13. So I mean, it's not like this is completely out, out of left field. So I think hopefully we'll see the platform step up to address some of these issues. But ultimately it's, it's not just down to the technology. This is, it's social, it's societal. We all have to kind of help mitigate the harms and it does. If it's kids we're worried about, it's got to start with the parents.

[Leo Laporte]

Coppa, which sets the age 13, doesn't say you can't use it. It says that they can't gather information about you that, you know, it's a very different kind of law that I think is a good thing. Right. You shouldn't. We shouldn't advertise sugary sweet cereals to children and we shouldn't gather information about them when they sign up for platforms. That's.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But you're not technically allowed to sign up for Facebook if you're at all. If you're.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's Facebook's response to coppa, which is.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Look, all right, in that case, don't be using our site if you're under 13. What they could say is, okay, we won't collect information on you.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

There's no fun for them.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a little too. That's a bridge too far for us. Jennifer Patterson Tuohy is here. Great to have you. JPT from she's on the Verge. Do you do their podcast, right?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, I'm on the vergecast occasionally. Yes. Especially whenever there's something about matter.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, does matter.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Matter. Doesn't matter Matter. Yeah. So. And Smart Home anything sort of connected home automation, IoT that's sort of my realm. And also on the Twit network once a month on Tech News Weekly with Micah. Micah Sargent, always a lot of fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Love having you on. From Engadget, Devinder Hardware, who is going to ces. You're crazy, man. Is CES still a thing?

[Devindra Hardawar]

That's still a thing. I mean, I have not been since before the pandemic, but really sending smaller teams basically. And I think a lot of sites have done this, but this year we're making a bigger push it in gadget and I kind of miss like seeing the new stuff that we need to write about for the following year. So especially when it comes to TVs, other devices like laptops and stuff, it's nice to get a hold of these things so I can tell people if it's good or not or interesting or not.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we'll talk about that when we come back. I think that's a. I'm glad to hear it's still around. And Doc Rock, who is joining us from the Aloha State in beautiful Honolulu, where it is you have an advantage in the advent of code. Do you realize that you joined me last night as I was trying to solve the first problem which ships at midnight Eastern, which, which means people who want to get on the leaderboard have to sigh off at midnight or, or if you're in the UK at 4:00am or something, it's not too bad here, 9:00pm but you're what, you're five hours ahead of.

[Doc Rock]

Oh, I'm three hours behind you, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Three hours behind, yes. It's like dinner time when it comes out. That's nice.

[Doc Rock]

It was like 8 o'clock when you were jumping off last night, so.

[Leo Laporte]

I love that.

[Doc Rock]

Yeah, I can cheat a little bit.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm gonna do that again tonight, 9pm Pacific. I'll stream it on my channel and on YouTube and so forth because it's kind of. I'm. I think it's kind of fun. It's risky for me. It's like going. Going around naked. It's like I may be a complete idiot. Watch and find out. Doc Rock is at with eCamm. It's great to have you. And of course you have your own YouTube channel, YouTube.comdocrock.

[Doc Rock]

Thank you. And, you know, it's funny, we just had this whole conversation about social media. And what I've done for the last month was I basically made a video every day for 30 days, and I keep them unedited and unpolish. And I wanted to be as natural as possible.

[Leo Laporte]

That's my special.

[Doc Rock]

My. My Gen X people are starting to be afraid because they think they need to edit everything from watching the kids in these perfect videos. And I'm like, no, man, we're. We. We already passed all of that. We got blemishes we can't get rid of, so let's just be us and. And share what we know. So I've been making a lot of videos super unedited and just. I love that putting it into work.

[Leo Laporte]

It's one of the reasons we do stuff live on Twitter. And I've always done stuff live on radio and TV to do the minimum amount of editing, to kind of let it all hang out. And I was looking back at the video I made last night, I was thinking, boy, I would like to cut out that 20 minutes of wasted time. I would like to tighten that up. But no, we go out there as we are. Doc Rock at doc rock on YouTube. He's a thinker, a creator, a maker. I'm you. I love that. What a great slogan. Very nice.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I love the unedited type of. You know, because there's too much polish now in social media and YouTube. And I love it when it's the. The personalities and the connection that you can feel with when you're listening or watching someone. I mean, I. I've been listening to Twit for a long time, and, you know, it was one of my first podcasts. And I just, you know, you really feel like you're listening to Friends talk as opposed to watching TV or a radio show where it's produced and polished and, and that sort, I think, is something that social media, the Internet has really helped one of.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and there's another, there's another side of that. I watch my son, who's a TikTok star, an Instagram star, he's a YouTube cook. And it kills you, all of that editing to create all that content every day. It's just not tenable. The people who do that, a few years in, they're burning out. It's just not good. So I've been in this for the long haul.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Authenticity is so key. Authenticity makes things.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I agree. Makes the world go round. I appreciate it. Great to have you three very authentic people with us today on this Week in Tech. We'll go to CES in just a little bit, but first, a word from our sponsor. This Week in Tech, brought to you this week by netsuite. All right. You know, I think probably some of you are in business, right? You have a company and you probably wonder, this future, this thing that's coming down the road at us, what is, what is going to happen? Ask nine experts, you're going to get 10 answers. Rates are going to go up, rates are going to go down, inflation is going to rise, inflation is going to fall. Can somebody just give me a crystal ball and get it done with? How about a Magic 8 Ball? Well, until then, over 38,000 businesses have future proofed their business with NetSuite from Oracle, the number one Cloud ERP, bringing together accounting, financial management, inventory and HR into one fluid platform. There's an advantage to having it. A single platform with one unified business management suite. There's a single source of truth, right? Plus you can see right into what's going on. You've got the visibility and the control you need to make quick decisions with real time insights, real time forecasting. It's as if you're peering into the future and you're getting actionable data that gives you the answers you need so that you can act with some authority, Right? Because you know when you're closing the books in days, not weeks, you're spending less time looking backwards, more time on what's next. That's pretty awesome. Tell you what, I wish. I wish I needed an ERP solution because this is the one I'd use. Speaking of opportunity, there's a lot of great stuff on the NetSuite site, including the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning. You can get that Right now for free. Netsuite.com TWIT that's netsuite.com TWIT the guide is free. So just go in there, fill out the form and download it and I think you'll find a lot of great insights in there. Netsuite.com TWIT thank you for your support, Netsuite. We appreciate it and thank you for supporting us by going to that address. We do stream now on eight different platforms. I should have probably warned you, Doc and Devendra and Jennifer that we are on not only in our club, Twitter Discord, but we're on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, X.com, linkedIn, Facebook and Kik. Is that eight? That's eight.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

I know.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Doing it right. That's what you gotta do. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I'm not sure, I don't see a number. But how many. Anthony, do you know how many people are watching right now on all those streams? Quite a number, I think. So be nice, be authentic. And you know what, when you do it live, you don't get to edit it. And I kind of like that. Ces. Oh, you can't call it the Consumer Electronics show. Right. It comes from the Consumer Electronics association, but it stands for nothing. Used to stand for the Columbus and Electronics Show. And I'm, you know what, if you don't explain it, then that's what it is. Then you're, I mean, you got to say that. I don't know why the CEA doesn't want us to say that anymore. But anyway, that's, that's what it is. It is normally a show and has been around for 50 years, I think something like that. Normally a show where electronics dealers would go to see what was coming from the manufacturers that what they might be putting in their stores in the holidays at the end of the year. So they go in January to see what they might be ordering in October. That's also important to know because a lot of the things you see at CES are not yet products or won't be products until the end of the year. So you have to kind of look at everything with a grain of salt.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

What do you might never be products.

[Leo Laporte]

Or very often nobody orders them.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

A lot of those.

[Leo Laporte]

Remember the toilet paper robot?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah. Well, there's a lot of stuff people bring just to get attention.

[Leo Laporte]

Just to get it.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact, I'll tell you the secret. They have these pre show shows like Show Pepcom and Showstoppers. CES does their own and the key is if you want to get ahead of the Game. You could buy a booth at ces, but better to buy a booth at these little mini shows. Better yet, buy a booth at the front door because most local TV journalists are so freaking lazy, they'll get the video they need at the first two booths and then leave. And that's where the toilet paper robot was.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Speed Day team for tech journalism. That's what those like pepcom and Unveiled.

[Leo Laporte]

So Devindra, you get. You're getting by now an avalanche and probably you too, Jennifer, of press releases.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Pr getting ready for invites. Like, I mean, what. December just kicked off, so I'm going to be flying to New York in a bit to take some early meetings from companies.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, now they're doing it even before you go to Vegas.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Oh, my. Most definitely. That's been.

[Leo Laporte]

Jennifer, are you going to Vegas for ces?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I will be there, yes. It's been a big smart home show for the last, well, pretty much since after the pandemic, since they reopened. It's the Smart home used to be the section used to be really, really tiny. The first time I went, which was I think two years before the pandemic. And then last year it was almost the entire Venetian conference room. Comfortable, all smart home. I remember, I think it was three years ago. Myself and our TV guy, Chris Welch, the Verge only sent sort of three or four of us. This was so the year after the pandemic. And he went to the Las Vegas Convention center, which is the big one first, and I went to the Venetian, which is the small one, because it's where the smart home was. And he messaged on our work slack and he said, the Samsung booth is really weird. And I went like about half an hour later, I went in, was like, the Samsung booth is awesome. Because it was all smart things, no TVs.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

He was like, yeah, I know it was a big change. But yeah, for me that was exciting. For him, not so much. He's like, where are the TVs? But LG still had their big giant walls.

[Leo Laporte]

It used to be you're going in the north hall, that first main entrance. Doors would open on the first day of the show and the crowds would pour in into the kind of the TV area. And I can't remember, was it LG who would. Somebody would have Sony. Somebody would have famous Panasonic always this amazing.

[Devindra Hardawar]

That's lg.

[Leo Laporte]

It was. I haven't been in years, I have to say. I haven't been since 2020. The last CES I went to was the COVID CES free Covid CES same. And I have to remember, I have to remind myself because at the time the Home Automation Pavilion, because it was in the, it was in the south hall, it was just like an area. I always thought of it as like the Tower of Babel Pavilion. A bunch of technologies that don't talk with each other, don't relate to each other, that are destined to break your heart. Really. Matters changed a little bit that now at least there's an industry standard.

[Doc Rock]

I'm praying for Matter stuff.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's something.

[Doc Rock]

I've been such a mess without matter and I'm like needing more and some of my. I have my OG Philip bulbs are finally starting to show the huge Hughes.

[Leo Laporte]

You have Philip Hughes? Yes. Philip Hughes shows you an old timer.

[Doc Rock]

And I have new Philip Hughes mixed in. And the problem is they don't got to talk to each other. They work on the hub when the hub feels like it. So I'm all in on anything matters. So I'm watching like a hawk for new stuff Matter because it's time to change about 54 light bulbs in my house.

[Leo Laporte]

Jennifer Matter was created by the big players. I think Samsung was involved. Google, Apple. The idea was we admit we failed you pretty much.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It only took 10 years for them.

[Leo Laporte]

To admit Samsung had SmartThings, which was kind of a nice. I think the idea was sort of like Matter to be kind of cross platform but nobody really achieved that. So Matter was supposed to solve this. Did it? Has it? Will it?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

It has not yet. It has made progress. It is a protocol. Well, there's various protocols that work under Matter. So it's a software layer over thread and wi Fi and you know, like Bluetooth and WI fi. It's going to take a while and we've only. It's been two years and they've made significant progress in two years. I would say not fast enough progress for most of us, especially sorry doc, for you and your Hue bulbs. But there are a fair. There are a lot of devices out there now that work with matter. It's just that Matter as a whole still has a lot of building to do before it's really ready for primetime. You know, the general consumer is not going to benefit really from Matter at the moment. I think when they first announced this first spec, which was two years ago, they said this is the start of a journey. Five to ten years from now, we'll be be, we'll be where we want to be. So I think, you know, we've, I, I buy, I would say I think five years is a good bet. So what are we in 20? We're about to go into 25. So 20, 30.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeez. In other words, don't hold your breath.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But if you're. If you're interested now, and if you're willing to take the time and the effort, put the effort in, you can go and buy bulbs that work, you know, smart bulbs that work with matter, and that means they will work locally in your home. And that's one of the key elements. And actually, this leads into a story we'll be discussing. But one of the problems we've had with IoT devices to date is because they're so dependent on the Internet or so dependent on a cloud connection. You know, you have problems when your light switch is a lot faster to use a light switch than it is to use, say, a voice command because of latency and lag. And matter brings everything local. There is still the potential. You can still use the cloud for the benefits that you might have from that, like updates or, you know, getting the weather for your smart sprinkler. But it all works locally in your home, so it should be. We're going to see a lot of benefit from that. If you start adding matter products now, it's just as the promise of matter was. You're going to be able to buy any device, plug it in or screw it in in your smart home, and it will work with any platform and with any other device that also works with matter. That promise is not really here yet. So we've got a ways to go for that.

[Leo Laporte]

How depressing. How long have they had? They've had two or two years.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I mean, how long did it take Bluetooth and WI fi, I mean, to be. It takes a while. It takes a while.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's a little faster for Bluetooth and WiFi. It feels like five years. It took them five years from beginning to, like, getting somewhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So what happened to zigbee, Z Wave? What was the. What was the one. The first home automation standard? What was it called where you'd buy all this stuff?

[Doc Rock]

It was zigbee and Zwave earlier.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. When you were in the. In the stereo store. Doc Rock.

[Doc Rock]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what I'm talking about.

[Doc Rock]

Yeah.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

You mean X1.

[Leo Laporte]

No, X1.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah. You're going way back.

[Leo Laporte]

Way back.

[Doc Rock]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

But that was the same thing, though. It was a desire to have a standard that would allow you to control a variety of devices in your house. Right.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

So zigbee is. What is. So zigbee is still there. Zigbee is The CSA turn, it's. The standards are all involved in matter, which is what. What's. What's interesting about it and why. Okay, 20, 2013. My math was bit off because that's not five years from when they launched X10.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry, not X1.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

X10.

[Leo Laporte]

X10. No, you were halfway there.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Three quarters of the. I had it in my mind, but I was looking at the wrong. But yes, X10 was the early, early days. And then we had Z Wave and zigbee. And zigbee is the foundation of Thread. Thread is a similar. Uses the same protocol.

[Leo Laporte]

I get the impression Thread is a Google Radio thing, right? I have Thread in my Google devices.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

It began with the Nest thermostat, in fact, before Nest was bought by Google. So Google inherited the foundations of Thread and then what's. And now Thread is very much a popular protocol with Apple and Google, so they're really both pushing it forward. So Thread is in all your HomePods and in most of the Apple TVs and also in the iPhones and in most of the new Macs as well.

[Leo Laporte]

So. Lovely. It talks to nothing, but it's there. Well, it's wonderful.

[Doc Rock]

They built like the NFC chip in iPhones forever.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, well. And we're seeing a lot. We're going to start to see a lot more interesting use cases for both Thread and the NFC chip. And uwb, which is another radio protocol that we're seeing in a lot of smart home devices. We're going to be seeing really interesting use cases around those in the next year or so. There's the new standard Aliro, that's been launched by the csa, which is the organization behind matter, which used to be the zigbee organization. So they're building on existing protocols, so it's not starting from scratch. That's kind of where the. That's where the hope is that this won't take quite as long as technology.

[Leo Laporte]

Designed to break your heart. Technology that promises everything and gives you nothing. And the industry has desperately tried to make this work. What is it? Is it that you have competing interests that just can't work together?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

That's what happened.

[Doc Rock]

Never as good as the real. So this is a remake of VHS and Beta?

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, it's worse than that.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's worse than that.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

That's what I said.

[Doc Rock]

The remake is as good as the real. My point stands.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

This is. No, the problem has been to some extent that inviting because. So we got. All the big companies came together to say we need to fix this. Like you said, Leo and You know, the idea being if we fix this basic infrastructure for our homes, then more people will adopt smart home. Because there was all these grand predictions that smart home would just really take off. And it kind of plateaued because of the complexity. You really needed to be someone that was willing to be a sysadmin for that, your home, in order to really benefit from home automation.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's gonna work. No, that's. You know what? That is true. It's always, so I'm the sysadmin. If I die, Lisa won't know how to turn on anything. Like, this is a bad way to do it.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, this is. Yeah. And this is what they're trying to fix is make it this so that you don't have to worry about the back end. Everything that. That's the point of matter. We're not supposed to know. Know what matter is. And ultimately it should just work just like we. Most people don't really know what WI fi is or Bluetooth. They just know that their headphones pair to their smartphone or their TV streams.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a joke in there. Something like, does this back end make my network look big or something? I don't. I have. I'm sitting over here. Here's a home assistant green server. I've got homebridge running on my synology. I've got 30 Caseta switches. I've. Even the lights here. These elgato lights are on the WI fi. Nothing works together.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Nothing works together.

[Leo Laporte]

It's all got its own app. It works with their own app, but not, you know, and then Apple has a temerity, put a bunch of buttons up on the screen representing this stuff, but it doesn't do anything. Google does the same thing. They each have their own home app. I think the Tower of Babel has gotten worse.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Oh, yeah?

[Leo Laporte]

Has it gotten.

[Devindra Hardawar]

But I'll just say this is all a little disheartening. Like, I've. The smart home hype has been a thing since, like my first CES, which was 2010, and living through that whole era of it all. So now it's like, okay, they're figuring out, okay, we got to really solve the whole background architecture thing. I think the still, the missing point is what do you do with this technology? And I think for most people, that doesn't matter. You know, I have friends who really, really love getting all the smart lights and changing their switches and everything. But if the thing you're changing is not as simple as just flipping on a light switch and value if it.

[Leo Laporte]

Works, and then it stops working after a month.

[Devindra Hardawar]

All those things, all those things like, then it is kind of worthless to most consumers. And I think they still have not solved that problem. I think the one home smart home thing that has been really cool for me is my Arlo cameras that are HomeKit compatible can show up on my Apple TV. That's kind of cool. I can hit a button and see where all my house cameras are and see around my house. But most people don't need that. So I'm still into that like killer use.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I would say energy management is going to be the killer feature.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. As it gets more expensive.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Sure. It's coming and that's what matters. Working on like super hard right now, that's their main focus. And that's why I think they've kind of failed to maybe pull up the really kind of core use cases because they're really focused on the future, which is a problem with protocols, I think, you know, when they're like, they look for a goal and then they may be rushing towards the goal rather than fixing the foundations. But I'm hoping, I think it's hopeful that we'll get there. But the energy management really feels like the use case that will appeal to the broader audience that matter was designed for. To make things simpler, you know, like you they just added evses, solar panels, water heaters, such to matter and appliances so that you are, in theory, you know, you'll be able to connect all of any, any energy large energy device in your home to one platform through matter and not have to worry about whether it works with HomeKit or if it works with this platform or that platform. Whether you need Homebridge or Home Assistant. Home Assistant is, I think got a really sort of interesting future in their smart home.

[Leo Laporte]

I hope so.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I like it streamline. Make it a little easier for it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Designed to be a layer on top of all of this so that you can clean.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So I live in Northern California. Our local electric company has proposed its fifth rake height of the year. We have a we. So we got a $1,000 energy bill this, this month.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

See, this is where you want the smart plugs.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's the first thing I told Lisa is, well, we have to figure out what is costing us, you know, what's the thing that we need to turn off? Because I don't, I don't know.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Didn't you move your whole studio in house, Leo?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but I don't think it's rad. I turn off everything. I'm only on three Days a week, and I turn everything off at the end. I don't know.

[Doc Rock]

Tech is really low power. Not like before.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think really what it is is the rate hikes. Not us. I blame PG and E. Not us. But I mean, five rate hikes in one year.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I think people are feeling it. Like, I live in Georgia, and Georgia Power has a monopoly on everything here. And with the Vocal nuclear plant, which took years to get online, they're like, cool. It's online now. Your bill is now $30 higher to help, you know, Georgia Power pay for this nuclear power plant. And you have no choice in it. You know, you have no choice.

[Leo Laporte]

That's basically the same here. We have one place to get our electricity.

[Doc Rock]

Yeah, same here. We have Hiko Hawaiian Electric. That's it. You got.

[Leo Laporte]

And I bet your rates are going up too, aren't they?

[Doc Rock]

Oh, 100. Oh, man, it's crazy. You guys are relatively cheap. I think we're at like 36 cents a kilowatt hour. I think we're one of what in the country. And we're pretty crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

That's twice.

[Doc Rock]

So here's what's hilarious about this, and I totally understand, but, like, we live in a modernity era, but my island loves to keep things old school because, you know, we kind of went, you're.

[Leo Laporte]

Burning bamboo for the power. What are you doing?

[Doc Rock]

No, guess what? Is every day in Hawaii sunny? You know, we have very little of. You know what else is very in every day in Hawaii, Wendy, is all, you know what they want one to do? No windmills, because they look ugly. And I'm like, but we're at damn near 46 a kilowatt hour. You know, we really have solar panels. We have so many flat top roofs and we have so much places to put solar. And we have, look, you can do it in your home. But like, a lot of, you know, commercial establishments don't have. So when they built targets here, and targets did like full roof, like completely sustainable building. Target's only been here about 10 years. Then people started paying attention because Target was saving the grip. So it's starting to slowly come online. But, yeah, it's insane.

[Leo Laporte]

This is another and a different story. But the power company here won't let you put in too much solar because they don't want you competing with them.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yep.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So you can put in as much as you might use.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Can you have a battery, though? Like, so you can.

[Leo Laporte]

We have. We have solar batteries, so in theory we could run off the grid. I haven't had to do that yet.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, and this is where I think we're going to see, and it's going to take a long time because infrastructure and retrofitting this type of stuff into current homes is hard. But if this is where the smart home really starts, I mean, this is where the smart home started a decade ago when it had its resurgence with the nest thermostat. Everyone was like, oh, this is great because I can save money on my electrical bill. So, you know, I think that that is the use case, saving money, convenience and security. Davinda mentioned the cameras and security. Home security is another. You know, the home security industry has been completely upended by the smart home and the DIY aspect, as you know, in terms of not needing to be locked into these monthly contracts for home professional monitoring. So there are some definite. There are areas where there are strong use cases, but the kind of the whole concept of, you know, your lights turning on, you walk in the room and the shades lowering when you say movie time, you know, those are the conversations that a lot of tech journalists will have about this stuff because it's fun and cool, but it's the core benefit to our homes and our infrastructure that I think we're going to find connecting and interoperability and having this sort of local connection in our homes so that our homes can basically diagnose problems for us, manage our energy for us, look after, you know, the systems in our homes to save us money. That's where that's not the sexy side of the smart home, but it's the important side.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, because I think I always think about what I really want is to be able to talk to my house and say, hey, good morning.

[Doc Rock]

That's why I left. When Dev said it was like early 2010s or whatever, I'm like, yo, man, me and Leo watched the Jetsons when we were kids. This stuff was supposed to happen a long time ago. So I've been on this since the Jetsons and it still don't work. Micah had talked about this sensor maybe like a week ago, and I can't remember the name of it, but it's supposed to be a really good sensor that when you walk in the room, it had better false detections at the Akara FP2.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

So it uses millimeter wave.

[Doc Rock]

Yes, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, that's cool.

[Doc Rock]

I'm going to buy that right now while we're talking. Before I forget.

[Leo Laporte]

That's really cool.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, it's a really, really difficult device to set up and don't use it if you have ceiling fans, but it is fun if you can get it to work because yeah, the idea being it'll just know exactly where you are in the room.

[Leo Laporte]

And technology designed to break your heart that's basically just wants to take you good, get your hopes up, slap you around, throw you to the ground. Sorry, we don't do that anymore. All right, so we will watch from ces, your reports. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy on the Verge. Devindra, what are you going to be looking at at CES this year?

[Devindra Hardawar]

Oh, I'm all, I'm all about the screens. I miss going to see those glorious screens and especially I know we want to talk a little bit about Black Friday. This has been a crazy year for TVs. Like I am watching OLED prices fall to like rock bottom prices. A 77 inch OLED from both Samsung and the LG under $1,500.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Just while like what we're seeing out there. So yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Are those considered still to be the best, best visual screens?

[Devindra Hardawar]

Definitely.

[Leo Laporte]

QDO LEDs would be a little bit better.

[Devindra Hardawar]

QDOLED, which I believe is the newer panels from Samsung.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a Samsung QD oled.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I like it a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Basically if you want an oled, Samsung or LG at this point are great.

[Leo Laporte]

But I paid twice that I think for my 77 inch Samsung QD OLED.

[Devindra Hardawar]

In 2017 I paid $1900 for a 55 inch OLED. So the prices have just gone way down. I bought my dad one on sale last year as well. That is a great size for a lot of living rooms. 65 inches is like the bare minimum for most living rooms now too. And you can get that for $1,000 on a no lead. So.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is just the benefit of a larger market and more manufacturer and improved manufacturing technologies, I think.

[Devindra Hardawar]

So I think that's mostly it. Like the scale of producing this stuff has gone down and also this is the time to upgrade because if the tariff nonsense happens next year, like everything is going to be more expensive. So. So if you were even on the edge of like making a big purchase like this, now's probably the time to do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Black Friday sales or do you. Do you? There are also super bowl sales, usually Cyber Monday sales.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Like it's ongoing until next week basically.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Okay, yeah, we actually on the verge we had a, you know, we do deals posts about things. You know, like I do a smart home deals post and we had a tariffs deals post. Go buy these things.

[Devindra Hardawar]

That's a great idea.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

If you're thinking about buying these things, buy them now. Just case.

[Leo Laporte]

I think, I think saner heads will prevail because Tim Cook was able to talk Trump out of tariffs in 2017 by saying, look, if you put a big tariff at the time was only a 25% tariff on Chinese imports. If you put a big tariff on the iPhone, you're just helping Samsung. You're hurting an American company and helping Samsung. And I think every CEO saw that, that because it worked. So that, that worked. And we'll go to the Trump administration and say, say you're just helping the other guys. It's not gonna, it's not gonna do what you think it's gonna do.

[Devindra Hardawar]

That's a, that's a hope. It's a big hope, Leo. Like it's gonna be very, a little different this time around. They did implement tariffs around like farming, right. And farmers. And the first Trump administration, it devastated farmers across America too.

[Leo Laporte]

So there is evidence.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, and in the smart home we've saw significant price, price rises on a lot of devices over the last last year or so because it was the knock on effect from the tariffs from the first Trump administration. So I've had a number of companies I've spoken to have already sort of said, well, we're not sure on pricing yet for this product next year because we're waiting to see what the tariffs will do. So you know, it, it's definitely, we will feel an impact pretty quickly in the smart home because almost everything you buy tech wise now, especially from China is coming from China. Or you know, there are some, I mean there's, there's a bit of diversification since the last round of tariffs. I think we've seen some like a lot more Taiwanese manufacturing. But yeah, we're going to. The industry is definitely bracing for it whether it happens or not. But also any excuse to be able to raise the prices. So we may see it whether, whether they're a terrorist or not.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's a good point. We saw them do that with inflation. They said, oh good. You know, the eggs, the eggs.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Which was apparently a big voter like decision factor up to the egg.

[Leo Laporte]

What is it with eggs? Are people eating, how many eggs are people eating? Are they eating a dozen eggs?

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, they have gotten more expensive. I think it's a, it's a jump that people noticed. But also it was corporate greed, folks. It's corporate greed doing this too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was like, chickens had their hands out or I guess it would. There Be their claws out for a pay raise.

[Doc Rock]

It was big, big poultry. They just got us big poultry.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we live in the chicken capital of America, Petaluma. And the law says everybody is allowed to have their own chickens.

[Devindra Hardawar]

And I would love a chicken.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I have. I had 17 I lost recently.

[Doc Rock]

Yeah. My boss raises this chicken. It's best. Free eggs.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, it's amazing. I don't know what happened. One of. Yeah, it's been. I think we've had a little disease going through. So it's been. It's been a sad few days, but. Yeah, but I have. I love. I love my chickens. I. Oh. I've been raising chickens for almost a decade now.

[Leo Laporte]

You had 17. Now, one of the things that happens with chickens is that can be a little smelly and messy. I saw a chicken coop that you roll around, you bring it to different parts of the property.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

That's great. I'm testing two smart coops right now. And one of them you can lift up.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Smart coop.

[Doc Rock]

Oh, my God. Yeah. So, Jennifer, this is funny you say that. So my boss, Katie, she's the director of marketing, ecamm. Last year this time she lost all her chickens because the smart coop thing, the. The chicken blocked the sensor. One of the furry ones that are dumb, it blocked the sensor and the raccoons was like, hey, open. And the raccoons just went in. So they rebuilt. They did what you talk about moved the coop, rebuilt it and made it without the smart door. Or they fixed the husband's engineer, so he fixed the smart door and now it's all working.

[Leo Laporte]

We have a cat door there that understands the chip in the cat and will not let another animal in.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

That's smart.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. It's probably the same technology though, except you can't block it.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, I don't know how was it a light sensor? I wonder how they managed to block it. But yeah, I don't know whatever happened.

[Doc Rock]

But she lost all her tickets in one day. And her. Her little. Her little girl was gutted.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no kidding.

[Doc Rock]

Give her an opportunity to explain to her and. Which is good again. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's about life, why you get a chance. I think we should ban death for children under 16. Should not ever have to experience that. So let's just.

[Doc Rock]

Well, in Australia, it turns out Rupert Murdoch says nobody.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's funny how much of this conversation is about surviving the future. Right? It's just you gotta have your own power. Gotta keep your own power. Gotta raise your own chickens. Raise your own chickens. We are building the max Mad Max future, because that's where we're headed and we just can't avoid it. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you have a well and well water and then let's see, what else do we need? We got the batteries, so you can.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

A cow maybe?

[Leo Laporte]

Me, a cow?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Keep the dairy going.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, really, we should be teaching children basic butchering techniques. I think that's probably true.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Like maybe in 8th grade you could learn how to. How to slaughter a pig. I think it'd be.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, you know, they have 4H. I mean, that is something they do teach kids that live in the farmlands.

[Leo Laporte]

I just buy 50 pound sacks of beans and I. I'm gonna live on that. I did have a 50 pound sack of corn, but something got into it and that was no good.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Oh, and you want too big? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Why did you have a 50 pound sack of corn for Leah?

[Leo Laporte]

I thought maybe, I don't know, you.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Were really prepared for the end.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it was okay. So I have a problem. I. I don't know if I mentioned it before, but I buy things on Instagram in the middle of the night and I saw. Yeah, you too? Yeah, I saw a. I thought this is great. A way to. Homemade tortillas. A tortilla. Turns out it's like anti tortilla press. And then you make your own masa. So I got the mortar and the pestle, but then you need corn, so I. Why I bought a 50 pound sack of corn.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Tortillas are so cheap, Leo. They're so cheap. You don't have to do this.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not rational. I'm saying it's three in the morning and I'm not rational.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Anyway, this is where they should ban social media for those over six months.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, that's true. Lock down social media purchases after midnight.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm like a gremlin. Don't feed me after midnight tonight. All right, let's take a break.

[Doc Rock]

Instagram now is selling random, what they're calling, like this new innovation, but they're like Japanese appliances that's been out in Japan forever.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's a big thing. Yeah.

[Doc Rock]

I keep seeing so many of them on ig and I'm like, bro, that is not new tech. What are you talking about?

[Leo Laporte]

But is it good?

[Doc Rock]

It's good stuff, but it's just hilarious how like, oh, we invented this thing and then they always call it like hibachi and I'm like, that's yakitori, son. That's not hibachi. They're not even.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I love yakitori.

[Doc Rock]

Related. They're different. And it's like, oh, you guys at the Japanese major, I lose my mind. And all of the mislabeled.

[Leo Laporte]

I bought this Internet gum, this Instagram gum, because it's made by hand. It's a guy makes it by hand and it's the hardest. Little balls of gum. You just really don't.

[Devindra Hardawar]

You don't really taste the hand. Grease the hand.

[Leo Laporte]

It says it's good for you. It's remineralizing your teeth. But I don't know, I shouldn't buy this stuff on Instagram. That's really the.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Moral of that one.

[Devindra Hardawar]

We're really seeing the social media dangerous right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, see, See? Ban that stuff. All right, so TVs. And you, Doc, you used to work in a stereo store, used to sell TVs. Used to be like $3,000 for not such a good TV.

[Doc Rock]

We originally sold plasma. The Marantz, they were 10 grand plasmas for like 20 grand. And then they got down under 10. And I remember people coming to our store standing goes, I can't wait till they get under ten grand. Then maybe I'll think about it.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Doc Rock]

And then it was like, well, I can't wait till they get under five. And now you could go to Best buy and buy TV for 75 bones.

[Leo Laporte]

That's amazing. And you don't want A Plasma Tech TV bought seven or eight of those $10,000 plasmas. They were only 55 inches. They may not even have been that big. And they burnt in almost instantly because they were always on tech tv. So the tech TV bug was always on the screen and they burnt in like that. I mean, in.

[Doc Rock]

So, Leo, I got in trouble because we had this like $15,000 Phillips and it was in the front of our store.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Doc Rock]

And back then there was this weird off, like, kind of cable company that flew by night. Spectrum end up buying them. But you guys were on that company. It was different from Spectrum at the time. Well, it wasn't Spectrum. Here was Oceanic Cable, which was Maaw. And I used to watch tech TV all day long in the store. And my mom got so mad one day she turns on the tv. She goes, what is this weird little thing? And she's like, you're always watching that computer stuff, and now this TV is broken. And I was like, no, we're just gonna play foam foam on it, you know, there you go.

[Leo Laporte]

It'll go away.

[Doc Rock]

And it works. But yeah, yeah, literally, I used to just watch Call for Help, thank you all day.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you Dr. Before it was even.

[Doc Rock]

ZDNet, whatever it was prior to.

[Leo Laporte]

Before it was ZDTV in 1998 and then it became tech TV a couple of years later. And then it became nothing a couple of years after that.

[Doc Rock]

I used to tivo them when I wasn't going to be at the store. And then I just watch it in the store all day when we had no customers. And mom used to get so mad at me. She's like.

[Leo Laporte]

People apparently were worried about the tariffs because Black Friday. I think Black Friday always hits a record. Online sales. $74.4 billion. That was up 5% over last year. This information comes from Adobe, which weirdly keeps track of all this. Total online Thanksgiving sales. 33 billion people are buying stuff on Thanksgiving.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Don't want to have to talk to their family. Probably.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's someone who buy stuff now.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that is one thing I don't like about social is that everybody's sitting at the table. Table. And I bet it even happened at Thanksgiving looking at their phone. Right.

[Devindra Hardawar]

You got to institute some rules, though. Phone's down. Phones in your phone. Get rid of the phone's away. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't be buying stuff on black. It's Black Thursday.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Black Friday is just a whole month now.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, it is.

[Doc Rock]

It is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Doc Rock]

I mean, it literally stops October.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah.

[Devindra Hardawar]

There were some good deals, though. The MacBook Air is still selling.

[Doc Rock]

I have a question for you guys. This is a fight in our house. I always rebel against the phone down rules because I never have that problem. And what they're like, well, that's because you can entertain them. Because I'm the Funko, Right. So when the kids are around me, they ain't on their phone. They're hanging out with me.

[Leo Laporte]

Because you're entertaining.

[Doc Rock]

Because entertaining the kids. So, like, I wouldn't. I don't have to make that rule.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm like, I'm gonna admit to some people the rule.

[Doc Rock]

How about you figure out how to have conversations so that they want to talk back to you? Be more interesting. Stop blaming the phone. I'm just really mad at people. Blaming the phone for everything thing. And I'm like, it's people. It's people.

[Leo Laporte]

People probably is. I sit there blatantly not looking at my phone while everybody around me is looking at their phone. And I just go. I literally get energy. Suck energy from the fact that I am the only one. Like, I'm. See, I'm a good person. I'm not looking at my phone. You're looking at your phone. But not me. Adobe said more than half of all the online spending was done on mobile devices prices.

[Doc Rock]

That's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

That's up 12% from last year.

[Doc Rock]

No surprise Jen was right. People didn't want to talk to their families, so they went therapy. Retail therapy.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I know. I think Amazon is my husband's favorite social network because yeah, sure, he spends all his time on.

[Leo Laporte]

Tell him about Instagram. Tell him about 3Mm's Instagram. You'll love it.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

No, I'm not getting him anywhere near it.

[Leo Laporte]

He had all sorts of weird stuff and then you forget you ordered it and it comes in the mail and you going what the hell is this?

[Doc Rock]

Leo Instagram for us is that used to be late night 10pm after assing on TV stuff. Yes, that's what we're.

[Leo Laporte]

I never fell for though. That's the funny thing.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I didn't fall for the wrong friction. Much more friction.

[Leo Laporte]

Pocket Fisherman. No, that's right. And if it, if it supports Apple pay, all the better because then I don't even have to do anything.

[Doc Rock]

Oh yeah, dude, the shop. My husband shop app is dangerous.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

My husband was like, oh, this deal that we. On this thing, we want to get our daughter for Christmas. It's, it's. We need to buy it now. Right? Because it's Friday. Like am I not understanding Black Friday? I'm like, dude, we've got like weeks that was never going anywhere. Deals just keep going until December. January.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's an interesting change. I thought Adobe said traffic to real retail sites from AI chat bots was up by 1800 percent because nobody was using them.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

No one was using them last week.

[Leo Laporte]

I understand, but what it means is somebody is using them. In fact they did a survey and found out 20% said they were going to the AI chatbot and asking for recommendations and deals.

[Doc Rock]

Yeah, Amazon has Chrome plugin now will automatically search all the sites. Right. So if you're looking for something, it will go and it will get all the articles from Engadget and the Verge and Wire Cutter and anywhere else and it gives it to you in the straight line and it tells you like these people said, X. And so you can build your research off of that.

[Devindra Hardawar]

We're probably the referral links that those likes need.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you used Rufus? The Amazon AI. Have you used Rufus? Rufus?

[Devindra Hardawar]

I've used Rufus. It's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you. Is it?

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's.

[Leo Laporte]

Rufus isn't responding.

[Doc Rock]

It's super dumb. Yeah, I tried. I wanted to know if the Gobi lights that I have back here here because I'M starting to like this company. There seem to be a little bit more.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I love everybody and they work with matter too.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Doc Rock]

That was my question and Doofus wouldn't answer me. I was doing that while you were talking. So many other names.

[Leo Laporte]

Rufus is a strange name.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Really?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

It's always going to be Doofus for me now.

[Doc Rock]

Yeah, well, because you can't be Rufus. That's Chaka Khan. I was gonna say you're stepping into my world now. Some Amazon.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

You got the curtain lights back there? Those looking. Looking good.

[Doc Rock]

Yeah. I turned it into a spectrum analyzer. But the problem is the mic, no matter how I fix it, is still a little too sensitive. So when I stop talking, it still will pick up the random air noise. But I like the idea of that spectrum is working.

[Leo Laporte]

You're saying that those lights are trigger. Oh my God, they are. They're triggered by your voice. Oh my God, that's lovely.

[Doc Rock]

Come on.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

We know what to get Leo for Christmas.

[Leo Laporte]

Just put it on Instagram.

[Doc Rock]

They're on sale on Black Friday right now for nine.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

You can actually get your. You could put the twit bug on the. You can. Like, you can.

[Doc Rock]

You can.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

You can put whatever you want on any kind of emoji or design.

[Leo Laporte]

Doc did it first and I can't copy.

[Doc Rock]

No, I didn't see nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not worried about you. Everybody else is going to say you're copying Doc. I don't want to. That's no good. All right, let's take a break.

[Doc Rock]

Your hair, if I could.

[Leo Laporte]

Finest badger wool. It's the key, you know. Gotta get it from Australian badgers. We have a great panel, don't we, huh? Doc rocks here. Jennifer Patterson Tuohy Devindra Hardawar. I'm sorry I got ahead of the switcher. Thanks for joining us. We appreciate it. Our show today, brought to you by Bit Warden. Did you do what I suggested on Thanksgiving? Did you confront your family members and ask them how do you keep track of your passwords? I hope you did. And I bet you got some terrifying answers. Oh, all I do is I take my birth date and I mix it up with my dog's name. And that's perfect, isn't it? And then I use it again and again on every site. No, you need Bit Warden Bitwarden, Password Manager. Open source. Which is great because you know that it's doing the right thing. It encrypts your passwords. It creates long, strong, unmemorable passwords. But the good news is you don't have to remember them strong encrypted so nobody can get at them. Make sure you have unique passwords on every site. In fact, Bit Warden the other day said hey wait a minute, this password you're using here has been seen in a breach. Would you like us to help you change it? And I did and it was wonderful. Bitward is not just for individuals though it's great for business. They continue to expand their integration ecosystem across all the platforms businesses use to support seamless operations. Elevate the security of your business including they support Microsoft Intune. So if you are an intune house, you're using Microsoft Intune it will integrate with Bit Warden to enhance device security and user identity management. Just enable Bit Warden secure app deployment on any intune managed endpoint including desktops and mobile devices. And Bob's your uncle rippling you use that for hr. It simplifies employee onboarding and off boarding allows IT teams to assign and revoke access to the bitwarden vault as employees join or leave. Isn't that Swap suite Vanta works with Bit Warden Vanta combines compliance audit and reporting with secure password management, which means your organization can help meet that SOC 2, that ISO 2701 or other standards because you're doing the right thing with passwords and Vanta will help you prove it. Rapid 7 ensures improved threat detection and response by correlating oh this is really cool. Correlating credential usage with security events who used that password when strengthening proactive monitoring and intelligence for enterprise security teams. That's just three examples of the many, many integrations Bit Warden offers to enterprises to increase your flexibility to centralize security management across existing technology stacks without, you know, changing the tools you're already using. Protecting employee devices, maintaining control over sensitive information. This is something every business needs needs. Bit Warden users can seamlessly connect tools for IT management, compliance and security to improve and standardize the deployment of enterprise credential management throughout your organization. Your business deserves a cost effective solution that can dramatically improve your chances of staying safe online. That's Bit Warden. It's simple to set up, it'll only take a few minutes and because it's open source GPL open source it can be inspected by anyone. Their codes on Git GitHub they are regularly audited by third party experts and unlike some companies, they publish the full results of those audits so you can see exactly how safe and secure it is to use bitwarden. The other thing I love about Bit Warden and if you know your uncle Joe said I'M not going to use a password manager. I'm not going to pay for it. You tell them Bitwarden is free for individuals. Free forever because it's open source. Get started today with Bit Warden's free trial of a teams or enterprise plan. Or get started for free forever across all devices. Unlimited passwords, unlimited devices. You can even use passkeys with a free account. You can even use hardware keys like the yubikey, [e-mail] Twitter bitwarden.com TWIT I am a huge fan. I recommend it. I tell everybody to use it. You should be using it. And get Uncle Joe to use it for crying out loud, because you know he's going to come crying to you when somebody steals his Facebook account. Bit warning gordon.com Twitter we thank him so much for their support of this week in tech. Oh, it's time for more government, more courts. Let's see. I'm a spice it up and start with Elon. What do you say? So Elon Musk. I just love the guy. He's decided, you know, this Open AI, which he by the way helped found and left left in a huff when they said we're not going to sell it to you and let you run it. He has decided he has his own AI now, Grok AI that OpenAI is too doing too well. So he filed for injunctive relief from the courts, saying you can't let them go nonprofit because they're discouraging investors from backing rivals like my company xai. Can you can you do that? Can you sue somebody for being competing with you? The motion was filed late on Friday. It accuses Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Microsoft and LinkedIn co founder and former Open AI board member Reid Hoffman, plus D. Templeton, former Open AI board member of various illicit activities and seeks to halt them. You should not be discouraging investors from backing OpenAI's rivals. I you know what if somebody comes and says I want to do podcast advertising, I tell them don't go to those other guys, come to us. That's called business benefiting from wrongfully obtained competitively sensitive information through OpenAI's connections with Microsoft. This all sounds like sour grapes.

[Devindra Hardawar]

The big whiny baby.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean he's a big whiny baby.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Like can you do that? Is the thing I've been saying about Elon Musk for the past couple of months.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you poor billions of campaign.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Can you truck can you two other states to campaign. They don't know what a guy can you and now he is firmly in place. So maybe he feels more protected now that he can do this sort of thing.

[Leo Laporte]

So for months, years probably, we've been posting on X. You know, when the new podcast comes out, we post a link to the podcast on X. Turns out we were wasting our time. Elon Musk says, yeah, we don't want any outbound links in tweets or whatever you call them now. Skeets, Z, whatever. It started when Paul Graham, who's the founder of Y Combinator Combinator, said this was right before Thanksgiving. The deprioritization of tweets with links in them is Twitter's biggest flaw. It bothers me more than all the new right wing trolls, trolls I'm used to. But what draws me to Twitter? Just find out what's going on. You can't do that without links. Elon says, well, dude, that's lazy linking. Just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply. Problem solved.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Problem solved. You should scroll up on that story, Leo, because that is just the perfect Elon face that I want to want to punch.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they always, you know, it's so fun.

[Devindra Hardawar]

They always lead pitcher for him.

[Leo Laporte]

They always. Elon has been so cooperative with all of the publications. Getty has a variety of embarrassing Elon images you can use in your posts.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, the interesting sort of follow on from this is how much traffic websites, news sites in particular, have seen since the giant surge of Blue sky following the election. Because Blue sky is like what Twitter was in terms of the links. You know, if you want to just go for the news or find interesting links that have been shared in your community to keep up on the news. You can do that at Blue sky now. And you haven't been able to do it at Twitter for a while. I mean, X for a while.

[Leo Laporte]

I did. I mean, I guess we kind of knew this, but it does mean that our marketing department has been spending a lot of time creating posts that no one has seen. Did you guys?

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you tell your Engadget marketing department, don't bother posting?

[Devindra Hardawar]

I mean, I have no clue what happens there. We have a whole like social media side of thing. But in general, Twitter engagement for media platforms has not been very good. Like for the past, even pre Elon, it was never very good. The people never really saw much traffic referral from Twitter and now it's just like, oh, you've just made it worse. So now people are going to Blue sky, which is much smaller, but the same thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I should point Out Meta also deprioritizes news links because they don't want to. They don't want to get involved.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, they want. They want you to stay in their platform.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the real reason.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

X wants you to stay on their platform, on its platform. And Instagram and Threads wants you to stay on its platform. They don't. That's why. I mean Instagram's never allowed links. Right. So you've never been able to link out. That's right. Lincoln Bio link in. Bio. It's. It's this sort of. Oh, the news. Being a news source is not what these platforms want to be. Although I think a lot of people still use social media as a new source. So there's kind of a real push.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean that's what X really was, was a kind of a feed of what's happening in the world as in the zeitgeist now without links, it's kind of much less useful, by the way.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Very less useful.

[Leo Laporte]

I blame you for this. You said show this picture of Elon and what I didn't realize. This is hysterical miracle I guess because remember I told you we're using a Mac in the cloud for ecamm. That Mac has reactions turned on and thought Elon was. So we got the two thumbs up reaction. Not in the podcast, just on the discord because I guess that's what's feeding the discord. So that's. I didn't even think that could happen.

[Devindra Hardawar]

That's a weird issue for that.

[Doc Rock]

That's funny.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me do it again. Okay. Let's just see if it happens.

[Doc Rock]

Yeah. Somebody screenshotted it.

[Leo Laporte]

Thumbs up. What do you get? Fireworks.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Devindra Hardawar]

My daughter loves that. When I FaceTime in. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. You know people were saying this the other day. They saying stop doing the thumbs up. You're getting fireworks. I said, no, I'm not. But apparently on some platforms, thanks to there being a Mac in there, AI.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Smart but not too smart, especially right now. Yeah.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

The open AI angle that is kind of interesting in here. I think that Elon probably does have a leg to stand on. Is this shift from being a not for profit and we're going to make this better for the world to. Oh, hang on. We just realized we can all make an awful lot of money here.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a. Yeah. I mean if you want to follow the sagas along and. And tattered story. The original structure was there would be a nonprofit. That's the way Elon and I think Sam Altman and the other founders originally Configured it. But they realized quickly that you can't be nonprofit because it costs so much to train these LLMs. You have to make money or at least raise money. So then they did something weird. They had kind of split it in two. There was a nonprofit and a for profit arm, and now they just want to eliminate the nonprofit arm because the.

[Devindra Hardawar]

For profit arm was like revenue limited for some reason, too. So that was. That was a whole thing. You know, this all reminds me there. There's some great conversations happening in Blue sky right now. And one thing that I keep seeing is that people are saying if we take Sam Altman at his word, right. That they want to stop AGI or whatever because of what they're building. Why aren't we hunting him for sport? Why aren't we sending people to stop him right now? Because you're. You're the danger. AI people.

[Leo Laporte]

You're telling Terminator.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Came back to stop Sam Altman all along.

[Devindra Hardawar]

He told us. He told us he's doing it.

[Leo Laporte]

So come with me if you want to live. That's interesting. Yeah. I mean, okay, so really, just between us, it's just the four of us.

[Devindra Hardawar]

No one's listening.

[Leo Laporte]

How many people, how many of you think that we really will, at some point in our lifetimes, have a machine that's like, you could talk like Hal, that you could talk to like it's AGI, like it's smart? Is that likely?

[Devindra Hardawar]

I mean, there's a lot of things. We don't know what's possible, but I don't think it's going to be within the timeline these folks are saying. Because, like, since I was in high school, I've been reading Michio Kaku and Ray Kurzweil and those folks, and I think a lot less of them now after seeing their predictions and seeing where we are. But 50, 100 years? Sure, maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

I've interviewed both of them many times.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I've interviewed me too. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's one of those. Those are the guys who, like big. And it's going to. And it's going to be amazing. Amazing. And. Yeah. I don't know. What do you think, Jennifer? We're gonna. You're gonna be able to. Is your daughter gonna be talking to a little, you know, AI buddy, like.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Clara in the sun?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I know.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Great book.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, great book.

[Leo Laporte]

Wonderful book.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I don't think we are as close to AGI as people would have us believe, I think. And I also don't necessarily see. See as much benefit from AGI, especially from My space, we're seeing an awful lot of push of oh, this has got AI. You know, we've had AI in the smart home since Alexa, but it wasn't really AI, But I think asi, Artificial Specific Intelligence.

[Leo Laporte]

I've never heard that term.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

My life may be the more what we're going to see in our lifetime that really does change things that, you know, very specific. It's, it's the difference between like Rosie the Robot and Roomba the vacuum. It's like whether we have, you know, one omniscient being in our home that can do everything for us or whether we have specific agents that are helping us do different things. Those feel safer. Yes, to me.

[Leo Laporte]

Unless specific thing they do is launch atomic weapons. But other than that, why do we.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Build the atomic smart home?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, it just depends on what their skills are. But I have a little AI that helps me code and it's quite good and it doesn't steer me wrong and.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

It works quite well and doesn't hallucinate and it has a very clear purpose.

[Leo Laporte]

Specifically, I said don't make up anything that you don't see in the documents that I gave you. It works quite well.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I mean, do we need. We're all tech geeks, we were all sci fi fans. You know, we love the idea of the Star Trek computer or HAL and this kind of concept that we grew up reading about or watching tv. And these are exciting ideas. But what's actually most useful? Is it the way Apple Intelligence summarizes my text messages or is it the way my robot vacuum can intelligently learn how to clean my floors? Know what, what, what do we need? What do we want? What's the benefit that we're looking for here? And that's, I think that's the important question to ask rather than let's create God, that just doesn't seem like a good idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me complicate this. I said before we die, but I know because there's an app that tells me that I'm going to die. This is. See, if I close my eyes, you can focus on this. It says Leo is going to die. Sunday, March 17th, at least in St. Patrick Day 2041, at the age of 84.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Terrifying.

[Leo Laporte]

Save the date.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I hate this app so much.

[Doc Rock]

It.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Only cost you $40 a year for it to make up a day. You're gonna.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the thing. And you know they has a three day trial, so I did the three day trial, but I have to remember to cancel because what it does is you go through the whole questionnaire and then it says, now do you want to know because you're gonna have to pay. And it was. I pissed me off. That was really ridiculous. Now it did say, and this is, I think the use of it with better habits. I could live to age 90, but.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I've got to have referral links.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

This doesn't this, like scan your, like, fitness date, fitness data and health tracking.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not that good. It's a questionnaire that you go through and you tell.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I thought I heard about some kind of connection that fitness apps had to something, you know, that can do this.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's inevitable. Right. This is just a matter of time.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Push you towards awards. Yeah. I saw this when I was doing some. Some scrolling, not talking to my family on Thanksgiving and I just scrolled right past. No, thanks.

[Leo Laporte]

Pats says, that is so dumb. Is there anything Leo won't buy?

[Devindra Hardawar]

Did you see the ad for this app, Leo? At what time in the.

[Leo Laporte]

I saw an article this morning and I said, oh, I gotta try that. Yeah, I actually had done this before. There's a free. Free questionnaire that you can do on a website. Let me see if I can find it. I think it's called living to be 100 or something like that by. It's basically the same questionnaire and it's for free. So really, that'd probably be better for you to do that instead of. Instead of what I did AI in the title. Yeah, yeah, that's true. This has AI in the title. That's pretty cool, man. All right, I've frozen all my screens here, so I think it's time for me to take a pause and figure out what's going on as we continue with this episode, episode 1008 of this Week in Tech with our great panel, Jennifer Pattison. Huey Tui. Isn't that a bird?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I like Huey Tui is a very old Irish name. I got it from my husband. Husband. It's very difficult to spell and pronounce, which is why my other social media is JP2E, the number two. The letter 2E's 2E because I like that. But yeah, very old Irish name. And then also a beer in Australia.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, really? Tui beer.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Oh, it may be a bird.

[Leo Laporte]

That's nice.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I don't know about the bird. I'd like to know about the bird.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a Tohi too.

[Devindra Hardawar]

He.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, it's a wonderful name and we're so glad to have you. Doc Rock.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Very happy.

[Leo Laporte]

Who also has a good name name and lives it his life.

[Doc Rock]

Somebody named Apple in your family. So they could be an Apple Tui.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple Tui.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah. Gwyneth Paltrow stole that name. I don't think anyone else.

[Leo Laporte]

She did, she did. And according to Instagram, her daughter Apple is looking quite lovely, by the way, I might point out. Oh, my cat's coming. So that's another reason.

[Doc Rock]

Anthony's cat.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I thought it was my cat.

[Leo Laporte]

Come here. Come here, Samantha. That you can't meet. See, cats won't do what you tell.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Them you want to hear.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. She just wants to be annoying.

[Doc Rock]

Cats should design the AI. That would be the best thing for the humanity is cats design the AI because it won't do anything.

[Leo Laporte]

I think, I think you could get an AI was as smart as a cat. The brain is the size of a walnut. What? How hard would it be to have an AI that is as smart as a cat? Not that you'd want that. We bought her a water.

[Doc Rock]

So she likes drink out of the them.

[Leo Laporte]

She likes to drink out of the. Out of the. The little faucet on the shower. She likes that. So we bought her a fountain. Won't go near it.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

She has her own personal kitty fountain. She won't go near it. And now she's just gonna stand there at my door going wow. But not responding. Oh, here she comes. Come on. Yeah, I have a bed for her. I've got it in my studio. I have a bed ready, waiting and able for her.

[Doc Rock]

Look at that company perk. Because Anthony's cat is in there.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I know there's another one there.

[Leo Laporte]

There's tibia. That's what gave me the idea. Tiberius is in the bed.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Just been sitting there.

[Doc Rock]

Oh, come on. Not the Tiberius. I love it and you're my hero now.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that a great name? That's because. Yeah. Come here, Sammy. Come here. You could be on tv. She says it's not tv, it's a podcast. I know better. Our show today. Anyway, great to have you and Devindra Hardware from Engadget. Wonderful to have you. Our show today brought to you by Experts Exchange. Actually, this is cool. We were talking about AI. Will AI ever be as smart as a human? Guess who is as smart as a human? Humans. Imagine a network of trustworthy, talented tech professionals where you could go, ask questions, get no snark, but just good information, industry insights, advice, how to's from people who are actually using the products in your stack. Instead of asking some dumb AI or worse, paying for expensive enterprise level tech support. Experts Exchange is the tech community for people tired of the AI sellout. Experts Exchange is ready to help carry the fight for the future of human intelligence. It's a human community with human answers. You'll get access to professionals in over 400 different fields. I'm talking coding, Microsoft, AWS, Azure, DevOps, whatever, Cisco, whatever it is you need to know. And unlike other places, there's no snark. Duplicate questions are encouraged. You've been to the sites where they go, oh, that question was already asked in 2002, so we're not going to answer it. Or worse, you could do it that way, but we think, I think you should do it this way. No, the contributors at Experts Exchange are actually nice people. A community you want to be a part of. Tech junkies who love graciously answering all questions. People have realized that the real benefit to becoming an expert is paying it forward is helping other people with your own expertise. One member said, I never had GPT stop and ask me a question before. That happens on EE all the time. Experts Exchange all the time. They're proudly committed to fostering a community where human collaboration is fundamental. The Experts Directory is full of experts to help you find what you need, including experts who listen to our shows. I know Rodney Barnhart, who is a security now listener, happens to be a VMware V expert and he's glad to answer your questions. Or the well known ethical hacker Edward von Billion. There are Cisco design professionals. You can even get, you know, executive advice. They're executive IT directors and more. Here's the other thing that's very important. Other platforms, let's be honest, betray their contributors. X does it. LinkedIn does it. Reddit does it. By selling the content. The content you, you're hard earned. Content you put there to train AI models, not Experts Exchange. Your privacy is not for sale. They stand against the betrayal of contributors worldwide. They have never and will never sell your data, your content, your likeness. They block and strictly prohibit AI companies from scraping content from their site to train their LLMs. And the moderators strictly forbid the direct use of LLM content in the threads. You're getting real answers from real humans. It's a community. You can't. A robot doesn't give you community. Humans do. Experts deserve a place where they can confidently share their knowledge without worrying about a corporation stealing it to increase shareholder value. And humanity deserves a safe haven from AI. It's Experts Exchange and I think it's so cool. I want you to try it right now, for free. For the next three months. No credit card required. Just create an account, ask your questions, browse e-e.com Twitter it's really, it's really a great place. It's been around for years. I used it years ago, often would go there to get answers to questions on the tech guy show. And when they called us, I said, you guys are still around. I love experts exchange. We thank him so much for supporting the show. You support the show, by the way, when you go there and use the special URL so that they know you saw it here. E-E.com Twitter, you know, they've been around for a while. They got a three letter. Those are, those are not easy to come by. Oh, I with one more X story which I think is kind of telling you. Remember the Onion bought infowars, right? And the Onion, which is great, that's the Alex Jones channel where he was, you know, railing against everybody. He lost a one and a half billion dollar lawsuit to the Sandy Hook famous family because he said it never happened, that we're all actors and such lies. The Sandy Hook families actually accepted half as much from the Onion because they preferred that the Onion get the infowars site and IP and vitamins than this other company that was bidding for it. That was essentially a, you know, a shadow company created by Infowars to buy it back. However, there's a little fly in the ointment. This week X filed an objection. Now, I thought originally when they said we, we have something we want to say that they were going to say, no, we want to buy it or maybe let then Alex Jones use it or something like that. No, it turns out that among the other things the Onion bought was the X accounts, the infowar Twitter accounts. And X said no, they don't own those. We own them. You do not own your social media accounts. You don't own your followers. You don't own your account. You don't own anything at all. And that is a fascinating assertion. I guess not. Maybe too much of a surprise, but yes, that's something for everybody to remember. You don't own that stuff you put up there.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Got to start blogging and get everybody personal websites. Get your RSS feeds up to date.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, I actually, I've mentioned it before. I use a site called Micro Blog Both. It's kind of a Twitter, but it's also my blog and when I post on it, it automatically, automatically posts it. To doesn't post to Twitter because their API is not open. But to threads, to Mastodon and to a blue sky that's Nice. Isn't that cool? So you can post stuff here. And I still own it. Right? It's mine. It's just syndicating it to those other sites. So if Twitter. Well, it's not Twitter, but. Because I don't use Twitter anyway. But if Mastodon or Threads or Blue sky disappears or asserts ownership of this stuff. No, no, it started here. I own this. Which I think is the right way to do it.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Got to go back to it. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Post. It's posse. Post once syndicate everywhere.

[Doc Rock]

I forgot original mic. I don't know say original, but one of the first microblogs I remember back in day, which we all love so much. And I think it was called Postable. It was kind of a yellowish.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I used it. And you would email to it. Post. They went at posters, something posterous.

[Doc Rock]

Bingo. Dude. I. I love that. And it's really funny you say that today. For my first video for December, I was going to talk about why I'm going back to blogging. And it had a lot to do with. Because, like, I've been on since the first invites. But yeah, I just feel like. I know that. I feel like somebody in my family would be able to get access to anything I put there later if something were to happen to me in St. Patrick's Day, at least 2041.

[Leo Laporte]

I got some time. Man, that's not.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, this was the whole sort of idea behind the Verges redesign last year was.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, really?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah. So we have these quick posts now on our site, which are basically Nilay Patel, the editor in chief, he would sort of say to us, guys, let's not put our thoughts and feelings and ideas on social media sites on X or any of them. Here, put it. Let's put it on the site. You know, let's give it to our readers. And you know, the. The Verge now has more of a kind of social media stream feel. Feel.

[Leo Laporte]

Nila's very smart. He used to be on our show, but he's too smart for us anymore. But I love Nila.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

What does that make me? Hey, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you're his proxy. You're. Yeah, you're smarter. How about that? You're even smarter. You come on this show. But this. I think this is really true. This is really true.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Because, you know, blogging is great, but, you know, there's always the kind of feeling like a blog requires a fair amount of structure or form or at least more than, you know, 75 characters. So the idea of these were more, you know, there were twofold I think, you know, I don't want to put too many words in Nilay's mouth and he's written about this so you can, you can find out more. But it was sharing things from around the web, which is something that social media is used for a lot. You know, we link to stories on different publications all the time that we, that we like or we think is worth disseminating. And then also just our thoughts, short and sweet when we have them that aren't necessarily a whole story. Because, yeah, the Verge is our home. Like, my author page has all of my stories on it. If I go to X or if I go to any of the social media sites, as you say, we don't. You don't own that. And it's important to always be able to, you know, especially as a journalist, own your own, your own content. And this isn't just social media. I mean, websites disappear, so your content disappears. I actually use a surface called authory that gets anything I've written online and what's the word? Stores it into like a PDF form so that I can always, even if the website goes out of business, I'll still have a copy of my article. You know, because the Internet is unfortunately ephemeral in many, in many senses, is you can't always guarantee that something's going to either be there or be the same as when you wrote it, because things get updated. And so, yeah, it's very important, especially for journalists, to be able to keep copies of everything you've done and copies of your work. And I think anyone that thought that they owned their Twitter account or X account, well, now the truth is out. I don't know that many people really realized that that was the case, but it's. It's true on all of the social media platforms.

[Doc Rock]

Really.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, of course, of course. That's why they can sell it to an AI for scraping, because that. You don't own it.

[Doc Rock]

Well, you know, it's funny is you mentioned the author page. If I pull up author pages, for me, they're all owning gadget now because TUA got sucked into Gadget vortex.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you were at the ultimate Apple Apple website.

[Doc Rock]

I was, yeah. Like, they still show up every once in a while when I'm looking for something and I'm like, yo, I forgot. I completely forgot. It's all over there.

[Leo Laporte]

Because.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, without. Without pictures, probably because most sites delete pictures after some of them are broken.

[Doc Rock]

Some of them are there. It really depends on whether it was because we did a change over in the Middle. And so some of the stuff that was on one of the services, all of the pictures survived, but like, you know, the old 2R TV logos and stuff which I designed, they still show up, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, that's cool.

[Doc Rock]

Yeah. So it's funny, I really, I really just resonated when, when JPT was talking. Like it all resonated to me about how much I missed those ideas of sort of owning your own byline and. Yeah, and what's really crazy, somebody had mentioned way back up in the chat, like, oh, you should have kept some of them Apple stocks. But when I first moved over into the quote unquote journalistic side, they wouldn't let you keep your stock. They wouldn't let you like a dummy. And come to find out, a whole bunch of people never diverse, never got rid of.

[Leo Laporte]

That's frustrating.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

I never have. Don't own any. I never have. So I guess it's also important that you don't own your YouTube content.

[Doc Rock]

Yeah, for the most part. And I fully understand that. I think that's something people do when.

[Leo Laporte]

They post on YouTube that they're.

[Doc Rock]

I, I teach my people that. But I don't think a lot of people know that they technically don't own their content. Right. And one of the things that I also do, there's a YouTub license and there's a Creative Common License. I tend to press the Creative Common License.

[Leo Laporte]

I did that. I do that too.

[Doc Rock]

Right. People say, well, what if somebody steals your stuff? It's not mine, bro. Like, I'm telling you thoughts from my head and I haven't invented a couple techniques that I think are my own. But I'm just here to share. Yeah, it still gets monetized for me being who I am. So like, I think that is such a weird concept. And we will be, we, I guess, better off the more we get used to understanding of what we're sharing and why we're sharing it. For right now, there's a lot of chase to be first and sort of one upsmanship. And I think that also adds to the toxicity of the platforms because now from a debacle that happened last year, people don't even trust the YouTube reviewers anymore because one of the companies had a one person that worked in that company that thought they were going to get the leg up and keep their job by trying to talk a couple of the YouTubers into not saying that they paid for this camera review. And then everybody slagged at the Company. And I was like, yo, I know most people at that company that was just one person speaking out of turn. And you know what I mean? So that whole embargo day stuff is kind of. I tell Road when Road sends me something, I go, mine will be three, four days late. And they go, why? Because I don't want to be on embargo day. I'm not competing with these kids.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

We don't own anything these days. They do. We, like, we don't own.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't own our music.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

We don't own. You know, there's so many things you think you, you've spent money on and you've bought in in the digital world. Yeah, I think there's a lot of people that don't really understand that. And, and that's, you know, that. And it's, it's frustrating. But there's also. You're paying the con, you're paying for the convenience. And it's so much easier to these days to, you know, stream the music. I mean, I used to have, you know, stacks of CDs. I owned that music. Now, you know, Spotify and Apple Music, I can listen to anything I want. But one day, if I stop paying, it's all gone.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, I still love physical media, physical movies, amazing stuff that you can get.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, but what can you play it on?

[Devindra Hardawar]

I mean, I can play it on a whole bunch of things. And I think more people should be talking about, like the 4K Blu Ray format is.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to buy the film stock because you could always get a light bulb.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Film degrades. Film degrades, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it doesn't.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah. Everything degrades.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, there's nothing. That's the, that's the downside, actually.

[Doc Rock]

Now we don't own any that won't play because they degraded. So disrupt, man.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Oh, that's the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Very bad in Hawaii because it's so humid there. Actually, that's more I. Tropical.

[Doc Rock]

I wasn't expecting it. I'm like, these are going to last forever. And I put them away and I go to pull out some old stuff and I'm like, wow.

[Leo Laporte]

I was working at a radio station when CDs first came out, and my, the music director, the program director came to it. Big conference room table. He said, great news. We're replacing all the other stuff, the vinyl and everything, with these CDs. They're indestructible. And he started throwing them. They're not indestructible. We learned a lesson that day. You know, you mentioned postures I feel like postures might. We should. I wish we could bring it back. It was sold. It went out of business. The idea was you'd email your blog posts in. I used it when we went to China because we couldn't. I couldn't post on Twitter or anywhere else, but I could email. They couldn't block email.

[Doc Rock]

Everybody supported my last post on Posterists are from China. That's really funny you say that.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Devindra Hardawar]

But WordPress supported that in like 2005 or so. Like you could, I guess. WordPress and other blog postures are so simple though. Tumblr tumbler family of stuff. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Why are those all. Did people just.

[Devindra Hardawar]

That Twitter microblogging killed a lot of that. Like you did this small blogging. Like the. I don't know, were those mini blogs. But when you could just like fart out a thought on a, you know, on your blog, you just lose the.

[Leo Laporte]

Urge to write a longer piece. Don't you just. Yeah, it scratches that itch. And so you don't need to do anything longer anymore.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Well, maybe you didn't need in the beginning.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Doc Rock]

I think that's also the beginning of our are number one, inability. Inability to communicate properly because it was easier to take a 240 character post and misunderstood what the person was saying. But if you force them to write 500 words where you can probably get out a deeper thought, that was too much work. So we ended up overreacting to a lot of sort of misguided 240 character tweets and we lost the ability to have conversation without just going straight to the left.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I mean people still misinterpreted those 500 word blog posts. Like I, I've been on the Internet long enough to be in fight with the comments.

[Leo Laporte]

People misinterpret anything. It doesn't matter how long it is. They're gonna misinterpret everything.

[Doc Rock]

I take it.

[Devindra Hardawar]

At least, at least with Twitter, like it's faster. I could be like, oh no, no, you're wrong. Or like, you know, you can explain.

[Doc Rock]

You misheard my five seconds talking.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Exactly. One of the best tweets is like. That's a whole other sentence. You know, I. Not even, I'm not even saying that.

[Leo Laporte]

What you're saying. Are we going to look back in 20 years and say, I remember the good old days of Twitter and all the wars and huh, you're doing it now. I'm doing that now.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Like the good old days of like early Twitter and like how kind of cool it was Cool. Unique. That was.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Devindra Hardawar]

And, you know, things are changing. I am. I'm following the Blue sky wave right now. Like, the things they're doing. The lessons Blue sky as a company seems to have learned from the issues with Twitter and everything else I think are kind of. Kind of heartening.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, everybody we talk to on these shows has started to move to Blue Sky.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it? You're nodding, Jennifer. You moved to Blue sky as well?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, I'm not. I mean, it's a casualty of the job, really, but I'm on, like, all of them. But I would say that Blue Sky I've started to use more. I joined when it first came out, and at first I really didn't sort of find a community there that I was. My smart home community was still very much on X, but it's. We've. Everyone's pretty much gone now. And Mastodon I still use. There's quite a good community there that I interact with a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're old school. Wow. We run our own Mastodon Instance, so I'm obviously a Mastodon supporter, but it's cool. Yeah.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I mean, there are too many, though. That's the thing now. Like, there are too many social. Social networks.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the question I ask when people say, oh, no, we've moved to Blue guys. You move to School sky because you still feel a need to do microblogging. Is that why or.

[Devindra Hardawar]

The conversations are great. Like, that's the thing. That's why I joined Twitter. And why I kind of love Twitter is that you could just strike up conversations with anybody. And to me, Twitter was always the purest thing of what I wanted from the Internet. You know, when I went to the first AOL chat rooms, like, oh, people are talking about video games and anime here. That's cool. Because nobody in my town is doing this stuff. So Twitter was that direct feed to the global conversation, and we kept kind of recreating that in Blue Sky. It's much smaller, but it's fun. Like, the energy is good, but it.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Is skyrocketed, you know, in the last three, three or four weeks. I mean, I think we. The starter pack stuff really has sort of. That was kind of a genius.

[Leo Laporte]

That was smart. That was so smart.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I mean, I went from two. I think I had, like, I don't know, 500 followers or something to 6,000 in, like a week.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

And now it's a. It's kind of hard to. I still haven't. It still hasn't necessarily Got its mojo yet, I think, I mean it still feels very much just like this is Twitter. But what it, this was Twitter but without some of the nasty side of Twitter. I, I love the links. I think that's great to have that back. That was one of the things I mainly use Twitter for was as a news source. I. But the conversation, I do see something get much more engagement there than I see on threads. And engagement, you know, is, is probably the key for me. That's what I'm most interested in, you know, being able to sort of talk to readers and reach in and people that in the space and like have those conversations. As you, as you said Vindra, that's, you know, that's what Twitter was so good for. X being able to reach out to people that, you know, you normally wouldn't be able to connect with. I mean, I used when I, when I started out as a baby tech journalist, I reached out to quite a few people from the twit network on, on Twitter and interviewed them for stories I was doing. And you know, it would have been hard to kind of connect. That connection is really key. But the problem now with seven social media networks that everyone's using, it's like, where do you go now and what's, what's going to, I mean the race is on, isn't it? Which is going to win or are we just going to keep. Are we going to have them all? Are they all going to continue? I mean, which one's your favorite now?

[Leo Laporte]

Briefly thought there would be, that it wouldn't be replaced, that we didn't need this and that we're just going to move on to something else. But I guess maybe there is a need to kind of create these communities online. It would be nice if there were one. But we've also learned that we don't really want to centralize this all into one private company because, well, you saw what happened at Twitter. There is a. Let me show you this app because I don't know if you know about it. It's called Clear Sky. Are you familiar with this Clearsky app? They use the API to do some interesting things. So for instance, they say right now there's 23.4 million active accounts on Blue Sky. You could see the top most blocked. By the way, Brianna Woo is Brianna Woo. But you can also like I can do my. Put my handle in here and find out and this is really useful. What lists I'm on. Which one doesn't. Oh, I can also see who I'm blocking. I'm only blocking one person.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Oh, Leo, you gotta really flex that block.

[Leo Laporte]

I gotta get. But I'm blocked by. By 22 people, so. Okay, I'm proud to say, here's the lists you're on. So I'm on 335 different lists. I think that's really interesting. Right? So this is a Clearsky app. It's a free app that just uses the API. And you can see if there's somebody on here, Palomar, who's blocked half a million site accounts.

[Doc Rock]

They blocked me. I'm like, what?

[Leo Laporte]

He's busy? I think it's just an auto block, obviously. Right? Yeah. Anyway, I just thought that was kind of interesting. That's, to me, a sign when. When this started happening with Twitter, with clout and stuff like that, that's a sign that it has gotten some currency in the culture. People are going to start writing tools around it. It's also a good sign because it means there's an API or there's, you know, and there is. There's the app Proto, which Blue sky uses.

[Doc Rock]

All of these lists that I'm on are people's twit list. How nice of you guys.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, see? Show up on Twitter, quit, you'll end up on Blue Sky.

[Doc Rock]

I've been on Blue sky like, like JBT from the beginning. But the only person I would actually talk to, strangely enough, was Jake Taffer because he was writing his book and I liked. I liked the book. And we were never talking about what he does. We're talking.

[Leo Laporte]

But that was what was cool about Twitter. Just as Jennifer was saying, is you can have these conversations with big shots. Yeah.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It was helpful when starting a podcast in like 0809. Movie directors and writers and stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how I met Steve Martin. He DM'd me. Said, you don't have to answer this, but I really like your shows. It's like, I'm not gonna answer Steve Martin. Are you kidding me? So, yeah, I mean, it was.

[Doc Rock]

I posted a thing about Vegemite and.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that'll do it.

[Doc Rock]

Roadhead sent me some Vegemite that probably got me blocked.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, don't start. All the Marmite fans got pissed off at you. That's the big battle. Marmite versus Vegas.

[Doc Rock]

Australian miso. That's it. So simple.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's umami, isn't it? Yeah. Actually, what it really is is the byproduct of beer manufacturer. But let's not get into that good stuff.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Marmite for the win.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're. Of course you're A Marmite.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Vegemite's awful.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you tell the difference?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, Vegemite O Marmite is just wonderful.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like, it all tastes like salt to me. I don't.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Cheese on toast. That's all I should have.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. Ian Thompson's always telling me that you got to put your Marmite on toast. Blue sky has implemented a more aggressive impersonation policy. So if you are a parody account or a fan count again, another sign of maturity. Like, oh yeah, this is starting to become a thing.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

They're growing up so fast. Fast a.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't it sweet? 44% of Blue Sky's 100 most followed accounts have a doppelganger, a double. That's either a parody or a satire or a fan account. So I doubt I have one, but now I will because I said it, so forget it. That's according to Engadget. Thank you Mariella Moon. And thank you, Devindra Hardawar. Let's take a break and we I do want to talk. Jennifer has posted a couple of things about the FTC report on smart devices, which is kind of an eye opener. And maybe you have some advice for us. Jpt. We're going to call her Chat JPT from now on.

[Doc Rock]

Love it.

[Leo Laporte]

Kevin King, our producer, was the one who came up with that Doc Rock's also here and Devindra Hardaware. Our show today, brought to you by our good buddies at ACI Learning. You might say. Well, how do you how the good buddies I've never heard about. That's the folks who do IT Pro. Ah, we've been talking about them since they started Binge worthy Video on Demand IT and cybersecurity training, whether it's as an individual, as a team, IT Pro is the way to get CERT ready. A video library of more than 7,250 hours of training that's mind boggling. And it's not old stuff. They have. Their seven studios are running Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, always keeping everything up to date. It's just that this is a fast changing world. It's new software, new certs, new questions on the tests, new versions and so they have a lot to do. But those 7250 hours are truly up to date training by people who are experts in the field, who love what they're doing and their passion is communicative. You become engaged in IT because they are engaged in. There's more too. If you get a premium training plan, you can get practice tests. The best way to study for the certification exams. I always think it's better to take the test before you actually take it. Right. To practice the test because then you go in with confidence and you feel like you're ready. I know what I'm going to see. I'm ready to do it. It just makes a huge difference. They also have virtual labs. You don't need to have a Windows server or Windows machine machines to set them up, configure them, learn the ins and outs. You do it all in a browser. It's pretty cool. Virtual labs. It's also great for MSPs who often use this to test configurations and so forth. It really facilitates hands on learning IT Pro from ACI Learning. They make training fun, engaging, enjoyable videos by real experts. It's the best way to take your it, your cyber career to the next level level. Be bold. Train smart with ACI learning. If you go to the website info.ac learning.com twit you'll see there is a code for 30% off your first year of the IT Pro annual training plans. That's a big savings. Just use the offer code TWIT100 or just go direct to info acilearning.com TWIT if you've said to yourself I should get into it, I need a better job and boy, so many of our listeners over the years have done that, have become IT professionals. It's a great career. There's always a need if you've got a team that you want to keep up skill, you know, skilled and upskilled. This is a great way to do it too. They the teams love it because it's great training. Info.acilearning.com TWiT don't forget that offer code TWiT100 we thank him so much for supporting reporting the show. So tell me about this FTC report.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Jennifer Pattison TUI yeah so basically the FTC did some googling. Wow. Impressive. Holy research that they did.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Because this is just sort of an early look at what is going to be a big problem. And it's actually Stacy higginbotham friend of the show. This has sort of been a personal crusade of hers for a long time. If, if you listen to her IoT Stacy on IoT podcast when she which she used to do she would harp on about this that smart connected gadgets need an expiration date. And what the FTC has done here has is research to see a number. I think it was 184 smart products to see whether they told consumers when they would Stop supporting them in the way that we know now that when a smartphone phone might.

[Leo Laporte]

Out of 184 products, only 21 said oh by the way, when you, when you hit St Patrick's Day 2041, that's it, it's over done. Yeah.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

So the idea basically being that these smart makers of smart devices are not telling consumers how long they will support their product. So if you buy a smart thermostat or a smart garage door opener, video doorbell, all sorts of things, home appliances, there's a list of companies that they researched and 184 of them, only 11, just over 11% actually had any data on when the device would stop working.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to confess I've never thought about that. I have a ring doorbell, I never thought about that.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

And ring may stop supporting it. Yeah. And it's a tricky area. This is why I wouldn't necessarily say the company is, are necessary at fault here yet because this is not something that's become part of the consumer consciousness. It's becoming that way now because we're having more, we're seeing more and more devices that have gone out of business. Companies have gone out of business. So there's no longer a cloud support. For example, a couple months ago AeroGarden, which was a smart garden device that you could put on your kitchen counter and grow.

[Leo Laporte]

I bought one on Instagram. Yeah.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Single handedly keeping Instagram going, Leo. But yeah, so it went out, of, it went out of business. It's shutting its servers down. You can still use the device, you know, to grow things, but you got.

[Leo Laporte]

To water it by hand now.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But there is no, there are no more software updates. And obviously the big concern here from the FTC's standpoint is if there are no software updates, your device could become a security risk if you keep it online. Ultimately most smart home devices, and you were asking about advice here, you know, they should still do what they're supposed to do even if they don't have an Internet connection. That is a key thing you should always bear in mind.

[Leo Laporte]

There is one issue though, which Stacy points out. It's one thing if your doorbell isn't getting updates or maybe a thermostat that would be. Or your garden isn't getting updates. It's another thing entirely if your router.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Is not going to WI fi. Router, yes. That's in fact we talked about this.

[Leo Laporte]

On, yeah on security and that's considered a, you know, a smart IoT device. We talked about this on security now last Tuesday because d D Link. There's a zero day exploit on D Link routers, which are very widely sold and D Link has no update for it. They're out of service, but lots of people, hundreds of thousands of people are still using them.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

And when you go and buy your WI fi router, just like when you went and bought your ring doorbell, it didn't think to you, didn't occur to you that this isn't going to work. And the difference here between say our smartphones or our laptops or our computers, which you kind of feel like probably aren't going to live with you forever, it's, you know, they're consumables is that a lot of the things you put into your house you expect will last the length of the house, if your time in the house. You know, doorbells, washing machines, fridges, they used to last 10, 15, 20 years. Obviously things have changed a little bit, but with technology, but the expectation for most consumers is that a device that you buy in to put into your house, that sort of infrastructure for your house is going to last a long time. And we haven't, we're just starting to hit this point where people are realizing, oh no, you know, this is, there is an expiration date because if the company decides, like D Link did, that they no longer want to support this product, it's just no longer going to work. Or if, you know, devices that may still have, do their original function, but if you keep them online and they're not getting software updates become a threat vector, which is obviously a big concern in the smart home. But you know, you also, if you have a smart thermostat, it may still work, but you'll lose, you may lose your features that you were using, like learning thermostats that predict when you're going to need to get warmer or cooler, those features go away. You've paid a premium for those features and now they're gone because the company has decided to stop supporting them. So ultimately the FTC here, this is more sort of just a, an opening sort of gambit. It looks like, like we're going to start looking into this more seriously. Although they do think there's, they pointed out in this blog post that, that this actually these companies may be breaking the law or the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act. So basically consumer devices that cost more than $15 should, you know, have a warranty. And if we're not, if you're not providing support and not telling the consumer how long you, you're going to provide that support for they could be in violation of this act. So we may see the FTC do something here. I think ultimately what we will start to see now is that companies hopefully will start thinking, okay, we need to think about this because they need to think. It's not just companies like Amazon or ring big companies like that, you probably feel a bit more comfortable buying a product from because they're probably not going out of business in the next five to 10 years. But it depends, you know, they do kill products. Yeah, you never know. They kill products. They do kill products regularly. But it's to their credit they do keep the support largely for. I mean there is a few, a few examples of. Not like the nest, protect the nest, secure.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Alarm system.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

They did kill that. But the bigger companies, Amazon has killed products. But then it's given consumers their money back. You know, it's understandable.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean you make a product, you're not going to support it for 100 years.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But this. Yeah, that's the question though. How long should, should they. What is a reasonable amount of time? And consumers should be aware.

[Doc Rock]

And that's the key at Apple because so we would have a five year functioning plan, right. And then we had a seven year obsolescence plan. But you know, there was time. I'm at the bar, somebody would come in with a 2012 square G4 power book. Favorite power book ever by the way. The time beautiful. And you know, it works and you know, and it's like, well, I don't need a new one. I'm like, how can you still use this? They're like, I just write like I write most people.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I don't buy something thinking, oh I'm gonna have to replace it in five years. You know, most people don't do that. By the way, Apple still does not say if you buy a new iPhone today how long you're guaranteed security updates for it. They don't.

[Doc Rock]

At least they're better than Android five or six generations.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's not, they never really say Android now does, right. Google does and Samsung does and more.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

And more companies are doing that. And I think we'll see come into the smart home. But this is also one area where matter is addressing this problem long term because matter is a local protocol and it's an op. It's also open source. So if your device works with matter matter, even if the company for the business goes out of business or shuts down support for that specific product, you will still be able, it will still work on your home network. And because it's open source, there's, you know, there's the potential that someone you know might be able, like if you. This is one thing that I heard Stacy say a lot and I agree with is if your company's going out of business or if you're shutting a product down, you know, open source, the API let. Let other people be able to keep the product going. Small communities. I mean we had an entire company that went out of business and the consumer users got together and took all of that. We know. I'm trying to remember the name.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Pardon?

[Devindra Hardawar]

It was an AI bot. Right.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

No, I'm thinking I have that.

[Leo Laporte]

The OZ Cosmo. I have that over here.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

This was a smart. A home automation company.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, wemo. It was like.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

We know it wasn't wemo. They've been around even longer than them. Oh, Wizard.

[Leo Laporte]

Woo woo. The name has escaped.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But the users bought the company and kept it afloat and brought it back online and you know, to be able. So this. These products are going to have a lifespan obviously, but insteon.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that it?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you to Richard Campbell.

[Doc Rock]

It's very much like. Like TiVo was too. Right. TiVo was almost dead in the water and the people were like no. People like Leo and I who had several who were like, you can't get rid of TiVo.

[Leo Laporte]

I wrote a book about it. Yeah.

[Doc Rock]

So I think it's a very similar sort of thing of.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, if there's anything shorter lived than an IoT device, it's a tech book. They are. Do not write tech books the likes of.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Well, especially about niche categories. Like I have never had a TiVo or like DVR like that whole phase of entertainment. I'm a home media guy, so. Oh, just. Just wild to me. But to what you're saying to what we're talking about here, would be nice to see more regulations around this, at least in terms of guaranteeing warranties or at least offline access. Offline capabilities.

[Leo Laporte]

I'd like to introduce you to Leo Laporte's guide to TiVo.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I remember that.

[Leo Laporte]

Thanks to Gareth Cranberry who helped me on that. Yeah. Technical accuracy verified by WeakNees.com they were actually the primary source for this. This was actually on how to hack the TiVo 1.0, which I'm sure TiVo loved that. Oh, and by the way, look what it came with in the book. It came with a CD inside. Yeah. Just what you wanted. That's history, huh? Isn't that ridiculous? Is TiVo still around. Yes. Replay went away though, right? That was the one that, that was the one that died. Well, good. I would love to see this. I think that we need to know and we need to think about it. It's good for consumers to be aware of it because it's not just them. When your router becomes a security flaw or your, even your doorbell, it could affect the Internet as a whole. Right. It could be used it as a botnet and all sorts of things. So this is a very serious issue. There's also an article you from the Verge. You mentioned. FTC is changing its telemarketing rules. Okay, get this. If you called a tech support scam number, they couldn't protect you. They could only go after them if they called you. So why, you might wonder, you see all these pop ups that say, oh, your computer is infected, call us. Because there was no way to get after these guys if you called them. The FTC has finally finalized amendments to the telemarketing sales rule, which makes it easier to protect consumers who are tricked into paying scam tech support companies. They could always go after them if they called you, but they couldn't go after them if you called them.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Unbelievable stuff. Have you guys seen the movie the Beekeeper?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Jason Statham fighting, like basically taking down a phishing scam company who.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Taking it.

[Leo Laporte]

Down physically, if you want some, takes you down. You get, you know you're taken.

[Devindra Hardawar]

But no, that movie's a big, a big fun time. And I think the way they visualize like the phishing scam companies and how like slimy they are, it feels really good, feels really cathartic to see him punch those people in the face.

[Leo Laporte]

According, according to the verge, people over 60 are five times more likely to be a victim of these scams.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Especially after midnight, three in the morning on Instagram.

[Leo Laporte]

What? I need to fix my computer. Let me call you right back. $175 million in reported losses. I'm sure it's more than that. Earlier this year, the F reported fake Geek squad. You ever get one of those Geek Squad pop ups? Or actually I got text messages almost. Gosh, I thought, oh, it must be real. It's the Geek Squad. And that they topped the list of fraud. $15 million lost to these clowns pretending to be the Geek Squad. Call Jason. Let's get him in here with his sawed off shotgun. One more break and then we're going to wrap it up. Believe it or not, it's been. I don't want to go. This is too much Fun. I would. I would just hang out with you guys anytime. Anyway, I love it. Devindra Hardawar from Engadget, Jennifer Patterson, Tui from the Verge. Doc Rock from Hawaii. It's good to have all three of you. You're wearing the Man United shirt because you're a. A supporter. Are you a soccer hooligan? Doc Rock, a Die Hard.

[Doc Rock]

Die hard. I is really born in the wrong place because like, I've been at this. So when MISL first came to the US I lived nearby RFK Stadium in DC So I got to go watch the Diplomats games. And back then, security just paid no attention to little kids sneaking in. So we watched all the Diplomat games at that time. They had this guy named Johan Cruyff turns out to be one of the greatest soccer players to ever play. So I've even seen a match between Johan Cruyff and Pele. So I got addicted way back then. And when TV started showing, you know, EPL here in the U.S. i was like hooked. And yeah, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the end. It is the most boring game. I don't know why they call it the beautiful game and all that. Because it's just.

[Doc Rock]

Because nothing happens.

[Leo Laporte]

They're running up and down, running back and forth, running, running.

[Doc Rock]

Help me.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I know, I know. It is very. It's way more interesting than American football.

[Leo Laporte]

You probably like cricket too, though. Let's be fair. Jennifer.

[Doc Rock]

No, no. So the problem is like if you only compare it to. To what you see in the image in the. I forgot MSL or whatever we have in.

[Leo Laporte]

I watched the World Cup. I watched the best stuff. It's still.

[Doc Rock]

World Cup's not the best. You need to watch the epl. Just. Just trust me.

[Leo Laporte]

Why is it better? Isn't it still people running up and down and up and down?

[Doc Rock]

No, there's finesse in their speed and their strategy.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Running, then sports in general. Not a good idea.

[Leo Laporte]

This is why I like the NFL. Because they run for like a foot and then some 300 pound guy slams him to the ground.

[Doc Rock]

Get him to listen. Here, the one. Okay. I'm nothing against advertisers. I love advertisers. They. They pay me.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Boring.

[Doc Rock]

But every five seconds it stops in footy. We stop one time because one time.

[Leo Laporte]

No. So that's why they plaster the field with advertising.

[Doc Rock]

100%. But guess who makes more money? So we doing it wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

Does soccer make more money really? Abso freaking lutely than the NFL?

[Doc Rock]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Help me out here, Devendra. This. This is.

[Doc Rock]

This is Sack Highest paid athlete in the world. Go.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Doc Rock]

180 million a year.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It is so much more fun to play than to watch. Like that's it is.

[Leo Laporte]

It's fun to play. I love, I love running up and down the field. Yeah, that's fun. I just don't want to watch somebody.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Else in the rest of the world though. I know football is like, it's, it's a cultural thing. It's, it's so much more than. America has changed a lot in the last decade. Like it's become much more popular here. When I moved here years ago and I used to have to, you know, do pay per view just to watch, you know, Premier League games.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple tv. But Apple does. Ms. Apple does this American. I would love to, but is that better? It's better. It's better Soccer. The Premier League?

[Doc Rock]

Yeah. Premier League is on NBC, dude. What are you talking about?

[Leo Laporte]

That's thanks to, that's thanks to that silly Apple show with the guy with the mustache.

[Doc Rock]

No, that. So you know what's funny? That show started as a skit. Yeah, that show started as a skit the day NBC bought the rest.

[Leo Laporte]

Soccer.

[Doc Rock]

It was a skit to know to teach us people about soccer.

[Leo Laporte]

Uhhuh.

[Doc Rock]

And then, and then 10 years later it became the TV show and so yeah, it's got even bigger. But I thank you NBC for finally. Because I used to jump through hoops. Santa iptv.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Oh my gosh, that was terrible. Yeah.

[Doc Rock]

The only thing good about Satan was the special one, the puppets with Wayne Rooney and oh my God, they were so good.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I remember when I first lived in the States, I had to go and buy the Sunday newspapers to find out the scores and that was. And they were three days late because it took that long to fly them over from the UK. So this was when I was 18.

[Leo Laporte]

Time ago. Wow.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But yeah, it's a much, much better now. And one day America will win the World cup, but probably not in our lifetimes.

[Doc Rock]

Not until we get rid of.

[Leo Laporte]

We've gotten to the finals. Haven't we got to the finals? No, never.

[Doc Rock]

No.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

No women.

[Doc Rock]

The problem is our guys go.

[Leo Laporte]

Women are great. Women have won.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Women are good. The women are good.

[Doc Rock]

The women are the best in the world. Yes, but yeah, develop a club system. Once we develop a club system, we'll catch up. There's no way we're going to do it. Sending our guys to play college.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But you keep putting all the soccer players on the football teams kicking the goals. So.

[Doc Rock]

Yeah, that's true.

[Leo Laporte]

The most, the most Ridiculous profession. Yes. I come out for a second every few hours to kick one ball once. It's a skill. It's highly skilled. Our kicker, we got a guy off the street because we had so many injuries in the 49ers. They got a guy off the street, he kicks the ball, makes the. You know, kicks it off the other end. The guy, right, runs it back and for some reason decides he can also tackle and tries to tackle the runner, injures himself, and he's gone. It was like he had one shot and that was it. They should only kick. That's the rule. All right, you're watching this Week in Tech and this Week in Soccer. Ignorance. And I apologize to the entire world, which thinks I'm a fool for not loving the beautiful game.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I'm sure it's more fun if you're at a pub with your friends.

[Doc Rock]

You know what they call it? The beautiful game. Johan Cruyff. Thank you. Astro. Corrected.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

We could do this Week in soccer.

[Leo Laporte]

Makes $700 million. I think that's a little bit more. But anyway, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna believe there's no. Look at. Baseball's even worse. And I will acknowledge that it's over for baseball. It's sad, but it's over. Making enemies, it's. Thank you for watching the show. We appreciate it. Now that I've made enemies of all of you, would you like to join the club? Club Twit. It is what keeps this show and all of the shows we do on the air. I am so thrilled with the success of Club Twit. Thank you to our more than 12,000 members. You have made it possible for us to say, not only stay alive, you're covering half our payroll. Now, without Club Twit, we would have had to let people go. We would have had to shut down shows. But I'd like to do more. And with your help, we can. If you watch our shows, if you enjoy what you see and you'd like us to keep going, I'd like to invite you to join the club. We keep the cost very low. Seven bucks a month. I mean, that's practically nothing. And for that, you get so much ad. Free versions of all of our shows, access to the Club Twit Discord, which is a great hang with some smart, interesting people. You also get to participate in our kind of Club Twit events, including Micah. He does his crafting course. So cute. He's doing. And his needlepoint or his cruel work while other people are doing their Legos. And so forth. We have Stacy's Book Club. Speaking of Stacey Higginbotham coming up in a couple of weeks. We're doing a James SA Corey, his latest novel. I can't wait to talk about that. Chris Marquardt does his photo assignments. We do a coffee show now with Mark Prince, the coffee geek. It's just a lot of fun to be in the club and it helps us keep going on the air. If you're not a member. We do have some new features we should mention. One is you can get two weeks free just to try before you buy if you want. And when you sign up for a club Twit, you will get an offer code which allows you to post it everywhere you want. And if your friends join using your referral code, you get a free month. So there's another reason to join TWiT TV club. Twitter really helps us keep doing what we are, I think what we do best. And we really appreciate your support. After investing billions to light up our network.

[Doc Rock]

T Mobile is America's largest 5G network.

[Leo Laporte]

Plus right now you can switch keep your phone and we'll pay it off up to $800. See how you can save on every plan vs Verizon and at&t@t mobile.com Keep and switch up to four lines via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualifying unlock device credit service ported 90 plus days with device and eligible carrier and timely redemption required. Card has no cash access and expires in six months. I am Christopher Titus of the Titus Podcast.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I am Rachel and I'm Ken Hyland, AKA the Highlander.

[Leo Laporte]

When the rest of the world is screaming insanity, we scream sanity. We do a satire comedy news and events podcast.

[Devindra Hardawar]

First and foremost, funny first.

[Leo Laporte]

Whatever's happening in the world, if you want to hear it in a way that doesn't rip your soul out, we'll make you laugh with it. At the end of the day, we just scream sanity. That's what we do.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Can we just talk sanity?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Because they have to scream sanity so.

[Leo Laporte]

Nobody'S going to hear it.

[Devindra Hardawar]

So tired of you guys screaming I talk stupidity. Well, that's true.

[Leo Laporte]

The Titus podcast on all major streaming platforms, YouTube [e-mail] Titus Podcast it's time to scream sanity. On we go with this week in tech. I think this will be interesting. The Supreme Court has said is probably going to take up a case about whose response possible for your piracy. Is it the isp? It's Sony versus Cox. Sony says Cox Cable is responsible for the piracy on its network. In fact, the jury found that Cox was guilful guilty rather Guilful was guilty of willful contributory infringement and gave them a. Gave Sony a billion dollar in damages. But the court, the fourth Circuit reversed the verdict saying Cox didn't profit so you can't charge him damages. There's a new trial. Sony and Cox are both seeking Supreme Court review. Is an ISP liable for the piracy that its customers engage? And this is mainly because the record industry for years has tried to go after customers and failed.

[Devindra Hardawar]

And the MPAA or at least some.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, remember that? Yeah.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

This feels like sort of last gasp of the dinosaur industry. It makes me so mad reading this because you know it's not the punishing they cutting the Internet off because someone copied your music and then like today you need the Internet for everything. And it's, you know, that's true.

[Leo Laporte]

It's more than just a luxury, isn't it?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

It's not. Yeah, it's a, it's a essential part of daily life these days. And it's. This just makes me mad. Reading this article made me mad. I'm like. And because it's the same, I mean it goes back to, you know, content non duration on social media. There's so many elements to this that you, you see throughout technology. It's like what's the difference between the pipes and the content? Like what is, who's, who's responsible for what? And the pipes. The Internet should just be the pipes of course and we need the pipes. You can't just take them away because someone's done something on the pipes that you don't like. It's like taking away cars because someone.

[Leo Laporte]

Had an accident or charging the phone company for those guys who call you up and scam you. It's not the phone companies right fault. What scares me is that the Supreme Court is considering taking this case. What they should say is no, the fourth Circuit was right. There's absolutely no liability here. What are you talking about?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But the knock on effect of this would be ridiculous.

[Leo Laporte]

You just don't know what the Supreme Court is up to.

[Doc Rock]

You know it's funny, this conversation just went around. So back here used to be Time Warner Cable, of course now on Spectrum and Warner is now WarnerMedia but then WarnerMedia is AT&T. So how come they didn't get talked about in this situation? Because they're the same company at this point. They can't shoot each other.

[Leo Laporte]

It's confusing.

[Doc Rock]

You know what I mean?

[Leo Laporte]

Like Sony again. Right.

[Doc Rock]

It was all crazy. Back in the day when everybody thought that the Internet was going to stop you from watching tv, watching movies, listen to music. If anything the Internet in Internet Internet increased some of the watchability of these things because we were able to hello, get social and build communities around Game of Thrones or House of Dragons, right? So now they've used it. Even the. The fact that kids today are into the Star wars that we saw in the theater in 77.

[Leo Laporte]

You're blaming the Internet for that?

[Doc Rock]

No, I'm saying the Internet helped. It kept it afloat. Disney tried to ruin it, it's true. But somehow we figured out how to fight back and fix them and make it better. And now there's whole brand new shows that we never would have heard of. You know George Dour, like I pray for that dude at Nightly and I'm an atheist. Like, but I pray for him because I'm like dude, I need you to finish the books.

[Leo Laporte]

Come on. He's not gonna finish the books, dude.

[Doc Rock]

He's having this. I'm a wishful man.

[Leo Laporte]

He's out there partying in his Greek cap, Greek sailor cap and he's not gonna have a.

[Doc Rock]

It's so funny that though this is a thing and it's like I agree with JBT in a sense that the industry just still are trying to hold on to something that kind of. That ship sailed a long time ago ago. And if anything I'm all used to be a conspiracy theorist on the fact of Napster was sort of backed by the companies that wanted albums to become singular purchase tracks. Like I still kind of sort of believe that a little bit. And that sounds weird to say that, but an experiment.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you like my. I could write a novel. I got a Greek fisherman.

[Doc Rock]

Dude, that works. You got double L, right? So George Double L. Martin. We just.

[Leo Laporte]

George L.L. martin. There you go.

[Devindra Hardawar]

The demotivational hat. Once you get it, you'll never get anything done.

[Leo Laporte]

I just kind of want to party, that's all. This is the new form of warfare. You remember that two cables connecting I think was it Lithuania to the Internet were cut. Two Baltic data cables cut. And now the suspicion is on a Chinese ship which had just been docking in Russia dragging its anchor for 100 miles. It could have been an accident. We just, you know, we forgot we dropped our anchor and we're just dragging it for 100 miles. They had just left the Baltic, Russian Baltic port on November 15th. The their. The question is, was the captain induced by Russian intelligence to carry out the sabotage? I Have a feeling this. You're going to see more of this kind of, you know, appalling sabotage. They did it with the cable, the pipeline, the underwater pipeline, and they did it with these undersea cables.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I mean, it's appalling right now already with open warfare, but this is. This is pretty bad. This is not. We're definitely to see more of this type of thing and Russia pretending that they're not involved at all. Yeah, we didn't do that. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, how are you going to prove it? Meta wants to put its own cable in. They are planning to spend as much as $10 billion. Here's a story from the Verge.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Actually, no, that story is really good, but it's not the one about Meta.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, what is this?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

This is a story that we wrote on the Verge a few. A year, almost a year ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's an older story.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

The underwater cables and how they repair them, which is really hard. And this is why it's so scary. What this sort of infrastructure warfare. Because it's really hard to repair these cables and it cuts those countries off.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yes. And this is why Meta is creating its own.

[Leo Laporte]

Just click the wrong link. Here it is. Yeah, there. So it would only be for Facebook.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

That's what it said it was. It was. Well, for. For it's. It's services. So all of the.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there is the Facebook Internet. Remember they offered that to India and India said, no, thank you.

[Devindra Hardawar]

The idea of no links on Instagram expanded to.

[Leo Laporte]

Overall, you never leave. You never leave. Meta's world. A 40,000 kilometer project. These are fiber optic cables that would lay under the circle and it would basically be a private Internet. Wow. Wow. Sources close to Meta confirmed the project, but this is a tech tech crunch scoop. It hasn't actually been publicly announced. When completed, it would give Metta a dedicated pipe for data traffic around the world. Not a surprise. Look at this. It goes all the way from Virginia beach and Myrtle beach all the way around the world back to California. Holy moly. The W cable.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I mean, we need more information here.

[Leo Laporte]

Part time.

[Doc Rock]

Could you just bring one of those cables up here?

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, Mark, how does Hawaii get an Internet? Does Hawaii have a subsea cable or.

[Doc Rock]

No? We have several. It's actually on the picture on the Verge article. And the funny thing is that boat, kddi, that was my phone carrier when I went to school in Japan.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Doc Rock]

Yeah, there's. There's like two cables coming from Washing, then one coming from California. But it's on the Verge picture. If you look at it again.

[Leo Laporte]

That's really cool.

[Doc Rock]

Yeah. Because originally, I mean, a lot of people don't realize this. We were one of the first connected places because of Pearl Harbor. Schofield.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Doc Rock]

Right back when it was Milnet, back in 1966.

[Leo Laporte]

Really.

[Doc Rock]

So we've.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Doc Rock]

We've been connected for a hot minute. The strange thing, look how all the.

[Leo Laporte]

Cables coming out of that little island there. Look at that. Wow.

[Doc Rock]

The part of the Ethernet substack was actually invented at University of Hawaii way back in the day. And then the board of regents didn't understand what it was going to be worth, so they were like, okay, whatever. And they gave it up to California. So I think it went to what.

[Leo Laporte]

Is Livermore or Livermore.

[Doc Rock]

It was Berkeley.

[Leo Laporte]

Berkeley.

[Doc Rock]

And we gave up any form of residual rights or money that we would have got. And so there's a rumor. I've never checked it because I don't want to be mad. That, like they still get like a $0.01 royalty on every single Mac address ever put out. And universal. You know what took up travel industry.

[Leo Laporte]

Management spin it differently. They were altruists. They realized how valuable this would be and they decided not to profit on it, but to give it to the world for a penny, whatever a year.

[Doc Rock]

Yeah. We did the same thing with pizza recipe, which is total bs.

[Leo Laporte]

That is not a. That pineapple and bacon do not belong in a pizza. Don't get me started.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Pineapple can't stand it.

[Doc Rock]

It's called. They call it a Hawaiian pizza. And I'm like, listen, bro, I'm gonna get. I'm gonna start getting mad. I'm not even Hawaii.

[Leo Laporte]

If you put spam on it, maybe, but not. Yeah, that would be Canadian bacon and.

[Doc Rock]

Pineapple, as we say in Hawaii. P. You're absolutely right.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

The infrastructure. The concept of these infrastructure attacks is really scary, though.

[Leo Laporte]

It is terrifying.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

There is how easily we can be kept and not just this one. I mean, obviously, deep sea cables feel like quite a challenge, but obviously they figured out a way to get them. But just getting any infrastructure in America, we are so dependent on our infrastructure and so much of it now is more easily hackable. It seems like that we. I feel like that's the biggest danger that's facing this country right now. And there's. Yeah. Not just our smart home devices that run that expire and turn into botnets, but our entire infrastructure in this country.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Gather your chickens. Gather your home batteries.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yes.

[Doc Rock]

This is.

[Devindra Hardawar]

This is our future.

[Leo Laporte]

Gather your batteries.

[Devindra Hardawar]

You gotta have your own infrastructure, Doc.

[Leo Laporte]

Rock Rich Campbell, who is, of course the host of Windows Weekly. Richard is proud Canadian. And he says, I didn't know this, that Hawaiian pizza was invented in Toronto.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Oh, this makes sense.

[Leo Laporte]

So, like everything else, you can blame Canada, Canada, Canada. It's their fault. It's their fault. Yo, Doc rock is at YouTube.com ocrock he is also the Director of Strategic Partners from ECAMM and has been instrumental in helping us set up this remote system that we use now, including eCamm. I really appreciate everything. And Zoom. It's a. It's. You know what? Just tell those ECAMM folks to work with the Zoom folks. If we can get them together in one place, we'd really have something. But we have managed to make sort.

[Doc Rock]

Of how it happened, believe it or not.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Doc Rock]

Alex introduced me to Andy.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Doc Rock]

At NAB a couple years back. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Doc Rock]

And then I got new. Andy was. But at that time, he. He wasn't completely Zoom yet. And Alex had introduced me to Andy.

[Leo Laporte]

He invented Zoom ISO and sold it to Zoom and became a Zoom.

[Doc Rock]

There you go. Now, now, you know. And so during that conversation, I was like, hold on, wait. This would be kind of cool. But then when I was messing with Zoom ISO, I'm like, my. My users, no way they could do the Zoom ISO thing because I know what I'm doing. And it was work. But I liked it. I liked it. And then when Andy got pulled over to Z Zoom, I was like, okay, now it's going to get easier. And so I was like, andy, you need to meet Ken and Glenn. And then they started talking and they became friends and so on and so on. I was like that girl with the old shampoo commercial, Faberge.

[Leo Laporte]

I told two friends, and then they told two friends.

[Doc Rock]

And yeah, it was fair faucet. Now that I think about it, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

How that stuff spreads. Was it fair faucet in that old end?

[Doc Rock]

It was very faucet.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I'll be dead.

[Doc Rock]

And then.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Doc Rock]

So that's how we got here. And telling you the Zoom ECAMM sort of collaboration, it just changed.

[Leo Laporte]

Wonderful. For us.

[Doc Rock]

It makes it so easy.

[Leo Laporte]

So easy. It's a lifesaver. We use it for all the big shows, including this one. Thank you, Doc. And your relationship with us is fantastic. We're very happy. Same thing with Jennifer Pattison Tuohy. She appears every month with Micah Sargent on Tech News Weekly and really ought to appear a lot more on our show. She's just [e-mail]. she is smart home mama. But I bet you have a X account called Chicken Mama somewhere just waiting to be launched. Right? She's got the chicken mug.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

That's a good one. I might have to think about that one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, maybe. Maybe just think about that a little bit. We'll all be coming to you for the eggs. Thank you. Jennifer, Great to have you on. I appreciate it.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Great to be here.

[Leo Laporte]

And then Vindra Hardawar, who is my. Who's my shadow when I'm not here? Devendra will be. And that's what we love. He's been a great fill in for me. Senior editor and Engadget and always a great guy. You're going to ces. You're crazy. But go ahead, have a good time.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Crazy. I'm looking forward to it. But also doing a lot of like prepping for end of year film stuff too. So it's, it's crazy time of the year. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I just saw Conclave and I really liked.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Incredible, Incredible movie.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But, you know, so Devendra hosts a really good podcast called Slash Film.

[Devindra Hardawar]

The film cast.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the film cast. I'm sorry, was part of slash film. Yeah. And so we always end up talking about movies a little bit. But I was, I was telling Lisa, I'm starting to feel like movies aren't enough anymore. I'm getting spoiled by these five part six, part seven part series.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I think Conclave would have been better in, in three or four.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I kind of disagree. I kind of like Conclave is such a good example of a movie that is nice and tight and just like you're in and you're out. Whereas that could easily be a six episode miniseries and you'd be like, you ran out of plot three episodes into.

[Leo Laporte]

And it was a great mystery and a fantastic twist at the end. I just really enjoy. We watched that.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Good stuff. Good stuff. If you like that, check out the Young Pope, because that was a limited series.

[Leo Laporte]

Loved the Young Pope with Jude Law. So that was good. And I told Lisa, I said, you know, this is just like the Shoes of the Fisherman, which came out in 1960. 68 with Anthony Quinn. And if you haven't seen that, you should see that. And Conclave because they're both about the papal succession Conclave that they do when a pope dies.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Anyway, I think they need to get rid of movies that have two parts though, because I went to see Wicked and I'm like, threw another one.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you know ahead of time that it was gonna be.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I did, I did. But I'm glad I knew I had Time. Because I would have been really mad.

[Leo Laporte]

I was pissed when Dune ended and it said, like, wait till next year. Find out what.

[Devindra Hardawar]

No, it's tough. It's tough. But I just saw Wicked too. It's like, I was not looking forward to that at all. I'm not a musical guy, but it's John Chu K, like, kicked off.

[Leo Laporte]

I love musicals. Saw Wicked in the theater. In fact, I think I saw it on Broadway with Idina Menzel.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I saw it in London with Idina. Mazel.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And Jennifer and Jenna with Christian Chenoweth. It was a good show, but it was not. It was not two parts, but it was very long.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It was very long. They think they brought in more stuff from the book and, like, it's more. More. They're building up, like, a broader universe, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no. Because there's been way too much Wicked advertising as is.

[Devindra Hardawar]

They're. They're.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

My goodness. I know.

[Doc Rock]

If you like tight shows, Leo, this gonna sound crazy. And I swear, I'm not chilling for JPT over there. You want to get Brit Box?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I was gonna say. That's exactly what I was saying.

[Doc Rock]

So much good stuff from Brit. I like, you know, sort of crime tv. It's crazy, but, you know, Law and Order style. But I'm really over Dick Wolf because.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

He has come to the one episode we need seven come to the conclusion.

[Doc Rock]

That Americans don't know anything. So he gives all the clues in the front. I know exactly what's happening within three minutes. On Brit Box, you watch the good cop shows like Tower. Tower is incredible.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm gonna write that down.

[Doc Rock]

The Passenger. The Passenger I just finished watching, which.

[Leo Laporte]

Is not really great channel.

[Doc Rock]

Sci Fi thing. So good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Doc Rock]

Oh, my God. Like you're a fan of Down. And then they'd be like, pat right in the face. You're wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

I like rural stories like Doc Martin and All Creatures Great and Small, where everything's just quiet and calm. And the worst thing that happens is Jennifer's chickens got into Devendra's garden.

[Doc Rock]

And that's the Passenger. So you'll love that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's basically sort of describe you. What a great show. So much fun talking to you. We'll have you all back very soon because this was. This was my. This is my great pleasure. We really appreciate it. Thanks to all of you who are watching. As I mentioned, we stream on eight platforms now. YouTube, Twitch, Kick X, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok. You can watch anywhere. If you want to watch. Live every Sunday, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2200 UTC. But you don't have to watch live. I know it's not convenient for a lot of people. People because it's a podcast. You can download it and watch it whenever you want. Get copies of this show and all the shows we do at our website, Twit TV. All the shows also have a YouTube channel. So if you go to Twit TV, click the button that says this Week in Tech. You'll see a link to our YouTube channel. That's a great place to get the video and to share clips. So if there's something you saw, like you say, oh, I really gotta tell my friends why soccer is the beautiful game. Gunta Kunta said. So then you can, you can clip that and send it to them. I'm going to make Doc mad. And you can send it to them and then they will, they will say, oh, this show is good. I got to watch more of that guy in the Greek fishing hat. What else? Oh yes, you could subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get it automatically. Any podcast client search for this Week in Tech or Twitch and you'll have it thanks to our club members who very much made this show possible. I really appreciate it. I'm going to do, if you're around at 9pm Pacific, do a little more coding in the advent of code. I'll stream that on all of our channels and I will see you next week on this Week in Tech. As I have been saying now for 20 years, this show's been going on for almost 20 years. Another twit is in the cam.

[Doc Rock]

Bye bye.

[Leo Laporte]

Doing the twin. Doing the twin. All right.

[Doc Rock]

Doing the twin, baby.

[Leo Laporte]

Doing the twin. Now at T Mobile get four 5G.

[Doc Rock]

Phones on us and four lines for $25 a line per month when you.

[Leo Laporte]

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