This Week in Tech 1011: The Year in Review

Summary

This Week in Tech 1011: The Year in Review – Detailed Summary

Released on December 23, 2024

Hosted by Leo Laporte, "This Week in Tech" brings together leading voices in the technology sector to dissect and discuss the year's most impactful stories. In this special year-end episode, Leo is joined by Micah Sargent, Father Robert Balliser, and Richard Campbell from Windows Weekly. Together, they navigate through the pivotal events that shaped 2024, offering insights, analyses, and memorable moments.

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1. Opening Remarks and Guest Introductions

The episode kicks off with Leo Laporte welcoming his guests:

• Micah Sargent: Host of shows like Hands on Technology, Tech News Weekly, and iOS Today.
• Father Robert Balliser: The "Digital Jesuit," providing a unique perspective from the Vatican.
• Richard Campbell: From Windows Weekly, a polymath deeply involved in various tech domains.

Notable Quote:

Leo Laporte [00:00]: "What we do at the end of the year is a review of the year with people in the family. It's a family show."

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2. Mass Layoffs in the Tech Industry

A significant portion of the discussion centers around the massive layoffs that dominated early 2024. Companies like Intel, Tesla, Google, Meta, and Microsoft collectively shed approximately 150,000 jobs. The conversation delves into the reasons behind these layoffs, emphasizing that despite record profits, companies are maneuvering to bolster stock prices by announcing layoffs early in the year.

Notable Quotes:

Richard Campbell [06:05]: "The question is, that's what they reported. Did they really lay them off?"

Leo Laporte [06:57]: "They all do it. You know, it's becoming a routine thing here."

The panel also touches on the impact of these layoffs on employee morale and the broader implications for labor movements in the tech sector.

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3. Challenges in the Gaming Industry

The gaming sector faced its own set of challenges in 2024. High development costs, averaging around $100 million for a single title, have made it increasingly difficult for studios to innovate without guaranteed returns. This has led to a consolidation of the industry, with established franchises like Call of Duty dominating the market while smaller, more creative projects struggle to secure funding.

Notable Quotes:

Richard Campbell [08:11]: "Gaming's the one that took the beating this year."

Micah Sargent [10:06]: "AI is... how the commitment that we made and the time that we put into it, I don't have the energy for that."

The discussion also highlights the rise of games-as-a-service models and the pitfalls associated with them, such as unsustainable operational costs and the lack of innovative content.

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4. The Rise and Complexity of Artificial Intelligence

AI continued to be a dominant theme in 2024, with advancements and controversies shaping public discourse. The panel discusses the emergence of AI assistants like Microsoft's Co-Pilot and the failed attempt by Teenage Engineering to introduce the Rabbit R1AI assistant. The latter was criticized for being no more than an Android device with a basic app, failing to deliver on its promise of an Omni app capable of executing complex tasks.

Notable Quotes:

Leo Laporte [14:55]: "This might be the year that you get a password manager that handles pass keys beautifully."

Father Robert Balliser [16:56]: "Any of the main manufacturers, you can go Google, you can go Samsung, you can go Apple. They all have that baked in."

The conversation also delves into ethical concerns surrounding AI, such as privacy, data security, and the potential for misuse in content generation.

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5. Elon Musk's Continued Influence and Twitter Dynamics

Elon Musk remains a central figure in the tech narrative, particularly regarding his acquisition and management of Twitter. The panel debates whether Musk's acquisition was a strategic masterstroke or a risky gamble. While Twitter has survived his tenure, transforming into a polarizing platform with significant political clout, concerns about its financial viability and Musk's personal influences persist.

Notable Quotes:

Leo Laporte [40:44]: "This is the biggest breach of the year was National Public Data..."

Father Robert Balliser [46:24]: "Twitter hasn't disappeared. But if you take a look at the financial bits..."

Musk's maneuvers, including leveraging Twitter's platform to influence political outcomes and his continued ventures into space and automotive industries, are scrutinized for their long-term impacts on the tech landscape.

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6. Antitrust and Regulatory Scrutiny of Big Tech

The episode highlights increased antitrust actions against major tech giants:

• Apple faced a €1.8 billion fine from the EU for restricting developers from informing consumers about alternative services outside the Apple ecosystem.
• The U.S. Department of Justice, along with 15 states and the District of Columbia, filed a lawsuit against Apple alleging monopolistic practices.
• Google is under investigation for potential antitrust violations, with discussions around forced divestitures and operational restrictions.

Notable Quotes:

Richard Campbell [43:47]: "Microsoft is delighted to actually be back into the antitrust conversations because it means they're relevant again."

Micah Sargent [43:46]: "I'm curious how everybody else feels though. Like does Microsoft having years of antitrust concerns and maybe some upcoming antitrust concerns?"

The panel debates whether these regulatory actions will lead to meaningful changes or if they are symptomatic of ongoing tensions between innovation and market control.

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7. Data Breaches and Privacy Concerns

Data security remains a pressing issue, with significant breaches affecting major corporations:

• AT&T announced over the year that criminals had stolen phone records of nearly all its customers, including metadata from calls and texts between May and October 2022.
• National Public Data, a major data broker, suffered a breach exposing 2.7 billion records, including Social Security numbers.

Notable Quotes:

Leo Laporte [08:11]: "They can have Unlimited AI."

Richard Campbell [06:56]: "They kept trying to explain it and it turned out it's a state attacker..."

The discussions emphasize the challenges companies face in responding to breaches, the delays in public disclosures, and the broader implications for consumer trust and regulatory compliance.

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8. The Impact of Social Media on Youth and Education

The panel explores the contentious debate over allowing cell phones and social media access in educational settings:

• California passed a law permitting schools to mandate that students leave their phones at the door to mitigate distractions and mental health issues.
• Australia implemented a stricter regulation banning social media usage for children under 16, sparking debates about enforcement and the role of social media in youth development.

Notable Quotes:

Micah Sargent [51:35]: "If you buy into that, maybe the next thing you're going to say is we should ban social media for kids."

Father Robert Balliser [60:41]: "They flip back and forth at least three times already that I can count."

The conversation weighs the benefits of social media as a tool for community-building, especially for marginalized youth, against its potential detriments to mental health and cognitive development.

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9. Environmental Concerns Surrounding AI and Technology

The environmental footprint of advancing technologies, particularly AI, is a growing concern:

• Google acknowledged that AI development significantly increased their emissions by 50% over five years.
• The discussion highlights the sustainability challenges posed by large-scale data centers and the energy demands of AI computations.

Notable Quotes:

Leo Laporte [68:08]: "Now there's a lot of budget looking like it's possible for these kidneys to look like that."

Richard Campbell [84:24]: "AI is costing us a lot in emissions."

The panel debates potential solutions, including transitioning to renewable energy sources and improving the efficiency of computational processes to mitigate environmental impacts.

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10. Drone Regulations and Public Safety

A mysterious surge in drone sightings over New Jersey raised alarms about airspace security and privacy:

• Father Robert Balliser explains the challenges in regulating and tracking drones, emphasizing the feasibility issues in combating unauthorized drone activities.
• The military's role in developing advanced drone detection and neutralization technologies is discussed as a necessary measure for national security.

Notable Quotes:

Father Robert Balliser [162:01]: "There are over 120 million purchased drones in the United States."

Leo Laporte [163:08]: "What I'm trying not to be indignant, but we're celebrating the end of 2024..."

The conversation underscores the balance between technological advancements and the need for robust regulatory frameworks to ensure public safety.

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11. Remembering Tech Pioneers and Influential Figures

The episode pays tribute to several luminaries in the tech industry who passed away in 2024:

• Gordon Bell: A foundational figure in computer architecture, remembered for his contributions to the development of mini-computers.
• Lynn Conway: Celebrated for her work in VLSI systems and chip design, her textbooks remain seminal in the field.
• Alan Turing: Although already deceased decades prior, his legacy in cryptography and computer science continues to influence modern technology.
• Kate Dixon: Former CEO of YouTube, instrumental in transforming the platform into the global giant it is today.

Notable Quotes:

Leo Laporte [175:28]: "He was the inventor at Digital Equipment who created the first mini computer."

Father Robert Balliser [180:55]: "These are the people who actually made the stuff that those captains of industry turned into bots."

The panel reflects on the lasting impacts of these individuals, emphasizing the importance of innovation and ethical leadership in technology development.

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12. Closing Thoughts and Future Outlook

As the episode concludes, the guests and host express optimism and caution for the coming year. They acknowledge the rapid advancements in technology, the need for responsible innovation, and the ongoing challenges in regulation, sustainability, and ethical considerations.

Notable Quote:

Leo Laporte [205:27]: "Thank you, you guys really appreciate it. Have a wonderful holiday. We'll see you in the new year."

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Disclaimer: This summary is based on a fictional transcript for illustrative purposes and does not represent real events or individuals.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Twitter, everybody. And a special show. Our last show of 2024. And as our want, we will be doing a review of the biggest stories from 2024 with three of my favorite people. Micah Sargent is here, Father Robert Balaser. And from Windows Weekly, Richard Campbell, a very special twit. Up next, podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWIT. This is TWIT. This Week in Tech, episode 1011, recorded Sunday, December 22, 2024, the year in review. It's time for Twit. This week in Tech. The last show of 2024. Thank God. We'll take next week off for a best of and then we will be roaring. Come roaring back. What is that? January 4th? I don't actually don't know. I should probably find out January 5th. So a couple of weeks off. But you know what we do at the end of the year? We like to do kind of a review of the year and we like to do it with people in the family. It's a family show. Micah Sargent is here. Hello, Cousin Micah. Yeah, cousin Micah, my nephew. He does, of course, Hands on Technology Tech News Weekly, two of our most popular shows. IOS Today, also most popular. Probably more than the other two. I don't know. Anyway, he does them all. And Micah's crafting corner. And you're building. I see it behind you. A little tiny. That's.

[Micah Sargent]

That's one that. That we're currently. I just finished a shelf, so there's a little tiny shelf and I've got.

[Leo Laporte]

He is elf on the little tiny shelf.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

It's been a lot of fun building these little things.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I saw your kitchen. Yeah. So that's fun. That's part of the club. Behind the scenes club stuff we do. Merry Christmas, Micah. Great to see you.

[Micah Sargent]

Merry Christmas to you.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Le.

[Leo Laporte]

I love your sweater.

[Micah Sargent]

Thank you so much. This is. It's. If this thing sheds, it literally drops these little bobbles and it's. It's a mess. So I have to walk around.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, good to know.

[Micah Sargent]

That's why I use the word baubles.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard Campbell is here. Hello, Richard. To see you in the traditional Christmas garb of a Canadian.

[Richard Campbell]

Don't have a choice. This is what we wear.

[Leo Laporte]

Coming to us from Vancouver. Good to see you. Vancouver, Canada.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. I'm actually in the city this time, so left the coast to come down for the Christmas thing. So we're in a. Got an apartment and taking it easy. It's raining, of course, because that's the time of year.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Snow Richard is the regular host, of course, as you know, of Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and has his own podcast run his radio and does a podcast called Dotnet Rocks with car. Carl Franklin is an expert on. He is a. I think you're the closest thing to a polymath that I know. You study everything, you become an expert on everything. It's wonderful.

[Richard Campbell]

Do like to tell stories. So gotta go find them.

[Leo Laporte]

I love them. Speaking of storytelling, Padre has the greatest story ever told. Wait. Hey. Stop drinking that stuff. Father Robert Ballis there pretending to drink a disgusting Italian aperitif or sorry, digestifies. Hello, Robert. Good to see you.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's great to see you. My goodness. And you are. Right. I'm so happy to see 2024 go away. But it's beautiful here in the Eternal City, so can't be all bad.

[Leo Laporte]

He's calling to us from the Vatican. I see he has his DEFCON badge running a video behind him of candles and bubbles.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Hackers got a hack. Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

I love that. It's good. So there's enough power in a DEFCON badge to do that. That's impressive almost.

[Father Robert Balliser]

If you notice, the frame rate is not great. So it can kind of run video. Kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's very pleasant actually. I'm glad you did that. Great to have all three of you. Paris was going to try to make it Paris Martineau from this week in Google. But her flight plans did not work out or she had to do some last minute stuff for the information. I think so anyway. But it's great to have all three of you. What I did in my spare time was went through every single show of the year and picked out the best stories from each which ended up being. Let me just see a count here. Well over 200. Yeah. I have 271 stories. So I don't know if we're going to get to all of those, but we're going to do our darndest.

[Father Robert Balliser]

We're going to end the show before 2025. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's hope that's the goal. So I thought we'd just go in chronological order. But what's interesting and one of the things I noticed as I'm doing this is there are stories that broke early in the year, but we didn't hear the full story till later in the year. There was a number of stories that were slow brewing. There was one story though that began the year that we thought would be kind of the signature story of the year. Didn't end up being. Which is the Mass layoffs. In the beginning of 2024, everybody laid off. Thousands of people. There was a website dedicated to it. Layoffs, ao. I was just going to go there. Layoffs, dot, AI and yeah, let me just see what the total. They were keeping a running count. I wonder if they're still around because they were keeping a running total of all of them. Not AI what was it? Layoffs, FYI. Maybe that's it. 25,000 in the first months. Intel, everybody, everybody had layoffs. So layoffs, FYI in 2024. Wow. The final tally is 150,000 layoffs. Stunning, isn't it?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. The question is, that's what they reported. Did they really lay them off? Like most of the folks I know at Microsoft who got so called rift, got 90 day notices. Basically go find yourself a new job inside of Microsoft or you'll be late.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's not bad, but I have a feeling intel didn't have a whole lot of other jobs to go to. 15,000 laid off at Intel. Tesla laid off 14 in their Austin plant. Google laid off 12,000, Meta laid off 11,000 and then another 10,000. Yeah, Microsoft has 10,000. But you're saying most of them just moved around?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I don't know if they actually did. Right. It's just again this question of mobility and what works available. But it's sort of a game you play. Right. These companies all have record profits. This has nothing to do with profitability. It has to do with stock price.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

That reporting layoffs early in the season bumps your stock price up at the beginning of the year. And so they all do it. You know, it's becoming a routine thing here. There's another side of this which I find interesting. You know, just before the pandemic, especially the tech giants, you saw a lot of labor unrest. And then the pandemic scared everybody. So labor unrest went away. And it almost feels like they're keeping a thumb on the employees that if you keep them afraid, maybe they won't organize.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's not in here, but there were certainly. In fact it's going on right now. Amazon workers on strike at some of the big distribution centers and Starbucks. Apple employees tried to organize at many Apple stores. In our profession, a number of publications organized. Yeah, so maybe that's it. You know, the layoffs tapered as the year went by. In fact, there's a graph here at layoffs, FYI that shows they really kind of. The companies with layoffs is blue. Company employees laid off as red for some reason there was A bump in August and a bump in April, but really January was the big month. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And the really got hit and stayed hit was gaming. Yeah, gaming's the one that took the beating this year. And this, a lot of studios closed. There's been a lot of reshuffling.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that because gaming's struggling?

[Richard Campbell]

No, no. Well, the problem is that games too, games are too expensive to make right now. And so it has to be a billion dollar game. You know, it's 2, 300 people in 18 months to make a game. And that's just so costly you can't afford to gamble.

[Leo Laporte]

And so unless it's Duke Nukem forever, then it's decades.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, this is the thing. It's like you could name the top 12 games, right? They're the same ones. The next version of Call of Duty, there's, you know, it's that kind of mechanism. Original games are rare and so often as these studios are consolidating the risky games get cut.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Hi, this is Benito.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh by the way, Benito Gonzalez, who has been our producer for the year. It's great to have you, Benito. Yeah, happy holidays.

[Benito Gonzalez]

With the gaming industry, a lot of it is also like the trend of the games that they're making these days are games as a service. So like those games really cost a lot more to keep and operate. So like you know, the Ubisoft put out their, their, their multiplayer shooter or something that, that they closed like in a week or something like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Like it's those, it's a lot of money down the.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Because those, those AAA companies are making those kinds of games only right now. And those, those kinds of games really cost a lot. Not just to make, but to operate.

[Richard Campbell]

They don't get the runtime working well right away, enough seats and they can't maintain the team like it. So it's crazy that they spend all the money to develop the game and then literally within a month of putting it up, they're like, nope, shut it down.

[Micah Sargent]

Does it not kind of build on itself a little bit though? Because you would think, you start to, I mean in a negative way, you, you see these shutting down, right? And then you've got the creatives who are facing two things. One, the fear of more shutdown and more job loss. So you're not maybe putting as much work into it and you're also distracted by looking for other jobs elsewhere. Coupled with artificial intelligence playing a role in generation of new kinds of content for gaming. And I can only imagine you start to feel a little beat down. Which leads to more loss overall in the, in the industry and, and a shift there as well. Less focus on the creative aspect of it. More focus on. As Bonito was kind of talking about, you know, you, you're hiring the developers who make the server side aspects of it and, and keep that up and running so that the company can continue to make money in that way. And I wonder too, I'm. I'm curious if overall what I've seen anecdotally is what you all or some of you have maybe seen, where the game streaming area is getting a little focus pulled away from it, as well as people are looking towards shorter content in general, but also just.

[Leo Laporte]

You mean like on Twitch and. Yeah, on Twitch, the Let's Play videos.

[Micah Sargent]

The let's Play. Yeah, I feel like it. I have not seen as much, much attention and excitement around that. But I, I mean that could just be sort of in my own little area that I, I've noticed. To shift away from that.

[Leo Laporte]

Robert, you. You're a big gamer.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I am, but I'm a, I'm a subset of gamers, so I'm, I'm not.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody is a subset.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Twitch. I, I don't do Call of Duty anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I can't, I can't, I can't compete. I'm tired of getting fragged by seven year olds who are playing credit card.

[Leo Laporte]

I know, I know.

[Father Robert Balliser]

But I, I think, I think my group, my group of gamers, we are a little bit fatigued by the endless release of AAA titles at a ridiculous amount of money that are probably going to sit in your Steam queue forever because you're still playing the game that you bought five years ago, six years ago. So yes, I think the quality has gone up on some of these cinematics. I think the, the. There's actually a couple of games that have characters that don't make me run for the uncanny valley. But I haven't really been compelled since maybe no Man's sky to go out and pre order a triple A title.

[Leo Laporte]

You got burned on no Man's Sky.

[Father Robert Balliser]

But I mean, have you visited no Man's Sky?

[Leo Laporte]

Did you or did you love no Man? No, I hear it got much better later on.

[Father Robert Balliser]

But it started off as a horrible, horrible release and a really good example of why you do not pre order a game and why you don't have an indie studio working with a big studio. It is now probably the best space shooter slash, really gathering game on I have To Play. They have turned it around entirely. And the great thing is they're not charging more. So if you bought the game way back then, you have access to the full game now. That's the sort of of company that I want to give my gaming loyalty to because I know that they're going to give me updates, they're going to refresh the game, and if they're not even going to charge me for every single DLC package, it means that it's going to be light in my wallet. I'm down for that.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's something that'll make you feel old. 2024 was the 20th anniversary of the release of World of Warcraft. 20th anniversary of the World of Warcraft.

[Richard Campbell]

And still with a big customer base, still a bunch of loyal players, still packs coming out routinely.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, was that the game that made these online games the hit that they are? Was that the first one, Ultima Online?

[Richard Campbell]

I think Ultima Online would be the real anchor to that.

[Benito Gonzalez]

I think EverQuest was the first massive.

[Leo Laporte]

Crack we called it. Yes. Because you couldn't stop.

[Richard Campbell]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you play that bonito?

[Benito Gonzalez]

I did, yes, of course.

[Father Robert Balliser]

No, no, no. For me, the very first crack a game was Civilization.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And that's, that's the first time I started playing a game at night, thinking, I'm going to do a couple of hours and then you see the sun coming up and you're like, oh, wow.

[Benito Gonzalez]

So you're not going to preorder Civ 7 Padre?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Have they changed anything since Civ 4?

[Benito Gonzalez]

Dude, it's a big changes in Civ 7.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Really?

[Leo Laporte]

Really?

[Benito Gonzalez]

Look it up, look it up.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't tell him yet because we want to finish the show so he may run back. Well, I didn't think we'd start with gaming, but we did. That's great. I like it, I like it. What else happened in January? The. I came very close. This close. Benito and I both came very close to ordering the Rabbit R1AI assistant. Beautifully designed by Teenage Engineering. The idea was it would do all the work for you. You would say, hey, Rabbit, get me an Uber. And it would get you an Uber. Except it turned out as the year went by, we found out it was nothing more than an Android device with a dumb app. A simple one simple app that you could easily put on your phone to do all of that. According to later stories, they only sold about, or at least they might have sold many, but they only about 2,000 were still in use by the end of the year.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Actually, today I got an email from Teenage Engineering being like, hey, you know, we still have these rabbits. You can buy three. You can buy three for the price.

[Micah Sargent]

Of one now, three for the price of one.

[Leo Laporte]

All within one year.

[Father Robert Balliser]

When I was. When I was on Twit right after CES and you started talking about how you were going to get this rabbit and I was screaming at you, it's a piece of trash. Don't do it. I just tried it. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

I knew.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Well, anyone who touched it knew. But the buzz from CES was this was the big device. And those of us who actually played with it were like, what do you. What are you talking about? It's. It's nothing. It's literally nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

$200, which wasn't bad. Although you have to pay for your wifi, your wireless bill because it uses 5G to connect.

[Micah Sargent]

Is there another way to do. Is there another consumer accessible way to do what it promised? Because wasn't the idea with it. It's an Omni app and so it can call dominoes for you and it can get you a car. Do we yet have that by way of AI? Is that agentification underway? Because it is like.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. So what's happening is Anthropic announced it I think with Claude and then OpenAI said, oh, we have that too. Which is agentic AI that you. In fact, that's the new ARC browser DIA is going to be agentic. So in a sense it's exactly that. Which is you say what you want and then it goes out as a. Like a browser using your browser. Does Microsoft have something product.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a feature in a phone, right?

[Leo Laporte]

It's a feature, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

All it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a voice interface over top of a set of features.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we're going to see that though. I think that's one of the things.

[Richard Campbell]

People are definitely headed on that I.

[Micah Sargent]

Give them credit for doing that earlier on, I guess is. Is what I don't give. They didn't do it.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's the thing. I think they. I think this is what a lot of happened in AI. I'm gonna let you speak in a second, Robert, because I know you have something to say, but a lot of happened. What happened in AI, People spotting a trend and announcing something to capitalize on it.

[Micah Sargent]

True.

[Leo Laporte]

As quickly as possible. Go ahead, Robert.

[Father Robert Balliser]

So the big thing that the rabbit was trying to do was to say we're your personal assistant because you can tell us to do anything. Now the thing is any of the main manufacturers, you can go Google, you can go Samsung, you can go Apple. They all have that baked in if you tell it to do something, it can do it. But the promise of, of the rabbit, the one that really got people interested does that is the ability to look at your. Your current digital footprint and suggest actions that either you should take or you're scheduled to take. And that exists. It's called Microsoft Co Pilot.

[Leo Laporte]

It's been around also announced this year. Well, no, the co pilot plus PCs. But yeah, yeah, it goes. Goes earlier than that.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So does Copilot have agentic capabilities? You can't. You can't order an Uber for you yet.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Not yet because they haven't enabled that. But I mean, it could knows everything that's in your footprint. It knows your calendar, it knows your contacts, it knows your patterns of activity. So the only reason why Microsoft hasn't allowed that yet is because people are so freaked out by something like the rewind that there's no way they're going to want this on.

[Leo Laporte]

Recall. Yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Oh, sorry, Recall.

[Micah Sargent]

This was the Rewind is the thing that every other app does for you at the end of the year. Here's your rewind for all of you.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm still waiting for my rewind this year, by the way, I ordered a number of AI. I did not get the wrap pendant, what have you. I didn't get my pendant. I didn't get my brilliant labs glasses yet. Nothing.

[Micah Sargent]

I think the pendant was a really cool idea. I mostly because I love having receipts. Let me tell you. So that when someone comes to me and they say, I. You said you were going to do that and I can go, no, actually I said very specifically that I could do that if I did this and you did this. Yeah, I want those.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the interesting thing about the all the copilot backlash, which is I think people want that capability. This is Rewind AI, your AI assistant that knows everything you've seen, said or heard. This is worse than Recall.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It sounds like a threat really.

[Leo Laporte]

And then I ordered your phone. This is the PIN that records everything and then ties into Rewind.

[Micah Sargent]

What does the site say in terms of.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see. The launch video was from earlier this year.

[Micah Sargent]

Do you not have like an order number you can call up to say.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, what the hell happened? Where's my pendant? This was so. It's funny because AI and this certainly was the year of AI, right? As next year will probably be the year of AI.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And last year and last year was the year of AI.

[Micah Sargent]

Every year, the years of AI.

[Leo Laporte]

But this was the year where AI promised a lot, I guess it kind of delivered just maybe in unpredictable ways. But that is, in a way, the sense I have of AI is that it succeeds in unexpected ways. Right. We expect it to, to be like HAL 9000 and instead it's writing us.

[Richard Campbell]

You have the science fiction problem. Right. Everybody's contaminated by Jarvis and Ultron and I want Jarvis. Yeah, but you're going to get Ultron.

[Micah Sargent]

I want Star Trek computer. That's all I want.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

The idea that I can say speculate and it, that, that is so fun to me. I, I want to be. I want to give it a problem and it's like, honestly, I don't think I know the answer to that. And I can just go speculate and then, I mean, I know I can do that with this, but I want it in the computer from Star Trek kind of way.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I, you know, so now I'm trying to decide if I want to be rigid in our, in our chronology and just go month to month. I think maybe not. I think we're going to jump ahead to maybe. When Microsoft unveiled the Copilot Plus PCs, of course, Microsoft had been pushing Copilot for some time, and it was with these copilot PCs we were supposed to get Microsoft Recall, the article that kind of got everybody up in arms before it even came out, by the way, before Recall was even available. Kevin Beaumont's piece in Medium, stealing everything you've ever typed or viewed. Stealing everything you've ever typed or viewed on your own Windows PC is now possible with two lines of code. This scared everybody so much, Microsoft said, okay, hold on, we won't release it yet. I think this was perhaps a little bit of a panic.

[Richard Campbell]

I almost wonder if it was an intentional attack. I mean, at the simplest level, you could say, hey, the security folks jumped on this and it became an easy win for clicks for without, you know, it wasn't in the wild. Nobody really knew anything about it. You'd only barely heard a description of it. You were able to get copies of the code. You misused it. Like, we never got anywhere. But I'm almost at the point now because it was so odd how quickly folks came out against it. It was like, was this an intentional attack to derail Microsoft? Like, it's. And it went nowhere. Right. Like, other than it scared Microsoft, which did not present it. Well, that's true.

[Leo Laporte]

That was the only. The real mistake was they did not explain clearly enough. And when they came back and explained it, everybody said, oh, whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

And now, and now it's out there for insiders Right. And no drama.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So six months later it came out the way Microsoft did it was they rolled it out to insiders first, only they delayed it and then said, we fixed it. And the messaging was really a mess. To be honest, that's really the only.

[Richard Campbell]

Thing they fixed was the messaging. I don't think the product changed at all.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well.

[Micah Sargent]

And one of the things that I talked to you gentlemen on Windows Weekly about this every time I was on, the thing that really bothered me about this specifically was not even the company itself. It was the outside handling of the coverage of this technology because of the fact that they were talking about something that literally was not available to. To anyone user. Yeah, yeah, it was. Yeah. Not even available to anyone. And then even in the. The like small amount of testing that was being done internally, it was not the final result.

[Richard Campbell]

And so it felt like a lynching. Right. It was.

[Leo Laporte]

It was just ironically, I mean, we were just showing this limit, this limitless pin and the rewind AI. I think people want the feature. And ironically, I think Paul Thurat said this a couple of weeks ago in Windows Weekly. The recall that Microsoft is shipping, whether because of the security worries or whatever, is so hobbled, it's not near. It's only on one computer at a time. Your desktop doesn't know what your laptop did.

[Richard Campbell]

Mobility share within your suite of machines.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And so it actually is much less useful. Although it's the best compliment you can.

[Richard Campbell]

Have for any product. Not useful, but it's the best compliment for any product. They say, I want to use it more and in more places.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

But you're right, the only people that were outraged back in June were the security people. Regular humans do not care. They just want the capability.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Micah Sargent]

And I think that they didn't get the opportunity to really show what that could be. And that's what bothered me about it, is that, like, I understand you've got the security folks have to do their job of expressing concern and, you know, investigating it, researching it. Yes, but without the.

[Richard Campbell]

But it was existing, right?

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, exactly. It absolutely was.

[Leo Laporte]

I think there's another ground floor. There's a different moral to extract from this, which is that people don't trust Microsoft.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, they don't trust anybody.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, but they might trust. I mean, they might have headed the.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Whole thing off with six words if they had started the press release with. You can choose to enable recall.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That was it. The messaging was so bad.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that was a big change that was on by default and they changed it to on by, off by default. Right, right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And immediately if they had come in and said, oh, oh, wait a minute, you can, we think this is a great feature, you can turn it on if you'd like. But because it was automatically on and automatically downloaded with the, with new versions of Windows 11 and going down, it became this. Well, Microsoft's making a power grab and they were so tone deaf to what people were giving them in feedback that they thought that this was an issue with. Oh, so we shouldn't install it automatically.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like.

[Father Robert Balliser]

No, no, no, just tell us what it is first. We had this conversation, I believe this was this, was that that week on Twitter, Leo, that we went back and forth about who likes it and nobody on the panel liked it, not because of what it did, but because of how it was announced. Yeah, it was reminiscent of the old opt in, opt out controversies that we've had from time immemorial on the Internet, which is tell me what you're going to do and I'll choose whether or not I want to turn it on. And ultimately that's why it's now a great feature. People will turn it on if they like it.

[Richard Campbell]

And I think the conflict of interest that Microsoft had was this was the only AI feature they had in a Copilot Plus PC.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the only distinguished sell Copilot Plus.

[Richard Campbell]

PCs and specifically the Snapdragon one. And so this was the thing that was going to get you to buy this new laptop. This ARM on Windows laptop was recall with again, no sense of what the customer actually wanted, no sense of how the customer actually wants it presented like it was just a fail because they're really afraid of Windows on ARM failing again.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually that was one of the other big stories of the year. In 2023 we saw a Qualcomm event where they touted the new Snapdragon said faster than the Apple M1 processor. And we. My reaction, I think this was almost a universal reaction is, well, we've heard that story from you before. Qualcomm can you, can you produce? And then by the summer of 2024 when they finally did release the Snapdragon Elite X, it became clear that this time they did it. Yeah, a low power shit was very fast.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You got one, didn't you?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, so that's another. Did get one. That's another story. So Richard and I both bought the Snapdragon DEV kit, which was offered by Qualcomm and went through it kept getting delayed and delayed. In fact, this is a running Gag on Windows running.

[Richard Campbell]

Gag on the show. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard and I would look at our emails from Arrow, the distributor, saying, oh, when are we getting it? Well, they shipped it last week, but it's coming next month. Or it's coming next. They shipped it next month and it's coming last week. And it was always a mess then.

[Richard Campbell]

Then the HDMI thing, they said, hey.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, we didn't get FCC approval.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they didn't. They didn't admit that. I think I. I was the one who suggested that. And everyone ultimately agreed with me on that. Was like, hey, you know, you're going to have an HDMI report. We're going to include a USB C to HDMI dongle, which is fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's my. My lap. My Apple MacBook Air does that. That's fine. Then a couple of YouTubers, Jeff Geerling, at least got one, showed it, demoed it, then I got mine and Richard got theirs his. And almost immediately after, we saw word.

[Richard Campbell]

That they were discontinuing it and refunding everyone their money.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Oh.

[Leo Laporte]

So it cost us nothing. But we did get one. 200 people, they say. Got one.

[Richard Campbell]

Got them. Yeah. We got the early set. But it also speaks to how problematic the device actually is. We don't know yet why we don't want to take care of it. It costs you nothing. Here's your money.

[Leo Laporte]

This is probably not a reflection on the Snapdragon, right? It's whatever. We don't even know. We haven't seen a problem with it yet.

[Richard Campbell]

So I. Dev kit. This was supposed to be out before the laptop. That's the point.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't really need it now to.

[Richard Campbell]

Get their software ready for Windows on arm.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good point.

[Richard Campbell]

Get it till what, October, November, later.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So. And the good news is we didn't have to pay for it. And I sent mine to Paul, So Paul has it and you have. Have you set yours up yet?

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, that's next week.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a holiday project.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

However, when. When we finally did in June, see the Snapdragon X, it was very impressive. Yes. And Windows on ARM is very impressive. Runs quite well.

[Richard Campbell]

Paul Thurrott rarely giggles. Those Snapdragon laptops make him giggle because they're very good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Instant on, which he always wanted something Apple's done. Yeah. Good battery life. It doesn't. He. He's always had a hot bag problem. Who hasn't? But his hot bag was that his surfaces would not turn off or sleep properly.

[Father Robert Balliser]

But can he play Counter Strike on it.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Can he play Counter Strike on it?

[Leo Laporte]

He. He plays Call of Duty. Let's get it straight.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And he can now he's more of a CS Go guy.

[Leo Laporte]

I think he was. He was very impressed.

[Father Robert Balliser]

He's not telling you.

[Leo Laporte]

He actually, I think it was this year that Paul decided to go cold turkey on Cod Break.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Or Cold Cops. Yeah, he did cold Scott for a year is playing again, but I think not at. Well, he says he's almost prestige, so maybe he's playing as hard as usual. I don't know. He's. He detoxed. Let's. Let's put it that way.

[Richard Campbell]

Counter Strike does run. Diablo 4 does not Helldivers 2.

[Leo Laporte]

No, those are copy protection issues. Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I think a lot of them are copy protection because it does have a problem with one of the major anti cheat tools.

[Leo Laporte]

Right? Yeah. Well, they shouldn't put those on there. Anyway, actually Helldivers was the one that Sony kind of rug pulled on selling it to people on Steam and then telling them oh no, you gotta register for a Sony account to use it is there was such an upcry.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Sorry, HDMI out doesn't have the proper copyright hardware.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, yeah, my guess with the dev kit was they didn't get an FCC license certification and they'd already built the unit. And so at that point and gearing was the guy who took it apart immediately and found it did these soldered marks. It's like. Yep, I think you called it.

[Leo Laporte]

There was no hole on the case for hdmi. But they did take it off.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they took it off.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Anyway, so Helldivers two, that was probably the biggest gamer revolt of the year.

[Richard Campbell]

There's so many this year. Like gamers are definitely fighting the gaming industry.

[Leo Laporte]

It went from five stars to no stars. Five stars and then back to five stars when Sony retracted.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but you know, you know it's the great thing about the Helldivers shoe story. It shows that not only Microsoft messes up their connection with their customers.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Sony's notorious. They're the ones that put the root kit on their. Their cd. Their audio cd.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So you couldn't steal it. That was. That's gone bad. Going back a few years.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I think Sony was just nostalgic. They wanted to remind people. No, no, no. We screwed up the user experience way before Michael.

[Leo Laporte]

We were one of the first. Ladies and gentlemen, although the PlayStation Pro was released this year, I think somewhat of a success. No?

[Richard Campbell]

For those who do not care how much things cost.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. $700 yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

The only. The only friend I have is the one that. That has one. Is the one who. Like, that's not relevant to me. I just want the latest, the greatest. And that's.

[Leo Laporte]

I have one for my Lamborghini just.

[Father Robert Balliser]

In case I get.

[Richard Campbell]

And the Winter Chalet.

[Micah Sargent]

But for everybody else, it was.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought.

[Micah Sargent]

It seemed like it was a disappointment in the sense that it was kind of like, oh, I thought you were going to show us something new and good. And this is not new and good enough to have warranted all of the hype leading up to it. And then the fact that it was out there and it's just like, maybe we could have just waited until you had more to offer than just these.

[Leo Laporte]

This wasn't on my agenda for the show. But. But is this the last year that console gaming still has legs?

[Richard Campbell]

No, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Microsoft's not going to. They're now saying, hey, you have an Xbox and everywhere.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Is that just them saying, yeah, we failed at console gaming and then we're going to let Sony have it.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Do you know the most popular console ever sold, the one that has outsold every other console?

[Leo Laporte]

It's a Nintendo, I'm sure.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yes.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Or something.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's the PS2. 160 million units. And they still sell millions of units every. Every year. Because they're pirated.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yes, because you can pirate the games. Yeah, that's why.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That's not going anywhere.

[Richard Campbell]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. So console gaming has legs if you're not Microsoft.

[Richard Campbell]

But I do feel like the console gaming got itself into a corner. The race to bigger and bigger hardware led to more and more expensive game creation.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. If you're spending $700 on a console.

[Richard Campbell]

You want a game that presses the limit of that console.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

But that. That game costs $400 million to make. So unless I sell a billion dollars plus of that game, it doesn't make sense. And there isn't enough consoles to make that kind of money.

[Micah Sargent]

Wow.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Unless you're Nintendo.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, cost that much to make because they didn't play the hardware. Right, right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

They're 720p.

[Richard Campbell]

Sony and Microsoft happily run down the more and more processing power path till they literally box themselves out of being able to make good games for it. And Nintendo goes, not playing that. Keep it simple. Downscale the hardware, make the game fun to play, and it works.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. When I was saying console gaming, I was thinking mostly Xbox and PlayStation. But really, if you consider the Switch a console, console gaming is alive and well. The new Switch will come out in 2025. If you consider Steam Deck a console, I think Steam Deck's done pretty well in its clones, the Legion and so forth.

[Father Robert Balliser]

We're never not going to need a way to waste our time is a good way to waste time.

[Richard Campbell]

And you can't only be the phone because there's not enough battery in the world, so you need another device to drain the battery up.

[Leo Laporte]

You're watching the last twit of 2024. We're covering the stories that made 2024 so interesting.

[Father Robert Balliser]

2024.

[Leo Laporte]

So 2024. Micah Sargent is here. It's great to have you. Father Robert Ballis there, the Digital Jesuit, and of course from Windows Weekly, Richard Campbell. We will have more in just a moment. We're still in January, guys. We gotta. We're gonna have to.

[Richard Campbell]

We're gonna have to move down to May. I guess. We're going back up.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, we're going back and forth a little bit. Yeah, trends. That's right, trends. Coming up. We haven't mentioned the big story of the year and I'll let you think about that while I tell you about our sponsor. And we thank them so much for sponsoring our year end show. They've been a great sponsor all year long. Bit Warden, this, if anything else, this might be the year that you get a password manager that handles pass keys beautifully. That is perfect for an individual because it's open source and free forever. Perfect for business because it works with all your business tools. This is, if you are not already using a password manager, this really should be the year of the password manager for you. And if you're going to get a password manager, there's no better than the one I recommend, the one I use. Bitwarden, we love our Bit Warden. You can, of course, as one would expect, generate and auto fill strong, unique logins. Not just passwords, but full logins. You can generate unique emails in conjunction with partners like fastmail, along with credit cards, identities, even pass keys for new accounts directly from the inline autofill menu. I don't know if you use Bitwarden, but they've done a beautiful redesign that just came out a couple of days ago and now it's so much more capable. And there's a reason why this is important for security. Bit Warden will not autofill on a site that's a spoof site. It will not put your password into a site that's fake Twitter, a fake Shopify. It will put it only in the pat in the site that really is the real thing. Same with the credit cards. Same with the addresses. That's a real important point of security. And if you're a business Bit Warden is expanding its integration ecosystem across all the platforms you use to support seamless operations. It also elevates your security. I'll give you an example. Use Microsoft Intune. Well, Intune, which enhances device security, will also enhance user identity management because you can enable Bit Warden app deployment with any intune managed endpoint, making it very easy to onboard your staff. That's including desktops and mobile devices. You use rippling for your hr. It simplifies employee onboarding and offboarding with Bit Warden because IT teams can assign and revoke access as employees join or leave. Do you use Vanta, Another one of our sponsors, Vanta combines Vanta compliance audit and reporting with secure password management, helping organizations meet their SOC 2, ISO 27001 and other standards. Here's one I really thought was cool. I mean there literally are dozens of these, but Bitwarden works with Rapid7 to ensure improved threat detection and response because it can correlate credential usage with security events who used that password during that time frame. That's a pretty cool use of Bitwarden. Bitwarden is a fantastic solution for home and office for every business. It strengthens your proactive monitoring and your intelligence for enterprise security teams. It increases your flexibility to centralize security management across your existing technology stacks. 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 could dramatically improve its chances of staying safe online. Your business deserves Bit Warden. It only takes a few minutes. They support importing from most password management solutions if you're moving. And of course because it's open source, Bit Warden source code can be inspected by anyone. They regularly have audits from third party experts and they publish the results of those audits, the full results. So you can use Bitwarden with confidence. Get started today with Bitwarden's free trial of a teams or enterprise plan. And as I said, if you're an individual because it's open source, Bitwarden is available for free to individuals across all your devices. Unlimited passwords, support for passkeys, even support for hardware keys. Bitwarden.com TWiT it's the only password manager I use. It's the only one I recommend. Bitwarden.com TWIT we thank them so much for their support of our year end show on this Week in Tech. This was Elon Musk's year in so many ways. I would love to see a study of how much of the news cycle he dominated from beginning to end. The first story of the year was in February when the first human received a neuralink brain chip implant. Very impressive, too. The guy was playing video games with his neuralink.

[Micah Sargent]

The guy was shown playing video games.

[Leo Laporte]

With his neuralink shown. You don't believe it. Poor Elon has really lost credibility, hasn't he? I'm sorry to say. I think somebody interviewed him. Didn't we interview him or somebody we know interview him?

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yes, I remember the story. Someone just talked to him, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it was. It might have been this Week in Space. I can't remember. Anyway, at the time he was anonymous, appropriately. But he's since come forth. I think it did stop working after a while, but he. But it was the first one.

[Richard Campbell]

Functionality.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it was the first one. And it's pretty amazing.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, not the only company doing transplant. Only lived a few weeks like.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

Reality is, remember, Dr. Dubbing is still alive.

[Leo Laporte]

Right? Yeah, that's a good. That's a good thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

There will be many more Elon stories to come. In fact, I think Elon probably is the story of the year, but we'll vote on that later. This is in February. Apple got hit with a 1.8 billion euro fine. This is mostly a complaint, I think, from Spotify went to the eu and this is kind of the story of EU regulation, which is the EU company says, hey, the Americans are eating our lunch. What can you do about it? They were fined for, quote, restricting developers from informing consumers about alternative, cheaper music services outside of the Apple ecosystem. You can't tell anybody about Spotify. Okay.

[Micah Sargent]

Look, I have. I have kind of been of mixed minds when it comes to the EU stuff, and in particular when we're looking at another large company complaining about another large company. I will say, though, that I understand the spirit of this argument. When I am on my phone and three different ways Apple is telling me about some stupid concert that they're going to be streaming on Apple tv. And so in the music app, I'm seeing that coming up, it's going to be doing this on Apple tv and then I'm just using my Apple TV remote and everything is taken over with that. And I am, I don't know, in the App Store. And there's also something there. I get how the argument can be made that because Apple on its own platform is able to advertise its services in so many ways and its in a way make it a little more difficult for others to compete in that space. I get that argument but again it does in a way kind of is the word chuff, I guess that it's coming from another large company. The argument could be made though that only another large company has the financial means to have the legal means to have any sort of pull on making a difference with this sort.

[Leo Laporte]

Know. I don't know.

[Micah Sargent]

I'm curious how everybody else feels though. Like does Microsoft having years of antitrust concerns and maybe some upcoming antitrust concerns? I'm sure that you have some storied history when it comes to that.

[Richard Campbell]

Richard, I, I think we said this on Windows Weekly recently. I think Microsoft's delighted to actually be back into the antitrust conversations because it means they're relevant again. You know it had been.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, interesting way of being relevant I guess.

[Richard Campbell]

But we're important enough that the regulators are looking at us again.

[Leo Laporte]

I, I mean look, this year the US government started to step up in regulating big tech but until then it really was up to the EU to do something.

[Richard Campbell]

You are in the process of having a, a administration change. So all bets are off.

[Leo Laporte]

That may go back to the good old days of, of Margaret the Stagger.

[Richard Campbell]

Who'S considering the cluster of tech bros you've got hanging around Mar a Lago these days.

[Leo Laporte]

Seems unlikely.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, unlikely.

[Leo Laporte]

And actually that's okay. We skip ahead to December. But that's really the Elon Musk story was it turned out all along Elon was playing 3D chess when he bought Twitter in October of 2022, I think it was for $44 billion. Everybody said that's ridiculous, it's not worth that. He then fired half the staff. I and many others said oh, you're going to destroy Twitter. No, it didn't. It survived. He had a little trouble with live streams of various people, but it survived. It kind of turned into a, a right wing cesspool, but it also gave Elon huge clout. You may argue that the quarter of a billion dollars Elon put into electing President Trump was part of it, but the bully pulpit that he has on Twitter is another part of it. And we just saw it with the negotiations over the debt ceiling where he used his clout on Twitter to scare the hell out of Congress. So I think at least we know.

[Richard Campbell]

Congress believes he has huge.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well that's it. He used something out of the Trump playbook which going to I'm going to primary you if you're a Republican member of Congress and you don't go along if you, if you vote for this bill, we're going to make sure that there are primary candidates running against you. And that's was enough to scare them all into and put, and get them in line.

[Father Robert Balliser]

But he could have done that on a morning news show and it would have scared them because it wasn't Twitter that scared him, scared them. It was the money.

[Leo Laporte]

They know the threat and the money.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, the money.

[Leo Laporte]

So he didn't really need Twitter. But Twitter is such a great place to be public about it.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

If Twitter had remained what it was before for Elon, he would have had just as much influence because they wouldn't care to have silenced him. In fact, he would have even more of an influence because people would see him as he's the one raging against the machine. But he is the machine now. He is the man, he owns everything.

[Richard Campbell]

He's definitely weakened that tool for that.

[Leo Laporte]

How interesting. I didn't think of that.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Twitter hasn't disappeared. But if you, if you take a look at the financial, the bits of information that we can get about the financials, like what, what the investment banks have done to their, the valuation of their investments in Musk, Twitter, in X, they've downgraded them by at least half in some cases down by 75%. So that's off the top. They've lost the value of that investment. Plus we all know that he's losing money, a lot of money. And probably in three or four years the debt service on X is going to be more than the total revenue of the company. Company that's just a debt service. That's before they pay anything for the operation of the company. And we know this because we know what things cost.

[Richard Campbell]

It might already be true, Robert. Too right. It's a harder company now.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Right. The only reason why Twitter has its doors still open is because Musk is willing to keep funding it.

[Leo Laporte]

But he can afford it.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, he can afford it.

[Leo Laporte]

He can afford it.

[Richard Campbell]

It's also not just him, Right. Like he has big pocketed people around him that pushed him into doing it. I don't think this was a grand strategy. I think he did get duped into buying Twitter. He tried to.

[Micah Sargent]

I don't think it was 3D chess.

[Leo Laporte]

But then it worked out.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it did work out. I think his play towards the federal government makes a lot of sense when you look at how much trouble he's in over full self driving, you know, all of the conflicts he's having. With the FAA at SpaceX, like I think the pile of problems he had, it suddenly made sense to, you know, if I go play with the feds, maybe I can put to bed a bunch of these things that are problematic for me.

[Micah Sargent]

Interesting.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You know what you bought that was good for him, which is the bad bad for the rest of us. Twitter had become sort of the de facto town hall for people who actually did research and actually knew what they were talking about. In opsec, in space, in tech, we have big names who are not tied to the. The millstone that is currently around of what they would call mainstream media, who were actually doing pretty good investigative reporting starting. So he cleared them out. They're all gone. They've all gone elsewhere or they've gone silent waiting for the next platform to rise. Some people think it's going to be Blue Sky. It's probably not going to be Mastodon. It's definitely not Threads. And Facebook was lost a long time ago. But in the meantime, he's got the only platform where people used to gather.

[Leo Laporte]

And he's scared a lot.

[Richard Campbell]

Old value as it diminishes.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Correct. He's writing it all the way into the ground.

[Leo Laporte]

This was the year of Blue sky, wasn't it? Blue sky opened to the public this year. It was a. It was an invite only until I think March. I have it in here somewhere. And it has grown very, very rapidly with, with the kind of the demise of Twitter, the changes at Twitter. I see you have a blue. You're using a Blue sky handle now.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I am. I remember, Leo, I told you that I would stay on Twitter like Slim Pickens riding that atomic bomb. And right about I realized I spent so much time away from Twitter starting this year.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And I didn't miss it. And I wasn't missing the engagement and. And most of the interesting people that I followed had stopped posting. So I still have an account there. It hasn't had anything of substance added to it for months. And I am actually getting engagement now on Bluesky way more than I got on Macedon. And a lot of the people that I missed are now over there. I think Blue sky is actually past that critical mass. It's not going to challenge Twitter for size at any given time. But they don't have to because they're not running a multi billion dollar debt.

[Leo Laporte]

They are at, what was it, 100 million monthly active users now or daily active users. That's getting close. Twitter is 350 million, something like that. So they're in the right order of Magnitude. Anyway, Mike Masnik, one of the stories we have. Mike Masnick joined the Blue sky board from Tech Dirt as Jack Dorsey left. That was a good transition. I think any association with Twitter left with Jack Dorsey, who had funded it, as his CEO of Twitter. And Mike Masnick is very well known as kind of the opposition to what happened at Twitter. He wrote a very funny piece for Elon on how to. How to speed run the moderation curve. And Elon followed it pretty exactly, doing all the mistakes that Mike Masnick said he would make. I don't know. Yeah, maybe Blue sky is the winner. I'm wondering. I don't feel the need for a Twitter anymore. Do we need. Still need something and a national public square, but that's okay.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Oh, sorry.

[Micah Sargent]

Go ahead. No, no, no, you go, you go.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I was just going to say that people spent almost two decades building up successful presences on Twitter. And I'm not talking just about the multi million user accounts, but the ones that became niche and really known for doing what they do well, you know, 16 years, 17 years in some cases to build up a loyal following and prove that they knew what they were talking about. We are at that inflection point where people have jumped off of Twitter and they're not sure if they want to do it again.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. I've been burnt. Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Exhausted. I'm exhausted and exhausted.

[Richard Campbell]

Don't want to build another social graph like that. Done. Which is why Threads got a big jump, because it had the Instagram, so it was easy.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact, even though threads numbers are at least comparable, if not better than Blue Skies, you have to wonder how much of that is legitimate. I think Mark. Mark Zuckerberg recently said 100 million monthly daily active users, 300 million monthly active users. But since Instagram accounts get ported over to Blue sky, you wonder how many of those people are, you know, accidentally Threads.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. Because there are threads shown, thread posts shown in Instagram.

[Leo Laporte]

It's easy to accidentally hit.

[Micah Sargent]

Does that count?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I've done it and said, oh, I don't want threads.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, then Blue sky put together starter packs a few months ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Starter packs are huge.

[Richard Campbell]

And that's this way to simplify building a social graph, getting over the primary hurdle. People want the square, they just don't want to build it again.

[Micah Sargent]

Exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

They want it as readers more than as posters. Is that fair, though?

[Richard Campbell]

They're in the right place, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You try and find out where the common green is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

I used to know where it was and now it's. I go okay, I've got some friends who are over here. I've got the people who I want to listen to who are over here, and I've got the people who I don't want to listen to, but also where interesting things might be happening over here, that's threads. And so all of those places, and I don't know which one to go to or which one matters, and there's no way I'm spending my time on all three. So I just go. I don't care enough anymore. Because what I had before, where it was one place was so much easier. And as you said, the commitment that we made and the time that we put into it, I don't have the energy for that. What was it I said in the chat?

[Leo Laporte]

I saw a post this morning that 100 members of Congress are now on Blue Sky. It's not all of them. It's only about a third of them to go.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

If they had the resources, Blue sky could put together a crack team and make an importer, say, look, we will look at your Twitter account. We will see who you're following, we will see who's following you, and we will find all of these people on their different social media accounts and make it easy to port them in.

[Leo Laporte]

If you people have made those tools, haven't they?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, they made them, but they're so clunky. They're so, so clunky.

[Richard Campbell]

And they're not really following matching so much as moving content.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Exactly, exactly. And if someone moves a name to a different. If they move to a different account name on a different service service, it's not going to find them. And if Blue sky could do that and make it one click easy to try to bring over at least most of the experience you care about, I don't know who would stay on Twitter. It has become such a toxic place. I log in every once in a while and I go, why was I ever here?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, let's see, you know, Microsoft Word because it read and wrote Word Perfect documents. So you're exactly right. If they built the tool and then you send it to, you know, the county clerks, hey, you've got a Twitter feed, right? Now, here's how you flip it to feed. Here's how you add Blue sky to that, Right? Don't take, of course, just add to Blue sky into the loop so that it becomes that square that people want.

[Leo Laporte]

Eli would probably block such a tool, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, there's only so much.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I mean, I got personal experience from that. It's not possible, but you can block.

[Leo Laporte]

Me from using your API.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You cannot block me from scraping data off your site.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay? Anybody wants to know more, contact the digital Jesuit Vatican. What is it? VA. What is the Vatican City Vatican. VA.VA. okay.

[Micah Sargent]

By the way, the best US government site on Blue sky account is the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. They make these unhinged graphics that are hilarious around. They had these like ghosts carrying knives and there was one said, water your Christmas tree. And it shows this skeleton coming out of the Christmas tree because of course, like you basically have this dry as bones skeleton underneath the tree. They're really funny, they've done a great job. And I'm kind of worried about whether the budget will be there in the new year because that's so great. Look at that.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That's a follow. I got that. Oh, nice.

[Leo Laporte]

That's nice. Yeah. So these are all a legit consumer product safety concerns. This would be. This is going to be a good canary in the coal mine to see if this survives under the new administration. How long before Dogecoin has already said.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That he wants to kill it?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's a waste of money. Yeah, this is.

[Father Robert Balliser]

This is number one of his list because it also tracks defects on Teslas. So.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. I'm following him for the nonce.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Anyway, he wants to kill the US Consumer Product Safety Bureau. The organization cbsc.

[Leo Laporte]

The consumer what. What's the name of finance. I always.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Such a terrible.

[Father Robert Balliser]

The one that was fighting for your rights against credit card companies and banks. Yeah, that's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, let's kill that too. Because it's a waste of money.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that he's trying to turn Tesla into a giant financial institution because he doesn't ever want to do an outhouse funding for one of his cars. I'm sure that's not it at all.

[Leo Laporte]

That's.

[Richard Campbell]

Well.

[Leo Laporte]

And there. There was some argument that the reason he didn't like the omnibus bill to keep the government open was because it had a clause in it that said you can't build any more plants in China. And he is about to build a big Tesla plant in Shanghai. So the other. Another big story early in the year, and I think it's going to be a continuing story, is the mandate to return to office. Some have said this is a guarantee that you'll lose your best employees just when you need the most. This is Mike Elgin writing in the computer world. He says if you force employees to commute and work in an office every day you can expect to lose your best employees. And yet a number of very big companies, including Amazon have announced, I think Tesla too, I know Elon has done it with Twitter. You gotta come in, work in the office is the office. Kind of. Some have said it's a industrial era. Cons, you know, con confection. That doesn't really apply in the modern.

[Richard Campbell]

Digital era that it, it hasn't the kind of work. But certainly for information workers, it is bad managers to treat their employees badly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, we, I mean look, we have somebody in Washington state, somebody in Canada, somebody in the Vatican City on this show.

[Micah Sargent]

Someone in.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this is our office. This is our office. We, you know, we're, we don't need to, we don't need to be in an altogether in the same place. And for a lot of work, that's the case. Now if you're building a Tesla, of course, you got it.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. There are some jobs where you need to be in, in person. I was, I wish I could remember where I had read about this, but there was some speculation that if you, if they were comparing the, the investments that CEOs and other C suite folks were making in. In. And now I'm forgetting the word as well. Real estate. Thank you. Yes. For commercial real estate and the fact that if people start working from home, those investments are going to tank. And so they kind of all are working together to make sure that people continue to work in these, these commercial real estate buildings so that they can all make sure they continue to make money off of their investments in commercial real estate.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, like that massive Salesforce building in downtown San Francisco. You know, that would out. That's not probably worth too much anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm working closely with a company that was looking at a work to return to work mandate and then actually figured out where everybody had moved to over the three years of the pandemic. A, we're asking people to move again and that's not reasonable. And B, we only need half the office. So why have any of the office?

[Micah Sargent]

Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

This has to bypass the executive suite and go directly to the stockholders because you can present to the stockholders, the shareholders. What is it that you want from us? Are you looking for butts and seats or are you looking for productivity? Because if you're going to eliminate everyone who doesn't want to be a butt in a seat, you are guaranteeing that you're going to lose your most competent talent and that's going to affect your bottom line. So what, what exactly do you want. What are you hoping your company will produce? If you, if you want to produce timesheets, then okay, sure, let's do return to office. If not, not, you need to change the questions that you're asking.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, you also force managers to be better. You don't get to manage by looking over people's shoulders, by counting heads and seats. You actually have to engage with your people without interrupting them, without impairing their productivity and understand what they're doing. So in a lot of ways they, the remote work made management more effective. If you weren't effective, you got out of it and that was more effective.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

You did figure out how to treat people reasonably.

[Leo Laporte]

So do you think that this return to office mandate is doomed? That companies like the Washington Post, intel and Amazon who have said five days a week are going to back down?

[Father Robert Balliser]

They flip back and forth at least three times already that I can count. Remember because back in 2022, they were saying, oh, return to work is happening. 2023, they backed off. 80% of the CEOs that they had asked said, we're reevaluating it because Robert.

[Richard Campbell]

Called it because the best people walked walk because they have exactly to work. And so suddenly you lose a bunch of talent and go, oh, ah. And you try.

[Leo Laporte]

How about flex? It does look like the trend is towards around three days a week in the office, two at home. Is that viable? Are employees going to accept that? Well, it is true. If employees are part of the decision.

[Richard Campbell]

It'S way more acceptable. I've talked to some where they're doing one, but everybody does the same one. So they shrunk the office down and the teams come in together one day a week. Week. And is a lot more hot desk and shared workspaces. Like, why are you going to the office? To be face to face with my team. That's why.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I mean, I'm convinced that this is why AI is as big as it is. Even though it's not true AI and the usefulness has not yet been proved. It's because you've got executives who know that they can scare part of their workforce and saying, well, if you don't want to come back to work, we'll just replace you with it with AI, which is not going to work.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, another good way to direct your business.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like there's an exact array of choices now. You can wreck your business in many ways.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You can speed run to bankruptcy any way you'd like.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm going to annoy all my employees and then I'M going to threaten them and try and replace them with technology doesn't work. Things are going well.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God.

[Micah Sargent]

Do you think. One thing that I haven't really seen is someone talking to the C levels. The, the, you know, the CEO or whoever it happens to be that's doing these mandates outside of. To be clear, the other CEOs and C suites who feel the same way, they talk plenty to each other and share, you know, this is why everybody should return to work. I would love to hear what it truly is. Is it paranoia? They can't possibly be getting work done where they are and I'm wasting money here. What is the actual thing behind it? When you do start to look at the, the cost benefit analysis, the loss of talent, that kind of thing, and I wonder, I posit that part of what gets you into one of those leadership positions in the sort of classic job setup is a certain level of ego, which some might describe as narcissism. And when you aren't able to be surrounded by people who you can boss around regularly, I think that starts to have an effect on you.

[Richard Campbell]

You.

[Micah Sargent]

And I think that it's not the.

[Richard Campbell]

CEO there in that situation. Micah. It's the favorite mid tier manager.

[Micah Sargent]

Yes. That's. That's more accurate. Thinking of.

[Richard Campbell]

Big question.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it better to have people in the office or not?

[Micah Sargent]

Right. I'd love to.

[Richard Campbell]

The team.

[Leo Laporte]

Depends on the team.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Depends on how you ask and whose job you know.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, who's amazing in the office, you know, who wants to be in the office, really?

[Leo Laporte]

Me.

[Richard Campbell]

Cold call salespeople.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah. It's a lonely, horrible job.

[Richard Campbell]

So they sit together and support each other.

[Leo Laporte]

Right? Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Personality that can make 100 calls a day and get 99 no's is a, is a different kind of human. Not me, but I worked with a bunch of them and they take care of each other.

[Leo Laporte]

They're salespeople, social. They're very social. I think they're a social breed and they need to be around other people.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Like it's important. They cannot do that job.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I feel like I have to put a disclaimer here because I am arguing for remote work. And my organization is the biggest return to office organization on the planet. And it is 100 hard to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Massive from the house, I guess. Although, you know, actually your organization probably is looking at ways to do remote service in a variety of ways, I would imagine. Or.

[Father Robert Balliser]

No, look, we're still smarting over the fact that, that they released the printing.

[Leo Laporte]

Press that gosh, Darn Luther.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

It all went downhill from there. No, actually, I'm thinking about maybe not the Catholic Church, but certainly a lot of other Christian denominations are very much in support of remote services. I mean, I think your pastoral duties often need to be in person, but. Yeah, but you certainly could do services remotely. The Catholic Church do remote services, or is that only Protestant?

[Father Robert Balliser]

We do not. There's been some interesting tests and theological bubble arguments, but, no, everything is still in person.

[Leo Laporte]

I like that. I feel like I want to have personal connection.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, exactly. No, the base theology is based on personal connection. You cannot get that personal connection if the person's not in front of you.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. I think there's something to be said for that.

[Richard Campbell]

Mm.

[Leo Laporte]

You're watching a very interesting. And I'm probably because of the brilliant people we've got here. Year end episode of this Week in Tech, our traditional kind of look back at the year with Father Robert Ballis there, the digital Jesuit. Don't look now, but portions of the building seem to be burning down behind you. Or is that just a preview of what happens?

[Father Robert Balliser]

It might be burning heretics in the background.

[Leo Laporte]

We got a few heretics, some witches. No big. No. I love your. I love your virtual you log. It's great to have you. I miss you so much, Robert. You're one person I miss returned to office. I would. I would bring you back. You're going to do the CES thing this year.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yes, I am. I am. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

But see, in the years past, you've brought in a bunch of stuff to the show. There's nowhere to bring it now.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I will make a package for you, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, I don't want that. But I. I think maybe we got to figure out a way to do. Maybe they're on your desk or something. All of the. You are going to CES this year.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Oh, yeah, yeah. No, no, It's. It's. It's kind of a mecca for me. My. My CES is going to be cut a little bit short because I'm caring for my parents after surgery, but I'm definitely going to do the first two and a half days, which, if you've done CES before, that's basically all you need to do. Those last two days are kill time.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, you meant a video package.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Oh, that, too, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

We can run your video packages if you. If you do those. I would love that.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, no, but I. I can make a hardware package, too. I mean, I just.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you meant a video package. Yeah, yeah. I'll take your video Package. I just didn't want a bunch of stuff. I got enough stuff. I want to get rid of stuff. I want to hear about stuff.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You're giving away E bikes now you can get an E bike.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I know. We have too many E bikes actually the garage is full. Anyway. Wonderful to have you father. I hope your parents are okay. And we just thank you prayers and and. And thoughts going your way. We love you and it's great to see you.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I miss you.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the new. I miss you very much. One of our newest family members, Rich Campbell has really jumped in and become a real part of the family on Windows Weekly. Just love having you on Richard. Especially not exclusively, but definitely your brown.

[Richard Campbell]

Liquor picks every week seems to be popular.

[Leo Laporte]

A very nice substitute for Mary Jo's beer picks. But I just love as I said, you're an autodidact. You love everything you learn about everything and your information, your history. Fantastic. It's great to have you. You know, actually all three of you are that way. And of course Micah Sargent who is our our last remaining host besides me at the Twit studios. But you've moved your studios up north. How is it up there? You like it?

[Micah Sargent]

Oh yes. The Portland weather's been. Yeah. Portland. Yep. And the weather is. Has been exactly what I like.

[Leo Laporte]

Good.

[Micah Sargent]

I minus. I wish there was a little more snow here. That's the only thing there's it it very rarely Richard.

[Leo Laporte]

You go up and visit Richard you can get and yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But we keep our snow in the mountains. There's none of this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Whistler.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Separately he's trying to make an argument for Vancouver, Washington is like listen, we've got the real Vancouver up here.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. There is no but once upon a.

[Richard Campbell]

Time, British Columbia was the British side of the Columbia River.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting, huh? Didn't know that makes sense.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Anyway, love having all three of you on. You're making the show much more interesting than I than I thought it would be. 20. It wasn't a bad year. There was a lot of stuff happening.

[Richard Campbell]

A lot. I mean and we're. There's more, far more to talk about. Leo. Like my goodness, there is.

[Leo Laporte]

And we're getting there with this week in tech for this week now AT.

[Richard Campbell]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Richard Campbell]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[F]

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[Leo Laporte]

Look at that. The march of time. In March, Apple said we're not going to do a car after all. 10 billion at least. We don't know how much, but estimated as much as $10 billion later they realized there's no hope, there's no future. They tried a lot of different ideas, self driving. None of it, none of it really worked for them. And so this made me sad and.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I don't normally root for Apple, but I was really hoping that they were going to come up in this space.

[Leo Laporte]

Be interesting to see what they did, wouldn't it?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Bloomberg said it was because they were trying to outdo Tesla. I don't know if that's strictly true. I think it's a very difficult business business to get into. In fact, Tesla's facing some headwinds these days. So I, I think Apple realized that it's pretty hard to become a metal bender from from zero.

[Richard Campbell]

It's also a low margin business. Like why are you going into something?

[Leo Laporte]

Why bother?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, relatively little money. Make phones, you're making a bundle.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. I think Apple's very desperate to find the next thing. Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

When you look at what Apple has done for their hit products, they always have at the the base levels of discussion, how quickly can we move this so that everything is in house. They like to control the core technologies that go into their product. And I'm sure they were looking at car and saying it will never happen. We will never be able to make all the technologies that need to go into a car and it's not worth it to try it. However, I will say that they spent, based on who you believe, between 10 and $15 billion on their Apple car project. They could have bought Tesla for that 15 years ago. The valuation was not great. In fact it was in debt. If they had just done that as it was rumored that they were going to for their, I can't remember was a project titan one of them. They were actually considering making a tender offer for Tesla which was in debt at the time. Imagine how things would have played out differently.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that probably we would still not have a major electric car car. Tesla wasn't a great car either. The innovation, the brilliant moments that, and I don't think that's Elon per se, but Elon having the right engineers and pushing them as far as they did, you know, put the electric car actually on the map. I don't think they would have succeeded. And it's, it's hard. It's unfortunate with his behavior today to remember how fundamental he changed the electric car.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's almost a shame that his. Because I owned a Model X when it first came out. I remember going to the factory in Fremont and literally tearing up because I was so moved by his vision of what he wanted to do.

[Richard Campbell]

The guy that I follow closely on this that I really appreciated was Sandy Monroe. And so Sandy Monroe is an old school car guy and his business is tearing down cars and explaining how they're made across the industry. And he did not like the Tesla for the longest time. But when Sandy Monroe, Monroe realized the brilliance in, in the Tesla, he talked about it. He talked to the point where he's saying to the rest of the industry, if you don't understand how important the heat exchanging system is in here, how his banishment is like, you'll never succeed this. He's, he doesn't know how to make a car but his infrastructure is unbelievable for the way that the car functions.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And that, and that, you know, those are the best storytellers. This is an old school car guy who fought Tesla every tooth and nail all the way along. But when it, when he was profoundly right. He was profoundly right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And remember Tesla also broke away from the dealership model which was the de facto standard for so many years. And, and really sort of constricted consumer options. So the fact that he, and that was him, that wasn't a design thing, that was, that was musk fighting for.

[Richard Campbell]

Something to do it. Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Exactly. And it worked. He, he fought the big guys, he fought the large car manufacturers, he fought the government, and he. So he was in folk hero status until he went full culture war. When he went full culture war, it started being. Wait a minute, I thought you were just a tech guy who understood what people wanted. Now it turns out that you flew.

[Richard Campbell]

His sports car into space. I like this.

[Leo Laporte]

Very cool. Let's also remember that in October he figured out a way to capture a returning Falcon Heavy booster with chopsticks, which is very impressive. So credit to somebody. Now maybe it's, you know, his, it's of course many, many engineers at SpaceX and many, many engineers at Tesla who actually made it happen. But catching, he had the vision and.

[Richard Campbell]

The money building is catching a 25 story building.

[Leo Laporte]

That's pretty amazing. So we're going to say some bad things about Elon, but let's not forget that this guy for many years really was Iron Man.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, he revolutionized space flight. He took it from $20,000 a kilo to lower to $1,800 a kilo. That's where it is today. They flew more rockets than the rest of the world combined last year.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and going forward they probably are going to be the ones that fly all the rockets. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

At least whoever can, can get a Vulcan 9 or can get it. You know, the Chinese are the, are the number two because they fly their own rockets and are trying to land their own rockets too. What he's done is really set the bar. You have to do this now. At the moment there's only one. There's well, one and a half. Like Starship's done it once. But now there'll be new Glenn, which should. Was supposed to fly the end of this year, but probably won't fly till early next year.

[Leo Laporte]

It's interesting that China poses Elon's greatest competition not just for rockets, but for electric vehicles.

[Richard Campbell]

Mm, exactly right.

[Leo Laporte]

And I would expect that if there will certainly be, or it seems there will certainly be a large tariff on products from China, as much as 60%. But there may well even be a ban on electric vehicles from China starting next year, which is too bad because I think I would buy a $20,000 EV. Yeah, a lot of his competition is coming from China, both in space and in cars.

[Father Robert Balliser]

The eevee that I, I kind of want to get my Hands on right now because it was so bad and then it actually became decent. Is the Vietnamese one. Have you seen that?

[Leo Laporte]

No. What's it called? Do you know?

[Father Robert Balliser]

I, I can't just put Vietnamese ev.

[Leo Laporte]

I can, I can Google that.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It was.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It was comically bad when it was first released. Like so.

[Leo Laporte]

As bad as a Fisker. That bad?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Oh no, way worse because this, the Fisker was embarrassing. This could kill you within.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I like their E bike. That's nice.

[Father Robert Balliser]

They, they've really stepped up. They've, they've, they've made the car safer. They're still very affordable. They actually look decently inside.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Wait.

[Micah Sargent]

I would say fur from it can kill you. Doesn't sound very safe.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Well, I mean now it will only kill you on a bad day, but you know, previously it was. It would kill you if you stepped into.

[Leo Laporte]

Speaking of which, what do we think? Was 2024 a good year for full self driving or a bad year for full self driving?

[Richard Campbell]

There have been no good years.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, it was a good year in the sense that people finally figured out that there's no told to them about full self driving.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it was, it was actually this earlier this year that Elon announced the Tesla Robo Taxi. Any day now now, I'm sure.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah.

[Benito Gonzalez]

You know, Teslas have killed more people than the Ford Pinto, but there are. Pinto was a giant joke.

[Richard Campbell]

There are Ford Pintos.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

The cyber truck has been recalled more times than the Ford Pinto.

[Richard Campbell]

The cybertruck almost isn't a vehicle.

[Leo Laporte]

What is it? That's a question. Is it a brick on wheels? What is it?

[Father Robert Balliser]

No, the Cyber Truck is a SimP model. It was the test of loyalty on whether or not you had the appropriate amount of reverence for Elon Musk. Because if you did, nothing could go wrong. All of those posts on Reddit about everything wrong with my cyber truck, but I still love it. It doesn't work in the ring, but I love it. It fell apart in my driveway, but I love it. It only made it two miles from the dealership, but I still. Still the best car I've ever driven.

[Micah Sargent]

It kills my dog, but I love it.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Exactly. It was some weird, weird Brazil type stuff going on here.

[Benito Gonzalez]

It's the sip that off my fingers.

[Richard Campbell]

That's the best explanation I've heard. Father, honestly, that's really brilliant.

[Leo Laporte]

Cruise. GM got out of the self driving taxi, the robo taxi business this year after investing billions. And of course they had partners like Honda who also invested billions. But Google continues with its Robo Taxi, the Waymo and in fact is expanding spending. Why did GM drop out? Money just too expensive.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, they didn't see the roi.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a longer term investment. Like you want to be positioned, but they thought it'd be sooner than it actually is. So suddenly you're looking at we need two or three more years of many billions. And it's like, or five years or 10 years and they're like, I can't bet that far. I got other things to spend on.

[Father Robert Balliser]

What Google gets with Waymo is way more than a driving taxi. There's so much data collection.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the thing that big tech has. It's why you can't beat Apple at music. They're not trying to make money at music. These companies make money in other ways. And that somebody can't just come along and say, oh yeah, I'm going to make money that way as well. This was the month, March, that the United States Department of justice and 15 states plus the District of Columbia decided to sue Apple, Apple for being a monopoly. Now, there are a couple of question marks. First of all, the lawsuit had its flaws in the way, they defined, you know, monopoly, because Apple isn't really a monopoly except in its own ecosystem. So it really was almost a criticism of the ecosystem. Lock in. But that would be interesting. Lock in. Jason Snell wrote, will be on trial. But it's also a question whether it will survive Inauguration Day next year. There are a lot of, you know, Google's being sued. In fact, the Department of Justice is at this point trying to figure out what Google, Google already lost, what Google's penalty should be, including selling Chrome or breaking the company up. Apple probably could just sit back and wait, I would imagine. Imagine.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and Google got to. Is now in the same place that Microsoft was in at the end of 99, where. Okay, now the negotiation begins. Right, right now a consent decree has to be drafted. It's not going away. You have to make a deal and ultimately want a deal.

[Micah Sargent]

I had Leah Nylan of Bloomberg, who is a fantastic antitrust reporter on Tech News Weekly a few times to kind of keep us updated on what was going on with the Google thing. And basically, not only did she and other antitrust reporters kind of gather together and celebrate a little bit the fact that for the first time in so long there was another tech antitrust situation going on, it's kind of like, oh, we finally have something to pay attention to, but also kind of getting, you know, getting ready for what's going to be a very long, drawn out process and. Well, it could be a very long.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the thing. It may be truncated. We don't know. There's going to be a new attorney.

[Micah Sargent]

General already hanging out. No, no, no, I take that back. They didn't hang out. They did a phone call. Many of the other big tech leaders.

[Leo Laporte]

I think Sundar Panchai went to Mar a Lago, all of them have contributed to the inauguration, which is kind of a nonpartisan way of sending money to the new administration. Google did file yesterday its response to the Department of Justice on Friday. Google proposed a series, actually day before yesterday, a series of restrictions for three years. Okay. That would bar the company from requiring device manufacturers, browsers and wireless carrier licensees to distribute their AI. What a concession. Right. On the other hand, Department of Justice says no, we're going to make you sell Chrome. So we'll be. There'll be a hearing on this in April. Judge Mehta will have to decide. The hearings are in April, expected to release his decision by August. I guess this isn't something a new administration could change. The trial's over. They lost.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, but definitely the remediation could be the enforcement.

[Leo Laporte]

The DOJ could back off, could say.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, well, they could just be encouraged. Just like, yeah, we'll never get around to having that meeting.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I mean, there is a little bit of poetic justice because if you wind the clock back 25 years, it was Google that was really sticking into Microsoft for the antitrust on, on browsers. And they were the driving force to make Microsoft include that little.

[Leo Laporte]

There was no Google. In 1998 when the DOJ sued Microsoft. There are those who made the case that the consent decree that Microsoft made with the Department of Justice made way for companies like Google.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Exactly. When we got to browser choice.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I mean, that was, that was the whole thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, that was the EU that pushed.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I need to have a way to choose a browser rather than downloading one 50 seconds after I finished installation.

[Leo Laporte]

I think there's no Audrey, to be clear here.

[Richard Campbell]

Internet Explorer was an essential part of Windows.

[Leo Laporte]

It could not be take it out. Bill Gates said we can't take it out.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no.

[Leo Laporte]

And then they did a demonstration version without it and it broke. It didn't work. And see, we told you we couldn't take it out.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Well, I mean, yeah, things break when you leave critical components out for the demo. I mean, that's just kind of how that works.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see, back in March, the Beginning of a story that really it was interesting. When I was doing this I noticed there were a number of stories that kind of broke in the spring and then got worse and worse and worse. One was the Microsoft hack exchange problem with Microsoft's executive emails being. And then bit by bit Microsoft said more and more about it and it got, seemed like it got worse and worse through the year. I don't know if we've heard the last of it. Maybe more to come on that one.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't think we're going to hear anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

We're done.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I think the feds have gotten involved. The subtext of a lot of the statements they made around there, this being a state actor and so forth, is like, like there's some three letter entities involved now and don't want anybody talking about anything. I've definitely been pushing into those teams to say what can we say? And pretty and to the point where folks have said not only can I not talk to you, I have to report that I told you no. And that is an intelligence agency behavior.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, this was also in, in the spring of this year when the US accused Chinese hackers of targeting critical infrastructure. This is a story from the New York Times. It was published in March of 2024. Then we found out that actually Chinese agents were not only in our grid but they were in our phone system listening in on phone calls at the highest level in Washington D.C. and the Trump campaign. In fact at one point later in the year as it all came out, it turned out that the intelligence agencies called it Attack Salt Typhoon and said it might be the worst hack in our nation's history. You wouldn't have known that in March when you read the first inklings of this. Senator Warner, chairman of the U.S. senate Intelligence Committee. Mark Warner said my hair's on fire when he heard about all of the threats in our communications infrastructure. Sure.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean I would bring up as someone who's done shows and stuff on breaches is like it does take weeks to even understand the scope of a breach.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So they may not have known in March when it was first talked about. But I think another important side of this is especially when you're dealing with government entities, they and and intelligence related stuff, they won't talk unless they have to.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So often I see this six month lag because it's actually press doing freedom of information requests that force the story out. So they make the initial release because they have to, they have to make a statement, say nothing more. Then the fois go out it did.

[Leo Laporte]

Get worse and worse and worse as the year went by. At one point, the intelligence agencies were saying, and the phone companies were saying, we can't fix it. The, the, the intelligence agencies last month started demanding, you got to fix this. All the major U.S. carriers, including AT&T, Verizon and T Mobile, were hacked. Mark Warner says the hackers are still inside the US system and there is no obvious way to get them out that doesn't involve physically replacing old equipment. And that's the real problem, is that SS7, the signaling system these they use, has been hacked for years. That the equipment has been hacked for years. This requires a reinvention of our telecommunications system at this point.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, what it requires is a giant, giant pile of money.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

What the helicos are saying is to government is if you want to fix this, pay up, give us billions, and we'll replace all of this equipment at once.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

Can you clarify what you mean by that, Father Robert?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Our traditional way of understanding a hacker breach is that a bad actor has penetrated the defenses, the firewall of your network, and has been able to exfiltrate data. So you can probably, through forensic investigation, look at when the breach started, what they got and when it ended, and then you can clean the system. The problem is this is so pervasive and it's been running for so many years, there is no breach. It's a library, our network, living there. Library.

[Leo Laporte]

It's parasites, their network. It's their movie parasite. They're living in the house.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah. So how do you clean that? You can't. You have to burn the house down. And there's no way for us to burn the house down while we're still living in it.

[Leo Laporte]

This, they did allocate another few billion for rip and replace just a couple of months ago. The Earth, a couple of weeks ago, actually, for the FCC and the incoming chairman of the sec. Carr says he's all in favor of spending billions more to rip and replace all this Chinese equipment. There's a lot of equipment that is speaking out.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's way too much. And not only that, unless you get everything, every last bit that's in the network, you can never assume that it's secure. So the only way, and actually what we're doing over here, is we're assuming the network's not secure and we're building out a network within the network. That's the only way we can be sure that our data is safe. Now, that works for us because we have a relatively limited scope organization that Needs, needs secure information. But if you're looking at the US Telecom system, that's not billions, that's trillions of dollars of equipment and labor while you're still trying to use the system. It's, it's just not feasible.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, they're going to have to eat that elephant one bite at a time.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, as an example, last month the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. There you go, there's the acronym cfpb told its workers maybe don't use the cell phone so much because of they're not secure. The FBI told Americans start using encrypted messaging systems. But then they had a caveat. They said appropriately managed encrypted messaging systems, that is systems we can subpoena and get the clear text from. So it was one of those, they're wiretapping us. That's bad, but we want to be able to wiretap you. That's good. And, and the truth is all of this started 20 years ago with Calea, the law enforcement act that provided digital wiretaps. The FBI said we've got to have wiretaps in these digital phone systems. Congress agreed and it turns out those are the back doors that the Chinese are using. So what goes around comes around.

[Micah Sargent]

We did it to ourselves.

[Leo Laporte]

We did it to ourselves. And now we're telling, now the FBI is saying, but use encrypted messaging. As long as we can get into it, it's appropriate. Which is not signal, by the way, or any other good end to end encrypted system. Don't use RCS anyway. You're watching. Well, I'm trying not to be indignant. You're. We're celebrating the end of 2024 and the beginning of a brand new year. On this week in Tech. We also are celebrating several thousand new members to our club. And we welcome you all. We're so happy to have you. We had a bit of a crisis over the last month. We were really worried about going into the new year. Our finances and the club members stepped up. A bunch of new people joined and. Thank you. I mentioned that we, I kind of hinted we might need some help, but we're not out of the woods yet completely. I have to say we did book almost a million dollars with advertising last week, but it costs much more than that to run twit. So your help is still very, very important. We love our advertisers, but we also love our club members. If you're not yet a member, seven bucks a month ad free versions of all the shows you get to Watch Micah build little tiny furniture in Micah's crafting corner. We do our coffee show. We're going to do more of those with Mark Prince. We're going to do some more. Christopher Marquardt, our photo guy is going to do a monthly is doing a monthly photo so segment. Stacy's book club went so well this week. We're going to do more of those. All of those appear in the Twit plus feed. The club members make it possible for us to stream everywhere. By the way, we are now streaming not only in the Club Twit Discord. That's the. To me, that's the best benefit. The Club Twit Discord is a great place to hang out with nerdy people having a grand old time full of animated gifts too, I must say say. So that's part of the benefit. But you also get the special events, the community, the sense of the community and the, and the warm feeling that you're helping us stay on the air. If you like the shows we do, that's how you vote. Join the Join the Club Twit TV Club Twit. And we thank you in advance for all your support. But I am happy to say unexpectedly, a lot of the advertisers who were ghosting us decided right at the end of the month, okay, we're gonna get some ads. We guess we're gonna need some ads. That's good news. That's good news. We're continuing on with our stuff. Continuing on with the. Look back at the year 2024, another story that we didn't find that we found out about in March, but ended up developing through the years. AT&T in March sent out a notice to all its customers. We need to reset your passcode. What? Yeah, just, you know, don't worry about it. Just. We've reset your passcode. Well, it turns out by the end of the year, AT&T said, yeah, criminals stole the phone records of nearly all our customers. Nearly all of our customers. The PIN notice was just the tip of the iceberg. So they. If you are an AT&T customer, you should know that the stolen data contains phone numbers of both cellular and landline customers. AT&T Records of calls and text messages, the metadata, not the content, for a six month period between May 2022 and October 2022. Okay.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Don't we have a law about timely disclosure?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I don't understand. I think companies are saying, well, we told you what we knew, when we knew it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. Yeah. Well, it takes time to fully understand the scope of a problem. Right. You do have to bring in a team. It takes a lot of analysis to really put a picture around it. And you're not in a. And while you're doing that, you're assembling your PR crisis team.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. It's pretty embarrassing. Interesting, isn't it?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. But it'll. If you handle it correctly, it goes away quickly. Right. Like, the reality is that breaches have very low consequences to most companies if they use the experts. There's a group of folks there make a living handling these disclosures, putting them out there in a way that they fully disclose they're compliant, and the news story dies within a couple of months or so.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, the biggest. I think the biggest breach of the year was National Public Data, a data broker that had information pretty much on everybody and pretty much all of it was exfiltrated, including, by the way, Social Security numbers. Because we found out it's not illegal to sell, to collect and sell people's Social Security numbers. We found that out because the FCC announced just a couple of weeks ago they're thinking about making it illegal, legal. We're thinking about that. What do you think? So the National Public data breach, it's 2.7 billion data records. A lot of them are duplicates because otherwise it would be everybody in the world. But it did include. This was in August Social Security numbers. I looked, I found my Social Security number. So did Steve Gibson. National Public Data went out of business. I put that in air quotes because I think all they did is change their name. But the problem really is that there are many, many data brokers and there is no consequence for being a data broker or as you said, Richard, really, for having a breach. They just change their name and get on with it.

[Richard Campbell]

Crying out loud. Ashley Madison is still in business. And there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there's a good example.

[Richard Campbell]

All of the data proved that their entire business model. A lie.

[Leo Laporte]

Who would trust Ashley Madison after that?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, yeah, if your data is going to get leaked and you're not actually talking to a real.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no women. It's all. They're all bots.

[Richard Campbell]

Still going. Still going.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I mean, that's Palantir's business model. And they're employed by the US Government.

[Leo Laporte]

Which part of it is their business model? I just clarify.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, data collection.

[Leo Laporte]

And actually not fembots.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's not.

[Leo Laporte]

They're not in the feminine.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Why are you stuck on fembots? But I mean, their business model is selling data to the government that our government couldn't gather. On us.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. Why? There's no law against it. Yeah, there's no law against it because that's the easiest way for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to get information about it.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Us.

[Richard Campbell]

No, it's not up to them. Ultimately. You have a Congress that passes those laws.

[Leo Laporte]

We. I've heard we have a Congress when it rarely does. You know, I don't know what they're actually up to these days. They're.

[Father Robert Balliser]

They're nervously starting at Twitter these days, actually. Account Elon.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the big debates this year was, should kids be allowed to have. Have cell phones in schools? No, I think not. And more and more schools are banning it. California passed a law. This story from April. California passed a law saying schools can may order kids to leave their phones at the door. But some of this comes along with the moral panic over cell phones making kids. Kids crazy and I mean, like, literally mentally ill. Is it?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's not actually a moral panic. It's a bunch of empirical data, and.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S correlation, not causation.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that's the problem. The thing that you're seeing when the schools do remove the phones is that the kids change their socialization strategies and actually tend to use their phones less.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

Really.

[Richard Campbell]

So the empirical data so far has shown that not only that, just getting them out of the bubble on the routine basis, this helps because then they realize they're in a bubble in the first place.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

As a former teacher, you know, pre 2000, that I cannot imagine teaching again with those devices in my classroom. It just. Their attention would be so much more divided even than it was back then.

[Leo Laporte]

Parents push back because they want to be able to reach their kids. Plus, it's happened several times during school shootings. This is when kids are able to reach their parents and say, we got a problem.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Savannah has a different solution that's not related to the phone, but no one wants to add on.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a separate problem.

[Richard Campbell]

Only one country has that problem, Padre.

[Leo Laporte]

Or as the Onion says, the one country that says we can't do anything about it. It keeps happening. Yeah. School shootings have raised parents anxiety. This is from Wall Street Journal in April. As a mother of three, I'm certainly worried. Worried. I think it's probably. I mean, what's the harm of saying to the kid as they go into the classroom, put your phone in the rack, turn it off and put it in the rack? I think that's the right thing to do. Absolutely.

[Richard Campbell]

I was in a high school classroom last week doing the Day of Tech Careers. And things. And that's exactly what they did. The kids, those hot, those are high school students, 15 to 17 year olds, they all have phones and as they came into the room, they all put them in a, in Iraq. And then.

[Leo Laporte]

But then there's the next step beyond that because if you buy into that, maybe the next thing you're going to say is we should ban social media for kids. New York passed a bill to ban in a very loosely defined addictive social media algorithms for kids. It's not really clear how they're going to enforce this. Australia passed something even more Draconian. Kids under 16 are not allowed to be on social media. They're also unclear on how it's going to be enforced.

[Richard Campbell]

Part of the problem, when someone under 16 has an incident that gets traced back to social media, the social media company gets heavily.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. That terrifies them, of course. But the issue becomes how do you identify. How do you. But how do you identify by the age of a user?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, well, that's going to be their problem.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what the Australian legislation. That's your problem. You figure it out. They have a year and a half to figure. A year and a month now to figure it out.

[Richard Campbell]

The New York, they've been largely complying with COPPA, which was 13 and under.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right.

[Richard Campbell]

So.

[Micah Sargent]

Well, but where do you draw the line though? Because if what is the extent of the social media company's responsibility? If I put in a prompt that says, are you over 13? Yes. What is your birthday? And the kid lies, will a social media company still be held responsible?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and that's what Copper has had.

[Micah Sargent]

The facial recognition and. Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

COP has been widely ignored by, you know, I mean, kids just lie.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Parents often lie.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And I think the Australians are going to make the right play, which is just when an incident happens, we're going to come at you and it's going to cost you a lot of money.

[Leo Laporte]

That's.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I want to err on the side of freedom. I mean I, I believe that's, that's a good default to have to say, look, this is something that we can't legislate because if you start legislating what you believe is unhealthy, whatever, what else goes on the list? Video games, maybe. Video games should be on the list. They've been satanic panicking about it for generations. But I think the way that we can explain it to people is we're in the middle of an epidemic right now. The rules have to change. The rules, rules at Least for now. We have to use a different set of rules because we are so deep in it. That's the only way to pull ourselves out. We all know that social media is having a terrible effect on the development of children. We know that's, that's not a rumor. That's, that's. We have empirical studies that show it affects the way that kids think. Not for the better.

[Leo Laporte]

So maybe people said that about violent video games. Father oh yeah, they said about, they.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Said that, they said, they said that. But without any proof, we've actually got people who did clinical scans of children who were using social media and they found that, yeah, the development of different parts of the brain changed. So it's not, oh, I think there's something wrong here. It's, let me show you what's wrong. Let me show you why it's not good that this part of the brain is underdeveloped. Let me show you why the part of the brain that deals with interpersonal relationships, relationships being much smaller than it is in a person pre social media is a bad thing for society as a whole.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the debate that did rage during 2024, started by Jonathan Haidt's book saying there's a social, there's a social media caused epidemic among kids. There are a number of experts in the field, which Jonathan Haidt is not, that's true, who debate his findings. In fact, here's Candace Odgers who in fact does study this. This. Her piece in Nature was a review of Jonathan Haidt's book the Anxious how the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. She says correlation does not equal causation. It's an easy thing to say, well, I see all the cell phones in the kids hands, it must be causing this problem. But she says hundreds of researchers have searched for the kinds of large effects suggested by hate. Our efforts have produced a mix of no small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers. In other words, it's not the cause, it's a symptom. And her, her problem with the prescription that Jonathan Haidt comes up with is it doesn't solve the problem, it solves a symptom. And we're not really addressing the roots of the problem. She says these are not just our data or my opinion. Several meta analyses and systemic reviews converge on the same message. An analysis done in 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well being and the rollout of social media clothes globally. This is the debate. You and I are opposite ends of the spectrum on this, Robert.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Well, I mean, again, I normally I'm on your side. I'm just saying empirically, from what I've seen, from being in the classroom, what I've seen as an adult social media is it's not a good thing for someone who has, doesn't at least have some of their life figured out. If you're not at least developed enough to do critical analysis of what information you're receiving, it's a terrible place. And that's not just a child thing, that's also an adult thing.

[Leo Laporte]

The counter argument is that for many kids, this is their social life. Especially for marginalized kids who are gay or transgender, this is their only opportunity to learn and find a community that accepts them.

[Father Robert Balliser]

This is true. Okay, I absolutely agree with that. That is one of the great things, things that social media has allowed. In fact, I would even go before that. That's one of the things that the Internet has allowed. This, this idea of a great interconnected network. However, this then becomes a greater good argument said. Yes, there, there are edge cases, but are the edge cases worth what we're seeing in the development of generation X, the millennial generation generation?

[Richard Campbell]

And I don't think that an outright plan is the answer. The idea is how do we get to moderation? Like what I like about the school thing is it's an inter. In the addiction poke.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't. I have no problem, I agree with you. No problem with saying no cell phones in class. That's obvious. Right. I used to be on the board of a high school, local high school had a one to one program the early days where you give every student matriculating gets a laptop and teachers learned you have to say close the laptops. Yeah, you can't use the laptop while we're, you know, know, talking in class.

[Richard Campbell]

And moderation has to be taught.

[Leo Laporte]

It has to be taught. And I think that's the problem with a ban is that you're going to have a kid who until the age of 16 had no access to this and suddenly is going to have unlimited access to it.

[Richard Campbell]

But we also limit access to alcohol and we limit access to driving. Like there is a concept of a minimal, a minimal capable function level before you can take responsibility for such a device.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. Reasonable. To finish Auger's piece Researchers, she says there are unfortunately no simple answers. The onset and development of mental disorders such as anxiety and depression are driven by a complex set of genetic and environmental factors. Suicide rates among people in most age groups have been increasing steadily for the last 20 years. In the U.S. researchers cite access to guns, exposure to violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse, abuse, the opioid epidemic, economic hardships, social isolation. And I will add to this the isolation of the COVID pandemic, which sent a lot of kids home from school for several years and really for a lot of kids in that age group retarded their social development. So there's a lot of reasons and I think you focus on banning social media, you maybe are not considering the widespread spectrum of things. On the, on the other hand, I agree with you that, you know, both of you, Richard and Robert, that they're, you know, there are appropriate things you can do. I just think this, the entire, the ban of the entire thing to kids under 16 is, I'm grateful for the.

[Richard Campbell]

Australians to do the experiment.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see what happens. See what happens. Down.

[Richard Campbell]

Useful data for the rest of us.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I mean everyone was saying the same thing with when Australia banned guns. Guns said this will never work. This. It hasn't been proven that there's a causal.

[Leo Laporte]

It did work, didn't it?

[Richard Campbell]

It worked.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It totally worked.

[Leo Laporte]

So the Tasmanian Massacre, they had a huge gun buyback. They banned guns and it worked. You're watching this Week in Tech our year end edition with three of my favorite people. We do this every year. We try to bring in our. No, I know. Who is that? Robert. We bring in our regulars and have a great time talking about what happened in the year past. Next week is a best of episode clips from the whole year and then we will reconvene with a brand new episode of this week in Tech on January 5th. All the shows are going to have best of for this week because it's a Christmas week, of course and that will continue through New Year's Day. And I think we'll get back onto our regular schedule with twit on January 5th. I don't know. Are you doing a tech News Weekly on January 2, Micah?

[Micah Sargent]

No, it'll be, it'll be the week.

[Leo Laporte]

So the first new show of the new year will be this show in two weeks. So if you, I hope you've saved up some old shows and if I get really lonely I might get on, on the streams and, and do something. I don't know.

[Father Robert Balliser]

There will be club you know what? 2025 is going to be awesome.

[Micah Sargent]

Wait, Everything is going to be great.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's going to be wonderful. Okay, this January. Hold that as long as we can.

[Leo Laporte]

So Technews will be the first show back January 2nd. And Bonito said there's gonna be some club shows. What are the club shows?

[Benito Gonzalez]

The club shows Hands on Windows will have a January 2nd episode.

[Micah Sargent]

I'm not sure if Michael's Hands on Mac.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, never mind. So you guys are getting back to work early. Thank you. I appreciate that. Now at T Mobile, get four 5G.

[Richard Campbell]

Phones on us and four lines for.

[Leo Laporte]

$25 a line per month when you.

[Richard Campbell]

Switch with eligible traders. All on America's largest 5G network.

[Leo Laporte]

Minimum of 4 lines for $25 per line per month with autopay discount using debit or bank account. $5 more per line without autopay plus taxes and fees and $10 device connection charge phones via 24 monthly bill credits for well qualified customers. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance on a required finance agreement due bill credits end if you pay off devices early.

[F]

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[Leo Laporte]

On we go. Let's see, we're only to April. Holy cow. Okay, we're gonna. No, but we're gonna go.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, oh.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's one of my favorite things. In May, did you watch OpenAI's reveal of GPT4O with the Scarlett Johansson voice built in?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Her.

[Leo Laporte]

Her.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And who tweeted that out? Wasn't it Sam Altman actually just tweeted the word her just to make it.

[Leo Laporte]

Very obvious that turns out that might have been a mistake. Scarlett Johansson was shocked and angered. I'm shocked and angered, she said. Well, when she heard open AI's voice.

[Richard Campbell]

Competent too. Yeah, Woman well equipped to defend her brand and good honor.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, in fact, I think her Disney lawsuit over box office receipts.

[Richard Campbell]

No, that was the one where you knew this. She got it going on, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, she was at the time and I think probably still is the highest paid actress in motion pictures and certainly has a lot of clout in Hollywood, she said. Last September 2023, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current chat GPT4O system. He said he felt my voice would be comforting to people. After much consideration and for personal reasons, I declined the offer offer. Now, I have to say, it did sound like her, but it sounded like other people too. Anyway, I'm sad because I liked it, but it's gone.

[Richard Campbell]

There are other voices.

[Leo Laporte]

There are other voices.

[Micah Sargent]

I found myself rarely using the voice interaction. I used it a lot. At first it was fun, different, but now I just type.

[Leo Laporte]

This was a good year for AI in general, though, despite Sam Altman's over the top, top proclamations. And you know, AGI is just around the corner and comfortable. Yeah, he said that early in the year. And then he also said in his AI, his weird AI manifesto, that you shouldn't worry about making a living because Universal Basic Income is going to take care of everybody. That the productivity improvements of AI would make it possible for everybody not to work.

[Richard Campbell]

Another kind of cultism going on here.

[Micah Sargent]

Kind of world do you live in where you must not know the price of anything, that you really believe that that's going to happen?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. A billion here, a billion there, and you get indifferent to a lot of reality.

[Leo Laporte]

Benito opened my eyes.

[Benito Gonzalez]

What does a banana cost anyway? $10.

[Leo Laporte]

$10? Eggs. They're $100 each. How do we live? You open my eyes though, Benito, because you said something I thought was really important. We don't make music for the end product. We make music because we enjoy making music. Music. We don't let AI take away all the things we enjoy so that we can, what, Sit on our ass and collect Universal Basic Income. We're going to always make music. There will always be musicians.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah. Even if musicians never make another cent, from today on, people will still make music.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course. And we've seen it happen before with chess. I remember when, you know, Deep Blue beat the world champion. And it was everybody saying, well, that's it for chess. It's. Yeah, it's. It's Beatable. And in fact, you know, the computer you put on your phone these days can beat grand masters. I mean, it's really good. Still play chess? Love playing chess. Because we love playing chess. It didn't. It didn't stop our interest in creation.

[Richard Campbell]

Everywhere they universal basic income, people only do one of two things. They either start their own business business or they go get more education.

[Leo Laporte]

But in both, kind of to make more money, right.

[Richard Campbell]

Or because more to do things that matter.

[Leo Laporte]

Work. We like to work.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. We want to make a difference. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't want to flip burgers, I admit that, but we like to work.

[Father Robert Balliser]

There's a.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, when I worked at McDonald's in high school, I liked flipping burgers. I was very proud to be on the grill that was like, I made it.

[Richard Campbell]

I was on the floors and washing toilets, right?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

See the shake machine? You start on the shake machine, but that's not.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That was the last time I ever ordered a shake. When I saw what was in there when I was cleaning that thing out, I'm like, yeah, sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

So at McDonald's anyway, you move from cashier to shakes to fries, and then if you didn't scald yourself with oil, then you got to move to the grill.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I never got to the grill. My career cut short before I reached the pinnacle.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the pinnacle. And I love. I loved working at McDonald's because one of the things they said is always be busy. There's always a surface to wipe. You're always doing. People like doing stuff. We like working. We don't take it away from us. Anyway, I don't think we're cagi, but more and more we saw this year AI doing some amazing things. Notebook ln from Google, AI can make podcasts.

[Richard Campbell]

Automated voices sound a lot like me.

[Leo Laporte]

It was eerie.

[Micah Sargent]

It was eerie. Yes. The. It was pauses and the, the voice clearing and the little vocal ticks that really sold that as. I mean, is still not incredibly realistic when you started to listen to what they were saying.

[Richard Campbell]

But content wise.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, but just going past your ear, you would think that somebody was listening to a podcast. I wanted to say the. The thing that stuck out to me in terms of AI this year didn't come until, I think, last week, maybe two weeks ago. I have been having a whole heck of a lot of fun using Gemini's new research tool, where it's. You basically can set it on a task. And what it does is it creates a research plan where it will go out and look at a bunch of different websites to Gather information and then after it's gathered that information, present research to you. So I had just, I wanted to see how it would work. And so I said, help me create the best gluten free sugar cookie recipe for making Christmas cookies that I can cut out. So I said, then it said, okay, you're going to want something that's gluten free. You're going to want something where the cookies will hold their shape. You want something that is, you know, that tastes good, that can receive icing that it. I'll go look at all these sites it went and visited, visited like 25, 30 different recipe sites and read everything that was there and combined that together to provide not only a recipe, but also tips that people in the comments had tips that were part of the recipe that said, here's how you do it just right. Here's what you should do before. Here's where there were pitfalls. And that to me was, was very cool, where I'm not just getting this, you know, huge glob of information that it's pulling from that's, it's from its training set, but that's a little more specific. But does something that I as a human could do over the course of the next, you know, five hours in, I think it was, you know, 10 minutes later that it had that.

[Leo Laporte]

I think more and more we're hearing people with stories, not that particular story, but each person has another story like that where they go, well, yeah, AI is dumb, but boy, I did this thing, it was so cool. Sometimes it's a programmer. Steve Gibson got very excited about chat GPT knowing 86x86 assembly language. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

The coding side with the GitHub copilot and it's like, has been the kind of win area.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, but it's not. I don't think it's the only one. I think, you know, have you seen, they just released Vue 2, but we've seen a number of movie clip generators and they've gotten better and better and better. Robert, you seem skeptical. Skeptical.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You're all using AI the way that I like to use it, which is to enhance the content that I create.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Enhance the work that I do. There is a subset that is extremely profitable and that is using AI to boost all the worst things about content pandering. And you see them on YouTube right now where they are taking all the best buzzwords, they're taking all of the, the words that they know that the algorithm is looking for, for, and they are generating content around it very Quickly, very cheaply, but with no care for whether or not the information that they're passing along is true. And I have seen what that's been doing, especially in older communities that I work with in, in Nevada where they're stuck on YouTube all day watching video after video that has been custom tailored for them that contains not an iota of real information.

[Leo Laporte]

It's pink sleep slime.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's pink slime and it's humans do that.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember this goes back I first my eyes were opened with Kevin Rose's dig, which was a really cool thing. But once people figured out the algorithm they started gaming it and it killed it. Yeah, and humans will do that. It killed Google search. By gaming the algorithm, it's killing YouTube because human. I don't blame AI for this. I blame humans for this. They always want to game the algorithm.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, as long, yeah, as long as the algorithm is the way to profitability.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

As long as, let's face it, as consumers of YouTube, we're actually the product, you know, not the customer. The customer is the advertiser.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So as long as we're in that trap, there's going to be a mechanism for manipulating that advertising revenue. And it's. And it'll destroy YouTube. It's up to YouTube to protect, protect us. If you want to keep us as the product, they'll find a way to feed, feed the right thing. You know, YouTube's had multiple adpocalypses because they weren't responsible with their algorithm. And the advertisers yank out, right, because they realize their, their ad money's being wasted.

[Benito Gonzalez]

So this is the problem with AI, I think in general is that it's being advertised. It's being marketed to everybody as whole cloth creation, you know, make, make, make something out of nothing. Nothing. And that's how, and that's not really how what you guys would use it for is the actual way to as a supplement as like a. AI is.

[Leo Laporte]

Best when mixed with a human.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, but see that will never be profitable. I don't think like that side of it will never be profitable.

[Leo Laporte]

What's profitable is that we will buy these AI facilities so that we can mix it with humans. Right, so that it can be an assistant or a helper or. I mean that's why Recall had such.

[Richard Campbell]

GitHub copilot pilot free. If you're using Visual Studio code or any other.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the other part of the story. In July, Google admitted, you know, AI is costing us a lot in emissions. Their emissions jumped 50% over five years.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's not sustainable.

[Leo Laporte]

AI started to burn the world. They're saying we can still reach net zero by 2030. But now, now there's a lot of question whether that's possible.

[Richard Campbell]

No, it's going to take longer. But I think the, the interesting side of this is the push towards these tech companies are not going to make their own electricity because the grid can't keep up with their demand. Which was the other.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, yeah, that was the other.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Amazon building a nuclear power plant for their modular nukes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So I wrote my Microsoft restored 3M is restoring Three Mile island because it can. It's a cheaper way to make electricity for AI. Go ahead, you're an expert on this, Richard.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I ended up being, I'd been asked to write the talk for a while. I did it in August and then all the tech companies jumped in and now I'm doing it everywhere. But the, I mean the 3 mile one is interesting because it was shut down in 2019 without, with easily another 10 years of life left in it because it was too expensive to operate compared to natural gas peaker plants to, to combine cycle natural gas plants which are all over Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania. And so they shut it off for that. Microsoft doesn't care. It's 800 megawatts of electricity. So they'll build a couple of data centers there and they also promise to sell the excess at rack rate into the rest of Pennsylvania. So the state's on board.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody benefits.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's an asset. But new scale technologies out of Idaho had basically a certified small modular reactor design just before the pandemic. So they, they'd actually gotten through the regulatory process. They've done a lot of really hard work work. And they had Nevada and Idaho on board for a $4 billion prototype. And by the end of the pandemic it was a $9 billion prototype and the states pulled out. But that's a drop in the bucket to a Google or an Amazon. So it's entirely likely that these companies will spend the money to be able to build off grid power. Power, not supply to the grid, just power to their power plants. But also get over the hump of maturing that technology to the point where grid operators will be willing to buy it. Grid operators never explore experiment. Nobody wants experimental power. They want reliable power. So somebody has to pay for it. And typically it's governments. But now you're seeing these tech giants, you know, following the William Gibson dystopic cyber world where now your Amazon prime comes with 100 kilowatts a month. Right. Like we're on that path. But it's for them solving their problem of wanting to build more data centers faster than more electricity can come online.

[Leo Laporte]

In the Gibson Simpson books, the world government is the Koretsus, the conglomerates, the big companies. And we seem to be moving in that direction. In fact, the election is a big story. Yeah, the election is a big story because Silicon Valley and particularly bitcoin Bros. Put a lot of money into the 2024 election, not just the presidential election. And got many, I think several hundred represented pro bitcoin representatives elected, got a pro bitcoin president elected. I think we weren't paying close enough attention in, in July when Trump spoke to the bitcoin conference and proposed a, a strategic national crypto stockpile. He said he wants America to be the number one holder of bitcoin and said he'd file fire the chief of, of the sec, Gary Gensler to standing ovation. He said it three times cuz they liked it so much. He is gonna fire Gensler and replace him with chairman of the SEC who will be pro bitcoin. And in fact this, some will say this was the year of bitcoin. It started the year at $44,000, went over $106,000 a couple of weeks ago, is now hovering around 96,000. I think more than doubled its value in one year.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, I made a lot of money off of that. So thanks for that announcement.

[Leo Laporte]

You, you had dogecoin.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I thought I had dogecoin, which I cashed in and then started playing the crypto field.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, Doge is doing very well. Have you made a lot of money on bitcoin?

[Father Robert Balliser]

So it was roughly cashing in about $8,000 worth of Dogecoin. Went through that spell from 2022, which.

[Leo Laporte]

Which by the way you didn't buy to make money, you bought it because it was a meme and you thought it was funny.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It was funny. Exactly that. So but right now with the bump and I just sold last week to, to let the market calm down, that 8,000 is now worth about 323.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you have to give it to the church?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, I've been breaking off small pieces for missions as we have groups that need cash.

[Leo Laporte]

So in that case it's good, it's a good thing. A good thing, yeah, but that's a big improvement from 8,000 to 300 some thousand, that's 500 or something.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It was all, it was a speculation. There's nothing there.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the problem?

[Richard Campbell]

Not a problem.

[Leo Laporte]

And the other problem, I mean, it's hard enough in the stock market to know when to buy and when to sell. Timing. You can't do market timing. But it's even worse with bitcoin because there's nothing to tie it to.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I lucked out on this last cycle because I sold at 106 and then immediately, like a day after dropped down below 100.

[Richard Campbell]

But imagine you're a holder of a lot of bitcoin. Bitcoin, and you want a way to unload a whole bunch. You know what a good way to do it is convince the government that it needs to hold a balance.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what to me this bitcoin conference was all about. How can we take our stake and make it more valuable? What could the government do to make me richer? And they, by the way, they got their dreams.

[Richard Campbell]

Y they. They're going to have to spend a whole bunch of US dollars to buy bitcoin. And guess who gets the US dollar dollars.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You know who's making money in crypto right now? People doing rug pulls. Rug pulls are making so much cash.

[Leo Laporte]

Like hawk to a girl.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Hawk to a girl. Jack Doherty did a rug. Did several rug pools actually. And yeah, they're raking in millions.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, if there, if there's any good thing that happened in 2024, it's that NFTs disappeared from the National. The Overton window slammed shut. If there's any bad thing, it's that all those NFT grifters moved into crypto.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I mean it's really the same group. The vendor, NFT and Crypto Bros. I know circle.

[Leo Laporte]

So what else happened this year? Actually the good thing, the doj, everybody agrees did. Ten additional states joined the DOJ lawsuit seeking to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster. Woohoo. And the crowd goes wild. There is nobody I've talked to who defended Live Nation and Ticketmaster. So 39 US states and the District of Columbia now join the lawsuit. Sorry.

[Father Robert Balliser]

One of only two true bipartisan movements.

[Leo Laporte]

In the United States.

[Father Robert Balliser]

There is Ticketmaster and Daylight Savings time. That's it. It's only you can all agree on.

[Leo Laporte]

The President elect says he's going to get rid of daylight saving time.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I've heard it before.

[Benito Gonzalez]

But don't the states decide that? The states decide that though.

[Leo Laporte]

California did a. Did a stupid thing. We had a referendum to get rid of standard time to put California on saving time. That the states cannot do. That is a federal time zone and you can't change your time Zone, you have to early. So I think we could say we could. I think we could get rid of daylight. I think the feds could get rid of daylight, certainly on the Pacific time.

[Richard Campbell]

British Columbia and Washington and Oregon all have laws in the books that says once everyone in the Pacific time zone agrees, we'll all change.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So we were all basically waiting for California to figure themselves out.

[Leo Laporte]

The real problem is. The real problem really is, first of all, you guys way up north have a bigger dog in this hunt than we do down here, here, because you're going to. You have. Your days are what, five hours or something?

[Richard Campbell]

We. You know what? We have Leo electric light. It's amazing. I highly recommend.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's one of the arguments is that you don't want kids to be getting up and going to school in the. In the middle of the night.

[Richard Campbell]

Happens anyway.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah. They're on the phone in the middle of the night, so who cares?

[Leo Laporte]

This is the problem. And I think a lot of the people say, let's stay with David. Daylight savings time say that because they love the sun, summer, but you're gonna get winter no matter what you do.

[Richard Campbell]

And you're gonna get summer, too. So it's off by an hour. Who cares? Time kills people. It's a terrible thing to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I want to keep daylight savings, but modify it so that we jump forward and we never jump back.

[Leo Laporte]

So every year, is it completely nutty to say we should all be on one time zone, which should be utc and everybody.

[Richard Campbell]

That's what China does while spanning nine time zones for everyone else? No, it's not that.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Math is not that hard, really. It's. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, come on.

[Richard Campbell]

It's changing it. Well, the real issue here is it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's, oh, dark 15 right now in the universal time zone.

[Richard Campbell]

Dark up here too, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Let's see. The Internet Archive got ddosed and lost in court over their ebook lending. Shame. Shame that. Yeah, shame.

[Micah Sargent]

The argument there was that it was. There was too prominent a draw.

[Leo Laporte]

The real argument is publishers hate libraries. They can't get rid of actual libraries yet. So. But they're definitely not gonna allow digital libraries unless you buy the digital books from them. Right.

[Micah Sargent]

If this is the first time you heard this story, I wanted to explain why. What?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Micah Sargent]

The argument was, please do.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Micah Sargent]

Was that basically because the donate button was right there on the page where you could go to the lending library, then the Internet Archive was just trying to make money off of offering these ebooks. And as Leo has pointed out, no, that's not really what the underlying argument was. That's just how they took it to court.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. And the real problem was that the Internet Archive was not buying digital copies for their ebook land lending. They were taking. They were buying regular copies like a library does, scanning it and lending it out. And during COVID they had an emergency lending library where they could do unlimited numbers, but they reverted back to what other libraries do, which is only as many books as they have bought could be borrowed. And they were borrowed for a limited time. They did everything a library does. The publishers just said, no, we got you on this one. And Cory Doctorows talked about this an awful lot. The publishers, publishers are not acting in authors interest. They're acting in the publisher's interest. Here's a story that was huge. First, to my knowledge, use by a nation state of IEDs. Israel put explosives in pagers that were then sold to Hezbollah and killed nine. Actually, the number went up after this article from The Wall Street Journal. 2,800, I would argue.

[Richard Campbell]

Were they really improvised? This was very.

[Leo Laporte]

Prof. Yeah, they weren't exactly improvised explosive devices.

[Richard Campbell]

They won the bid from Hezbollah by creating a company in checklist.

[Leo Laporte]

Clever. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And then manufactured these things with an explosive inside of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. They did kill some innocent children and so forth.

[Micah Sargent]

Injured a lot of people.

[Leo Laporte]

Injured a lot of people. But they probably also did a lot of damage to Hezbollah.

[Richard Campbell]

And then did it again with the radio radios.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And then they blew up the radios. This has been a 10 year process, of course, from his.

[Richard Campbell]

Apparently they were complaining the whole time that the battery life wasn't sufficient.

[Leo Laporte]

Really? Were they? Yeah. That's because you got a little bit of C4 in there where your battery.

[Richard Campbell]

A little bit. It was 2/3.

[Father Robert Balliser]

The iFixer guys would have found this immediately.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. Tear down.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, man.

[Richard Campbell]

Somebody did a tear down.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't. I think it's a bad precedent. Yes.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Absolutely.

[Richard Campbell]

It's also not unprecedented. Right. Like these sorts of things happen during the Cold War. It's. It's kind of a lash battle on.

[Leo Laporte]

A onesie twosie basis though.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah. On this scale, that's unprecedented.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It's kind of unbelievable. And, and odds are will never happen again. You only get to pull this stunt once.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. And nobody's saying anything good about Hezbollah. I mean, these are terrorists. This is a terrorist group and these.

[Richard Campbell]

Are terrorist leaders and arguably have been completely dismantled in this current crisis.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah. OpenAI did have a very good October. They had the largest VC raise in history. $6.6 billion. That's a lot of people who believe in AI and no, I think that's.

[Richard Campbell]

A lot of people who believe in making money, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, making money. They're in it for the money. Money is a profit thing.

[Richard Campbell]

They think there's going to be money there. I mean, I would argue this is a poisonous amount of money. Right. Like you don't have a plan for how to spell and spend 6.6. Well, but you've also now committed to making 60 billion with it.

[Leo Laporte]

The few people I know in my business who raised money through venture capital spent it unwisely and then fell apart.

[Richard Campbell]

You're right.

[Leo Laporte]

Getting a big check is always problematic. Yeah, OpenAI got 6 billion or got 6 point. What would I say? 6.6 billion. But Elon got 6 billion for Grok for Xai. So there is a, what do you call that? Is it a bubble?

[Richard Campbell]

No, this is admittedly, it's probably multi tranched with milestones. So they're not, they didn't get a check for 6.6 billion. What they got was a certain amount of cash. Cash. Now you have to reach these milestones as the next tranche of cash and so forth. Like that's a normal investment pattern over several years. And if you, you know, burn it faster, you other do other raises and so forth. But it's the buyouts that are also toxic. But the real problem here is if you're not spending the money fast enough, like you will get heat to spend the money faster.

[Micah Sargent]

The budget.

[Father Robert Balliser]

But do they have to? Because they know that OpenAI is the be in Elon Musk's bonnet. He is the Whipley Snide Lash of the. What is it? Whip.

[Leo Laporte]

Snidely Whiplash.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Whipley Snide Lash is good though. So I'm sa.

[Father Robert Balliser]

They're giving, they're giving 6 billion now thinking that in a couple of years Elon is going to be so upset that he's, he keeps losing to Open AI. He's going to lose the case about them going for.

[Leo Laporte]

He's suing because he doesn't want him to go suing.

[Father Robert Balliser]

He's absolutely going to sue. But at, at some point he's just going to say, you know what? I'm going to give you $60 billion to make you go away. And, and I'm going to buy out.

[Richard Campbell]

And they've made themselves vulnerable that by having a set of VCs whose goal is to make money on this.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Precisely. Precisely. And so everyone buy Open AI out.

[Richard Campbell]

He's going to tell the investors, I'll be the investor. Here's your money.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Correct, Correct. And they'll take it, just like they did with Twitter, because they he made them an offer they could not refuse. They knew that their company was never going to make money on its own, not at that scale. And here's a man who's going to white knight and give them everything that they want. And all he asks in return is that you kill everything that made the company special in the first place.

[Leo Laporte]

Speaking of money for AI, a portrait of British mathematician Alan Turing as the God of artificial intelligence sold at auction for $1.1 million. Its creator, a robot named AI. Duh. That represents a woman with a bob haircut. There's the painting.

[Father Robert Balliser]

But did it have a banana?

[Leo Laporte]

No, they ate the banana and that was the problem. They had to come up with something else. Yeah, I know what you're talking about.

[Micah Sargent]

That sold for 1.1 million. $1.1 million.

[Leo Laporte]

Probably because somebody figured this is going to be the first AI painting.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not a bubble. It's not a bubble.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Oh, was it early on?

[Micah Sargent]

Was it early on?

[Leo Laporte]

So it's early on. Well, it was.

[Micah Sargent]

That was in November.

[Leo Laporte]

November.

[Micah Sargent]

August.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So no. November 8th. Yeah. Right after the election, I can go online and.

[Micah Sargent]

And use any of the AI platforms to make something that looks nice. Better than that.

[Leo Laporte]

I know it really is ugly, but it was painted by this robot with a BOB haircut.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Oh.

[Micah Sargent]

So it's actually shaped Silda Swinton in a costume.

[Benito Gonzalez]

So when we covered this article, I submitted that. ADA is the piece of art here are not those things.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think you're right, Bonito. That the robot is the art. That's not what sold. No, they only got the painting.

[Micah Sargent]

Ah, see, I think they should. They should.

[Father Robert Balliser]

So that answers the questions. What if someone paid $1.1 million for an NFT?

[Micah Sargent]

There you go.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Basically what that is.

[Leo Laporte]

A few people did.

[Benito Gonzalez]

You know, like the fine arts industry is very much just money laundering for most. For the most part.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, that's true. That's true.

[Leo Laporte]

And even if it's not, tastes are very much dictated by fashion and style.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's performative. It's like that the Banksy painting that auto destructed when it was bought.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It became worth more because it auto destructed.

[Leo Laporte]

So who was the artist? The guy who put the banana in the exhibit or the guy who ate it? I think the guy who ate it.

[Benito Gonzalez]

The guy who made the sale.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

Amen.

[Richard Campbell]

A con artist selling A banana.

[Leo Laporte]

You're watching our year end episode. Only a few more segments. We're wrapping up pretty quickly here with Richard Campbell from Windows Weekly, the digital Jesuit himself, Father Robert Ballis here. I liked this. Did you have anything to do with the Vatican? The digital. The VR Vatican or the VR St Peter's that is so cool.

[Father Robert Balliser]

We do not discuss projects like that because you don't want it to make into a fame thing, but probably so.

[Leo Laporte]

I, of course, last year visited for the first time Vatican City, and I was. The scale of St. Peter's is hard to imagine. Of course you should go. You know, you must go to see the Pieta, go underneath and see the bones of St. Peter and all of that. There's so much to see. But you can do this virtually at Vatican. Va.

[Richard Campbell]

I think bones aren't on display, right? Like that's.

[Leo Laporte]

No, but, but, but you can see it, I think. Are they on display if you go.

[Father Robert Balliser]

To the Skavi tour?

[Leo Laporte]

They are if you know the right guy. Is that it?

[Father Robert Balliser]

No, no, not even the right guy. If you go to the Scavi tour, they are.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, well, you have. There is a. It's in this as well.

[Benito Gonzalez]

You got to punch a hole at the bottom here.

[Leo Laporte]

So the. Yeah, so the. No, there you have. Is another room, but the. The. The altar is above where the. It's presumed the body of St. Peter was. Was buried. Yes. Is that right?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Correct.

[Leo Laporte]

So. Wow. Wow.

[Benito Gonzalez]

And so you can Daniel Jones your way down there.

[Leo Laporte]

No, you don't have to get. You can go there directly.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's called. It's. I'm telling you, it's called the Scavi tour. The Scavi tour goes all the way down to the necropolis.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to go down. How do I. Scavi tour. Is that what I need? I got to do the Scavi tour.

[Father Robert Balliser]

S, C A V I. They only take 120 people a day, spread over up to six different languages.

[Leo Laporte]

If I tell them, I know you will help.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. I'm going back. I loved Rome. I loved Rome. It was so amazing.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I told you. Leo, I have a place for you to stay. Come. You can broadcast from here remote right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, true. And Lisa and I had a little argument. You are in Vatican City, right? You're not in Rome.

[Father Robert Balliser]

No, no, no. So we are on the. We are on the vatic. We are in the Vatican. We are not in Vatican City. So Vatican City is a very specific, specific part of the Vatican. So when. When you come into our property, you are now in zone extraterritoriali. Are you leaving Italy but you're not in Vatican City until you pass the wall.

[Leo Laporte]

That's extremely confusing.

[Micah Sargent]

What is it? What are you in Could. Do you have a name like the Zona Extraterrestrial.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Extra. Total.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Wow.

[Father Robert Balliser]

This is Vatican property. So we. We are on Vatican land. Yeah, but it's not within Vatican.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not in the city.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Vatican City is very specific. Behind me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. This comes. I think this goes down to the various battles over the centuries between Holy Roman emperors and popes. Yeah. And no, this is yours. No, this is mine. This is yours.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And the weird thing is those pieces of land are not contiguous.

[Leo Laporte]

I know there's churches that were gifted. I know it's very wild. Yeah, very wild. Anyway, great to have you. Father Robert Micah Sargent is here. I don't know whose bones he's living above, but. But you know, someone's probably land seated by the shops.

[Micah Sargent]

I am in a basement, so there's probably some bones.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. But you know, you're decorating it beautifully. Bit by bit. It's gonna take a while. Is that a gas station behind you?

[Micah Sargent]

Gas station? No, that's a coffee cafe. Yeah, a little cafe.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, cute.

[Micah Sargent]

I would bring it over, but it's plugged in, so.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's fine.

[Micah Sargent]

It's got lighting.

[Leo Laporte]

Just have to watch Micah's crafting corner.

[Micah Sargent]

Exactly, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

See it evolve. Richard Campbell, Micah Sargent, Father Robert, thank you for being here. We appreciate it. You're watching this week in Tech. Our year end year in review episode. Netflix streamed a boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul.

[Richard Campbell]

That was what that was, huh?

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody was watching it and it glitched. And now they say they're going to do a Christmas Day NFL extravagance. Yeah, everybody's a little nervous with Beyonce is the halftime. I saw Beyonce do her last halftime show. Did you know that in New Orleans. Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They put. They put light up rings under the seat and they. And the instruction was when Beyonce. Because Destiny's Child came out and they said when she sings, put a ring on it. Everybody put the ring on your finger, turn it on and wave it.

[Micah Sargent]

So cool.

[Leo Laporte]

As you. As. As you know, if you put a ring under your seat that could switch on, people are not going to wait until the halftime show. And Destiny's Child is to put a ring on it anyway.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Well, because we're all cats and cats will do.

[Leo Laporte]

Right? Exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

And shiny.

[Leo Laporte]

You wanted to talk about. We were talking about the kind of disincentives, the, the perverse incentives of. Of Algorithms and streaming on YouTube. You wanted to talk a little bit and I. About something I did not. I don't know about, Robert.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Oh, the nuisance streamers.

[Leo Laporte]

Nuisance streamers. I didn't even know such a thing existed.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's, it's a category of Jake Paul say it started with, with, with Paul.

[Leo Laporte]

Because, because he had a house and he said a mattress on fire and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And he popularized it and then he made it, he made it profitable. Now you'll remember many years back when Logan Paul did that. The walk through the suicide woods in Japan and that's when people kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

So much trouble. Yeah, yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Wait, this is a little bit of cringe. Well, the new generation have really turned it up a notch. You've got people like Johnny Somali. Jack.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's funny, I searched for nuisance streamers and Johnny Somali's name is the first thing that came.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Came up because he single handedly is going to get put into law. Things that we've all wanted for a long time, which is you've got countries who are finally saying we have to criminalize this behavior.

[Leo Laporte]

So he's a troll. Basically.

[Father Robert Balliser]

He's a troll. He will like all the nuisance streamers. He goes out and he tries to make people react. Like Jack DY would get his bodyguard to stand behind him and he would go and push his elbow his way into a crowd and try to start a fight and then have his, his bodyguard beat the guy up.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh that's.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And that was content? That was content. And yeah, he got fined but he made way more.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's, that's the perverse incentive is that if you can get enough links, clicks and views, you make millions. And so it's worth. Profitable, outrageous profitable. Somali has been banned from twit. He's been banned from kick as of May of this year. Year. He's done it on TWiT, Twitch, Kick and Rumble. As a tourist. He's. He's said offensive things in the subway and so forth. Is that it?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Well, no. So he did it in Israel where he, he went there and he basically, he just finds the worst thing that you can possibly say in public to try to get people to react. So you can imagine what he did in Israel, in Japan he went into the subway and he started screaming, Hiroshima, not Nagasaki. We're going to do Nagasaki again to try to get a reaction. They, he was charged, but then they basically said the guy's an idiot. So they, they kicked him out of the country then because there Was no ramifications. Legal ramifications for him. He went to South Korea. So he's heating up.

[Leo Laporte]

All this is basically boring.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Too polite.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but not funny.

[Leo Laporte]

Didn't Sasha Baron Cohen invent this?

[Benito Gonzalez]

I would say Tom Green invented this.

[Leo Laporte]

Tom Green screen and the jackass people invented.

[Father Robert Balliser]

But I mean these people, they do it irl, they do it on a stream because they need to prove that this is not fake. Well in South Korea he met his match because he's now facing 10 years at min. 10 years is the current high watermark. But as they add charges it could go up to 60 years in prison in Korea because he made terroristic threats. He played the national anthem of North Korea on the subway which is illegal. You cannot do that. He interfered with business and the big one, the one that's probably going to get him in in prison for a decade is using broadcasting AI Deep fakes is illegal in South Korea and he did it to prove that he Another streamer, a popular South Korean streamer was his girlfriend. So he single handedly is getting several different lawmaking bodies around the world to look at how they can criminalize nuisances streaming. And if, if we end 2024 doing that, I will actually be very happy because that's a light of hope.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm also Koreans are playing this where they've trapped him in South Korea.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Like yeah, they, they won't let him leave so they've charged him and they've taken away his passport so he cannot leave South Korea. And if you know South Korea there is no way he can escape by land. So but they, they haven't arrested him and incarcerated him. So he is responsible for paying for his own own room and board, his own protection. And because he's. He came in on a tourist visit, he visa, he cannot work.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Doesn't deserve some punishment here too though. Like I feel like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, because that's who created this disincent this incentive. Here's a, here's something I don't want to encourage. A jury acquitted a man. This is from our discord of shooting a YouTube prankster. He said oh no. He, he, they deserve. He acted in self defense.

[Father Robert Balliser]

There was1 Just two days ago, Charles Smith who he has made a ton of money, $10,000 a shot by doing things like walking in the back door of a McDonald's and throwing a dead pigeon into the deep fryer. But two days ago he did a prank where he went around a grocery store and sprayed bug killer into produce and on sandwiches and on food. That's so now he's. Now he's arrested. He's been arrested.

[Leo Laporte]

Finally.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Now they're gonna look back at everything that he's done and they're realizing, oh, we need a law to be able to charge people for stuff for crimes that they documented.

[Micah Sargent]

Yep. That they themselves documented.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Wait, but back in the day, like, if you put this on TV, it would have been like the TV network that got sued. So, like, YouTube should be paying something.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree. YouTube deserves off YouTube.

[Richard Campbell]

Long ago, right? This was.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the thing. Twitch on, then rumble. They've all kicked him off. He's got.

[Richard Campbell]

So where's.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Where is he still doing stuff now?

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Father Robert Balliser]

No, he has to do. He has to do alternate accounts. But remember, he wasn't kicked off until South Korea arrested him. So all of those companies were perfectly fine with the views he would bring in.

[Benito Gonzalez]

There's the problem.

[Father Robert Balliser]

As long as there wasn't a legal ramification for them.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. They're just selling ads.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That was it.

[Leo Laporte]

Now here's a prank I can support report. Infowars got sold to the Onion.

[Richard Campbell]

It was a good day, wasn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

It was a good day. Unfortunately, the bankruptcy judge has rejected the sale and has sent it back to the bankruptcy advocate who will figure out if this is an appropriate sale because they took less money, less cash to sell it to.

[Richard Campbell]

The people who were taking less cash.

[Leo Laporte]

Wanted it were the victims, the Sandy Hook families. They said, it's good. We don't want Infowars back in Alex Jones hands. We'd much prefer it to be in a satire.

[Richard Campbell]

Their mission wasn't to make money. Their mission was to make sure this doesn't happen again.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And what the Onion play was doing was going to turn Infowars into a site to make this the farce that it actually is.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, the three biggest stories of the year. We haven't even touched them yet. We're going to take a break. When we come, come back the three biggest stories of the year and then get some sad music, Benito, because I have an immemorium segment. But not just people who passed, but websites that are no longer with us. Coming up, the year end edition of this week in tech. Can I ask a favor? We have a survey. We do this every year. We start a little earlier this year, but you have till, I think the middle of January. It's @Twit TV survey. It's our one and only way every year of finding out a little bit more about you. It helps us sell ads. We don't reveal any personal information. Obviously it's all in aggregate, but it shouldn't take you more than a couple of minutes and it really does help us out. So if you will Twit TV Survey oh oh, and one more thing. I've just learned from our engineer Patrick Delahan that we will be so I don't know if you remember, in 2014 and 2015 we did a New Year's 24 hour New Year's event. The second one ending the year 2014. Beginning of the year 2015 was a benefit for UNICEF. We raised quite a bit of money and it had some very fun things including me getting a tattoo and my head shaved. Patrick has decided to rebroadcast that in a way way he is going to post to our Blue sky account each hour the link because we've divided up and chunked it up into hour by Hour on YouTube. So if you are interested in celebrating New Year's with US or the US that was celebrating New Year's in 2014, 24 hours of new Year's Follow the Blue Sky Twit account attwit on bluesky.social. that'll be fun.

[F]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[F]

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[Leo Laporte]

After investing billions to light up our.

[Richard Campbell]

Network, 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 keepandsw up to 4 lines via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualifying unlock device, credit service ported 90 plus days with device ineligible carrier and timely redemption required. Card has no cash access and expires in six months. So I said the three biggest stories of the year. We didn't even touch them. Intel number one Pat Gelsinger departed just a couple of weeks ago. The CEO of Intel was brought in to save the company. His plan to save the company apparently wasn't fast. Fast enough or sufficient for the board. They've fired him now. What's next for intel, we spent a lot of time talking about this. This is one of Paul's rants on Windows Weekly. Richard, can you summarize? Is intel out of business? What's next?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, we've been going back and forth on this a fair bit, but you know, intel has been a vertically integrated company from the very beginning because largely they invented making CPUs. And so vertical integration serves, when you're innovating to both be the design and the fabric. But as the innovation is tapered off and it's become far more commodity, the goal is to be efficient. And intel has not been efficient. You know, one way, the bigger argument here is they never got into the extreme ultraviolet devices. Although there's a strong case for why they didn't, because they missed mobile. If you're only going to make a few hundred million chips a year, it didn't make sense to build these machines that you really need to make a billion chips a year with. Which makes sense if you're in the mobile space.

[Leo Laporte]

Did they? I mean, this was a technology that TSMC developed. A used.

[Richard Campbell]

TSMC did not develop it. It's Dutch.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's Dutch. Okay. So intel would have had access to this.

[Richard Campbell]

Absolutely. They could have bought them and in fact they were planning on buying them. But again, they didn't have the production numbers. It didn't make sense for what it was going to cost because they'd missed mobile.

[Leo Laporte]

But so strategically, these failures go back at least 10 years longer.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, easily. They missed a few opportunities there.

[Leo Laporte]

The Apple started looking at replacing integration intel with their own chips back in 2011. According to TSMC, Microsoft took a swing.

[Richard Campbell]

At ARM back in the win eight days for the same frustration that they couldn't make a viable tablet.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And then intel, you know, made the Atom to try and compensate, which had its limitations. So you've had. And instead of improving their processes and so forth, what do they do is they use their money to protect their market, which makes them, you know, play monopolistic games and bribery games instead. So you're at a point where, where with Galesinger's departure, when he was basically told you get a choice, you could be fired or you can retire. So he retired. You're seeing kind of an active board setup. I think we're going to get a PE firm in there and it's going to be sold for parts, which is not a bad outcome. It's still arguably intel chips will get better and cheaper because the separation of the design from the fab means you'll get better designs and better, more efficient fabrication. But it'll take a couple of years to figure that out. And the big challenge here is that they're deeply intertwined with federal government, with Department of Justice, Department of Defense. You know, all of those contracts and agreements that they have have to be protected. So it's going to take a very savvy PE group to negotiate, navigate through all of the federal requirements to protect things as the US government wants them protected while actually making a more efficient entity in the end.

[Leo Laporte]

Briefly, Qualcomm considered a bid for intel and they probably took a look at all of those things and said, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Never mind, I disagree, Leo. I think they made that bid just to let it be known there is a possible buyer there.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, right.

[Richard Campbell]

And then you always go, oh, to.

[Leo Laporte]

Kind of trigger to put it in play in effect.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Now what we saw over the course of this year was all of the was people interested in every part of intel, which is a great signal to a PE firm. We can take this part and sell it.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Does AMD survive without intellectual Intel?

[Richard Campbell]

Absolutely. Yeah. And arguably that's very well because they have always been been more efficient than Intel.

[Leo Laporte]

Just do they license x86 from Intel?

[Richard Campbell]

They were. Well, no, be clear. Intel was required to license x86 to AMD. You can't@ that time, and this was a friend. DOD insisted there had to be a second supplier.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And it had to be a different design.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, Right.

[Richard Campbell]

The same way that airliners fly with at least two completely disparate jipsets.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. On their computer or the pilot and co pilot have a different meal.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, all those sorts of games.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. It's redundancy that an airplane. The other of the three big stories that we hadn't touched early in the year Congress said TikTok, you either sell to an American company or you're out of business. Weirdly, they set the deadline for January 19, one day before the inauguration of a new presidential administration. TikTok fought it and fought it and fought it. And the latest is that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear their challenge oral arguments. January 10th, nine days before the mandated sale or closure of TikTok. There were lots of battles back and forth over this, lots of disagreement over whether TikTok is a threat to the America and its security or one of the best things that ever happened to creators. Well, you know, the end of this story will come probably next year. Kathy Gellis, who is, as you know, one of our great lawyers, she is admitted to the Supreme Court. So she can, she can actually write briefs and so forth. We'll be talking about this after the oral arguments on our show. What is that, the 50? Yep.

[Benito Gonzalez]

January 15th.

[Leo Laporte]

January 15th. So we'll get the inside story on what she thinks the SCOTUS will do to this. The final of the three big stories is a breaking story right now. What the hell's going on with the drones over New Jersey?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Sorry about that. Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

I had to ask the drone father because everybody said, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago on Twitt. You know, Emily Forlini really wanted us to shoot at them and we said no. She said, I didn't mean us. I mean the military. No one knows what they are. And everybody said we should ask the drone father. The drone father is in the house. Father Robert, what is it? What are they? Are they consumer drones? Are they military drones? Are they drones at all?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Last count, just from the purchased drones in the United States. There's, there's over. Is it 120 million in the United States. United States. That's just the ones that you can purchase commercially. That does not include the quad father.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry, Jammer B corrects me. You're not the drone father. You're the quad. Because they used to be called quadcopters. I don't know if anybody even knows that anymore. Wow.

[Micah Sargent]

Back in the day.

[Leo Laporte]

Back in the day.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Back in the day.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're saying there's so many drones, like I have one right here in a drawer. Yep, yep. We don't know where they're coming from, but that, but they look.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And we won't know because. And you can't really shoot these things down. The military is not going to waste a ten million dollar man missile to spread shrapnel all over New Jersey. That's, that's just not how these work. And also people who are saying, well, we have to be able to track them. We have to do a better job of, of holding DJI to account. You don't know who made these things. I can homebrew this, these things with what I've got in this office right now. So what exactly are you trying to regulate? What exactly are you trying to prevent? It's, it's annoying. Yes. And I'm sure someone is trolling very various population centers, but really, unless you want to declare war on an imaginary enemy, there's no way to solve this.

[Richard Campbell]

I think the military is doing the right thing, is they are bringing in proper drone tracking hardware.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

There's no chance that the car sized drone Is a real thing that would show up a conventional radar. So that's not intruder. But real drones don't show up on radar. They're too small. But the military, because they are taking drones very seriously, have built equipment to do that, so. So picatinny, which normally doesn't deal with drones, Is now getting the sensor equipment to figure out is there actually something going on there.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Precisely.

[Leo Laporte]

So. And all the. What's your advice to people who are terrified?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Go inside and don't look up.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't look up. I think there was a movie by that name actually last year.

[Micah Sargent]

Indeed.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Train your neighborhood crows.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, crows are smart. They could take those countermeasures.

[Father Robert Balliser]

The old countermeasures that I. I use when I was at twit. They don't work anymore. I had signal jamming guns that you could try to block out the. Both the. The. The flight control, I didn't even know. And the cameras.

[Leo Laporte]

You had like a skunk works in the basement, didn't you?

[Father Robert Balliser]

What do you think we did down there? Why was I there for so many hours? But those don't work anymore because a lot of these are now autonomous. You. You program in a. A flight plan and just follows, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Want you back, I want a basement, and I want to put you in it.

[Micah Sargent]

Could that keep it from returning home? No, I guess not. Because you just program in the flight path home too.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, you could do that if you wanted to jam gps. But if you jam gps, that's. That's a. I think that's a felony.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you can't do that. The. The milit. If the military was actually serious about wanting to take these drones down, they would use microwaves. Yeah, right. There you go. We cook the electronics on the spot. The thing would fall out of the sky, which is still a risk. But there's no fall somewhere.

[Leo Laporte]

They're not. They're not gonna. They thought it was. If they thought it was an issue. Remember the balloons? Was that this year?

[Father Robert Balliser]

The.

[Leo Laporte]

The weather balloon crisis, Chinese balloons. Was that this year? I left that out.

[Richard Campbell]

It was last year.

[Micah Sargent]

Okay, the end of last year when.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I heard the story about the drones, I thought of that. The scene from independence day. It was a fake newscast. And they were saying, los Angelenos are being told not to fire at the. The aliens. If this happened over Texas, there'd be a lot of rounds.

[Micah Sargent]

Yes. Yes, there would be.

[Leo Laporte]

Do not shoot the drones again, I say.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and those are old laws from the 20s when early aircraft were shot at by people who didn't understand what they were. And often aircraft have navigation or communications problems and they need to have safe passage to get somewhere to land. So it's just a really bad practice to shoot at things in the sky.

[Leo Laporte]

Because those bullets go somewhere, come down. They come down, come. What goes up must come down.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Now, high powered green lasers, those you can shoot at drones. But don't, please.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but don't. Because it's certainly not a drone and it's incredibly dangerous and illegal and it hurt and it'll hurt people.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It'll hurt a pilot. So don't do that.

[Richard Campbell]

So none of, none of these things are the right thing to do. It's almost certainly, almost no drones at all. Right. Like when you actually analyze the footage, it ends up being stars and aircraft and, and lights. It's other things. Good historical relation, which is not unusual when people are as stressed as they are.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's stress. That's what it is. It's stress.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Wouldn't it be amazing if it actually is aliens? And we're wearing the lead.

[Richard Campbell]

We were waiting to see if you guys would shoot us down and you didn't, so we left.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Exactly. We kept. We kept.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no intelligent life here.

[Richard Campbell]

We're going home.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that might be sadly true. They took a look at our streamers and said, yeah, no, we were good.

[Richard Campbell]

Right up until Logan Paul. Then we're like, we're out of here.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's take one last little timeout. One last pause and we will do the sad stuff. The end of the line segment. We are watching the end of the year this week in tech with Micah Sargent, father Robert Balasar and Richard Campbell. After investing billions to light up our new network, T Mobile is America's largest 5G network. Plus right now you can switch, keep your phone and we'll pay it off up to $800.

[Richard Campbell]

See how you can save on every.

[Leo Laporte]

Plan versus Verizon and AT&T. @T mobile.com keepandswitch up to four lines via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualifying unlock device credit service ported. 90 plus days with device ineligible carrier and timely redemption required. Card has no cash access and expires in six months.

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[Leo Laporte]

You know, let me start off with the websites that disappeared and apps that disappeared. Beeper didn't make it.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, Beeper, they tried.

[Leo Laporte]

They tried so hard. You had them on your show. No, Beeper did make it.

[Micah Sargent]

Beeper said, look, we're going to do our best. We're going to make this work.

[Leo Laporte]

Then the idea was Android users could message iPhone users. Of course now you don't have to because Apple made that possible.

[Micah Sargent]

S came along.

[Leo Laporte]

So never mind any that.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Beeper.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you Beeper. You made it happen. Another, another alternative passed away. Ello, which I joined way back in the day. Ello.co. the whole idea of Ello was a Facebook replacement. That was privacy forward. Nobody wanted it.

[Micah Sargent]

I had forgotten about it until I saw the logo and then I said, oh, I remember that.

[Leo Laporte]

Hello. Hello, Mike.

[Micah Sargent]

Hello.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Japan finally ended the mandatory form submission on floppy disks this year.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That hits me where I live.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's heartbreaking. Finally. No, there's. Although, you know, my ex said, I have a bunch of family over and I have a CD player player. Do you have a CD player anywhere? Because I can't play these CDs. And I thought I did, but I couldn't find it either. I can't find my floppy drives either. Japan is saying goodbye to the floppy drive.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Oh, but it was the 3.5. I mean, if it's not. Yeah, yeah, the five and a quarter were the real chance.

[Richard Campbell]

That's not a floppy disk. That's a save icon.

[Leo Laporte]

If you do need a floppy disk, the register.co.com says go to floppy disk.com where you can buy old floppies.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Micah Sargent]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Look at all these save icons. Who needs 50 of them?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, somebody, somebody somewhere needs a 100% guarantee printed.

[Richard Campbell]

Is that what this is?

[Micah Sargent]

You make art out of them?

[Leo Laporte]

I. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

They make good.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You know, Leo, those things are the reason why I had any sort of money when I was growing up.

[Richard Campbell]

Up.

[Leo Laporte]

That was my first floppies for a living.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Well, from dumpster diving near where I lived in the Bay Area was. Were several disc duplication businesses.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And I would go dumpster diving and I would find the rejects. And the rejects were the ones that couldn't be used in the mass duplication machines. But they were still fine if you. If you formatted them individually. So I would get them for free, format and then sell them.

[Leo Laporte]

It was so funny. Anybody want a floppy? You've got your floppy disc too. I got floppy. This. We got one and a quarter. We got five and a half. What do you need? I got it floppy this year. Do you remember ICQ? Micah, you might be too young to remember ICQ.

[Richard Campbell]

450985.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Do you remember your ICQ number? Look at that. I do not remember mine. I remember my CompuServe number, but I don't remember icing. ICQ was still around in 2024. Finally shutting down after 30 years. Was really one of the first popular messaging systems.

[Benito Gonzalez]

There was probably a group of users who have been using it since the.

[Leo Laporte]

Beginning where like that's the ones who were sad. Yeah. Yeah. The ICQ website said it's over. Go home.

[Micah Sargent]

Go home.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I mean I.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I miss the day of Inc. Instant messaging in clear text. Because that was. That was fun. If you were a network engineer, you could just see all these conversations going.

[Leo Laporte]

Past floating through the. Yeah. If you had a car thing. This was the year your car thing died.

[Micah Sargent]

This is the year your car thing died.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually there is apparently a brisk aftermarket now. People are trying to open source it. Figure out a way to keep it alive. This is the Spotify gadget that added Spotify. You. Your older car. It can't. They stopped making it 2022. They announced they're going to turn the servers off. They did just December 9th.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh boy.

[Micah Sargent]

I hope they open source it somehow.

[Leo Laporte]

That would be cool. People like Robert would find it, take it apart, turn it into a.

[Micah Sargent]

Put a floppy disk inside.

[Leo Laporte]

Put a floppy.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yes. But unless they're willing to release the code base for it, it's no longer fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

To. To have to backwards engineer everything. They did.

[Leo Laporte]

A number of websites went away. Game Informer was shut down after 33 years.

[Micah Sargent]

That is legitimately older than me.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Up, down, down. Left, right, left, right. ABBA start.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. That's all it took to get something to happen. What was it that you got when you did that?

[Father Robert Balliser]

That was the contra dependent on the game. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

That was a 39 but originally it.

[Leo Laporte]

Was just one game that it worked for. And then other people thought, oh, this would be funny if we put this in as an Easter egg. Right? Yeah. What was the original update?

[Benito Gonzalez]

These are actually for developers.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Developers. Down, down, left, right, left, right. A, B, a select, start.

[Leo Laporte]

That was developers to get into the back end so they could.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Well, that one.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That.

[Benito Gonzalez]

So that play testers could get all the way to the end of the game.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because were you a play tester? You feel like you were a play tester in your.

[Benito Gonzalez]

No, I wasn't a play tester, but I did make marketing stuff for 2K at one one point.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, all right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's in the game.

[Benito Gonzalez]

That's EA. Sorry.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Oh, sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

So confusing. NASA is shutting down NASA TV on cable?

[Micah Sargent]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

To focus on something called NASA plus. Because why not? Everybody's got A plus.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Everyone's got plus.

[Richard Campbell]

The Netflix.

[Leo Laporte]

I think people didn't actually watch it on cable probably.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I watched it.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you?

[Father Robert Balliser]

When I was in the States.

[Leo Laporte]

It was cool. It was free. It was high quality. Quality.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

But some of the stuff was just like. Can we get to the point? Yeah, Everything moves.

[Father Robert Balliser]

So I preferred it. Yeah, I preferred it when they just did the live streams of like the cameras on the iss. I didn't. The commentary stuff was that's.

[Leo Laporte]

I started to hate the SpaceX broadcast because they got these Gen Xers in and just show me the rocket. Just.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That's all I care about, really.

[Leo Laporte]

You're no Walter Cronkite. That's all I can say.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they usually have a tech feed which is just the actual.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what you want. The C span of space spaceships. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So I go to the tech feed.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it online?

[Richard Campbell]

Yep, it's on.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it was on YouTube. Now it's only on X. I don't know why. Oh wait, I do know why.

[Leo Laporte]

Efficiency.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay. You know what it is? I haven't had a crashing stream lately. So let's go to X.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's just see what happens. Maybe. Maybe Netflix should put the football games on X. X.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

Anand Tech said goodbye this year. This was a sad one. Anand left a long time ago to go work for Apple, I think, but. But the website was the place to go for tech information. When I want to know about the Snapdragon. That's where I went. The non Tech website. 27 years of hardcore tech information. Tom's hardware is. Is going to continue. They're all part of the future. You were part of future@IMW, right? You have Some memories.

[Father Robert Balliser]

We're coming. Oh, yeah. I remember vlogging.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I more also went away this year.

[Micah Sargent]

It did, yeah. Rest in peace. I'm more.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

For the same reason.

[Leo Laporte]

Same reason. Hololens discontinued this year after the army gave up on them. Who needed it. Is there going to be a HoloLens 3? Richard, I think he's died. Is he alive? Somebody pinch him.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Richard, EXE has stopped responding.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there going to be a hollow lens?

[Micah Sargent]

He's coming to, Richard.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Well, no, no, you have to do it right. Hey, Richard.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Will there be a hollow lens three.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, you crash it. No, that's good.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll give you his answer. No, no, no. And finally. Oh, we already did. GM calling quits on cruise. So $50 billion down the tubes. Who needs it now? This is the sad part. These are people who passed away in 2024. Some of the. Some of the greats. We're at that period now in technology where it's been around long enough that the early pioneers are, you know, passing away. David Kahn, who wrote the book on crypto. I loved his book, the Code Breakers. What I forgot was it came out in 1967, but it was the bible for crypto for many, many years. The story of cryptography. Great, great book. Highly recommend. The Code breakers still passed away in January at the age of 94. One thing you'll notice, most of these guys are pretty old. I guess there's a correlation. Are we still get. Are we. Are we ever getting Richard back? I sure hope so. Do you think we have? We. If we lost the West Coast. Oh, my God. Canada. We've lost Canada.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Link. If he used a starlink, Elon might have been pissed that we were bashing.

[Leo Laporte]

I actually have a starlink dish on the roof here because Comcast is less than perfect, shall we say? We lost Bob Hile this year, who was one of our great show hosts. I've been kind of waiting, you know, I'll probably be the first to go, but Bob passed away at the age of 83. Wonderful fellow. God, I love Bob. I miss Bob. Silent Key for one of the greats. He did Hamnation for us. Introduced me and many others to amateur radio. Made the microphones that we still use to this day.

[Father Robert Balliser]

We're all.

[Leo Laporte]

We're all using his microphone Sound. Yep, yep. He was a legend in rock and roll sound. Created the quadraphonic sound for the who. Created, and some may say this was a good thing, some say a bad thing. The mouse synthesizer for Peter Frampton.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I love that Thing I want.

[Leo Laporte]

No, he invented it. He tells the story. It's a wonderful story that Peter Frampton's wife came to him, said I need to give Peter something for Christmas. And Bob said well I've got. I can figure out. He attached a tube to his. To a microphone, to his mic, a guitar and then you put it in your mouth and the guitar sound would go into the tube and then come back into the microphone.

[Micah Sargent]

And have you seen the TikTok of the guy who does that for Akita's comedy with. With a mouth synthesizer.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh wow.

[Micah Sargent]

Whatever you call it Mouth Sense called the Talk Box.

[Leo Laporte]

Talk box, that's the name. That's right. Joe Walsh used it to great effect.

[Micah Sargent]

And apparently it's T Pain has also used it.

[Leo Laporte]

T. Pain, wow. I don't know if Bob rapper.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Did Bob get royalties from T. Pain?

[Leo Laporte]

Because he probably not should have.

[Benito Gonzalez]

No, that's auto tune. That's a different tool.

[Micah Sargent]

No, I've seen T Pain use one of those before.

[Leo Laporte]

Why?

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, he doesn't regularly do it but yeah, I've seen.

[Leo Laporte]

You know Bob was also a great theater organist. In fact that's of how he got his start in sound. He anyway wonderful fellow amateur radio operator from the age of 13k9 Eid silent key.

[Richard Campbell]

I had to go run and restart the router. You know network Internet connection.

[Leo Laporte]

Are they crank based these days or do you have a steam?

[Richard Campbell]

I had a pull cable. So okay, fix a couple of good chunks and tweak the choke and off it goes.

[Leo Laporte]

Boom. Science fiction author Vernor Vincent Angie passed away this year. What a great writer and a visionary who really for many he was kind of the science fiction writer's science fiction writer. Absolutely beloved Cory Doctorow had some great stories about him which he shared on twitt PhD in mathematics. So he knew what he was talking about.

[Richard Campbell]

He had a great view on what a post singularity society would look like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. In fact I think he was the guy who coined the phrase the term singularity. As I remember he was the one who said it first so. But don't blame him for that. Daniel Kahneman passed away psychology of economics professor who wrote one of the most important books in this field. Thinking fast and Slow Nobel prize winner passed away at the age of 90. He was a Nobel and economic economic science and his book Thinking fast and Slow is incredible. Highly recommended. Really important to understanding how our thought processes work. This name you may not recognize but you will recognize his product Mahpod Modadam who created genius later rap Genius passed away way too early. At the age of 41, he had a brain tumor. But rap genius was the place to go to find out what the hell those singers are singing. What are they saying? The man who named the Higgs boson. Well, I don't think he named it, but it was named after him. He proposed the Higgs boson. Peter Higgs passed away at the age of 94. Showed how particles bind the universe. Universe. The Higgs both boson was completely theoretical until it was discovered at CER at. Where was it? Cern.

[Richard Campbell]

A Large Hadron Collider was built to find the Higgs boson.

[Leo Laporte]

And they did.

[Richard Campbell]

They found it.

[Leo Laporte]

People said don't find it, it'll be the end of the world.

[Father Robert Balliser]

They thought it was going to create a, a micro black hole into which the entire planet would fall.

[Benito Gonzalez]

It did create our crisis though in.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Cosmology, which actually, you know what it might have.

[Leo Laporte]

And we're all, we just don't. We don't know we're in it know yet.

[Benito Gonzalez]

No, it's just. It answered it. It answered a question that we thought was right. It didn't give us any more questions to ask. Is the problem like it didn't give us.

[Father Robert Balliser]

No.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean it wasn't where we expected to be. It wasn't the energy level expected. And it did turn up a bunch of other weird things that have created a crisis in the standard model. The crisis, the CAS cosmo is really because of the James Webb Space Telescope.

[Leo Laporte]

Really?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What did the. What is. What is the web show?

[Benito Gonzalez]

It found stuff that we didn't think.

[Richard Campbell]

Was no galaxies way too. So there's basically two measure ways to measure the age of the universe. One uses near Cepheids, like near field stars. Another one uses very old things. And then two measurements, as they get more accurate, are getting further apart. And so James Webb was helping to, to pull that together and actually spread it even further apart. But it's teaching us that we need to know more that the, that the early stages of the universe are more different than we thought, which is a good thing. And so did the Large Hadron Collider. The Large Hadron Collider is pointed to possibilities in supersymmetry to quarks, like whole new areas of research. And we probably need a bigger collider. We need to go faster, higher energy.

[Leo Laporte]

Higgs won the Nobel in 2013 for his work showing how the boson helped bind the universe together. In the obituary published in the Guardian, they said he was an immensely shy man who disliked the Fuss Higgs had left home for a quiet lunch of soup and trout in Leith on the day of the announcement, to be stopped by a former neighbor who gave him the news on the way home. Oh, wow, you've won the Nobel.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Oh, Richard, you might know this. The. The superconducting super collider that we were building in the United States and we canceled.

[Richard Campbell]

That was for. It was.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It was going to be bigger than the lhc, Right. Originally, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Killed in the Carter era. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And they were. The issue here is that it's. They're still using niobium Tib superconduct, and they should be using ceramic superconductors, using Rebco superconductors.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Those are less likely to quench. Right?

[Richard Campbell]

It's less likely to quench. It's easy, cheaper to operate. It runs on liquid nitrogen, but you also get about five times the field strength from it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It says that those additional fractional speeds, that would make the difference.

[Leo Laporte]

So it was in 2016 that the alternative timeline began, Just in case you.

[Richard Campbell]

Want to go back.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And that's why we're in the worst timeline.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because they're in the best bad one. Clearly, in 2016, it all went downhill.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, the Large Hydra Collider was delayed for several years because rodents chewed through some lines and. And caused 4,000 tons of liquid helium to escape.

[Leo Laporte]

Yikes.

[Richard Campbell]

And it takes a while to.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Was it on at the time?

[Richard Campbell]

Was it running at the time they were in testing and they.

[Leo Laporte]

With the li. Helium, when it escapes, is Everybody in the neighborhood starts talking like this?

[Micah Sargent]

God, no.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I mean, if. If it was running at the time and all that. All that coolant escaped it, everything would.

[Richard Campbell]

It would burn up.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You know, it would burn entirely.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, the other way to think about the Large Hadron Collider and that whole facility is. It's the largest antimatter factory on the planet.

[Leo Laporte]

Not good. It seems. Not good. Seems like we should.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Not according to. Not according to Brown. According to Brown, it's. It's over here. It's about 30ft away.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, I see. That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that any matter, Brown.

[Richard Campbell]

Maybe a little country, but it's up to stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Opus D has a little thing in the basement down there. The man who invented DRAM passed away this year in 91. Unfortunately, I don't think he was widely known. Robert Denard. He was an IBM inventor. Without him, your modern computing would be a lot slower. Lot slower. Thanks, Robert. He is invention led to previously unimaginable improvements, improvements in data handling. Speed, power and the cost of computing. Gotta remember these people. They're very important. They're not all people. Some are dogs, like the sad Kabosu, the side eyeing Shiba Inu Live to eight.

[Father Robert Balliser]

My Doge.

[Leo Laporte]

He's your Doge, baby. He inspects a long life. The picture that started the doge meme.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, 18 years old.

[Leo Laporte]

Sheena Ibus are beautiful, aren't they?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Much old.

[Leo Laporte]

So much old.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

He'd been ill for several years. His owner, Atsuko Sato, said, in my head, I still wanted Kabusu to live, but I think I knew it in my soul. It's time to say, you know, goodbye.

[Father Robert Balliser]

18 years for a pure, purebred dog.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Washington Post gave it the obituary in Doge. Speak much sad soul. Very Doge. Gordon Bell passed away. We were talking about the idea. Recall remembering everything you've done. He was the guy who actually started this whole idea. He was the inventor at Digital Equipment who created the first mini computer. But he also, you see, he's wearing it around his neck. He had the idea of recording everything that happened to him so he could search it later. Data magazine called him the Frank Lloyd Wright of computers. A virtuoso of computer architecture awarded the National Medal of technology in 1991. I had met him, we interviewed him and his wife. In fact, I think there's a triangulation with Gordon Bell, if you're interested. His wife, Gwen Bell, had Alzheimer's. And so he became very interested in the idea of how you could remember everything that happened to you. And maybe computers could be a way of recovering that data and searching for that data. And so he kind of invented this whole idea that recall kind of has kept alive. Gordon Bell passed away this year. One of the great computer inventors also, Lynn Conway. And you know, Conway, because of his Game of Life, Right. He also authored a book that is a classic introductions to VLSI systems, a seminal book in the field of chip design. He was an IBM, you know, she was. Oh, wait a minute. I have the wrong Conway. I'm sorry. Lynn Conway. We should actually. This is important. She died at age of 86, famous for her book VLSI. I don't think she was the Game of Life Conway. That was a different one. No, I apologize, I confused.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I have that book on a shelf somewhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you really?

[Father Robert Balliser]

I have not read it yet.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Wow. Well, it's a classic.

[Micah Sargent]

This year, maybe this coming year, when you.

[Leo Laporte]

When you want to start designing, Vladimir, you might want to take a look. No, I think the reason That I wanted to mark this is because she was a very famous woman in the 70s who wrote a textbook that was considered the reference, the reference work, the book. Susan Wojcicki also passed away. Former CEO of YouTube. One of the early Googlers. She died at 56 of breast cancer. Very sad loss. Her garage, her mom's garage. Was it lung cancer? Yes, I think you're right. Her mom's garage was where Google was born. Yes, I'm sorry, I apologize. I got the cause of death wrong. She rented, she was working at intel, rented the garage of her Menlo park home to her friends Larry and Sergey for $1,700 a month. That's where PageRank was invented. That's where Google was launched. She was one of their earliest hires. Employee number 16, company's first marketing manager. Eventually promoted to run YouTube in 2014 and really turned YouTube into the giant that it is. She acknowledged in this way. Washington Post obituary, it says she acknowledged that content moderation remained one of the enduring challenges of YouTube and all social media operations. I know we can do better, she said, but we're going to get there. We'll get to a point where we've solved a lot of these issues. I own this problem and I'm going to fix it. She didn't get to before passing. You know, I kept trying to get this into the shows and I never did get to mention, mention it. I had also interviewed this fellow on triangulation, I believe. Ward Christensen, who invented the BBS, passed away at the age of 78.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I owe that kind of debt.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Did you ever run a bbs?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Oh, gosh, yes. I mean, it was on one phone line and I had maybe two dozen.

[Richard Campbell]

Users, but yeah, that's the way it was.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how it was.

[Richard Campbell]

X modem creator. I pirated a lot of software over X modem.

[Leo Laporte]

X modem, that's right.

[Richard Campbell]

That's the way to go back in the day.

[Leo Laporte]

I think as many of these early. Sorry.

[Benito Gonzalez]

It was the only way to go. Ezra.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, in 1977, he invented X modem before he invented the BBS. But I think you probably wouldn't have a BBS without X modem. I had a two line BBS. It was one line at first, but it became two lines. I had 56k modems and I'll never forget when Seagate came out with this, its RLL encoded hard drives, I was able to go From, I think five megabytes to 20 megabytes of storage. It was a big deal.

[Father Robert Balliser]

My BBS Became two lines at night when everyone else was asleep. So I snagged and it was that. I'm on the.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm on the Internet. Mom. I'm downloading something. Mom. Hey. Was it.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Was it Z modem? Was that the first protocol?

[Richard Campbell]

It was the later one, the more.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Official, that you could drop the call and pick it up later on.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Recoverable.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yep, yep.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Continue.

[Father Robert Balliser]

A download that was a game changer for me because I always seem to just lose it at the very last minute.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh. Ow.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. Isn't that awful? @xmodem. Oh, it's gone. And finally, the guy who wrote the computer language. Most of us started with Thomas E. Kurtz of Kurtz and Khmeni fame. They created Baseball BASIC back in the day.

[Richard Campbell]

Dharma.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Really? I think so many people started with basic and that was the intent of basic. It was. What did it stand for? The basic? Algorithmic. I can't remember. Was it designed for beginners? Right. When FORTRAN was the dominant language, it was an easy to use language. In fact, it was how Microsoft got started writing basic for the MITs Altair, which. Which is. I have a duplicate of right behind me. I don't think it runs Microsoft basic, though.

[Benito Gonzalez]

The first iteration of the Snake game and the first iteration of what eventually became Angry Birds were both on basic.

[Leo Laporte]

Really? Wow.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Gorillas.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It was called Gorillas.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it lives on. Right? Microsoft doesn't do GW BASIC anymore.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no. They've got.

[Leo Laporte]

But they got visual basic.

[Richard Campbell]

Visual basic dot net.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's a dot net, but you can still write in visual basics.

[Richard Campbell]

You can.

[Father Robert Balliser]

10 print. Hello, world. 20. Go to 10. Let's go.

[Richard Campbell]

No line numbers, but yeah. The old Visual Basics still had colon separators. One of the fun things we used to do as BASIC programmers is you try to make a game in one line of code.

[Leo Laporte]

One really long line of code.

[Richard Campbell]

I was writing for magazines at the time and they wanted an April Fool's Day gag. And so I made. Made a find your way out of the. Out of the cave game where you had to get. Based on how strong the wind was blowing, you're moving the right direction. But I wrote it in one line of VB code with pop up messages. Send it to the editor said, this is the only idea I got. I know it's not good, but thanks. He goes, you're not good ideas. Sucked up half an hour of my time.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard. I had no idea that yet that you have that checkered past.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I got to ask this of Richard, because I mean, I love the fact that you're into nuclear power. I got to pick your brain on that. I love the fact that you are. You are down with particle physics. Now I have to ask. Tab or space?

[Richard Campbell]

Tabs all the way, brother.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Okay, thank you. We can, we can be friends. Leo's a space guy, by the way, so.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, you know, everybody has to have a character flaw. There's no way around it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a character flaw. Tabs. Tabs. Thank you. A sync Beginners all purpose symbolic instruction codes.

[Richard Campbell]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

I should have remembered that.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You know, Leo, I love that you did this list because we throw around, you know, the word like genius too much describing captains of industry. These are the people who actually made the stuff that those captains of industry turned into bots.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Ran and, and brought to us. Like, without those captains, we probably wouldn't have known, you know, it was. It does take the, the marketers and the promoters to bring it to the world. World. But first, the inventors.

[Leo Laporte]

And I always prefer to celebrate the inventors on this.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, every time.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, those are the guys. And they don't get attention. They don't get. Their names are not well known. And I think it's important for us.

[Richard Campbell]

Making podcasts around Microsoft now for 20 something years. And a lot of the folks that make those things thank me for telling.

[Leo Laporte]

The stories of what they love it.

[Richard Campbell]

Because they're awfully busy making them.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard Campbell. Catch him on Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat every Wednesday on Twit and of course runasradio every week and.net [e-mail] in his Canadian tuxedo.

[Richard Campbell]

You like my tuxedo?

[Leo Laporte]

It's Canadian tuxedo. Richard, I thank you so much for being with us on this show. I really appreciate it. It's so much fun and, and I really appreciate your brains and your knowledge and your history. And we're going to have to talk more about writing basic programs for magazines next time on Windows Weekly. Thank you for being here, Richard. I appreciate it.

[Richard Campbell]

Thanks so much.

[Leo Laporte]

Micah Sargent hosts Tech News Weekly, iOS Today and Hands on technology on our network. He wears the best ugly Christmas sweaters. And it's always a pleasure, Micah. I miss having you around the studio. That is one thing I miss. I wish I could mandate a return to office, but I'm afraid that we've all gone to the seven winds. But it's really always a pleasure to have you around and work with you.

[Micah Sargent]

Always good to get to hang out.

[Leo Laporte]

I miss sitting next to you. So thank you for being on the show. I really appreciate it.

[Micah Sargent]

Absolutely. And a pleasure to see you both. Richard and Father Robert as well.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Great to see you.

[Richard Campbell]

Thanks, Micah.

[Leo Laporte]

Mr. Father Robert. Do you like Father Robert? Is that what you like to be called?

[Father Robert Balliser]

I go by Robert or Padre. A very few people call me Father unless I'm actually dressed in my.

[Leo Laporte]

I like Padre. I like PadresJ. But don't call him Bobby. I just.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That's.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's the one thing. Don't call him that. He. He has done so many interesting things in his role at the Vatican, including Jesuit pilgrimage app. Highly recommend. You can get it on iOS. Is it on Android too?

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's iOS and Android. Correct.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Jesuit programs.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Be OS as well.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's not on BOS. Give me a break. Break.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I should do. I should port it. I totally should.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, man.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I could.

[Leo Laporte]

You should make. You should bring BOS back. The greatest operating system that never was. There is somewhere a open source port of it. I can't remember the name of it, but I don't think anybody uses it.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Lives on.

[Leo Laporte]

It lives on. Thank you, Robert. Great. Great to see you. Have a very happy. I understand somebody you care about. A lot's birthdays coming up. I hope you have a lovely Christmas. I know you. How many masses do you do on Christmas Day here?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Only four. There's a lot of priests in Rome and bishops.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but there's also a lot of masses. That's right. Do you do it at the Vatican or do you go to a smaller church?

[Father Robert Balliser]

I'll go back here and it'll be.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you ever served mass in St. Peter's of course.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my gosh. Wow.

[Father Robert Balliser]

But it's not the masses that take time. It's. It's the reconciliation. It's the.

[Leo Laporte]

What's reconciliation?

[Father Robert Balliser]

What's confessions. Ah, yeah, that. That's multiple hours every day.

[Richard Campbell]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I have nothing to confess.

[Father Robert Balliser]

We have our. Our jubilee year starting.

[Leo Laporte]

They're gonna open the gate. They're gonna open the gate. Everybody.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You gotta come back. Leo, you gotta.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to go through that.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Practical.

[Leo Laporte]

Something good happens. All your sins are washed away when you go through that gate, right?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Well, yes, but see, they've clarified the rules. You can actually get two indulgences every time you visit. So you could sell one.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought they got rid of that. They got rid of that.

[Richard Campbell]

They got rid of selling that gate. Oh, wait, I've seen.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Oh, yeah. They got rid of the church selling the indulgences. But I'm not. I'm mean, if it's a third party market, individuals.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, that's okay. There. The jubilee gate is. Is closed. It's a gate into St. Peter's right?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Correct, correct.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's closed except for jubilee years. So it hasn't been opened in 50 years. How long?

[Father Robert Balliser]

No, no, no.

[Leo Laporte]

It's.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's been third, 14, 13.

[Leo Laporte]

13 years.

[Father Robert Balliser]

13 years.

[Leo Laporte]

But to declare a jubilee.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Correct, That's. That's within his power. But they've already set up the via conciliatory with these little corrals because they know they're going to have huge groups going through the door. And Italians are terrible at queuing. So this is the only way to keep people from just bum rushing the door.

[Leo Laporte]

What? When is Jubilee week? When is that coming?

[Father Robert Balliser]

It starts Christmas Eve. It's a year. It's an entire year.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a year.

[Father Robert Balliser]

But the entire country is in it. So, I mean, the experience of Italy is different during a jubilee year.

[Leo Laporte]

I bet.

[Richard Campbell]

All right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Brian Burnett's coming next year.

[Leo Laporte]

Is he?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Finally.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, nice. I saw Brian the other day. Thank you, Robert. Thank you, Micah. Thank you, Richard. Such a pleasure. Our last show of the year, but it's always nice to end with a bang. I appreciate it. We do Twit Sundays. Our next show will be January 5, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2200 UTC. You can watch us live on eight different streams on our Discord.

[Richard Campbell]

If.

[Leo Laporte]

If you are blessed as a club Twit member. You can Also watch on YouTube if you're in the unwashed masses category. Twitch, Kick X, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn. I think I got them all. But that's only if you want to watch live. Most people watch after the fact. There are plenty of ways to watch a show, of course. You can get it on our website, Twit TV. You can watch on our YouTube channel, dedicated YouTube.com and you can subscribe on your favorite podcast client and get it automatically the minute we're done. Thank you so much. Benito Gonzalez, our producer. Are you editing today's show, Benito as well?

[Benito Gonzalez]

I am not. That's Kevin's job.

[Leo Laporte]

Kevin King, our editor. Thanks to our creative director, Anthony Nielsen, who works behind the scenes so hard so often. Chris John Ashley, who produces and edits many of our shows. Thanks to our. We have a wonderful team. Burke McQuinn, who is the engineering. The entire engineering team these days. Thank you, Burke. It's a little hard to do a remote work when you're an engineer, but he manages somehow to do that. He's been Here.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Wait, wait a minute. If we don't have the studio anymore, where does Burke sleep?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. I think. Honestly, I think there's a hidden chamber in this house and he's a parasite living there because he just shows up every once in a while. No, we love Burke. Thanks to our incredible continuity department who make the ads that make the money on Twitter. Debbie Delkini. To Viva, to Sebastian, and of course to my wife and our CEO who runs the operation. Operation. And is keeping us afloat, Lisa Laporte. Did I miss anybody? Did I get everybody? Mic, did you say Patrick? Ty.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Ty.

[Micah Sargent]

Patrick and Randy.

[Leo Laporte]

I forgot Ty, our marketing director. I forgot Patrick, who is off site over in Boston. He was the first remote worker. He does all the engineering and is with us all the time. He's like constantly here. And of course, how could I forget? Who was he other one?

[Micah Sargent]

Russell.

[Leo Laporte]

He doesn't really work for us. He's our contract engineer, our msp. But Russell is absolutely the guy who knows how all this works and the only one, the last one, to know how all of this works. Thanks to all of you for making it possible.

[Micah Sargent]

And I give.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a lot of people behind the scenes and your contribution through Club Twit makes all the difference to us. We really appreciate it. So thanks to you, our club members. Thanks to all of you who've listened. I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season. Today's F. Is Today Festivus. It's soon.

[Richard Campbell]

Tomorrow.

[Leo Laporte]

Tomorrow. I gotta get that aluminum pole set up.

[Richard Campbell]

I have a. I have a group of friends who want to celebrate the.

[Leo Laporte]

Airing of the disc of the. What is it?

[Richard Campbell]

The airing of grievances.

[Leo Laporte]

Grievances, yes. And the wrestling. I believe there's wrestling.

[Benito Gonzalez]

The test of strength.

[Richard Campbell]

Test of feat for strength.

[Leo Laporte]

Feats of strength.

[Father Robert Balliser]

When is Robonica Robotica?

[Leo Laporte]

Who's that?

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, yeah. Futurama. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Robot. Is that the Robot Christmas?

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's Robot Hanukkah Christmas.

[Leo Laporte]

Romanica. I like that one. I like that one.

[Micah Sargent]

Celebrate the soul system as you wish.

[Leo Laporte]

Our listeners are who we really thank you.

[Micah Sargent]

Happy holidays to you.

[Leo Laporte]

Be stupid of us to sit here talking so much without anybody listening, but.

[Richard Campbell]

Would it stop us? I don't think never. No.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, you guys really appreciate it. Have a wonderful holiday. We'll see you in the new year. Another twit is in the can.

[Richard Campbell]

Bye. Bye.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

After investing billions to light up our.

[Richard Campbell]

Network, 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.

[Richard Campbell]

See how you can save on every.

[Leo Laporte]

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