This Week in Tech 1014: Just Say It's Capitalism

Summary

All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio) Episode: This Week in Tech 1014: Just Say It's Capitalism
Release Date: January 13, 2025
Host: Leo Laporte
Guests: Father Robert Ballecer (Digital Jesuit), Nicholas De Leon (Senior Electronics Reporter, Consumer Reports), Cory Doctorow (Author from Pluralistic.net)

---

1. Introduction and Panel Overview

Leo Laporte kicks off the episode by introducing a star-studded panel featuring Father Robert Ballecer, Nicholas De Leon from Consumer Reports, and author Cory Doctorow. The discussion centers around a CES post-mortem, significant data leaks from mobile apps, and the pressing need for comprehensive privacy laws.

“It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech...”
— Leo Laporte [00:00]

---

2. CES 2025 Post-Mortem

Father Robert Ballecer shares his observations from CES 2025, expressing disappointment over the repetitive focus on EVs and AI, likening the event to a yearly déjà vu with minimal groundbreaking innovations.

“Every year we can tease a couple of interesting things out of CES...”
— Father Robert Ballecer [05:22]

Nicholas De Leon discusses Sony's ambitious but overpriced electric vehicle, critiquing its practicality and market positioning.

“...90,000 feels a little expensive...”
— Nicholas De Leon [05:28]

Cory Doctorow criticizes the trend of subscription-based car features, emphasizing the lack of consumer ownership and the potential for market manipulation.

“Remember, the only reason there's such a thing as a subscription car is that the Digital Millennium Copyright act makes it illegal to reverse engineer it...”
— Cory Doctorow [06:52]

---

3. Data Privacy and Mobile App Vulnerabilities

A significant portion of the discussion highlights the alarming revelation that most mobile apps are leaking user location data to data brokers. Cory Doctorow stresses the urgency for robust privacy legislation to combat these pervasive leaks.

“It's all coming up next on Twit podcasts you love from people you Trust.”
— Leo Laporte [00:00]

“It's pretty much all of the apps you use on your phone are leaking your location to data brokers...”
— Cory Doctorow [06:52]

---

4. Real-World Impacts and Personal Anecdotes

Father Robert Ballecer transitions to discussing real-world crises, notably the severe wildfires affecting communities, drawing parallels between technological vulnerabilities and environmental disasters.

“So, I mean, it's not small. It’s just horrific...”
— Father Robert Ballecer [13:36]

The panel expresses solidarity with affected listeners and shares personal stories, highlighting the intersection of technology, community resilience, and environmental challenges.

---

5. Innovations and Product Critiques at CES

The panel critiques various CES innovations, labeling many as "Worst in Show" due to their lack of practicality and intrusive data practices.

Cory Doctorow introduces his new book, Picks and Shovels, and discusses the "Worst in Show" awards, emphasizing Consumer Reports' role in highlighting tech failures.

“I had to buy it this year because I had a busy schedule...”
— Cory Doctorow [16:03]

Father Robert Ballecer criticizes Sony's AI refrigerator and other overhyped gadgets, advocating for products that offer genuine utility over flashy features.

“The Samsung booth this year was probably the best microcosm of what's wrong with CES...”
— Father Robert Ballecer [18:16]

---

6. Assistive Technologies and Ethical Considerations

Father Robert Ballecer highlights advancements in assistive technologies, such as exoskeletons that restore mobility to paraplegic individuals, while Cory Doctorow shares concerning stories about the lack of support for critical medical devices.

“There's a company from Canada called Humans in Motion... it will stabilize you and prevent you from falling...”
— Father Robert Ballecer [27:59]

“There was a jockey who relied on an exoskeleton... a tiny piece of bent metal caused it to fail...”
— Cory Doctorow [28:08]

---

7. Content Moderation and the Future of Social Media

The conversation shifts to Meta's (formerly Facebook) approach to content moderation, with Cory Doctorow and Leo Laporte debating the effectiveness and ethical implications of moving to community-driven moderation systems like Community Notes.

“Meta was going to stop doing fact checking and stop moderating...”
— Leo Laporte [70:08]

“It's okay to foment genocide against the Rohingya now or whatever...”
— Cory Doctorow [82:35]

They discuss the challenges of balancing free speech with preventing harmful content, critiquing Meta's strategies and the broader social media landscape's impact on information dissemination.

---

8. Legislative and Regulatory Insights

Cory Doctorow delves into the complexities of current privacy laws, the inadequacies of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), and the necessity for comprehensive federal privacy legislation to protect users from data exploitation.

“We need a federal privacy law with a private right of action and no preemptions...”
— Cory Doctorow [162:54]

Father Robert Ballecer echoes these sentiments, highlighting the role of organizations like AARP in advocating for stronger privacy protections.

---

9. Cybersecurity and Virtual Privacy

The panel underscores the critical need for robust cybersecurity measures, referencing recent data breaches and the vulnerabilities of everyday applications. Leo Laporte and Cory Doctorow advocate for tools like ExpressVPN to safeguard personal data against pervasive surveillance and hacking threats.

“Every time you connect to an unencrypted network, and that's everywhere...”
— Leo Laporte [155:12]

“A privacy law is the answer to that...”
— Cory Doctorow [162:54]

---

10. Concluding Remarks and Future Directions

As the episode wraps up, Leo Laporte promotes upcoming events, including Cory Doctorow's book launch and Nicholas De Leon's work at Consumer Reports. The panel reaffirms their commitment to technological transparency, user privacy, and ethical innovation.

“Martinhench.com...”
— Cory Doctorow [48:07]

“And the digital Jesuit, Father Robert Balassair...”
— Leo Laporte [72:29]

---

Key Takeaways:

1. Repetitive CES Trends: The Consumer Electronics Show has become stagnant, with minimal innovation and excessive focus on EVs and AI.
2. Privacy Concerns: A majority of mobile apps leak location data to brokers, underscoring the need for stringent privacy laws.
3. Ethical Technology: Assistive technologies show promise, but lack of support and ethical considerations pose significant challenges.
4. Content Moderation Challenges: Meta's shift to community-driven moderation raises questions about effectiveness and ethical implications.
5. Legislative Gaps: Existing laws like the CFAA are inadequate for modern privacy and cybersecurity needs, highlighting the urgency for comprehensive federal legislation.
6. Cybersecurity Tools: Utilizing tools like ExpressVPN is essential for protecting personal data in an increasingly vulnerable digital landscape.

---

Notable Quotes:

“It's all coming up next on Twit podcasts you love from people you Trust.”
— Leo Laporte [00:00]

“It's pretty much all of the apps you use on your phone are leaking your location to data brokers.”
— Cory Doctorow [06:52]

“Meta was going to stop doing fact checking and stop moderating...”
— Leo Laporte [70:08]

“We need a federal privacy law with a private right of action and no preemptions...”
— Cory Doctorow [162:54]

---

Conclusion

This Week in Tech 1014: Just Say It's Capitalism offers a critical examination of current technological trends, privacy vulnerabilities, and the ethical dilemmas facing both consumers and creators. Through insightful discussions, the panel underscores the imperative for meaningful legislative action, responsible innovation, and vigilant cybersecurity practices to navigate the complexities of the modern digital era.

---

Note: Advertisements, introductions, outros, and non-content sections have been omitted to focus solely on substantive discussions.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. Oh, oh. Make some time for this episode. We've got one of our best panels. Father Robert Balaser is here, the Digital Jesuit from Consumer Reports, Nicholas De Leon and Corey Doctorow with his brand new book. We have lots to talk about, of course, a CES post mortem. Maybe mortem is the right term too. We'll talk about the big hack. Turns out pretty much all of the apps you use on your phone are leaking your location to data brokers. And Cory Doctorow explains why we need a privacy law bad. It's all coming up next on Twit podcasts you love from people you Trust.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

This is TWiT.

[Leo Laporte]

This is TWiT this Week in Tech. Episode 1014, recorded Sunday, January 12, 2025. Just say it's capitalism. It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. And there has been a little bit of tech news. Father Robert Balasser is back from ces. He is, of course, our very own Digital Jesuit. Actually, you're not back. You're still in the Vatican, as you.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Said, for another month. I'm on parent duty.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, good for you. Well, love to your folks and I hope they do okay. We just put one of ours in hospice. I know how it is.

[Cory Doctorow]

Sorry, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Anyway, it's great to see you. We will get your CBS report. You're still editing the. The clips which we will put up when they. Many clips.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Many. And actually some interesting stuff. You know, I have to get buy this basic negativity. I have because I've seen it before because for some people, this is amazing technology that made its way over to Vegas.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, well, I'm going to be the guy you have to talk out of skepticism. Also, Nicholas De Leon is here from Consumer Reports. He's their senior electronics reporter. Did they send you to Las Vegas?

[Nicholas De Leon]

No, I basically asked not to go this year. I went last year. I try to go like every other year.

[Leo Laporte]

That's good.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Kind of the cadence. We sent a bunch of folks, but I stayed home here in Arizona.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah. And I see that Stacy Higginbotham printed out a CR for you as well. That's nice. Do they send those out when you. When you start working for some reports? They give you a little.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Then they sent that one to me, I think during the pandemic at some point for like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because they need things like this.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Like little media appearances and stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Hey, look who else is here. It's really great to see. Cory Doctorow from pluralistic.net thebezel.org Although there's a new book and we will. Well, let's plug it. You got it right there. I don't have it yet. Picks and shovels. It's a Marty hench mystery from the.

[Cory Doctorow]

80S, the early 80s, the era of the weird PC. And I'll point out that I also have an EFF back there.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you do? So, okay.

[Cory Doctorow]

It's lost in the noise.

[Leo Laporte]

I have the traditional podcaster color bars because my Pixu has died. So it's supposed to be a clock for people who miss the clock. It's 2:24. You could just do your timing from there.

[Cory Doctorow]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

So where should we start? We can either do Facebook or ces, which would make you happier. Let's start with CES and we'll do Facebook a little later.

[Cory Doctorow]

I'm not.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to say, I'm like, I'm with Nicholas going every year. Seems a lot to me. I haven't been since COVID And it seems like there's a. You know, there's always going to be new TVs, there's going to be a lot of concept stuff, but is there something. And then today, this year, of course, it was AI everywhere. Right.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

What'd you see?

[Leo Laporte]

That was good. That was important.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Yeah. That's about it. Yeah. So, I mean, look, look, every year we can tease a couple of interesting things out of ces, but I was just. I was speaking to Bonito before we started the show, and we could have replayed the package I created for last year, and it would be exactly the same as the package I create for this year because it's EVS and it's AI. Yeah, Some new screens and then the rest of it. And the rest of it wasn't really great. In fact, some of the biggest motion that I saw at CES came before the actual show started. It was during the press days. Sony announced some new partnerships. They announced that their. Their new vehicle, their collaboration, which is, by the way, 90 spoilers and dollar car is crap. It's. It's. Sony is doing a grand experiment to see who will pay $90,000 for a $40,000 EV with a PlayStation. That's probably the best way.

[Leo Laporte]

Nicholas has a stuffed PS3 controller on his sofa.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Well, PS5, but yes.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, so maybe, maybe you're the one.

[Nicholas De Leon]

90,000 feels a little expensive. I remember. I'm pretty sure I saw the Sony concept car at CES last year as well. Maybe it was a different model or whatever. But I don't altogether hate the idea of a Sony EV. That's kind of interesting, but not for $90,000.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

$90,000 starting if you wanted in any usable trim, you're looking at 110, $120,000. And for that $90,000, you get terrible range. You get a terrible power system. It does not charge as quickly as like a Tesla or even a Nissan Leaf. You get styling that. I think they want it to be futuristic. It's got a dash wide screen where you can put up the different apps that you want to run. But other than that, it's. It's not a great car. I mean, it's an okay car. It's a decent EV, but again, it's like a $40,000 EV, but they think you're going to pay more because it's Sony. Honda, not so much.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah, maybe in like 1990 when Sony was still like, yeah, you know, the.

[Leo Laporte]

Brand it used to be.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Oh, by the way, Leo, you're going to love this because their big announcement was all of these features like driver assist and self parking. It's absolutely free for three years.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, first three years. Yeah, that's the new this. I think it's inevitable we're going to see subscription cars. I mean, everybody wants.

[Cory Doctorow]

Remember, the only reason there's such a thing as a subscription car is that the Digital Millennium Copyright act makes it illegal to reverse engineer it and just make a mod that lets you turn that subscription into something you own. If we had functional markets for this stuff, the way these guys who claim to be capitalists say that they want, then, you know, the fact that you could buy a twelve hundred dollars a year subscription to your accelerator pedal would prompt someone to make a $200 mod that just gives you your accelerator pedal.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Reverse engineer it. But you can't, because that would be wrong.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

And actually, on the EV panel that they had on Monday, one of the speakers, she did this thing about. Because it was a question and answer and someone in the audience said, what do you think about the trend towards subscription everything? It seems as if EV manufacturers are adopting what the software industry has done. Everything is now as a service. And there were so many ways she could have answered the question. The way she answered it was, I think consumers are getting used to it and they actually like it. I'm like, whoa, that's like the one wrong answer. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they actually like it. We like spending money. Why not more money for simple basic services like car seat heaters that BMW tried But failed.

[Cory Doctorow]

Actually, your boss is right.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

That's.

[Cory Doctorow]

That's the official. The official. That official mode of disc.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

That's right.

[Cory Doctorow]

Your boss is right. You do like this.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

And actually, the other EV trend is if you went to the west hall, which is where Most of the EVs were located, it was China, China and Korea.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the next question I was going to ask, because it used to be the fun thing at CES was to go to the hall where all the international, especially Chinese crazy stuff was. But now, given that we're going to probably see 60% tariffs with China in the next couple of months and that, you know, China may not be the easiest country to buy something from in the next couple of months. You still saw a lot of Chinese presence there, huh?

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Oh, yeah. Because remember, it's an international show.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, that's true. It's only the US that won't be able to get it there.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Exactly. And when you looked at the Chinese offerings. Yes, okay. We could make lots of fun about how Chinese vehicles have developed over the years, and there's some safety concerns that have to be addressed. But the vehicles that they brought looked good. They looked really, really good. And they had models like an EV minivan with chairs that swivel around that started at $30,000. So it's sort of. It's sort of like, okay, well, you can get a luxury EV from Honda or from Sony or from Tesla, or you could buy an EV for everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

Why are Chinese cars less expensive? Are they subsidized by the government or are they legitimately less expensive? I know the market wants them to be less expensive, right? I mean, you can't.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I mean, it's some. At least three of the companies were either state or heavily backed by the state. So there's a lot of subsidy there. They're also in there in deployment method. They're all in startup method. So they're trying to get a customer base starting in China. So they're trying to force out Tesla. They want Tesla to no longer be the status symbol for EV luxury. And they might actually have it.

[Leo Laporte]

But also, ironically, with Elon Musk in the government, it looks like Tesla might lose its government subsidies along with all the other EV manufacturers, which is pretty hysterical. Really weird. But he also, I think, is lobbying hard and Trump has said this to ban Chinese vehicles in the United States.

[Cory Doctorow]

I'd heard that Chinese vehicles are also shorter range and that's. They enjoy lots and lots of advantages because a shorter range, smaller battery, it doesn't weigh as much Lots of other things in the material bill become cheaper. And given that, you know, the very large majority of the, of the trips that most people take are quite short range. You know, this is, we have, we have a car with a 200 mile EV range which turns out not to be as useful as we thought it would be. Like it's not enough to get us to San Diego and it's way more than we need to get to like Anaheim. So we end up renting a car when we go, you know, if we go skiing or something, we'll rent a car. We don't, we don't try and get anywhere in our 200 mile EV and we paid a substantial premium versus say 150 mile evidence to, to get that, to get that 200 miles. And you know, honestly if I had it to do over again, I would get a 50 mile EV.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the number one complaint I hear from Americans about EVs is the range. And yeah, we have a 90 mile an hour Mini Cooper, 90 miles range. Mini Cooper. That's fine for getting around.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. Where are they going? I mean sure some people have very long commutes and that is a legitimate thing but statistically they don't have long commutes. Statistically their commute is not longer than the range of a bottom of the barrel ev and the savings are gigantic to drive one of those.

[Leo Laporte]

Well then I got something to ask you before we go on. You're okay, right? You're in the LA area. I know. Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

We are not in the bit that's on fire that we. The Hollywood Hills fire was close, but it's out. And you know, there's more winds coming and a lot of the stuff that's on fire that's upwind of us is super toxic. Not just the houses, but there's like a lot of industrial sites that have burned. And so we're masking up out of doors, we're running our HEPA filters, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Been there, we did that in the fires up here. Yeah. How you feel? It's awful.

[Cory Doctorow]

My kids school was shut last week and my wife's office and I swim in the pool across the street for pain control and that was shut all week. But they all say that they're reopening tomorrow. But the winds are going to kick up again tomorrow and last till Wednesday so it could get bad.

[Leo Laporte]

Again, our deepest condolences. I should have started the show with this and I completely, I mean thankfully.

[Cory Doctorow]

We don't need any condolences but there are lots of people who do?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Kevin Rose is one. Kevin. Kevin is fine. And Daria is fine. Their kids and toasted. The dog is fine. But they were burned out of their home in Pacific Palisades, which might build.

[Cory Doctorow]

My wife took a load of non perishables and PPE and medical supplies and water to the Rose bowl yesterday. And I guess if anyone is within sound of this voice and you've got things to donate. They've got all the clothes they need, but everything else they're short on and they're collecting it at the Rose Bowl.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Yeah. The two big Jesuit schools, Loyola and Loyola Marymount, have opened up their doors and they're taking in people who just need a place to stay. They're making sure they're clothed and fed. So it's bad. I think we lost one of our communities and then my family. We lost. Two of our family members, lost their houses. So it's. It's big. I mean, the area that's already been burned is bigger than the entire city of San Francisco.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

So, I mean, it's not small.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Just horrific. So, you know, all we can say, once again, you know, hang in there. And we have a phrase here. Sonoma strong after several years of fires, and we're going to have another very, very dry January and February, which puts us also at risk. And it's. It's really a scary thing because you're not safe. So we're just thinking of you and Kevin.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

It is weird that January is now fire season.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That doesn't seem right, does it?

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Right. I mean, that's not normal. That's not okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think we probably have, and I don't know, but I imagine we have a few listeners who are also displaced.

[Cory Doctorow]

I'd be surprised if there weren't.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

I mean, the evacuation zones were quite large, the plate, much larger, obviously, than the zones that burned. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you know, I've been using watch duty ever since our fires up here. And I know that a lot of people in the Southland also recognize the value of watch duty. And they're. I think they are a non profit as well. Scooter X says you can support them with donations as well. So this is a very useful tool for keeping an eye on. It's actually what the firefighters use to keep an eye on what's going on. And it is a nonprofit, so donate if you can. There's. Everybody needs it. Over a million people downloaded watch duty in the last couple of days. I would imagine most of them in the Los Angeles basin. Ah, all right. Back to the toy store.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Way to bring the show down, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry. All this real stuff, I apologize for not, you know, let's talk about carbon.

[Cory Doctorow]

Intensive semi disposable electronics. I agree.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. If you bought it, you can toss it. And that's the mo. That's the real thing to remember. You never have to keep those. America.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, beautiful.

[Leo Laporte]

You sent me, Corey, a great link. The Worst in Show awards. Worst in show. CES.com. this looks like an EFF joint but.

[Cory Doctorow]

It'S, you know, it's. The leaders of it are the repair Coalition and iFixit, but Consumer Reports and Perv.

[Leo Laporte]

I see Stacy, Stacy Higginbotham on environmental impact. Kyle Wiens.

[Cory Doctorow]

I'm usually a judge for this and I had to buy it this year because I had a busy schedule. I haven't even had a chance to watch the videos yet. But you know, having judged it, it's pretty rigorous criteria. You can see I actually have a worst in show award up there on my shelf. We don't actually send them to the companies. We asked them if they don't want them or none of them have taken.

[Leo Laporte]

I also see you have a mug that I think maybe Posey made saying best of. So that's good. You got both.

[Cory Doctorow]

Best dad.

[Leo Laporte]

Best dad. Oh good. You are. You're the best dad. Absolutely. So what did they yet name the worst in show?

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh yeah, they have, but I haven't seen it. It's in the videos.

[Leo Laporte]

You got to watch a video. Yeah, they. My favorite category is who asked for this?

[Cory Doctorow]

That's half of ces.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Who did ask for this?

[Cory Doctorow]

Last year I did this for BMW when they put heads up displays with like ads on your windscreen.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's Stacy participating in that. These are the judges. Yeah, it's. I mean especially at. In, you know, I mean this does tie into the fires, especially in an era where the climate is. Is going downhill thanks to consumption of oil products. And, and of course there's going to be people listening to this show are going to just turned it off. Turn it off. Because they say how dare you. I think it's the, the. It's a pretty uncle that it's happening. It's not Jewish space lasers. It's not Governor Newscomb. It's called climate change.

[Cory Doctorow]

Now as a Jew, I have to say it might be Jewish space lasers.

[Leo Laporte]

You'd like to take credit but no, you don't get to Corey. You don't get to.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I mean everyone talks about the Jewish space lasers. No One talks about the Jesuit space lasers. I mean, ours are way more powerful, much more sophisticated.

[Leo Laporte]

You're gonna. Yes. Drink, Nicholas? I agree.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Corey, comment on this stuff, that worst of list. It would not be a complete list unless it includes that it was at the Samsung booth. Their AI refrigerator.

[Cory Doctorow]

I've not looked through the video yet. I don't know who won this year.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I mean, if there was ever a product that didn't need AI, that's it. The way that they were trying to sell it is, oh, the AI has cameras so it can see what's fresh and what's not. I'm like, what?

[Leo Laporte]

They've been talking about a refrigerator that would open your order your groceries for years.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Yeah, I know.

[Leo Laporte]

They never work. And Samsung, by the way, is famous for selling a refrigerator with an Internet browser in the door that doesn't work anymore because they don't keep it up to date.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

The Samsung booth this year was probably the best microcosm of what's wrong with ces. It was huge. It was glitzy, it was bright. There was a lot of blinky things, and there was nothing of substance in there. Half the booth was just hype, not actual product. But, oh, wouldn't it be nice if we did this and this and this? And that's like the worst of ces. It's like, look, actually show me something rather than trying to get me excited about something that might or might not happen in five years.

[Leo Laporte]

Cindy Cohn, who is of course EFF director, nominated a in order to suck in bathtub and their money. That's why when I polled my co workers at EFF about the worst in show for CES for 2025, they suggested the increasing trend of smart infant products, which.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Oh, God, those were everywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Parents.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Those were everywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

If you read the comments, often end up traumatizing those new parents. Yes. Because you think you're put your baby in the robot. The robot. And the worst thing is not only is the robot not really doing a good job of caring for your baby, it's collecting all the information it possibly can.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

They had. They had a baby monitor. They said the selling point was, oh, and it stores all your audio and video safely in the cloud. I'm like, no, no, no, don't do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Safely.

[Cory Doctorow]

Kidding me.

[Leo Laporte]

In the cloud. In safe. It's safely in the cloud.

[Cory Doctorow]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

What are you. What are you talking about?

[Cory Doctorow]

We are safely in this package we've made out of Saran Wrap.

[Leo Laporte]

Nathan Proctor, who is with the Public Interest Resource Group, nominated the product. No. Who asked Wondered why your washing machine.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Couldn'T make phone calls?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Cory Doctorow]

Now bespoke AI Appl. You won't have to worry about keeping your pocket sized phone on you.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I missed this one.

[Cory Doctorow]

Your fridge or oven can handle those.

[Leo Laporte]

This sounds like the Samsung. According to their press release, it's a.

[Cory Doctorow]

Bold step forward in realizing it's screens everywhere vision. Now considering Samsung's well litigated path.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the one you were talking about, Corey.

[Cory Doctorow]

This might be a appealing vision to their who asked?

[Leo Laporte]

That's the winner. And who asked for this? I won't keep playing it because I don't want to take away views from them. Go to worst in show ces.com, cindy Cohn, executive director of EFF on privacy. Paul Roberts, who is a founder of Secular Repairs on security. Stacey Higginbotham from Consumer Reports on environmental impact. Kyle Weems of Ifixit on repairability. Nathan Proctor from Perg with my favorite category. Who asked for this? And I will leave a cliffhanger. Overall Worst in Show from the executive director of repair.org, gay Gordon Byrne. I can only imagine if the Samsung is not the worst in the show, if the bassinet that spies in your baby's not the worst in the show, what could it be?

[Cory Doctorow]

This is the show that has seen the debut of laparoscopic sex toys. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, what do you mean? No incisions. What are you talking about?

[Cory Doctorow]

No, a dildo with a camera on the end of it.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Oh, they used to call that Teledildonics.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

No, no, no, no, no. That's remote operating.

[Nicholas De Leon]

This is a.

[Cory Doctorow]

This is a leaky WI fi enabled camera.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, no, no, no.

[Cory Doctorow]

Your most intimate moments.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no.

[Cory Doctorow]

Default password is password. Password.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

At least Change it to password. 1, 2, 3, 4. No one guesses.

[Leo Laporte]

Come on, there must have been something you saw that is world changing, Father Robert.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Now, I mean, okay, there's a. There was a few things that I thought were interesting that's.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, in years past when we had a studio, you would bring a trunk full of garbage to put on the table to show off. What would you have brought this time? Since you.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I still have the trunk full of garbage. It's just none of it I really want to show.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

There's a few that are interesting. There's a couple of constant glucose monitors, the CGMs.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'm excited about that. Although I'm still waiting for non invasive. Right. I have type 2 diabetes and I would certainly love to have something like that in the watch.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

They have that and that will actually be in the packages I'm putting together. There's a company that is in the last stage of FDA approval. And so they said within a quarter. And it's a scanner that uses near ir. It's non invasive, no prick, no nothing. It's basically just put your hand under there. And it worked because I had a scan with that and then I did one of the. The pin pricks and the numbers matched up. So that's. That's decent.

[Leo Laporte]

That's ex. That's pretty exciting. That's world changing.

[Cory Doctorow]

In fact. Interface with a. An insulin pump, though.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

No. So this one was.

[Leo Laporte]

They probably could because there are approval on that. I imagine you can get de novo approval for something that does you. You know, that's how the Apple watch stuff works because.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't want somebody to rely on this. That could be problematic. Especially if it's got an insulin pump attached to it. Imagine the security concerns.

[Cory Doctorow]

No, it's not to. It's not to make an insulin pump. It's interface one to the other to do a closed loop. Right. There's a lot of T1 parents of T1 diabetics are really interested in this because it's very hard to monitor a toddler's glucose. Well. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I have a good friend. I have a good friend with T1 diabetes and her daughter rather has T1 and. Exactly. Right. It's very difficult. And plus they. They've run out of places to put the monitor because, you know, you try to move them around and you know, they. Yeah, it would be nice to have a non invasive system of some kind. Would be fantastic. One that I also a big money because there are millions of type 2 diabetics and then many, many others who would like to know ahead of time. Pre diabetic. Elon Musk's next spouse, I think was shown. This is the robot girlfriend, Aria. Oh, her. A companion. A companion. Delightful.

[Cory Doctorow]

They finally figured out how to get around the ban on Booth babes.

[Leo Laporte]

They make them out of rubber. That is actually horrific. The uncanny. The uncanny valley. I like the way the camera followed you on that one, Corey. That's good.

[Cory Doctorow]

I have one of these dumb AI cameras.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. I love it. I love it. But that's what you need it for. The. The face palm. Can you take it away?

[Father Robert Ballecer]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Real uncanny valley on this.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

It was horrible. It was. I went down there. I didn't even want to film it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Just lots of robots, tons of robots for everything from pets to robots. That actually the most useful robot was at the ZTE booth. It might have been. It was a robot that did the dishes.

[Leo Laporte]

Company that is not allowed to import into the United States.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Exactly. That was something that was actually useful. Dishes. It would automatically take dishes. Dishes out of the sink, give them a rinse and put them in the dishwasher and turn it on. I'm like, okay, that I could see you being useful, but.

[Leo Laporte]

But really a human could just. Instead of putting them in the sink, put them into the dishwasher.

[Cory Doctorow]

I see you have never met my daughter.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. What was I thinking? Teenagers. We forgot. Yeah. Is she a teenager?

[Cory Doctorow]

She is 16. She's going to university next year because she started.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Oh my goodness.

[Leo Laporte]

When she was born.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wasn't that long ago. It goes so fast, doesn't it, Corey?

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, it's pretty amazing. She's had some pre acceptances. She's thinking about the University of Hawaii.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Great. I lived there for two years.

[Cory Doctorow]

Did you major in pineapple studies? That's what we're hoping.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I didn't. I was actually a. I was one of the ministers at the. The chapel that was at the edge.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it in owa.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Oh, wow. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it North Shore, so. Because then you could major in surfing.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. He's really interested in. Is environmental studies and environmental economics. Perfect.

[Leo Laporte]

I bet you it's a great environmental study.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Actually their environmental studies program, especially their oceanographic studies program is second to none. I mean they. You can. They will actually take you on some of the research vessels that go out of Hawaii and you can do research that.

[Leo Laporte]

It's quite nice.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that would be so awesome. Hono studies. I would do that in a heartbeat. I love it. Anything else to say about CES before we move on from this tawdry topic?

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Something that was useful specifically in my situation when I'm dealing with elderly people. There's a company from Canada called. Is it Humans in Motion? They brought out an exoskeleton that is production. You can actually buy it today. And the woman doing the demonstration was paraplegic and she was walking around. She was interesting. Yeah. So it's got enough of the smarts that it will steady you and it will not accept any input that would make you fall over. So with my father and Parkinson's and his inability to move around, I mean, this is something he could actually use.

[Leo Laporte]

This has been long promised, of course, often with mech warriors, but I think this would really be incredible. Wouldn't it be amazing?

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Well, a lot of times when they show this tech, they show that it could be used to like help warehouse workers, you know, because it actually adds things.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

This is stability. This is purely. I want to give motion back to someone who doesn't have motion anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Canadians.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

They're nice people. They're nice people. Yeah. Corey, I hope you never have to wear this, but it's nice to know it's there.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. I mean, if it's a subject you're interested in. My friend Liz Henry is a cryptech person. She uses a wheelchair and she's really into open source hardware for assistive devices. A lot of user maintainable stuff. That's, that's obviously a really major thing you may have seen this year. There was a big story about a, a jockey who had broken his back in a horseback riding accident and who relied on an exoskeleton for many things, I mean for mobility, but also to avoid like bed sores and blood clots. And there was a tiny piece of bent metal that holds the battery in the cage. It's a watch battery for the remote. And it got metal fatigue and stopped working. And the manufacturer said, well, this hundred thousand dollar exoskeleton is now five years old. So we've end of lifed it and we won't give you the bit of bent metal. You can spend the rest of your life in bed or find another hundred thousand dollars. And it took a big public name and shame campaign for them to agree to repair the remote so that he could get out of bed again.

[Leo Laporte]

They did fix it though. I remember reading that story. Yeah, that's good. I'm glad they.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, we made a big stink.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, horrific. But that's Henry.

[Cory Doctorow]

Let me see if I can find her site. Liz Henry has a real emphasis on maintainability and I mean if you just type Liz Henry into the search engine of your choice, you'll find it. But she's also, she's got small grants, sort of $3,000 ish grants for people who are doing early stage Cryptek development and can help you out with that stuff. Yeah. Bookmaniac.org that's her. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

So somewhere in there there will be something about her Cryptek work.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting. She's at Mozilla, normally the bug master at Mozilla, now senior Firefox release manager.

[Cory Doctorow]

And she is partners with Danny O'Brien, my former colleague at EFF who's I'm the godfather of his daughter, but he's the guy who also coined the term life hacking.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, and she was a developer for BlogHer. Oh. You know, it's funny how the good people all mesh somehow in some interesting way. That's great.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

All right, how about, how about some good news, Leo? Yeah, so the representative from OpenAI, she was part of the AARP, had a huge section of the, the, the Venetian Innovation Pavilion and we have, we can't.

[Leo Laporte]

Quite get there from the lvcc, but that was nice of them.

[Cory Doctorow]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

But.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

No but, but it wasn't.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, I am in the AARP and I am well old enough to be in there, so you should mocking anybody.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

That's because one of the topics that they brought up was the education of the elderly and safeguards so that the new generation of deep fakes and AI scam calls don't affect them.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you imagine?

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Yeah. So there was this big call, she was like, look, we need companies to help us with this because we know it's a problem and we're enabling it and we don't know how to, how to not enable it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

So that, that was, that was interesting. A little admission from an up and coming company that their product is being used for. Wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's interesting.

[Cory Doctorow]

I, AARP are getting on the forefront of stuff. I was at a hearing for the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. They have a rule that will effectively ban data brokers that they're finalizing and they were collecting data stories and one of them was from the aarp. And you can buy as an ad target seniors with dementia.

[Leo Laporte]

Great.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Kidding me.

[Cory Doctorow]

Dementia, you know, and also like results from the Pentagon talking about ad targeting for service people with gambling problems. And also notoriously, Facebook was advertising to or was was offering teenagers with depression as an ad targeting body.

[Leo Laporte]

What is the status of that regulation? Is that going to happen before January 20th?

[Cory Doctorow]

I don't know if they'll finalize it before January 20th. You'd like to hope that there'd be continuity. I don't know if Rohit Chopra is going to step down or not. I haven't followed that. But the interesting thing about the CFPB is there was a Supreme Court case about their authority to do rulemaking that, you know, there's been a lot of erosion of the authority of the executive.

[Leo Laporte]

Chevron deference and yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

And it was a 9 to 0 unanimous decision that the CFPB has good rulemaking authority.

[Leo Laporte]

Good.

[Cory Doctorow]

So in theory they can do it. And Chopra is a powerhouse. He's made so many amazing rules. There's been such a flurry. The, the people who stayed in to the bitter end. Khan at the FTC and Chopra at the CFPB have introduced just a flurry of rules, investigations, cases. And I think what they're doing is saying to their successors, you know, like the ball is in your court. Now you get to decide like these are things that materially negatively affect Americans where the government can step in and make a huge positive difference to their lives. Are you going to rise to the challenge or are you going to let Americans suffer? And you know, there's been some bipartisan support for some of these enforcements. So maybe we'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

Hopefully Congress has had the devil of a time creating a federal privacy law. But if you could DO regulation, not 1988.

[Cory Doctorow]

The last, last consumer privacy law we ever had was one that bans video store clerks from telling the newspapers with VHS cassettes. You have.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank goodness. Thank goodness. That's been. We've been protected there.

[Cory Doctorow]

So you don't have to worry about your video.

[Leo Laporte]

I do worry about the cfpb, however, I think that it's on the chopping block for surely. Right. Yeah. I ordered two AI devices from the CES pile. The B, which is a B AI is a be like a bumblebee that you wear on your wrist. Listens to everything that's going on. But. But does. I think it's illegal because it will provide you with a text transcript which means it is recording it. So it's violating two party recording laws.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

That's not a great start to the device.

[Leo Laporte]

And then there's another one that doesn't. That you. You let me see if I can find the picture you put on your temple. Looks like a giant pearl that you stick on your temple. And then it doesn't. It just gives you notes. It doesn't necessarily record. It just says, oh, and the reason you wear it in your temple. This is snake oil. It can monitor your brain waves. So instead of having to say, you know, hey, Omi, you just think and the Omi will do something. You don't think so, Corey, it's not going to work.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

The Omi is taking notes. Why did I buy this? Why did I buy this?

[Leo Laporte]

This is so expensive.

[Cory Doctorow]

And then the ladies in the background are kind of laughing at him.

[Leo Laporte]

They are. They're mocking him. They're mocking him. But he's cute. Even if he has a pearl stuck to his temple.

[Cory Doctorow]

He's so dumb.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

What they're saying is, do you remember when we thought Google Glass was the stupidest thing people would put on their face?

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So I did order both of these. They weren't Very expensive. I mean, I think they make their money on the monthly subscription, so this one makes a little more sense. These are. I did not order these. These are earbuds with AI But, I mean, I think Apple's gonna give us those at some point, so. Right.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

The voice cloning stuff was pretty cool. There's at least two different translator companies that not only do they do a decent job of translating from one language to another, but they will translate you into another language using your voice, which I'm like, okay, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

I love that. Well, yeah, I think Google's promised that with Gemini so that we can make podcasts. In fact, I've even seen them. They have the lip sync and everything in a different language in your voice. I think that's pretty cool. That'll happen. And at that point, we'll start offering our shows in other languages. Languages I don't speak.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

If you're going to do that, though, you really need to cut down. Well, we have to cut down our use of idioms, because idioms don't translate well into other languages.

[Leo Laporte]

Mama. I don't know. I'll think of an idiom in a moment. Why does that man keep. Keep talking about horses and barns? What's going on?

[Cory Doctorow]

I just ran into this because in my. I've got an insidification book that I turned in to my editor at Forest Ration Room. We're going through edits, and I use the phrase, they're getting worked like government mules.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

Which my editor had never encountered. And he was like, I don't understand this. This simile, and I think we should replace it with one that's more obvious. And I'm like, it's. But it's idiom. It's very old. There's. There are many variations. They beat you like a government mule. They worked you like a government mule. They ran you like.

[Leo Laporte]

Even if you don't know the long and sordid history of government mules, that simile kind of works well.

[Cory Doctorow]

Okay, that's what I thought.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Let me give you an example. Not too long ago, I was working on a project with a very important religious leader, and the idiom that he used was one from Venezuela. And the translation into English is something like, when the chicken sees the pot boiling, it might as well jump in. Which we can kind of get that. It's like, well, when it. When it's a done deal, it's a done deal, Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

But when. When AI translated that into Italian, the translation was something along the Lines of the chicken gets mad because it's being murdered. And it's like, whoa. What?

[Leo Laporte]

That sounds like Apple notifications to me. Exactly.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

So not always. Not always. It's a hit or miss thing.

[Cory Doctorow]

And yeah, there's a Central American idiom. Tengosoro mi tripa. There's a. There's a fox in my stripe. Exactly right. Which means I've got a stomachache. And then siento como impero embernado. I feel like a poisoned dog. Which means I'm hungover.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, I'll use that, mama. Why does the. Why does the podcast keep talking about murals and dogs? Let's pause for a moment and talk about something more commercially interesting and then we will continue with a great panel. Corey, Dr. Us here. Nicholas Deleon is just enjoying his beverage. Go ahead.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah, I actually wanted to ask before we jump ahead, was CES always this silly? Was it always this height?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's a good question.

[Nicholas De Leon]

I remember reading one of my favorite magazines as kids was Sound and Vision magazine, which is like a home theater magazine. And you'd always read the dispatches of like, you know, all this new TV tech, plasma on the horizon. I don't remember them really like dunking on too much stuff. Like just seems to be what people do now was. So did it just become kind of like a parody of itself or. Or was it always.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I don't know, it changed with Apple.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Okay.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

And while tease that while Leo does the ad, the whole idea was. So when Apple started doing their new jobs in release cycles, they were releasing all the way throughout the year. CES used to be the time where the last four months of the year, all of the new tech releases were held in secret because they wanted something for the show. And so when the show actually came around, there was a reason for the hype because this was really stuff no one had ever seen before and you had to explain it. So it made sense once they started copying Apple's year long release cycle where there was nothing being held back, it was always on their own time.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

And they had to hype up stuff that either they had already released, was already ready, or might be ready in the future that there was nothing saved up. So I'd say probably for the last 15 years is what you're talking about. Where CES, the hype scale has gone so far off the range because they don't have anything held in the backup.

[Leo Laporte]

And the big companies don't even go anymore. So that takes some of the seriousness.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Microsoft's not there. Intel's not there. I mean, actually they are, but they are off the strip.

[Leo Laporte]

They're in suites and they're in suites.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Because it's cheaper for them and they get much better effect.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Apple doesn't need to go to ces. That's silly. They don't even need. They didn't even need Mac World Expo anymore. Right?

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They killed Mac World Expo, Robert. I forgot. Speaking of silly, you used to have a thing that told you you had to go pee. Did that ever work? You read that back from CES a few years ago. I remember.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

It did. It did. It did. It did. Okay. It was called the D link and it totally worked. It was. It. It went around your. Your bladder and you got a little app on your phone. It would tell you. Because it was like it was a sonogram. So it would tell you how full your bladder is.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's useful.

[Cory Doctorow]

It.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Well, the idea was they were going to sell it in nursing homes. I'm sorry.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. Okay. That makes sense.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Yeah. So for people who have lost the ability to know when they need to go to the bathroom, they could. They could actually. In a nursing station.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

You could tell which. Which your patients are having trouble. They just released a new version this year.

[Leo Laporte]

They.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

They had table. No one was there, but it's. They've shrunk it and they've made it much easier to use, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. So there. That's not silly. That's serious.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

That's not silly.

[Leo Laporte]

Anything else you'd like to know, Nicholas?

[Cory Doctorow]

I'm just trying to think.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry.

[Cory Doctorow]

You asked to make with this and I can't think of any. Something about IP addresses.

[Leo Laporte]

Health over IP address.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Yeah. Cesip, something like that.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, we really do have to take a break, so you all can do whatever you need to do. Father Robert Ballisaire is here. The digital Jesuit. Great to have you. His app is Jesuit Pilgrimage app, which I didn't know. See, I asked you about some other projects. You said, well, we don't take. We don't take credit in the church for that because it's a big team. But you do take credit for this. And I didn't realize it because you did it yourself.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Yeah. Got bored. Made something. And I had to register a name for the app when I bought the license to develop on. From Apple.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it on iOS?

[Father Robert Ballecer]

It's on iOS, it's on Android. And soon it'll be coming to the Palm os, which means I can put.

[Leo Laporte]

It on my LG tv.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

That's good.

[Leo Laporte]

Also, Nicholas De Leon, who is the senior technology reporter, electronics reporter for the Consumer Reports. Geez, you'd think the senior electronics reporter for Consumer Reports would go to the Consumer Electronics show. But no, Nicholas is too senior for that. That's how you know somebody's senior when they can go, yeah, not this year.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Well, it's funny. I like ces. I. I've been to many of them. I always like party. It's a fun show. It is very, you know, depending upon your role. It's like a ton of work. It's not just like a fun. You're going.

[Leo Laporte]

It's much more fun when you're not reporting. When you're just going.

[Nicholas De Leon]

I would imagine so.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, I've done that. Actually, the one thing I did wish I had gone to see, I guess the Delta used the Sphere for its keynote and they used it to good effect. That big giant sphere inside has a. Is a giant projector. And they sounded like, it looked like.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

And you know what? They announced that Delta was no longer partnering with Lyft and they were now partnering with Uber. That was their announcement.

[Leo Laporte]

They bought. They. They rented the Sphere for a day, put up tons of decorations, invited the press and I'm sure offered them poo poos. And that's it. No, it was worth it to go.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

In the Sphere this year.

[Leo Laporte]

Creators got very excited because they also announced they were going to start putting some creator content in their seat back entertainment.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Yeah, that was a waste. But the Sphere was cool. The Sphere was.

[Leo Laporte]

You get to go. Did you get.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Of course, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Jealous. That I wish. I bet. Cory Doctorow also here. His new book is coming out February 18th. Picks and shovels. That could be two things. It could be about infrastructure or it could be about Levi's.

[Cory Doctorow]

It's about grifters.

[Leo Laporte]

Grifters.

[Cory Doctorow]

Why am I not in the camera? What has happened to me?

[Leo Laporte]

I decided the book was more interesting. I hate to tell you, Corey, it's about grifters.

[Cory Doctorow]

So it's. It's Martin Hench, my. My forensic accountant. It's his first adventure in Silicon Valley.

[Leo Laporte]

Love it.

[Cory Doctorow]

In the early 80s, you know, he. He drops out of a CS program at MIT because he's too busy programming computers to go to class. Ends up becoming a cpa. Follows his roommate out to San Francisco looking for gold. And his first job is working for a weird PC company. And this was the golden era of weird PCs when everyone was making a.

[Leo Laporte]

Weird PC halt and catch fire era, right?

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, the halt. Exactly that era. And the weird PC company he works for is called Fidelity Computing. And it sounds like a joke. It's run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi. But the joke is that it's, it's a faith selling multi level marketing scam and they are preying on their parishioners. And he very quickly realizes he's working for the bad guys when they hire him to destroy a rival firm that was founded by three people who've left the firm. One is a nun who's fallen in with liberation theology Marxists in Central America. One is an orthodox woman who's been kicked out of her family because she's gay. And one is a Mormon woman who's left the church over its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. And so he joins with them and they get into a trade war with this weird PC company which very quickly becomes a shooting war because it turns out that these guys aren't just scammers, they're mobbed up. And so it's a high tension, high stakes mafia thriller about there any chase scenes.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

So it's a documentary basically. There's nothing you mentioned that I haven't seen in the church.

[Cory Doctorow]

So Jello Biafra is in it. You know, this is the era when he's like running for marathon Dead Kennedys.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

They're doing Shell Pro Unix shell programming on eighty thousand dollar workstations.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is awesome.

[Cory Doctorow]

Hands soldering their own floppy drives and doing all kinds of fun things. And it's, it's a real, it's like a version of the startup narrative that's, that's built around the busting the grift instead of like faking it till you make it.

[Leo Laporte]

Love that. Let's bust the grift.

[Cory Doctorow]

Stephen Levy, or Stephen Levy said nice things about it. Stephen Fry wrote a long. I asked him to send me like a page of love notes to the book. So it's had great early notes, all these computer historians, Claire Evans, who wrote broadband, and Steven Levy. As I said, John Martin.

[Leo Laporte]

Were you around in that era?

[Cory Doctorow]

I was a PC kid.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So you're a kid, but you were into it.

[Cory Doctorow]

I was a modem using PC PC kid. Right. My dad was a computer science teacher. So we had terminals in the house in the 70s and then an Apple II plus in 79. And I always say that like I didn't have lowercase letters for four years because we could either use this long or a modem or a 80 column card. And there was no way I was taking my modem out of my computer. So I was just, I had 40 columns of all capital letters that I could dial up. Bbss.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, that's great. And I was running those bbss.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Yeah, we can have. Yeah, yeah, that's good memories.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't wait to read it. I tried to buy it and they said no February 18th. But there is a Kickstarter. You go to the Kickstarter and calm.

[Cory Doctorow]

Well direct you to it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh good.

[Cory Doctorow]

Martin.martinhen c h.com and as with all my books, I've done my own audiobook for this. So because Audible won't carry any of my books because they're DRM free, I have to make my own audiobooks and sell them myself. And so the way that I recoup the substantial cost of hiring Wil Wheaton and getting a professional studio and a great editor is by pre selling a whole ton of them on the Kickstarter as well as hardcovers and ebooks and so on. And if there's a tech scam that you really like from the last four, 40 years and you're feeling very spendy, you can commission a short story about Martin Hench busting that scam.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's brilliant.

[Cory Doctorow]

It's not cheap, but it's cool.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Corey's version of Cameo. He won't do a video for you, but he will write a short story for you.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

What's the link again? I'm going to get that right now.

[Cory Doctorow]

Martinhench.com.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm scrolling down because I want this. Let Corey write a book for you.

[Cory Doctorow]

I just gotta tell you, Leo, it's $10,000.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, but you know, I wouldn't mind a short story written by Corey. There it is. Commission of Marty.

[Cory Doctorow]

I had a couple of these from a Kickstarter I did for a Little Brother novel and I wrote those. They came out this year. They came out really well.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, nice.

[Cory Doctorow]

And I'm one story away from having enough little brother stories to do a short story collection. I'm probably gonna do that next year.

[Leo Laporte]

Very cool. Some really nice, as you said, Stephen Levy, Stephen Fry, John Scalzi, all loved the book. This is a must. Martinhensch.com Especially if, I mean, if you listen to the show, I'm sure you're a fan of that era. If you didn't live it, at least you know of it.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

You had me at gun toting nun. Yeah, that does it for me. I'm in.

[Leo Laporte]

It's your, it's your fantasy, isn't it? MartinH.com all right, now I have tried to go to a commercial now for half an hour. I keep talking to you guys because you're interesting. Darn it. Darn you. But we will be back with more and the interesting stuff will continue, I promise. Our show today, brought to you by Coda. We love this sponsor. We love this sponsor. If you want to turn your back of the napkin idea into a billion dollar startup, well, you know, there's a couple of ways to do it. Countless hours of collaboration, teamwork. You got to build a team that's tough. A team that's aligned on everything from values to workflow. Wouldn't it be nice if there were a tool to make that easier? Coda, Coda, IO, Twitter. It's an all in one collaborative workspace and I've used a bunch of these. This is easily the best one. It literally started as a napkin sketch itself. And in five years since launching in beta, Coda has helped 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. With Coda, you get the flexibility of docs, the structure of spreadsheets, the power of applications, and the intelligence of AI. All built for enterprise. All there when you need it. Because it's all part of Coda's seamless workspace. It facilitates deeper collaboration, quicker creativity, gives you more time to build, less time futzing around with the tools. They're all there whenever you need it. In fact, Coda is going to help you generate new ideas. That's what's so cool about it. When a tool is ready to hand, the minute something the germ of an idea starts, you got the tool. It makes it so much easier to bring it to life. That's why I use Coda. If you're a startup team looking to increase alignment and agility, Coda can help you move from planning to execution in record time. Try it for yourself. Go to coda. C o d a IO twit today 6 we offered this the last time they were on and people jumped at this. I hope you take advantage of this. Six free months of the team plan for startups. That's enough to get your startup off and running. Frankly, C O D A IO Twit get started for free and get six free months of the team plan. Coda IO Twit thank you Coda for your support of this week in tech and you support us when you go to that address so they know you saw it here. Coda IO Twit. We are actually seeing a little bit of the B roll from CES that Father Robert was. You're going to edit up your your thoughts and your comments. And give us a little mini tour.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Oh, yeah. I'm doing a couple of different versions. I want to do, like, CES in 60 seconds and then do a longer version.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's probably all I could tolerate.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

60. Yeah. 60 seconds pretty much gives you everything you need to know about ces.

[Leo Laporte]

My feet hurt just looking at that video. Go.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

It. I, I. Okay. 200,000, 136 steps.

[Leo Laporte]

How many miles is that?

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Too many.

[Leo Laporte]

Too many.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Especially since I'm carrying around the equivalent of a Tesla on my torso.

[Leo Laporte]

And why do you do this? Is just fun.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Because you like penance.

[Leo Laporte]

Penance.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

No, I mean, look.

[Leo Laporte]

Six and a cover and two cess. Right?

[Cory Doctorow]

That's it.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I. I have been going to CES for decades. Same thing with defcon. And so, yes, right now, I think it's horrible and it's terrible, and I never want to go back to CES because I got nothing out of it this year. Give me six months and I'll feel different. Because every once in a while, something wonderful happens at ces. Something. Something incredible, something fantastic, something very cool. Just. I haven't seen it the last two years.

[Cory Doctorow]

You're basically explaining why people have a second child every once in a while.

[Leo Laporte]

Every once in a while. Notice Corey has one.

[Cory Doctorow]

Just one. Yeah, that's.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

That is fair. That is fair.

[Leo Laporte]

I had two. And the second, by the way, is opening his restaurant. New York City in a couple. Hey. And I invite you all to go to Salt Hanks on Bleecker street on the. In the West Village. It's in the former slutty vegan slot, right next to John's Pizza.

[Cory Doctorow]

When does it open?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know, with restaurant openings, but he's hoping to open in the spring, early summer.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

They're gonna do a soft open, right? A soft open.

[Leo Laporte]

First, you will hear a lot about it on our shows because I will be all excited, and I'll be going out to New York, and we might.

[Cory Doctorow]

Even do a show for February 26th. We're doing a book event at the Strand with John Hodgman, but it sounds like it won't be open. Yeah, it's gonna be great. I've got great tour interlocutors. Ken Liu, Charlie Jane Anders, Wil Wheaton, Dan Savage, John Hodgman, Peter Sagal. It's going to be really fun.

[Leo Laporte]

That's fun. Is it seagal or seagull?

[Cory Doctorow]

Seagal. From. From. Wait, wait, don't tell me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I thought it was seagal.

[Cory Doctorow]

No, seagull.

[Leo Laporte]

It's seagull. Okay, I know who he is. I love him.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, we were speaking of DEF con, and Corey sent me this toot from Jeremiah Kimmelman at Journa Host thinking of Aaron Schwartz today, and I'm stuck on this photo. This is a photo we've showed before. This is a. A class of people at Y Combinator about. I don't know, was this 15 years ago? Something like that. You see a young Sam Altman, who still looks the same age, by the way, standing right next to a very young Aaron Schwartz.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

America's. What do they call him? Boy. His. Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

The Internet's own boy. The wonderful Brian Appenberg documentary.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And I think the point Jeremiah's making is actually really interesting. He says he and the guy next to him, OpenAI's Sam Altman, each scraped thousands of documents. Remember, Aaron Schwartz got in trouble with the Computer Fraud act for downloading papers. We paid for paper, scientific papers.

[Cory Doctorow]

What was allowed to download that? The charge was that he was allowed to download them, but he wasn't allowed to write a script to do it. And on that basis, they charged him with 13 felonies and threatened him with 35 years in prison.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And he took his life as a result. So Jeremiah says, thinking of Aaron Schwartz today, stuck on this photo, he and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman each scraped thousands of documents. One did it to make knowledge free for all, while the other did it to make money through probabilistic plagiarism. The US DOJ only came after one of them. The other is fetted by tech bros and executives. Thank you so much, Aaron, for rss, for Markdown, for Creative Commons and more. I'm sorry our society failed you. That is very poignant and very true.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. Yesterday was the anniversary of Aaron's death. It was a rough time. I will say that Aaron never told anyone why he downloaded those documents. To my knowledge, he might have been planning to make them available, but he had previously done something else where he'd scraped the whole purpose of law review articles and then compared the kind of publications that academic lawyers did before and after their departments got giant donations from oil companies to see whether they started arguing that oil companies shouldn't have liability for climate change. And unsurprisingly, they did. And so it's not beyond the possibility that Aaron was scraping all of those JSTOR articles to do some kind of big textual analysis. He might not have intended to republish them. If he had, I would have supported him. But we don't even know why he.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't Even know why he was at mit, right?

[Cory Doctorow]

Harvard.

[Leo Laporte]

Harvard.

[Cory Doctorow]

He had an account at mit and he was allowed to be there. He was allowed to use their WI Fi, and when he was on their WI Fi, he was allowed to access jstor. All of those were things that he was permitted to do. But rather than click the links one at a time, when he accessed jstor, he wrote a little script.

[Leo Laporte]

That one does. Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

And that was a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a law that Ronald Reagan passed in a panic after watching war games in 1986. Oh, my God, we can't do anything about this stuff because there's not enough laws for it. You need to make a law. And so Reagan signed. Well, he whipped his Congress to pass the Computer Fraud and Abuse act, and then he signed it in 1986. It's a ridiculously broad law. It's been narrowed recently through a Supreme Court case called Van Buren, but it's still way too broad. And it basically says you can't exceed your authorization on a computer. And so what the prosecution argued here was that Aaron was authorized to access every file that he accessed, but he wasn't authorized to access them with a script. And so he exceeded his authorization.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

They just tried to use that in Georgia, was it three years ago, because somebody, they said, oh, somebody broached. Breached our. Our security. And they got addresses for all of our state employees because they hit F11, because it was included in all the comments of the HTML page. And they were saying, oh, well, that's, that's. And then it was struck down. So obviously something has changed. But I did not know the backstory about why Ronald Reagan did that. That's crazy.

[Cory Doctorow]

Was absurdly broad. So we had a client who was using the iPad version of the AT&T billing app, and he looked at the URL it was loading and it just ended in a serial number. And he was like, is that a globally unique number? Is that a serial number? So he added one to it. And he was looking at someone else's billing data, and he realized that he could enumerate several million AT&T clients, billing data, their personal home addresses, financial data, and so on. And he published that AT&T had this leak and he was actually criminally convicted and went to prison. And we ran his appeal because we did not want that precedent being set.

[Leo Laporte]

That's our own Randall Schwartz, who for a long time hosted Floss Weekly, was convicted under the CFAA for three felony counts and five years probation. He did get the felonies. Expunged thank goodness. But still. And he never did. It was the same. It was very similar. You know, he said I obtained. He was working at intel and he said trying to help intel by revealing a problem in their security. They didn't like it too much.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, I mean, there's a broad sense among vendors that bad news about their company should be theirs to time and release and that if they don't think this bad news should be in the public eye, then no one should be able to say it. I mean, there might be circumstances in which certain bad news might not be something that you'd want to publish right away. I'm thinking of things like Heartbleed, where maybe you want to like, wait, patch it first pushed. But vendors whose stock prices go down when the bad news is published are not the people who should be the custodians of the decision about when bad news can be published. They are not neutral arbiters of that question. And they routinely and continuously make bad choices.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I thought that that had been somewhat fixed by laws requiring them to reveal breaches. Don't they have to, at this point, have to?

[Cory Doctorow]

That's breaches. That's not vulns.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, yeah, you can hide the vulnerabilities.

[Cory Doctorow]

So if you've got a continuous glucose monitor and you've hooked it up to your, your, your insulin to make a closed loop artificial pancreas, and there's a vuln that allows you to wirelessly dump all the insulin into your bloodstream all at once, as there have been many of for Medtronics pumps. You might want to know about that. Right, because like, someone can kill you where you stand with like a little WI fi device. And that might be something that you enters into your consideration before you buy that device or use it or wear it in public or whatever. And the idea that the firm gets to decide who, who when you get to know that is, I think, very bad.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that brings us to this story that train hackers, you gave us the numag DRM disclosure. What's that all about?

[Cory Doctorow]

So this is this gang of hackers in Poland called Dragon Sector. That's the name of their Capture the Flag team. And they got a call from a state train operator saying, we bought these trains from nuvag. It's a Polish word. So the W is a V pronounced as a V. Nuwa, not experience with nuvog. And we put out the maintenance contract to tender and NuVOG was not the best bidder. So we have someone else, but every time we take it in for service or bring it to the depot or just park it. The trains brick themselves and we can't unbrick them. We think something weird is happening. So they went and they looked at the firmware and it had been booby trapped. Nuvog had logic bombed its own trains. So if the train entered a geo fenced area that included a third party service depot, or if it was stationary for a certain amount of time, or if there was a third party component that was installed in the loco, then the train would brick itself.

[Leo Laporte]

And in other words, they wanted to prevent somebody from taking it to a third party repair. That's right.

[Cory Doctorow]

They wanted to prevent their customers from using these third party repair depots that had won the competitive tender for maintenance service on these trains. And so they revealed all kinds of crazy things, you know, so they went into this. It turns out that there was like a way to override it where you would go into the toilet in one cabin and then like lock and unlock the door twice and then press the emergency call and the train would be.

[Leo Laporte]

Bricked up, down, down, left, right, left, right.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Only in the toilet. Okay.

[Cory Doctorow]

And they found out that the, that there was a guy. There's another state owned train company that every time they took their train to this one station, just on the track, it would freeze, it would brick itself. Like it would literally stop on the track filled with passengers.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Cory Doctorow]

And just stop dead. Right. And when they decompiled the software, they saw that the geolocation rectangle for a nearby service depot had been sloppily drawn and included a little section of track. And so that track was like booby trapped. They, they. It turned out that this third party train company had never revealed this because what they ended up doing was removing the GPSs from their trains.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Hey, that works.

[Leo Laporte]

We fixed it.

[Cory Doctorow]

They presented this at ccc, which is the Chaos Communications Congress, which is held in Germany every year. And it's hell, it's the most hardcore of all the information Sec Congress.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think, I think somebody in our chat, I think Galia was there. Yeah, yeah. Last couple of weeks ago. Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

The thing that makes it so hardco is it's held between Christmas and New Year's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's hardcore.

[Cory Doctorow]

Willing to like talk your family into saying, hey, instead of going to see your family at Christmas or going skiing or whatever, probably we go to this hacker conference in Hamburg.

[Leo Laporte]

Sure. And Hamburg is so lovely that time of year, I must say. Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

So they presented in 2023, which was like the end of the year and Then they got sued repeatedly by this company. And there, there have been multiple parliamentary inquiries and so on. And one of the causes of action here is that the law in America that bans reverse engineering, section 12 one of the Digital Millennium Copyright act, the DRM law, that says that removing drm, trafficking in a device to remove DRM is a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. The US Trade Representative went to Europe in 2001 and got them to transpose that into the European copyright directive. Article 6 of the Copyright Directive says the same thing. And of course Poland is part of the European Union. And you know, Poland has been like a source of amazing hackers doing incredible things for many years. You know, during lockdown. Medtronic, the company with the dodgy insulin pumps, they also make the world's most widely used workhorse ventilator. And they use parts pairing for all the major components in the, in the ventilator. So if you take a dead ventilator with a live screen and put that into a live ventilator with a dead screen because it's not serialized to the central computer, unless you're a technician, an authorized Medtronic technician who types in an unlock code, it won't recognize the screen. It's the same thing John Deere tractors do. It's the same thing cars do. It's called parts pairing or vinlocking. And this Polish hacker got really pissed off because there were hospital med med techs all across the world who are like, I'm trying to keep my ventilators running during the pandemic. Medtronic can't even send a technician to type and unlock code. There's no planes flying. And so this Polish hacker who used to work for Medtronic made like a Raspberry PI or eeprom based authorization gadget and made a bunch of them and put them in whatever housings he could find during lockdown and started mailing them to hospitals. And so hospitals were opening the mail and there was like a guitar pedal with a USB port epoxy to it it that would unlock your ventilator after you fixed it, or like a clock radio or a bedside lamp. And no one knows who this guy was because he was or woman or non binary person. They were totally Anonymous because Article 6 of the Copyright directive creates criminal liability for them for doing this. And you know, these are the, these are the hospital's own ventilators. They don't lease them from Medtronic or whatever. They belong to them. You Know, people who say, if you're not paying for the product, you're the product, they really misunderstand what cause causes companies to abuse you. It's not paying for the product that makes them treat you well. It's fearing that, you know, you can retaliate against them by getting a regulator involved or switching vendors or whatever. If they're not afraid of you, they will treat you like the product all day long.

[Leo Laporte]

Father Robert has a good coda for this. He says, hack a train. So they revealed this hack and got in a lot of trouble with NuVOG. NuVOG weaponized this DMCA provision. And so this is the talk at the.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, it's a great talk. One of the things they reveal in the talk is that, you know, the majority of customers for trains in Poland are publicly owned firms. And the publicly owned firms have strict procurement rules, statutory procurement rules. And when they put out a tender for new trains, Nuvog often is the cheapest option and they are legally required to buy the train with the cheapest option. And so NuVog is still selling tons of trains in Poland, even though they're doing this nonsense.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And they denied that they know anything about the locks. Even though. Yeah, they say three. They say train operators revealed they paid NuVoc more than €20,000 for unlocking a single train, which they were able to do in 10 minutes. They probably went in the bathroom and opened and closed the door twice.

[Cory Doctorow]

So what was happening is train operators called nuvoc and say, our train has stopped working. And they would say, ah, it sounds like you need your security resynchronized. And they would say, okay, what does that cost? And they said, €20,000. And they said, okay, well, I guess we've got to pay you €20,000 because we need this.

[Leo Laporte]

We need the train.

[Cory Doctorow]

And then they would just remote into the train and go, like make train go and collect €20,000.

[Leo Laporte]

Right to repair, baby.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, next, since your blood pressure probably isn't yet high enough, we're going to talk about Meta. Stay tuned.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Oh, good.

[Leo Laporte]

Nicholas De Leon here from Consumer Reports fighting the good fight. You are, I know, are big on the right to repair movement, as is Consumer Reports. And this is the kind of silly nonsense that goes on. It's great to have you, Nicholas. Cory Doctorow, of course, his new book picks and shovels go to martyhench.com Martin. I call him Marty for some reason. Martin.

[Cory Doctorow]

He goes by Marty, but it's Martin Hench. I just wasn't going to register two domains.

[Leo Laporte]

But Martinhen, my friend Marty, the CPA forensic accountant, his new book, martinhensch.com to get on the Kickstarter so you can read it the day it comes out. And of course, the digital Jesuit, Father Robert Balassair. Great to have you. You're going to be another month in Nevada and then back.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Correct. So the agreement that I've made with my big boss is I can come back for roughly three and a half months, a year, so I can take care of my parents, give my sister a break, my mom a break, etc.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's nice to know the Vatican has something.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

We're like. We're like a Vin Diesel movie family. You know, It's.

[Leo Laporte]

You know. You know, Vin Diesel was. Was at the Golden Globes last week, and it said among his credits, he. That he was in the Guardians of the Galaxy. And I said to Lisa, I said, I don't remember him in Guardians of the Galaxy. She said, yeah, yeah, he was Groot.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He had one line.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I mean, it's. He's there. He was there.

[Leo Laporte]

Perfect. Perfect casting. That's all I'm gonna say.

[Cory Doctorow]

Did he voice it over and over again or did they just record it?

[Leo Laporte]

Take one? Yeah, that's the question.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

He did every single line. And it's a. His lines were, I am Groot, we are Groot, and I love you guys. Those are the only three lines he said the entire series.

[Leo Laporte]

He had some trouble memorizing the script, I understand, but did, in fact, they put a little thing in his ear.

[Cory Doctorow]

So eventually he got off book, though.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he got off buck. You know, if you listen to all this stuff, you might be thinking, I really think I should have a good VPN in my back pocket. Well, you should. And the one I use and Recommend is Express VPN. We love this sponsor. Going online without a ExpressVPN is. I don't know. It's like driving without car insurance. Right. It might be a great driver. With all the crazy people on the road these days, you don't want to go out there without car insurance. You don't want to go on the Internet without encryption. Every time you connect to an unencrypted network, and that's everywhere, from a cafe to a hotel. To not use the free airport WI fi. I've been told that many times, especially during DEF CON in Vegas, but I'm. You know, I'm just saying, they just found out that there was a. You know, the fake cell towers, what they call those Shark sky, stingrays. Stingrays at the Democratic national convention, snarfing up IMEIs they don't know who did it. Every time you connect to an encrypted network, I was saying, cafes, hotels, airports, your online data is floating out there. Steve Gibson on Tuesday. This shocked me. I thought, well, at least we don't have to worry about our email passwords anymore. Randall Schwartz, my favorite hacker, I remember he used to go on these geek cruises with us. He went on a geek cruise and the first day he was going around with a piece of paper to people, he came up to me and said, is this your email password? I said, yeah. He said, you're sending it in the clearance. But that was a few years ago. I thought every email server now by now was encrypted. No. Turns out Steve Gibson was talking about there's tens of thousands of email servers still running in plain text. That means not only is your email flying through the air unencrypted, but your password. Unbelievable. And that's the worst thing, of course, if somebody hacks your email because that's where all of your I forgot my passwords go. I mean, this is. You're pwned by then any hacker on the same network can gain access to and steal your personal data. And it's not always HTTPs, it's not always TLS encrypted. And frankly, it doesn't take a lot of technical knowledge to hack somebody. We had Alex Stamos on the other day, formerly of the Stanford Internet Observatory. He teaches classes in hacking. And he brings this WI Fi pineapple to class. And you know this cheap thing, it's 100 bucks or something, and all you need is this WI Fi pineapple. You sit in an open access point at the airport or whatever, and you can see what people's WI FI connections are. You can pretend to be their house. So your, you know, your laptop, you're sitting here and your laptop says, oh, we're home. Joins the fake wifi access point. Now every bit of your traffic's going through the pineapple. A smart 12 year old can do it. And there's a lot of money in this. Of course, hackers can make up to a thousand bucks or more selling your personal data on the web. In fact, in many cases, we know it's not even illegal. This is. Okay, so have I made the case? You need a VPN and I think you need ExpressVPN. It stops hackers from stealing your data because everything you do is encrypted from your device to their servers. Now this is why it's a good thing to go with ExpressVPN. Because the servers, you know you're kicking the can down the road. The servers also see everything, right? You want a VPN you trust. Furthermore, you want a VPN that does no logging. ExpressVPN does no logging. In fact, they go the extra mile they've created and it's been vetted by third parties, this trusted server technology. So when you press the big Button on your ExpressVPN app, on your phone, on your laptop, even on your on your router, you can get them on routers too. It spins up the server in ram, it's sandboxed, can't write to the hard drive, and as soon as you disconnect, it's gone. And no trace of your visit is there, right? So no logging. As if that weren't enough, they also run a custom Ubuntu distro, or is it Debian? I think it's Debian Distro that erases itself every morning, completely erases the hard drive. There is no trace of your visit. You can even use cryptocurrency if you want for your membership. So you really can maintain an anonymous connection to the Internet. So why is ExpressVPN the best VPN? It's simple, it's super secure, of course, because it's using strong encryption to take a hacker billions of years to get past. That it's easy to use, works on all your phones, laptops, tablets, routers, cnet, the Verge, many others. Rate it number one I it's the one I use. And in fact when I travel, it's a great boon. There was a really good piece in Bleeping computer about how ExpressVPN works and they talk about all these third party audit technologies that they use to really make sure you're anonymous. We also know it because when law enforcement comes a calling, and in some countries all they need to do is burst down the door and take the servers. There's never anything on them. There's never anything on them. And I'm not recommending breaking the law. I'm recommending protecting yourself as against the bad guys. Secure your online data today. Visit expressvpn.com TWiT E x p r e s s vpn.com TWiT right now, four extra months free when you buy a two year package. That's the best deal. Brings it down below seven bucks a month. Look, you don't want a free VPN because if you're not paying for it, they're making the money somewhere you but less than 7 bucks a month for the best. Expressvpn.com TWIT 4 extra months free when you buy a 2 year package. Expressvpn we thank him so much for supporting this week in tech. So I have a friend who used to work at Meta is still on a number of message boards of former Meta employees. And as soon as Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta was going to stop doing fact checking and stop moderating, at least in the US a variety of content, the boards went crazy. It turned out. I did not know this, but he informed me. One of the reasons Mark did this, it wasn't the Biden administration, it was the employees at Meta who said, you can't let this stuff, you know, this anti LBGTQ stuff, you can't let this hate speech, you can't let, you know the stuff that happened in Myanmar and the Philippines. You can't let this happen on Meta. We don't want to work for a company that enables genocide. So Mark did two things. In the short term, he did fact checking and moderating. In the long term, he fired them all. So there isn't apparently the same internal pressure anymore. And that that combined with the fact that there are certain people in the new administration who hate Mark Zuckerberg. I think Donald Trump said in fact that he was going to throw him in jail. Now he likes him. He says, I have a warm spot in my heart. I like Mark Zuckerberg. We found out Zuck met with Trump right the day before, announcing that in the US Meta will get rid of fact checkers, replace them with Community notes. Actually, I'm not sure I hate that idea. I think Community Notes is a. But I'm sure you guys will have an opinion. He's also going to move. This one kind of frosted me a little bit. The firm's content moderation teams from blue state California, where they're inevitably biased, to Texas, quote, where there is less concern about the bias of our teams. He admitted to the changes, the changes to the way Meta is this from the Guardian? Meta's filtered content would mean we're going to catch less bad stuff. All right, so there's the story. Corey, first of all, let me ask you. I personally think that content moderation at scale and fact checking scales in the scale of Meta is huge. Is very, very difficult to do. I'm not sure that I hate the idea of community notes.

[Cory Doctorow]

I don't hate the idea of community notes either. They're a perfectly good Way. A good way of doing some kinds of content moderation. I think that, you know, I think that by the time you're arguing about whether or not this one guy, who no one ever voted for, who bought all of his competitors and who used all kinds of, of anti competitive conduct to drive his competitors out of the market, whether that one guy has the right idea or the wrong idea for how 4 billion people can talk to one another and in the news that you've, you're, you're too far down the stack. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

You're focusing on the wrong problem. Yes.

[Cory Doctorow]

You know, it's not so look, the. There, there. The old content moderation policies were anything but great, right? People who survived genocides, who uploaded video of the war crimes committed against them, found that that video being deleted under content moderation rules. People who'd experienced racial slurs and discussed the, the abuse they'd experienced had their content removed for containing racial slurs. And then there were the deliberate ones, the ones that were not just, you know, kind of weird edge cases, but like people who supported Palestine independence or who opposed genocide had their content removed and so on. So there was all kinds of stuff where Facebook made very bad moderation calls. And you know, there are lots of ways that Mark Zuckerberg could have announced that he was getting rid of this broken system. The most offensive, worst, most terrifying way to do it would be to include a long list of incredibly offensive, disgusting things you're allowed to say about trans and gay people and immigrants and say these are now all okay. Which is what he did. He basically said, yeah, that.

[Leo Laporte]

That was weird.

[Cory Doctorow]

It was very weird. Weird, right? It was very, very weird.

[Leo Laporte]

It's okay to say this now.

[Cory Doctorow]

It's okay to. It's okay to foment genocide against the Rohingya now or whatever, right? Like it's the most. Like it really. I don't know if you can call it saying the quiet part aloud. It's like it's like standing at the top of a mountain with a giant PA stack and try this, kids. Yeah, like, like getting, getting like the app that, you know, makes your phone going and sending an alert to it that says the quiet part. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

It's like tick tock saying it's okay to eat Tide pods. Go ahead.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, like it was very. It's a very terrible and disheartening thing. But you know, I think that the right answer to this or the right way to think about this is that given that Facebook has been so bad at moderation that all of the moderation that we're mourning the passing of was, at best, fixing a few things around the edges on a platform that is just irretrievably toxic is why are people on Facebook? And I think the reason people are on Facebook is because they love each other more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg. And by making it hard to leave Facebook, by not having you talked about.

[Leo Laporte]

The Anatevka problem on Twitter last time you were on.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. We're all in Antefka.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. The people in filler on the roof love each other more than they hate being beaten up by Cossacks. The only thing worse than living in Anatevka is being forced to leave Anatevka. And so if there was interoperability, if there were APIs that let you leave Facebook, go to a rival platform, exchange messages with the communities that you left behind and so on, people would leave. Right. And they would go somewhere else. This is what Facebook did. I'm sure I said this the last time I was on. You know, when Facebook started, they had a billionaire problem named Rupert Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch owned a service called MySpace. MySpace was the most successful social media network in history. Everyone who wanted a social media account had one already on MySpace. And they didn't say, hey, leave Facebook. Go to MySpace. Never talk to your friends again until they get wise and come with you to my Facebook. They gave you a bot, and you gave that bot your login and password, and it went to MySpace and logged in as you scraped all the messages waiting for you brought them back.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't remember that. Wow.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Wow.

[Cory Doctorow]

So, like this, you know, they. They gave people a way to ease their passage. So you didn't all have to agree at once that you were all going over to MySpace, you know, or to Facebook. To continue the antep a metaphor. My grandmother was a Soviet refugee. She was a child soldier in the siege of Leningrad.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Cory Doctorow]

Got evacuated to Siberia. Eventually got knocked up by my grandfather, deserted from the Red army, went to Azerbaijan, and then decided not to go back to Leningrad. They destroyed their papers so they could become displaced people, made their way to Frankfurt and got a displaced person's boat to Canada. And the thing is, no one else in her family did that. All the ones who stayed behind Leningrad stayed behind. And the reason they did that is because of each other. Right. All the old people had young people they were looking after. All the young people had old people they were looking after. They couldn't afford to leave. And so here we are a couple of generations later. I've got a Great life. My father had a great life growing up. He was born in Azerbaijan, but, you know, he grew up in Canada and had a great life. My, you know, my, my family in Leningrad, they're screwed, right? In St. Petersburg, you know, they're, they're all worried about.

[Leo Laporte]

Your grandmother made a huge sacrifice in her life so that you could have a good life.

[Cory Doctorow]

And she lost touch with everyone in her life. So my father talks about a decade after they landed in Canada, the phone ringing and it was my grandmother's mother who she didn't know was alive or dead. Right. So why didn't people leave? Because they knew it was a one way journey. Because they knew they would lose touch with everyone. Because they would lose everything. If you make it possible for people to go to one place and then another, you know, I'm a Canadian. I lived in Central America and then I lived in San Francisco and then I lived in London and then Los Angele Angeles and then in San Francisco and then in London, then in Los Angeles again. I might leave, you know, again next year when my kid goes away to university. I've got a Canadian passport, a British passport, an American.

[Leo Laporte]

Where would you go? Just.

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, I'm completely passport, so I could go to the EU and because my grandfather was a Polish citizen, so I.

[Leo Laporte]

Hear there's a train company there that's looking for. Yeah, exactly, Inspectors.

[Cory Doctorow]

So I wouldn't necessarily go to Poland, but there's 27 countries that it happened.

[Leo Laporte]

All you need is a Schengen Pass passport and you're anywhere. Yeah, so.

[Cory Doctorow]

So, you know, making it easy for people to leave means that they don't have to put up with the bull of the people running the place. And the fact is that Mark Zuckerberg has made it as hard as possible for people to leave. So, you know, Mark Zuckerberg has these incredible moderation, free speech, absolutist policies where you can talk, you know, foment genocide. But if you mention Pixel Fed, which is an Instagram competitor that runs unbelievable. On the Metaverse on the, on the, on the Fediverse, if you mention Pixel Fed on Instagram, you'll have your account suspended. If you tell people how to leave Instagram, they'll suspend your account. If you tell people to murder their neighbors, they're like, no problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's important too. This isn't, this isn't just Facebook. This is all of Meta. So it's threads, it's Instagram, it's Facebook. Yeah. And no. So X, you're still on X for the Same reason you don't want to leave your friends. But X uses community notes and they seem to work okay. Some people, we were talking about this on Wednesday on this Week in Google and Paris or Jeff said, well, what about brigading community notes? What about, you know, moderating? That's possible too, right?

[Cory Doctorow]

It's possible. And moderators make mistakes. I mean, you don't. What you want is defense in depth. What you want is community. More than one set of community notes, potentially, you know, Minority Report. What you want is like, you know, you think about all the stuff Slashdot did for moderation, where you have an independent panel that's evaluating moderation and so on. So, like, your chance of getting to be a moderator goes down if your own moderation calls are downranked by meta moderators and whatever. There's a lot of different ways to design this. And some people, that's the game they want to play. They're not on Twitter to talk about Twitter. They're on Twitter to like think about how Twitter works. And same with Flashdot back in the day. And they'll happily do this all day long.

[Leo Laporte]

Let them.

[Cory Doctorow]

You know, this is like, for a certain kind of person, this is model.

[Leo Laporte]

UN the truth is, Mark's not. This is lip service. Mark doesn't care about that. That whether it works or not, right?

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. No, he doesn't care at all. Mark wants to make a lot of money and have no accountability.

[Leo Laporte]

The main thing is to avoid accountability, to be able to say something that makes people go, oh, okay, good.

[Cory Doctorow]

There's a thing called Will Hoyt's Law that conservatism consists of one principle. That there are in groups whom the law protects but does not bind and out groups whom the law binds but does not protect. Mark Zuckerberg wants to live in an environment where all of his rights are protected, but he does not have to respect anyone else's rights and everything else.

[Leo Laporte]

Roots for me but thee, but not for me. Yeah. I love, by the way, that law. The Hoyt's.

[Cory Doctorow]

Whose law is it? Will Hoyt, Frank Wilhoyt and not the Frank Wilhoyo everyone knows. The other Frank Wilhoyt. There's two. The guy who everyone knows in his Wikipedia entry has an entry for Will Hoyt's Law to say, this is not the guy who came up with Will Hoyt's Law. One L and Wil Hoyt. It'll probably come out.

[Leo Laporte]

That's at Francis W. Francis Wilhoyt.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, that's not the guy.

[Leo Laporte]

This is not the Will Hoyt. But this is the one that has the entry that says this quotation is often incorrectly attributed to Francis Wilhaugh. It was actually a 2018 blog response by a 59 year old Ohio composer, Frank Wilhoyt.

[Cory Doctorow]

Frank Wilhelm, they're all called Frank Welhight.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a, it's a very, I like the, I very much like the law. So you're still on Meta, aren't you, Father?

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I am on no meta platforms whatsoever. I'm not on Facebook, I'm not on WhatsApp. I'm not on Instagram. I haven't been for about 14 years now.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, I call that being a Zucker vegan.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I know I was big into it and my job required it for a while, but once I was able to separate.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's a, kind of my attitude is I don't want threads, Instagram or Facebook, but I have to kind of, I kind of have to be there at least things to see, like for instance, how community Notes are going. So I have, I maintain journalistic accounts there, but I, I, I don't enjoy it. I did get rid of my Facebook account for a long time, but I realized I was missing the, the story sometimes. How about you? Are you Nicholas? Are you, yeah. Facebook user or just like me, a Looky Lou?

[Nicholas De Leon]

The actual blue app, Facebook, I don't use very often. Actually. WhatsApp, I use every day. I talk to some friends back in New York and all my family, crucially, is all on WhatsApp.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the problem, isn't it?

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah, well, I mean, it's funny, like if you were to ask them about any of this like content moderation stuff, they would have no idea what you're talking about. Even if you explain to them, they would be like, I, I don't want to hear this.

[Leo Laporte]

I get the same thing when I say, oh, look how awful Twitter's becoming. People say, what are you talking about?

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah, no, I'm still on X too. I, I feel like one of the few remaining, you know, quote unquote journalists on X. But a lot of the sports guys, you know, Fabiche Romano, like a lot of the kind of mainstream I'm on, if I'm on the X for any like actual reason other than like sending silly Seinfeld gifts or whatever, it's like it's for sports report and they're all still there and none of them are right, I don't see any of this sort of like discussion.

[Leo Laporte]

And honestly, when the fires were going on in la, the most up to Date fastest info was coming to me on X. And by the way, faster than the news networks, for sure. Yeah. So there are reasons it's still there. Maybe we can save it. I don't know. Should we try to save Meta? No. What happened, by the way? I thought Meta was all about the Metaverse. What happened that. What happened to that metaverse.

[Cory Doctorow]

Leo? Don't tell me you still have legs.

[Leo Laporte]

I still have legs.

[Cory Doctorow]

Jesus Christ.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, I wish to God that the Metaverse lived up to its promise, because once we close the studio, I am living in a virtual world. I'm all alone in my little attic, and all of you guys are out there in the. In the. In the verse. Whatever verse. The. The zoom verse. And I would like some friends.

[Nicholas De Leon]

I feel like I did a Metaverse story for CR right around that time. Basically, Zero. People read it like it was not a. It's not. It's even like a nerdy. Even like a nerdy topic. It's, like, way down the list of, like, things people were into.

[Leo Laporte]

That's actually something I grapple with all the time.

[Cory Doctorow]

All the Metaverse users read it.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Zero, perhaps. Actually, yeah.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I. I have abandoned the Metaverse for. For all of my relatives over the age of 70 who now use that almost exclusively. So they. They're in there. They're. They've got their. Their WhatsApp, they've got their post.

[Leo Laporte]

Not the VR stuff. Just the.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Not the VR stuff. They wouldn't know what to do with the VR stuff, honestly. And just like most of us would know what to do with the VR stuff. It's. Look, I have. Moving over to Blue sky slowly. It's made me realize I spent the better part of two decades building up social media presences for companies that I now display, and I really don't want to do that again. I really don't want to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you are an unwitting pawn. You thought you were putting content out, but in fact, it was building them their businesses.

[Cory Doctorow]

So. I want to be on Blue sky really badly. It sounds great, but I feel like they have built a nightclub, they've invited 17 million people to it, and they haven't installed any fire exits. Yeah, right. The fact that they. They say that they're going to have federations someday, but they have not prioritized it in their development timeline, and they have made it so that if the CEO gets kicked out by their VCs from Blockchain Capital and replaced with someone who starts doing the same stuff that Elon Musk did, then there's no way for you to go. You have exactly the same Anatevka problem. And what's really worrying about this is if they actually did have federation that like, they keep saying they were going to have. They've said this since day one, that they were going to have this. They've never delivered it. If they had real federation, then if the VC came along and said, all right, you've got to make everything worse. You got to insertify it, you could imagine the CEO saying, well, you know that if we do that, everyone's going to leave. Right, right, right. One of the reasons that VCs ask you to do this is they don't think you'll lose user. Lose users as a result.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You know, and everybody loves stickiness.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Ironically, Threads is more federated. Blue Sky. Ironically, there's been a bit of stuff on Mastodon about what are we going to do about threads?

[Cory Doctorow]

Because there's no moderation with Threads existing and being federated with Mastodon. I know that's not a popular opinion in the Fediverse, but I feel like it makes it easier for people to leave Facebook and go to Mastodon.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Cory Doctorow]

It's providing a path that I do.

[Leo Laporte]

Not block Threads on my social because it's a way to follow people who are not elsewhere.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't have a problem with that if it's a lot of. But if, you know, I moderate pretty actively and if somebody. If some. Some. An account is appalling, I just block it. And you can easily block an account rather than block the server. So.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Do you guys get any sense that people are tiring of social media? Like, it feels like every other. Like, oh, I gotta leave X now. I gotta join Blue Sky. Like, I don't want to join. Another thing to have to leave in two years. Like, it's. I've been doing this for, what, 20 years of like, popping between. It's like, I don't know, I'd rather like go on a walk with, you know, with my dog or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree with you, but I want a social group and unfortunately, I don't have one locally so much. I. I'm building as fast as I can.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

But. But most of the people I know, we are united not by geography, but by interests. Yes. And. And that's where I meet those people. So I remember something like that when.

[Nicholas De Leon]

When I was a teenager, I was huge into pro wrestling and so some of my first kind of like, online social interactions were like, pro wrestling dedicated message board. So it's like I don't know. These people, these people were all across. All over the world, actually. But we had a thing in common. We liked watching. And so that was like how you formed friendships. And now that's way easier. You know, you don't have to jump on Usenet to do that anymore. Anymore. Now you can open up threads or whatever the Instagram, whatever the case may be. So there's clearly like, people want to do something like this, where you hang out with folks who are into what you're into, but it just feels like the experience is just so, like, bad a lot of the times that's like, you know what? You can't crack this nut.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I'm just gonna. I'm gonna reopen my old bbs and that's the only social I'm gonna do. People can dial in and let's go.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, and you know, lines though, because otherwise it gets too busy.

[Cory Doctorow]

It used to be that, you know, in the days of BBs and magazines and whatever is that although we didn't have social media, if you were interested in wrestling, you could get a wrestling magazine and then maybe find a wrestling fanzine in the back pages and so on. Exactly. And. And if you were someone who wanted to write about wrestling, there was someone who might pay you to do it, or at least an audience for it. And now all of that stuff is on social media. So I think about, you know, books. I write for one of the big five publishers. I'm a Macmillan author. And there aren't, you know, hundreds or dozens of newspapers and magazines that review science fiction novels anymore. There used to be. There's one science fiction trade magazine holding on by the skin of its Teeth, Locust Magazine. I write for them. I've written a column for them for 15 years. And they're just, just eking by. And so the thing is, if we get rid of social media, it's not that. It's not that we won't get rid of something terrible. There's lots terrible that we'll get rid of. But how will anyone sell a book and how will anyone write about a subject of interest? Like, how will we. What's the transitional phase between social media.

[Leo Laporte]

And if we get rid of AM radio, how are you going to sell a record?

[Cory Doctorow]

It's. Well, the problem is this is a roach motel. Communities check in, but they don't check out.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

So if you can move the communities off social media, if you can move.

[Leo Laporte]

Them to, though, Corey, what would it look like? Would it look like Usenet? Would it look like Slash. What would a successful social media, a safe, successful social media network look like?

[Cory Doctorow]

I think it would be a protocol that would federate Mastodon, Blue sky and whatever comes next, all of them. And you could just follow people wherever they were. And you'd be on Blue sky because you like the Blue sky vibe. But there'd be no Posse is different. I do Posse, post on site, share everywhere, or syndicate everywhere where I have a canonical link that's my own website, pluralistic.net.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. I copy and paste into Tumblr and Mastodon and Twitter.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not good. I use Micro Blog. I use Manton Reese's Microblog and it does post to Mastodon. This is my posse. Mastodon threads LinkedIn. I think they just added. So he's slowly building something that will post everywhere.

[Cory Doctorow]

Does it look good? Because my experience has been that every time I do this, it doesn't look good. It doesn't feel like a native post.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yes, it does. Oh, it does. It does a nice job of it. Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He's really thoughtful. You know, he's part of the automated tools. He's part of the decentralized web movement, you know, and he's done. I think it's been around almost 10 years now. Micro Blog. And I think he's got the right idea and he's quite accomplished at it, I think.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Anyway, my organization has been doing really good social media for a very long time. It's a way that you can get information. If you can get out, you can touch grass.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. If you just build a building in every community where people can gather.

[Cory Doctorow]

It was really good. Except for that one period where they got very angry about some books.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they had the same problem. It was. They didn't. You could check in, but they didn't really want you to check out.

[Cory Doctorow]

That's right.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Oh, no, we have people checking out all the time now.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, you're being facetious, but actually that's what we're trying to duplicate. Yeah. Is that is the community. The kinds of communities we had in religious communities or communities of any kind. We don't really have communities anymore.

[Cory Doctorow]

Kiwanis. Lions.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there is a. There is a Lions Club. And the Moose Lodge in town was. Was kind of thinly populated by people who were superannuated. And I had a bunch of friends in their 40s who said, you know, if we all got together, we could actually take it over.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And they have a nice little clubhouse and they did.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, they've got, they've got prime real estate. They've got cheap beer. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

There's the only bad thing was in order to become official, you had to go to the big moose convention.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, really? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And there is an oath you have to give pledging fealty to God or something that they were. Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

A lot of these are religious. A bunch of them also used to have really racist policies.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And so they, I think there was some discomfort with the oath, but they, they got over the discomfort because the lodge was pretty nice.

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, you know, the advantage in the era of COVID is you go to the swearing in ceremony wearing a mask and not recite.

[Leo Laporte]

They'll never know. Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

And they'll never know.

[Leo Laporte]

Guys, wise shut.

[Cory Doctorow]

Ask me about my U.S. citizenship ceremony.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, all the presidents. Come on.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

You know, most U.S. citizens couldn't pass the citizenship test.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, U.S. citizens could. But that's because we don't need to. We were born here.

[Cory Doctorow]

I got into an argument with my examiner because she was like, what. What is the economic system of America? And I said, I know the answer is capitalism, but it's technically a mixed market economy because the single largest employer is the federal government. It's the Pentagon. And you cannot tell me that a country whose largest employer is the federal government is a capitalist economy, is formerly a mixed market economy. Just like. Just say it's capitalism.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I have to check this box. I work for that group. Come on, let's go.

[Leo Laporte]

I saw the name Cory Doctorow on the list. I was gonna have some problems. That's hysterical. Did you really say that? That?

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah, we had a whole discussion.

[Leo Laporte]

God bless you. I love it. It's a mixed market economy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's fair. I think that counts. They should give you credit.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's. Let's take a break. We are doing a wild twit. Let me tell you, as always. Father Robert. I should have known. Corey. Father Robert. Robert. Nicholas. It was going to be crazy. It was just going to be the day after.

[Cory Doctorow]

See?

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

It was going to be in the Computer Chaos Congress. Did they change the name to Chaos Communication Congress?

[Cory Doctorow]

It's the club is called the Chaos Computing Club. The conference is called the Chaos Communications Congress. It's very confusing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I always just call it the Chaos Computer Conference, but okay.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

By the way, Corey, you know that you were evoked in the this year's DEFCON badge, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, I saw that. There was an inshinification. I spoke at defcon this year. I guess we Missed each other. But yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So what. How was the. There was an insidification thing in the DEFCON badge.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Yeah. So the badge this year was. Every other year is an electronic badge. And they built it off of a newly released Raspi that drove a little screen and there was a mini game. And in the mini game, Cory Doctorow is mentioned several times and the theory of.

[Cory Doctorow]

Very flattering. That badge was also the source of a giant controversy, which I.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Yes, it was. Yes. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What. What.

[Cory Doctorow]

Whether the contributors got paid and whether they. Over their source code the way they were supposed to. And there was just a whole. Like.

[Leo Laporte]

I could just tell you for sure. Not mentioned in the GitHub badge.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

No. So the. The creator of the badge actually did a talk and was escorted off the stage from his talk because he. It. It was bad blood going.

[Cory Doctorow]

Complicated.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's good.

[Cory Doctorow]

I couldn't figure out who was in the right. I. I spent. That's the thing to figure it out. And I was like, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Nope. Yep.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I've heard both sides and they both sound good.

[Leo Laporte]

You ought to know that. That's important. Yeah. That damn Martin Luther guy will never get over that.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I'm still trying to fix the door. It's got a big nail hole in it.

[Cory Doctorow]

Racist views.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he was a. He was actually an anti Semite.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

And yeah, it wasn't so great. I have access to all the works and all the letters and yeah, when.

[Leo Laporte]

I found that out, I was kind of disappointed a little bit.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

But it's also that.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, it was a different time.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

It's a different time. I read the archives from Jesuits who were on mission in Asia and there are a couple there who, if they were alive today, you'd be looking them going, you are the most racist person I've ever met. They had good intentions, but crazy racist.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, look what they did with the Indian churches in the United States. Or the Indian schools, rather, in the United States. I mean, it's tragic, it's horrible, it's horrific.

[Cory Doctorow]

I hear he was good to his mother.

[Leo Laporte]

Mrs. Luther loved her little boy, that's for sure. Marty, come here.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

She used to nail his chores on the door.

[Leo Laporte]

You and those theses again with the theses over and over. You'll go blind. Okay, you win, Corey. Our show today, brought to you by Threat Locker. We've talked before about Zero Trust. It is such a brilliant, simple concept and the best way to harden your security. Never worry about zero days. Supply chain attacks. Threat Locker solves the problem worldwide. Companies like JetBlue Trust, Threat Locker you know, there was another airline that trusted another company. Didn't work out so good. Trust, trust. JetBlue Trusts Threat Locker to secure their data and keep their business operations flying high, if you know what I mean. So the idea, and it's very simple, it's deceptively simple, is you take a proactive and this is the key deny by default approach to cybersecurity. You know, just because somebody's in the network doesn't mean they're good guys, right? You know that now, right? You. So you block every action, every process, every user unless explicitly authorized by your team. It's simple, right? And Threat Locker not only helps you do this, it provides a full audit for every action which makes risk management and compliance a snap. Their 247 US based support team will fully support onboarding and beyond. So they make it very easy to implement and it's remarkably affordable. I was shocked, I went, you know, I said well we should do this. I couldn't believe it. Stop the exploitation of trusted applications within your organization. Keep your business secure, protected from ransomware. Organizations across any industry can benefit from Threat Lockers ring fencing by isolating critical and trusted applications from unintended uses or weaponizing limiting attackers lateral movement around the network. Work. They just, they just can't. Oh, and another great thing, Threat Locker works for Macs too. So your entire enterprise can be protected. Get unprecedented visibility and control of your cybersecurity quickly, easily and cost effectively with Threat Locker. Zero Trust endpoint protection platform. Really an amazing group. Get a free 30 day trial. Learn more. How about how Threat Locker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. Threatlocker.com threatlocker.com and by the way, their big event is coming up next month. This is exciting. I wish I could go. I can't, I'm tied up. But I would love to. I know. I think Jonathan Bennett from Untitled Linux show is going. Zero Trust World is coming up and for a limited time you can visit 0trustworld.threatlocker.com We've got a special code. I want you to use this so they know that you know, you saw it here. ZTW. That's for Zero Trust World. Twit 25. That's a lot. That's a lot of W's in there. ZTW Twit 25. You'll save $200 off registration for Zero Trust World 2025. You get access to all the sessions. There are hands on hacking labs, you even get meals. There's an after party. It is the Most interactive hands on cyber security learning event of the year. I'm so bummed I'm going to miss it. February 19th through the 21st. It's also a great place to bring your family because it's the Caribbe Royale in Orlando, so they can be off doing something else. While you're learning about the latest security tools, be sure to register with the code ZTWIT25ZTW for Zero TrustWorld. You wouldn't think that'd be a good thing, but Zero Trust is a good thing. Zero trustworld.threatlocker.com and don't forget that code to save 200 bucks off your registration. Thank you Threat Locker for supporting our team and our fans and for supporting the show. We appreciate it you support it when you go to that address, especially if you use that code. ZTW Twit25 this is really upsetting. The Heritage foundation has decided that if they can't control it, they don't want it. And they are going after Wikipedia editors. They told the people planning to donate to Heritage foundation that's part of their work to combat anti Semitism. It is not to combat anti Semitism. They're going to target volunteer editors on Wikipedia, the folks who've made Wikipedia one of the biggest successes of the Internet. The Heritage foundation, which is of course a conservative think tank, says that those editors are abusing their position by publishing content the group believes to be anti Semitic. What it is is, by the way, Heritage foundation created the Project 2025 policy blueprint for the Trump administration. What it is is just like Elon, they want you to. They don't want any independent media. They want you to get your information from approved sources. Not this Wikipedia thing. Thing. Do not fall for this. Corey, you have anything? I see a link here popping up.

[Cory Doctorow]

I dropped in a link to Molly White's commentary on this.

[Leo Laporte]

This is where I found out about. I love Molly is a longtime editor of Wikipedia. She started when she was a kid. Yeah, she is just the greatest. She of course created the Web three is going just great website and her citation needed newsletter had this article, Elon Musk and the Rights war on Wikipedia.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, she's really, really. She really nails it. I mean obviously we're talking about a real mismatch here where you have individuals who are volunteering in their spare time. So not proposing to unmask astroturfers who are paid contributors who are, you know, sneaking in and, and, and making edits in bad faith. Whatever. These are people who are pseudonymous or Sometimes even reveal their real names who are, in their spare time, trying to take one of the best things on the Internet and in the history of the Internet and keep it good and make it better. And they're targeting them. It's really cool. Quite disgusting. I have a great bit of trivia for you about Molly White, if you'd like.

[Leo Laporte]

I would love it. She's been on our shows. We love her.

[Cory Doctorow]

So I had breakfast with her at south by last year or the year before, and we had a lovely chat. And she said at the end, you know, I'm. I'm. I'm so ambivalent about copyright. And it's weird because I'm about to become the executor of my grandfather's literary estate. I said, oh, that's interesting. Did he write a memoir? And she said, no. Oh, I'm Molly White. He's E.B.

[Leo Laporte]

White. She's E.B. white's granddaughter.

[Cory Doctorow]

She's the Elements of Style lady. Your. Your Oxford commas.

[Leo Laporte]

I got the book right here. Not to mention the Once and Future King.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. Which now do you have Elements of Style or Charlotte's Web right here?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't have Charlotte's Web right here, but I do have Elements of Style right here.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I love Charlotte's Web. I have Charlotte Webb. Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right next to the Giving Tree and Father Robert. I suppose that the very definitive views that E.B. white had about whether Jesus takes an S after the apostrophe bears on your work every day.

[Leo Laporte]

He said ancient.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Something I consider every morning.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see if I can remember this. You always have apostrophe s, even if it's the Joneses, but. Well, that's not a good example. But even if it ends with this, except for Jesus, because ancient names, you could have just an apostrophe. Is that right, Corey? Am I right? Am I remembering that?

[Cory Doctorow]

That is my recollection. You should ask.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. Let me go get. She's E.B. white's granddaughter.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. How amazing is that?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and I think if E.B. white wants to copyright all this stuff to hell. I think go right ahead.

[Cory Doctorow]

Actually, it started entering the public domain this year.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. 1924 and 1929 for music, right.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. So the first. The first EB White works entered the public domain. Entered the public domain this year. So it won't be for very long.

[Leo Laporte]

So she doesn't have to worry about it for too long. He did write the Once in Future King, right?

[Cory Doctorow]

I think so.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's My favorite Arthurian legend book. It's wonderful. Of course, Charlotte's Web is probably his best known work and every writer.

[Cory Doctorow]

Th. White.

[Leo Laporte]

Th. You're right. You're right. I got the wrong White.

[Cory Doctorow]

Okay, sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

What else do you write besides Charlotte's web then?

[Cory Doctorow]

E.B.

[Leo Laporte]

White.

[Cory Doctorow]

Biblio.

[Leo Laporte]

Looking it up on the old Wikipedia. I'm sure Molly's weighed in on this.

[Cory Doctorow]

He wrote the great guy.

[Leo Laporte]

Stuart Little.

[Cory Doctorow]

Stuart Little, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Great Stuart Little. What a great.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, he's Math Bibliography.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. One of the great. One of the greats. Oh, geez. And you know, his haircut looks just like Molly's. So I think.

[Cory Doctorow]

And they kind of look alike when you look at the pictures.

[Leo Laporte]

They do. There's a. There's a resemblance. So she is a perfect example of why Wikipedia works. People really who are committed and yes, they have a mechanism to handle bias, to handle cheating, you know, and I think it's. It's remarkable document that is on the moon now.

[Cory Doctorow]

It's not like there haven't been problems. It's not like there haven't been shills, and it's not like there haven't been bad calls on Wikipedia. And I think there's room even for legitimate debate about kind of the standards for notability. And all that, you know, you often hear from people is like, well, I know a thing is true about me, and Wikipedia won't let me say it for a while.

[Leo Laporte]

My article said I'd written. Written for Hustler magazine and that was right.

[Cory Doctorow]

But those are all legitimate things that I think Wikipedia should strive to improve. And I hope they will.

[Leo Laporte]

They do.

[Cory Doctorow]

And I don't think that. That. I don't think that doxing and terrorizing volunteer Wikipedia editors is going to help. Help.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, she's talking about the tweets that came from Elon Musk on Christmas Eve.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Stop donating to Wokopedia. What is wrong with him? I think it's all the Diet Coke.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

He's bored.

[Leo Laporte]

He has a lot of money, a lot of diet. Did you see the picture of his bedside table? It's like litter. It's like, littered with Diet Coke cans.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

It's just OIC vials and Diet Coke.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Elon. Oh.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I mean, Wikipedia is so transparent. That's. That's the thing that makes it work. You can see the edits, you can see when they were made. You can see who they were made by.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

So I never stop at the document when I'm looking at something that might be controversial. I will always look at what edits have been made in the last couple of months. And that gives me a really good indication of whether or not this is information that I have. Have to have to fact check again and again and again. I mean, I don't know of any other source that lets me do that.

[Leo Laporte]

It always bugs me when I hear a school banning the use of Wikipedia for school papers.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Shouldn't be your only NYU for college. And they were very, I remember the journalism program, they were like, if you even like go to Wikipedia on your, your laptop, you're in trouble.

[Leo Laporte]

I was, I guarantee you the same program is saying, but chat GPT, no problem. Problem.

[Cory Doctorow]

I don't know.

[Nicholas De Leon]

It is today. This was a while ago.

[Cory Doctorow]

Was that when Clay Shirky was running the J School or, or before?

[Nicholas De Leon]

This would have been 2005, 6. So I don't know who was in charge.

[Cory Doctorow]

I think that was before. I think he was still just ITP then because I cannot imagine Clay sanctioning that policy.

[Nicholas De Leon]

That would be. And I was like, you know, huge nerd. Obviously. I was like, are you like, okay? You know, you can't really fight your professors and that type of thing. But it was very discouraging.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, I believe it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So one of the things they're spreading is the lie that the wiki, that when you donate to Wikipedia, you're not donating to the online encyclopedia, but instead the Wikimedia foundation, which is some sort of left wing, you know, something or other.

[Cory Doctorow]

I mean the foundation does fund a bunch of stuff, you know, like if they identify areas that are systematically undercovered in the, the corpus, they might, you know, try and figure out how to encourage more contribution. I don't think they pay contributors. I wouldn't swear to it, but I don't think they. They pay contributors, I think, but they do have a pretty active program, as you'd hope they would, of trying to figure out how to get more contributors to under contributed areas and under under resourced languages, you know, outreach, that kind of thing. How do we get these experts to come and be a part of our project?

[Leo Laporte]

You know, and of course people in power don't like Wikipedia or the Wikimedia foundation because they stand up to power. In 2017, they denied Turkey's attempt to force the site to alter information about the Turkish government's support for terrorist organizations. This is Molly White writing. The foundation has likewise resisted threats from the US refusing to submit from legal threats from the FBI in 2010 after they demanded Wikipedia stop using an image of the FBI seat Seal. A seal we all paid for, by the way.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. Public domain.

[Leo Laporte]

And in 2015, filing suit against the NSA over its upstream mass surveillance program.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Powers that be don't like that. They're uppity. This uppity Wikimedia Foundation.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I'm not allowed to make any edits to anything about the Vatican or the saints or the Society of Jesus, because all when I'm at my workplace, I come up with a Vatican ip.

[Leo Laporte]

You come up with a dot va. So they block you.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

They block me.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's fine.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I understand it, I get it. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I, yeah, they aren't quite as effective in blocking. Like, in theory, they, they can't stop me from editing my own article, but I never would.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, and, but you can. And by the way, you can always tell when somebody's doing that. You know, Leo laporte is the good looking podcaster who's been dominating the podcast airwave since 20 2005.

[Cory Doctorow]

And I, I think we can all agree that like the, the. Every publication, irrespective of how it's made, should strive to get better. And none of them are perfect.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

And Wikipedia is imperfect, but it's imperfect in ways that are different from the ways other. Other media are imperfect. And it, it is complementary to them in many ways because it doesn't have the same blind spots. There may be some blind spots, but they're not the same ones. And so there are a lot of gaps that Wikipedia fills that other publications wouldn't. I do think it's an unalloyed good, which doesn't mean it's perfect. And I don't think there's a single Wikipedian who would say it was perfect. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

But you. We need more sources of information, not fewer.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And we need more independent sources of information, not fewer. I mean it. Anyway, I think we're preaching to the choir here. If you support this independent source of information. I think one of the things that we do that's really contrary to the general flow of online media is we don't do link bait. The closest I do to link bait here is, is the crazy headlines. And my staff hates it because they say it doesn't reflect the content. I said, well, how do you reflect the content of a three hour show with ten words? You can't. So I gave up on that entirely. We believe in spreading more light than heat, and we really appreciate those of you who support our work here. Of course we're ad supported, but ads don't cover the entire cost of what we do not even close. Our club is a huge part of our revenue stream. In fact, the club pays about half of our payroll, which you know is vital to keeping this going. If you're not a member of the club, we try to make it affordable. Only seven bucks a month. We try to make it easy to join and we give you benefits. We give you ad free versions of the show shows. You're paying us so you don't need to hear ads, although you can. There are a number of people who still subscribe to the ad laden feeds because they like the ads. Thank you. You also get access to the Club Twit Discord which is now there's a community I can get behind. I love the Club Twit Discord. You've got a bunch of really interesting smart people talking not just about our shows but about everything that's going on in the world of geeks. And you can see here's somebody talking about the Suno theme I just posted there. Are you interested in the US Open? I don't know what you know, there's all sorts of stuff going on in here. But you also get special events. Stacey Higginbotham's book club is in here every other month. I think we're going to end up doing Orbital, which Stacy warned us is a difficult book. But I think it's going to be fun to talk about Micah's crafting corner. Every month a cozy chill crafting session. You can bring your own craft. We also do photo time with Chris Marquardt. We just did ours last Thursday. Lots of other events, special events we put on in the club to make it a club. Right? It's a club. That's the whole idea. If you're not a member, become one of us. Twit TV Club Twit. And thanks in advance. We really appreciate our club members. They make it possible for us to stream. Oh and Joe is volunteering. Thank you Joe for we had a wonderful photo walk when I was in New York City a couple of months ago and I guess I'll be back in New York City when Hank opens his restaurants. So yeah, we'll do a photo walk and maybe I'll even throw the sandwiches in. So join the club so you can hear about those and other events. Twit TV Club Twit. And a happy birthday to Roberto who is now a senior citizen. 65 years old. You still seem as youthful as ever and just as handsome. Let me see if I can find the find your post. Look at you guys. Is that your friend Pete. What did you have? Did you have pizza? And now Roberto would like you and me to sing Happy Birthday. If I had my keyboard here, Roberto, I could play that. That is one of the songs I can play. I'll sing it. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Roberto. Happy birthday to you. You're a senior citizen now and you are actually starting to look your age. I've known Roberto for quite a while. Happy birthday, Roberto. Oh, one more thing. While you're there, club member or not, we do our annual survey at the first month of the year, every year. It's the only way we can. We don't spy on you. We can't. It's a podcast. RSS doesn't give us any way of monitoring you. So we ask you to fill out this survey. We're not interested in you as an individual, but as, as an aggregate audience because we like to be able to tell our advertisers, you know, 75% of our audience. Actually, it's more like 80%. Are it decision makers, things like that. It also helps us tailor our programming to your interests. That's at Twitt TV survey shouldn't take you more than 10 minutes and it really helps us out a lot. So if you haven't yet taken the survey, a couple more weeks to do that. I think we'll stop at the end of the month. Twit TV Survey. Thank you. Thank you for doing that. We'll be back with more of this week in tech and our amazing panel. But first, a word from our sponsor, US Cloud. Now, I love these guys. I had never, I'd be honest, I had never heard of them. And I got on a phone call with them and I said, well, what do you, what do you do US Cloud? We said, well, we are the number one Microsoft Unified support replacement. We do Microsoft support. I said, oh, that's cool. And why would, why would people use US Cloud? Well, they gave me a bunch of reasons. We've been talking for a few months now about US Cloud. They are, besides being the global leader in third party Microsoft support for enterprises, they support 50 of the Fortune 500. But one of the things they told me is switching the US cloud can save your business 30 to 50% over Microsoft Unified and Premiere support. I said, well, that's great, but if it's cheaper, it's not as good, right? They said, no, it's better. It's less expensive and it's better, it's faster. In fact, twice as fast in average Time to resolution versus Microsoft, two times faster. And they're better because their engineers, they recruit the best engineers with huge experience and they're all based in the U.S. so you're talking, talking to people who really can help you fix the problem. And they do it faster. Now they can save you money in a new way. US Cloud is offering something they call their Azure Cost optimization services. If you use Azure, you definitely need this. I mean, honestly, when's the last time you went through your Azure bill? Line by line? If it's been a while, you almost certainly have something I call Azure Sprawl. A little spend creep going on. You know, servers and VMs running and you didn't. You've been running them for years. You forgot about them completely. You, nobody's using them. Good news. US Cloud offers an eight week Azure engagement. It's powered by VBox. It will identify key opportunities to reduce costs across your entire Azure environment. When I did this ad the other day, somebody in our discord said, yeah, we had servers running for four years, $50,000 a month we'd completely forgotten about. That's a big difference, right? You'll get this expert guidance, access to US cloud senior engineers. They have an average of over 16 years with Microsoft products. At the end of the eight weeks, your interactive dashboard will identify, rebuild and downscale opportunities and unused resources. Which means you can reallocate those precious IT dollars towards ST you really need. Or invest your Azure savings in US Cloud's Microsoft support. Completely eliminate your unified spend. Sam, the technical operations manager at Bead Gaming, he gave US Cloud five stars. He said, we found some things that have been running for three years. Same story, right? No one was checking. These VMs were what, I don't know, 10 grand a month. Not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spent on Azure. Well, that kind of adds up. Once we got to 40 or 50,000amonth, it really started to add up. Oh, he's saying what I said. It's simple. Stop overpaying for Azure, identify and eliminate Azure creep and boost your performance all in eight weeks with US Cloud. And of course, you can use that money to get some replace your Microsoft Premier Services. Visit uscloud.com, book a call today. Find out how much your team can save US Cloud faster, better Microsoft support for less. Hey, here's something the CFPB wants to do, which I think is great. They want to protect your Robux.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Yeah, good.

[Leo Laporte]

In a new proposal issued Friday. This is from Wired magazine, the consumer Financial Protection Bureau seeks to regulate virtual currencies like my Simpsons donuts or your Roblox bucks.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Leo, I have to ask, in your best estimation, how many donuts did you buy?

[Leo Laporte]

$300 worth of donuts, and I. And I can't get them back. The problem isn't so much idiots like me spending money on virtual stuff that I shouldn't be. The problem is scammers and hackers. Yeah, the. The proposed rule from the CFPB would interpret terms in the Electronic Fund Transfer act, which will protect you against things like ACHS and Zelle and stuff like that, to include some virtual currencies supplied by gaming and crypto companies. It is not unusual that you will lose assets, hackers will steal your assets as you're transferring them and so forth. In fact, Robux can be converted into US dollars. So we're not just talking donuts here. This ain't just donuts. This is money. Real money. Another. Another nice move from Rohit Chopra. I. Is he. So we don't know what's happening with this?

[Cory Doctorow]

I don't know. Someone probably knows. It might be. He might have announced it. We're getting close to the wire here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

On January 20th. So there may be an announcement, but I have not seen it a week from tomorrow. I've been pretty busy. I've been. I'm writing a documentary series for the cbc, the Canadian broadcaster, and I've just been heads down on.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you. What is that about? About.

[Cory Doctorow]

About insidification. It's called who Killed the Internet?

[Leo Laporte]

You know, we're going bad, yet it's not. I'm not dead yet, but we're going.

[Cory Doctorow]

Back and forth on the, on the structure and kind of what. Where I think we're probably going to end up landing. I'm actually writing something about it for Pluralistic today. Let's just point out that a lot of the decisions that we see in our history that are, you know, really disastrous in retrospect, like, like, you know, Section 121 of the DMCA or whatever, that they were warned when these policies were being discussed that it would come to this. And then it came to this. And you can't really say, like, well, who could have predicted? Why. Why blame us? Because they're to blame. And so we're going to point out that these people are alive, they're around, they're here in our world. They're often very wealthy and respected and they made these bad calls and never took any kind of heat for it. And we're gonna put some heat on Them. There's a couple of Canadian lawmakers who consulted on Canada's version of the DMCA. They got 6, 500 comments saying that it was a terrible idea and 50 comments saying that it was a good idea. And the minister responsible guy called James Moore is now very wealthy. White shoe lawyer gave a speech where he said, we're going to throw away those 6,500 comments because they are the babyish views of radical extremists.

[Leo Laporte]

Extremists, of course, like Cory Doctorow. Yeah, yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

So we should just take these people and hold them to account when, when, when you make a decision in the teeth of expert advice and then it's a disaster. Someone should point that out in the future.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, congratulations. I know insidification was the official word of the year last year. Macquarie Dictionary has named it the word of the year 2024 as well.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, and the new scientists made in shit a scene. It's word of the year as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that our era? Have we decided it's not the Anthropocene? It's the insidious scene. Okay.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Ask Corey a question, as it's not really something we talk about at cr, really, but like, is there a single moment or single event that you could point to when the Internet. Because now I feel like you log in. Everyone hates the Internet. Like, who likes using this anymore? Is there. Was there a decision, Was there a company, something that clicked and it's like, like the BCAD of all this stuff? Or is that like the wrong way to look at this?

[Cory Doctorow]

So I think that what happened, you know, the engine ification at its root is about the idea that people who are no better and no worse than they were 25 years ago who are running these companies lost the constraint that used to stop them from wrecking things. So they used to have to worry about competitors and regulators and their own powerful workforce and interoperability. And each one of those things kind of disappeared. They were all eroded. And they were eroded because of policy choices, right? The decision not to enforce antitrust law law, the decision to weaken unions, the decision to expand IP law to block interoperability, the decision to allow these regulators to be captured and not to update privacy law and so on. These were all choices that were made and they got easier to make, right. The more power these tech firms had, the easier it was for them to secure policies that gave them more power still. And so as a result, what you see is something like a, like a doubling curve, where for a very long time it's very Shallow, and then it gets steeper and steeper and then it just takes off. And so, you know, I think most of us would say that the last like eight years or so have been pretty bad. And what I think makes, makes this different from other times in history where you've seen individual platforms go sour, like MySpace or LiveJournal or whatever, various e commerce platforms, is that they all did it at once. Like, everything sucks all at once. There's no refuge from, from it. And, and that's the, that's what I think we're living through now. And I think that, that it's because the constraints have collapsed across the board sectorally and because digital stuff has moved into the real world. And so you can turn cars into subscription services, which is just not a thing that was, like, technically possible.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

And, you know, labor is now being mediated through apps in a way that they weren't before. There was a, an amazing report last week about how. How, or no, it was in December, about how nurses increasingly, rapidly, increasingly are not hired by hospitals anymore. They're, they're brought in through apps that do gig work. And these apps are buying commercial data on the nurses who work for them. And nurses who have higher credit card debt are offered less wages because the app assumes that if you're broke and if you have a big bill, you'll take a lower wage. And so this is just not stuff that was technically possible because our labor markets weren't mediated through apps in this way. And it was the systemic erosion of labor rights by gig platforms like Uber that opened the door for doing this to nurses.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's coming from both directions. You know, this is their capitalism there. We incentivize this, and then the means became available and the two together. And, and you've got, you know, it's not just nurses. I've seen evidence that, that you will pay more when you're online if your IP address comes from a wealthy location.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, 100% personalized pricing is on, on the buy side and on the sell side and with, you know, eshelf tags and so on. It's going to be in the retail environment as well.

[Leo Laporte]

New York City's started surge price pricing. After the hue and cry on that, you know, because it costs more to get into Manhattan during certain times of the day. I thought, oh, my, they must be 50, 60 bucks. It's $6.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, what the hell?

[Leo Laporte]

It's not. I mean, 6 bucks, we pay that much to go across the Golden Gate Bridge.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

No, we paid double that to Go across the Golden Gate Bridge.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. What people are upset about 6 bucks to get into Manhattan during 9 to 5?

[Nicholas De Leon]

I don't have seen any of the videos.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, it looks like that's disinformation. I don't think it's a ghost town.

[Nicholas De Leon]

No, not. But like it. I'm saying, like a lot of the advocates are like, oh, it appears to.

[Leo Laporte]

Be working, you know, and then, and, and then others are saying, depends where you are if you're on X. They saying, you see, it's killing the city.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. Restaurants are dying.

[Nicholas De Leon]

One side will say exactly that and then the other side will say, this is good because it's easier for people.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't want people. Yeah, I think it's. I think frankly they should ban private vehicles in all cities.

[Cory Doctorow]

But that's the problem is it's not a progressive tax. Right. So there's a large group in like a very.

[Leo Laporte]

Some people, six bucks is a lot. Yes.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. In a very unequal society, six bucks is a lot. And then for another group of people, it's nothing. And so you don't want it to be nothing and you don't want it to be a lot. Right. You want it to be some friction. And it's not just some friction where you have this very, very unequal society where some people are, are a little poorer every month and some people can just light 100 bills on fire all day long. And I don't know how you solve it. This came up in London. I mean, obviously bankers coming in from Chelsea had no problem with the congestion charging. And now they've got the ulas, which is the, the Ultra Low Emission Zone. It's still not a big deal. You know, people can afford, Bankers can afford it to come to the city. But you know, if you're a man with a van who does odd jobs and you come into the city.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true.

[Cory Doctorow]

It's. It's a big hit. And I don't know how to resolve it because I don't want to surveil people. It means testing sucks, you know, like, it's just. It is what it is.

[Leo Laporte]

But I understand our Manhattanites have corrected me. Professor Banda, Panda bear says it's $9. Sorry about that. And trucks and buses are $14 to $21, but still $21 divided among a bunch of truck deliveries. I saw restaurateurs saying, oh, we're going to have to pass this along to customers. Really?

[Cory Doctorow]

If you've got one customer and they have to pay $9, sure. At least nine customers. The extra dollar will probably be fine.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, like I said, Hank's open up in a restaurant in Manhattan and I don't know if he's addressed this yet, but those sandwiches are going to have to cost more. I'm sorry. It's not my fault. Blame Governor Hochschule. All right, let's see. Twitch streamers returning home. Talk about the rich getting richer. People like Ninja, who left Twitch to take a lot of money from Microsoft at Mixer. I forgot what Ninja got. It was millions of dollars. He left Twitch in 2019 for a deal with Microsoft's now defunct, by the way, mixer for $30 million. Mixer, he got to keep it.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

He got to keep it higher Package.

[Leo Laporte]

He got to keep it because Mixer flopped. He went back to YouTube. Myth received $4 million from YouTube over his two year contract. But they've all gone back to Twitch because the contracts ran out. They took the money and Twitch is the place to be, apparently. Even though Amazon's Twitch is apparently losing money right and left and they've been laying off people used to work at Twitch. Right, But Benito. But no, Gonzalez, I actually used to.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Work there at this very moment, at that moment when they were, when all the big.

[Leo Laporte]

When Ninja was abandoning them and Mixer.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Had just come up and they were, they're starting to buy up all the streamers. So I was working there at that time and yeah, that was definitely happening. And then, but this was inevitable.

[Nicholas De Leon]

This boomerang was inevitable because those companies don't.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

You're losing money on those contracts.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, this is what they said. They said YouTube doesn't care about live streaming anymore. Now they're all about short shorts.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Yeah, that's exactly it, right?

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, YouTube could afford 30 million. It's not, that's not the issue. Microsoft can afford it. But, but, but they've changed their priorities every five minutes.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

When you.

[Leo Laporte]

Valkyrie is going back after she. She left for five years and three contracts on YouTube. On Wednesday, she moved back to Twitch. But is Twitch going to survive? Benito, what do you think? I mean, you know, a lot of people were.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

It's a culture thing and like to Amazon, it's not a lot of money. No, they're not losing a lot of money. They're probably losing more on the web store still, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they're losing more on Alexa. We know that.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I want the gaming streamers back on Twitch because when they started finding lucrative deals elsewhere, that's when we started seeing the rise of the nuisance streamer gamers and their channels Right. So if, if the gamers come back, maybe we get a little less attention paid to the people who really should have no attention paid to them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And I'm glad that these people like Faze Swag from Faze Clan. He says he, he got generational wealth from his YouTube contract. This is from a Bloomberg story. His father had two jobs. His mother worked the night shift. YouTube's offer for him to live stream Call of Duty Duty allowed him to help his mom retire. Yeah, and now he's back and I.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Mean, it's, it's work. If you've got a successful live streaming channel, that is a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, you know, my poor son, my poor son is, you know, stressed through the roof because every minute you need to post another, another piece now. And by the way, I give TikTok a lot of credit because, and I mentioned this many, many times. The oral arguments for whether or not to ban TikTok were heard on Friday for the Supreme Court. They're going to have to rule in the next week if they're going to stop the forced sale or closure of TikTok. The deadline is January 19th. The day before inauguration, the Trump, incoming Trump administration filed a brief with the Supreme Court saying, give us some time. I think we can make something happen here. Yeah, but those who listen, and we will have. Kathy Gellis, who is an attorney admitted to the bar at the Supreme Court, who of course listened to the oral arguments, will get her opinion on Wednesday on this Week in Google. But the general press said that it seemed like the justices were pretty much ready to ban TikTok. There wasn't a First Amendment issue in their mind, should it, should it be banned or sold? Does it matter? You know, who benefits? Instagram just in time to save Mark Zuckerberg.

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, might we all benefit if the guy who destroyed the Los Angeles Dodgers ends up owning TikTok?

[Leo Laporte]

That's one of the possibilities. Now, are you not a McCourt fan?

[Cory Doctorow]

I don't know. I think that the, the current thing that his, his blockchain based social media thing is just nuts. It doesn't make any sense to me at all.

[Leo Laporte]

He, he says he's got $20 billion in commitment, which is, I don't think, enough. And by the way, the Chinese government has already said or forbade ByteDance from selling the algorithm. So I guess he'd be buying the.

[Cory Doctorow]

He says he doesn't want the algorithm anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

How hard could it be? You just, if you notice somebody watching a video, you give more of that.

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, look, I think there's, there's like TikTok did do a pretty good job, better than its predecessors of figuring out things that plausibly you might like. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they're brilliant. The virality. This is, this is exactly why people go back to Twitch for the ability to make it to be a king maker or queen maker. The ability to take somebody like Salt Hank, who's making sandwiches to 5,000 people and promote him in the for you tab, and suddenly he's got two and a half million followers. Incredible.

[Cory Doctorow]

So what's interesting is not just that they could do that, because anyone who's got a lot of users can do that. So like CNN could put you on the news, right? And you do.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, itunes, Apple has the power to make any podcast to hit what was.

[Cory Doctorow]

What they were good at was guessing which users to show that to. They weren't just having a megaphone. This was why there was such a scandal when Emily, I've forgotten her surname at Forbes, Emily White, did a story on the heating tool, which was a secret tool at TikTok that they would use to do just that, to just give a bunch of traffic to a performer. And they would do it tactically. They go like, there's not a sports bros on the platform. They pick a sports bro, they make him king for the day, he's getting bajillions of views. He goes around like a Judas goat and says to the other sports bros, they love sports content on TikTok. And then people like retool as tick tock users falsely, right? They think that they're doing well. I call this the giant teddy bear strategy, because when I used to go to the Canadian National Exhibition or traveling carney that used to come to town every year, if you go to the midway at like 10 in the morning, there's a guy with a giant teddy bear that you get by getting five balls in a peach basket. But like, no one's ever gotten five balls in a peach basket. But that guy is doing, doing is. He's saying like, hey, I like your face. Come over here. You get one ball in the peach basket. I'll give you this keychain. We'll trade two keychains for the teddy bear. And that guy wanders around all day lugging this galactic scale teddy bear. And people are like, oh, I guess I can win a giant.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you telling me it's a profit thing? Is that what you're telling me?

[Cory Doctorow]

But it's not just that it's a profit thing, that it's deceptive.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right. So they're peach.

[Leo Laporte]

Basket is not, in fact round.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, you mean the basket. Yes, that too. But I mean the heating tool. Right, right. Like when, When Uber, you know, there are all these stories in the New York Times about Uber drivers in New York 10 years ago who are making $100,000 a year, or, you know, $100.

[Leo Laporte]

You see the billboards outside of every casino in Las Vegas.

[Cory Doctorow]

Sure. And they're giving them. Well, no, but it's different because in Vegas, they just one. One player out of X will win a jackpot.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

But Uber, what they're doing is they're saying, you, you, you individually, we are choosing you to give you. To give you a jackpot. Actually, if you did that in Vegas, the Nevada Gaming Commission will put you in prison. Right. The dealer at the blackjack table.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't have to.

[Cory Doctorow]

You win.

[Leo Laporte]

Because the psychology of gamblers is always, oh, that's me.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right. And so then you get these people out there, out there sort of bigging up the service, claiming that it's very lucrative. They're speaking from their own kind of worm's eye view. They don't know that from the God's eye view, you. That someone has reached in and said, you're going to do well. And, you know Veena Dubal, who's a lawyer who's done some ethnographic work on Uber drivers, she talks about how these Uber drivers are pulling down, like, two and a half shifts a day sleeping in their car. People who live in, like, the outer, like, way outside of San Francisco drive in for three days a week and sleep in their cars to drive. And they're on the message boards with people who are making a hundred dollars an hour.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

And they're making eight. And they're like, I'm doing Uber wrong. I don't know what I've done wrong. And what they've done wrong is they're not the one Uber reached in and touched and said, you get $100 an hour, and for Uber, it's a bargain. And so I, I think that, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Know, it's exactly right because as soon as Henry hit it, there were a. A dozen asmr sandwich making TikTok feeds, you know, because they saw he was doing well and they, they copied it. Now, I don't know if the heat tool hit him or, or what.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Elon tried to do the same thing with Twitter. Twitter, when he went to X, he was offering some of the bigger influences, influencers, including Mr. Beast, massive payouts, just a lot of money because he wanted them to post about how much money they were making so that it would lure other content creators back to X. So, yeah, it's par for the course now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more. That's all. I'm sorry.

[Cory Doctorow]

The thing about, about. About. I almost said Flickr. The thing about, about TikTok is that, is that, that they, they have both things running in parallel. Sometimes things go viral because they're really good at predicting that there's a latent audience for a thing and they show it to those people and those people are like, that's amazing. And sometimes things go viral because they're cheating.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

And that's what makes.

[Leo Laporte]

And you don't never know the difference. I can't tell. So Frank McCourt is actually paired together with Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary, which immediately sets off alarm.

[Cory Doctorow]

He's done so well since he was orphaned and wrote that memoir.

[Leo Laporte]

They're gonna. They're gonna. And the White House has given its. Go ahead, make an offer. I don't think, somehow I don't think TikTok.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

It doesn't make sense for TikTok to sell. Why would they sell off a competitor to their service? They know that they can, they can still get plenty of business outside of the United States. It doesn't make sense for them to have a close clone inside the US that they don't control.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, then there's also the question, and you'd probably be an expert on this Father of how do you ban TikTok? One thing they will do on January 19, barring a sale, is tell Apple and Google take it off the store. But that's. They can't say unload it from the phones.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

No. And you can't, you can't blacklist their IPs. It can go basically from anywhere. So I mean, it's essentially giving businesses the ability to tell employees that using TikTok on. On a device can be a fireable offense. That was one of the scenarios that we had to game out because if the ban takes hold, we've got a lot of, of HR departments that want to know if they should enforce that, if that should be part.

[Leo Laporte]

You mean in the church?

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Okay, so remember when we say the church, there's a lot of businesses that operate under the, the umbrella of the church. Well, okay, so let's say we've got a. One of our research centers in los, In Los Angeles. And TikTok is now illegal. TikTok has now been banned does that go into the employee handbook that we do not allow the use of TikTok? We'd have to campus over our network. Yeah, it's, it's, it's one of these weird things where we're like, we don't really know what a ban would look like. We don't know how serious they want to be about the ban. Is it just going to be you can no longer get the app on a new device? If, if you have the app, will it still work? Will it still update? So it's all hypothetical right now because unless you want to fragment the Internet, you can't really ban a service.

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, I also think that what they'll do is just kick it out of the app stores and that's going to do 90% of the work. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

They will do that. That's actually in the law. But the law also says you can't tell ISPs to block it.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right, right. Because I think there's a strong first amendment argument about that. I want to say that it may not be as easy as you think for TikTok to walk away from the US US market not because there aren't lots of other people everywhere. But the US has the combination of being rich, populous and having no privacy law. Right.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

The most valuable users that are large.

[Cory Doctorow]

But they have privacy laws. There are lots of poor countries that have bad privacy laws and there are lots of small rich countries that have weak privacy laws.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm counting on France.

[Cory Doctorow]

You know, no privacy vacuum, wealthy nation.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

And normally, normally I'd be down with you except for the fact that ByteDance does is very close with the state. So I mean if, if they have any pull whatsoever, the state is not going.

[Leo Laporte]

The state's Chinese Communist Party.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Right. The Chinese Communist Party, they see it as a strategic asset. They're not going to clone off a piece of their strategic asset.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, that's a, that's a better argument than the argument that they can just make up the revenue somewhere else. That they're, that they're geopolitical or real politic things. But I mean America is unique. I mean, I think, think that we underestimate how contingent so many of our weird technological factors are. I, I was had a conversation with Bunny Huang, the hardware hacker about the CHIPS Act a little while ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

And he said the reason the CHIPS act is going to fail is, is because Taiwan is so distinctive. It is a country with an amazing education system and a bad passport. And that is why you have PhDs with, with PhDs in electrical engineering who will work in the chip fabrication facility where they make $50,000 a year and sit in a bunny suit for an 8 hour shift without a toilet break, overseeing 5,5 nanometer scale chip fabrication where like he was just describing, it's crazy. You at you vaporize tin into an evacuated chamber. You track, you track the droplets. You hit them with one laser that smashes them into a coin shape. You hit them with another laser that vaporizes them. And that's how you get the light wavelength needed to do the fabrication. Every wafer is balanced on two platforms that spin to stop any vibration. They have to be exactly the same size and weight and this whole thing has to be recalibrated constantly. It's not a, it's not a science, it's an art. And you need a PhD in electrical engineering to do it. And the people who do it get $50,000 a year. And so like that's just not a thing you're going to do in America, right? And I'm like, well you're right. There's like. That seems plausible.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, you just don't have the climate. I mean TSMC is building a plant. In fact they're doing 4 nanometer chips, they said in their Arizona plant up in Phoenix.

[Cory Doctorow]

I bet they're going to pay their PhD electrical engineers more than 50,000.

[Leo Laporte]

More than 50. A lot more than 50. Let's take a little break because we're going long and I saw Corey yawn, so I know it's time for a nap.

[Cory Doctorow]

So long, long, long days. Short nights these days.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I know you got stuff to do. We're going to wrap this thing up. But what a great panel. I am having so much fun. It's always a pleasure to have Nicholas De Leon, Cory Doctorow and father Robert Ballisar in the same zoom. Thank you. Thank you guys. I really appreciate it. Our show today, brought to you by the password manager. I use and recommend Trust no other bit war, open source gpl, the trusted leader not just in keeping your passwords safe, but secrets and pass keys too. In today's digital landscape, I want to speak specifically to businesses. I know every one of you individuals is using Bitwarden because it's free forever. Unlimited passwords, pass keys uses sports hardware keys. I actually pay them the 10 bucks a year premium just to support them. I love these guys, but businesses, you should be using it too. In today's digital landscape, protecting your organization is more critical than ever. And Bitwarden, you might say, oh, it's open source. A bunch of, you know, hippies and they're not going to be good for. No, no, no. Oh, no, no, no. They are there for businesses. They've stepped up to the challenge with powerful new features designed to simplify and fortify your enterprise password management strategy. I'll give you an example. They just expanded their teams plan with a robust skim system for cross domain identity management, user provisioning. I have no idea what that is, but it's good. Do you know what it is, Father Skim? I never even heard of it. Anyway, if you're in business, you do this allows MSPs and organizations, this is, this is the benefit of it to streamline access control by integrating seamlessly with the leading IDPs like Azure, Active Directory and Okta and OneLogin and JumpCloud and so forth. Bitwarden has made it very easy to onboard and offboard employees. They deliver enterprise level security capabilities that work for businesses of all sizes. And that's not all. Bitwarden has also redesigned its password manager browser extension. I don't know if you've noticed if you're a Bit Warden user. I did, it was like, whoa, they changed it. But it's beautiful. It's a more intuitive and efficient password management experience. The new extension features a modern interface, faster navigation. It is a lot faster, clearer organization, smoother workflows. So even individuals are going to benefit from this. Certainly businesses too. Makes it easier to manage passwords across platforms. Bitwarden is not just about security, it's about simplicity. Because if it's not easy to use a password manager, you're not going to use it. It right. Bitwarden setup takes just a few minutes. They will import from like the MySpace story. They will import from most password management solutions. So you don't have a big, you know, oh, we got passwords here and passwords there. Just right into Bit Warden. I had no problem getting my stuff over from LastPass. And of course because it's open source, that's really important. I think anytime you have encryption, it's really important, important that it be open source so that maybe you're not the expert that can vet it, but experts can vet it, make sure there aren't backdoors that it's done properly. That's using known and trusted encryption technologies. It can be inspected by anybody. But Bit Warden also goes every year out to get it audited by third party experts. And they do something a lot of companies don't do. They publish the full report. So you can see exactly how well Bitwarden does your business deserves a cost effective solution for enhanced online security and so do you. And you know I know you all using it or some password manager, but you know you have friends and family who are still using the same password for every site and it's made up of their dog's name and their birth date and their mother's maiden name or some insecure thing like that. Get them to use Bitwarden it's free forever and if you're a business, get started with Bitwarden's free trial of a teams or enterprise platform plan. Bitwarden.com twit unlike a lot of other companies, the free version of Bitwarden, because they're open source, is full unlimited passwords on every device. IOS, Android, Mac, Windows, Linux. It supports passkeys, it supports Yubikey and other hardware authentication. All of that for free. Free forever. For individuals, that's just the starting point. And for enterprises it does Even more bitwarden bitwarden.com TWIT thank you Bitwarden for making a great product that I've been using every day for years and I really love bitwarden.com Twitten thank you for supporting our show. You support us. By the way, if when you sign up for a trial or you send a friend there, you say go to bitwarden.com twit that way we get credit for it. This is depressing. 404 Media we'll do this quickly. Candy Crush, Tinder, My fitness pal all spy on your location. And it's not because the guys who write the apps or the gals who write the apps have put that spying in, but because they're using ad platforms that automatically send location information back through the advertising ecosystem system, data brokers can listen in on that process according to 404 Media and harvest the location of people's mobile phones. This is. Here's the pull quote from Zach Edwards from Silent Push, a security firm. This is a nightmare scenario for privacy because not only does this data breach contain data scraped from the RTB systems, there's some company out there acting like a global honey badge badger doing whatever it pleases with every piece of data that comes its way. Tinder, Grinder, Candy Crush, Temple Run, Subway Surfers, Harry Potter Puzzles and Spells Move It. My period Calendar and Tracker. 10 million people use that. By the way, my fitness pal. Tumblr.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, my favorite Tumblr.

[Leo Laporte]

Tumblr Humbler, Yahoo's Email Client Microsoft 365 Office app Flight Radar 24 Multiple religious focused apps, Muslim prayer apps, Christian Bible apps, various pregnancy trackers, and yes, many VPN apps.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

There are no ads on my app, so no one's tracking you.

[Leo Laporte]

Also, you're safe.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Thankfully, I don't have to worry about Tinder or Grindr or any of the fitness apps.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you get dates, then? I don't understand. Okay, no fitness. I know. I'm. Me neither.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Yeah, not so much.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But I do. I do love Tumblr. I do.

[Cory Doctorow]

I'm a very avid Tumblr user.

[Leo Laporte]

I. I don't want to go for another two hours, so I'm not going to ask you about Matt Mullenweg. We'll just save that for.

[Cory Doctorow]

I wish I understood what was going on with him. I hope he is well and figuring stuff out for himself.

[Leo Laporte]

It's getting worse, too. They're starting to kick people out. Mountain. What do you do? What do you say? What do you do? Muslim Pro. Which is good, because you don't want to use the amateur Muslim app.

[Cory Doctorow]

You don't need Muslim Light.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Wait, is that. Is it. Is that Mus Match.

[Leo Laporte]

Must match. No, Muslim Pro is a Muslim prayer app.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Oh, okay.

[Leo Laporte]

It said they didn't even know about Gravy. Yeah. We display ads through several ad networks to support the free version of the ad, but we don't authorize these networks to collect the location data of our users.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Well, of course you do. When you.

[Leo Laporte]

It's in the fine print somewhere there. Gravy's been hacked, by the way, which is part of the. Part of the. Part of the hair on fire in this story. Joseph cox writing in 404. I don't know what the answer is to this. I mean, it's just basically a privacy law.

[Cory Doctorow]

A privacy law is the answer to that. This. I'm sorry, it's just, like, not that complicated. A privacy law. Put these guys out of business law. A privacy law. That's all we need, a privacy law.

[Leo Laporte]

How is it possible this is legal? You know, I just saw the other day the CFPB proposing that it would be illegal to sell someone's Social Security number. It's legal. Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

No, I mean, Congress.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Yeah, I can. I can bite from the AARP right now.

[Leo Laporte]

It's legal?

[Cory Doctorow]

I mean. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it Congress, or is this CFPB regulation going to be sufficient?

[Cory Doctorow]

The regulation won't be sufficient. We need. We need Congress. Federal privacy law with a private right of action and no preemptions, because the.

[Leo Laporte]

Supreme Court that threw out Chevron deference is going to absolutely throw that out. As well.

[Cory Doctorow]

It's just, it's just a regulation does not have the same force that a law has. We should have a federal privacy law. It should have a. So one of the things I don't think the CFPB can do is create a private right of action. That's really important. That's when you as an individual, are.

[Leo Laporte]

You in favor of those. I. That it bugs me because the Texas, Texas uses that a lot.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, that's. But, but that, that's not a good private right of action. The Americans with Disability act is a good private right.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, well, there are those who, I mean, I know a lot of small businesses that have been very much harmed by. By entours.

[Cory Doctorow]

Are poor of the America of the Americans with Disability act, then fix them. But I mean, I think that you have to distinguish between people who are, who receive baseless threats and people who lose lawsuits.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

Because.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I do. But there are a lot of businesses. There are ambulance chasers in the ADA root.

[Cory Doctorow]

The American with Disability act says if you do renovations, then during the renovations you have to accommodate people. It doesn't say you have to do anything. If you're changing the steps, you have to add a ramp. If you're not changing the steps, you don't have to add the ramp. Right. Like it's.

[Leo Laporte]

But there are people who go around and tell you that you do. And that's the problem.

[Cory Doctorow]

Okay, but like that's right. Like you know that what we don't want is a world in which you only get privacy if a federal prosecutor or state attorney general thinks you need one.

[Leo Laporte]

The CFPB does not have a big enough enforcement arm.

[Cory Doctorow]

Antitrust law is going to do is going to do reasonably well under Trump because of prosecution. Private rights of action. So the case that EPIC just won against Google over monopolizing the payment process payment system, that's a, that's a private right of action. Right. Like you have even with trillion dollar companies, you have a lot of billion dollar companies who are angry about being exploited, who can use private rights.

[Leo Laporte]

Explain what a private right of action is to people.

[Cory Doctorow]

It's a right to sue. Right. So under most federal statutes only give the federal prosecutors or sometimes state attorneys general the right to enforce. Enforce them. But if you have a private right of action, then you can say, oh, you violated my privacy. Sure, I'm going to send a letter to the state AG and say, you, you violated my privacy, but I'm also going to file a lawsuit. Right. And you know, in those cases, ambulance chasers are great. The no win, no fee bar actually goes out and finds people who have been screwed over and says, tell you what, you don't need money. And in fact the bigger and richer the company is that screwed you over, the more money we can get out of that them for our fees if they fight it. And so we're going to go after them.

[Leo Laporte]

If you're for it, I'm for it. And absolutely for a federal privacy law that's.

[Cory Doctorow]

And no preemption. So we need to keep the state laws intact because what they really want to do is preempt those laws.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. With a. Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

Get rid of the Illinois biometric privacy law.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what Mar Blackburn's all for. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I couldn't figure out why Marsha Blackburn was supporting a privacy law till I understood that it invalidated all the state law laws.

[Cory Doctorow]

Sure, sure. And they're like, oh, we'll have a patchwork of laws. Just don't violate people's privacy. It's really straightforward.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, Corey, my theory has always been that we would never get this because law enforcement goes sub rosa to the Congress and says you can't do that because we need that information. We buy it.

[Cory Doctorow]

That that's been the historic story.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

That there, you know, for years I've gone to Silicon Valley and talked about privacy and, and had, you know, Googlers say, well like all Google wants to do is show me better ads. I don't give a damn. But like those guvies at the nsa, they're all too stupid to get a job in Silicon Valley. I don't want their thick fingers on my data. And then I go to, to the Beltway and I give that talk and they're like, well, those Googlers would sell their mothers for a nickel. I don't care if Uncle Sam knows my information. You know, I already, I got security.

[Leo Laporte]

I trust the government, everything.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right. They got it already. But what they don't understand is that there is no private and public or private public surveillance. There's only public private surveillance. That it's the intervention of the public sector of safety and security agencies that actually allows the coalition of surveillance of the surveillance industry to successfully resist privacy law. It's that that is the unbeatable combo.

[Leo Laporte]

We got to get Marty Hench in on this.

[Cory Doctorow]

Maybe that I'll bring him out of retirement for one last job.

[Leo Laporte]

The new book Picks and shovels comes out February 18th. Go to March and you can get in the Kickstarter for it. That's the best place to Buy it. Right. Corey supports you. Yeah, it's great.

[Cory Doctorow]

It's those numbers.

[Leo Laporte]

Doesn't cost more.

[Cory Doctorow]

Doesn't cost more.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no.

[Cory Doctorow]

And you know, you can get it signed and whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I like that ebook. And I have a few of your autographs.

[Cory Doctorow]

Ebook or the audiobook from the Kickstarter. They come without a eula. So it's not just that they're DRM free, but they're also EULA free free. So you have all of your copyrights intact. So you get the right to sell it, to loan it, to give it away. Just like don't violate copyright law.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's funny. I went to the Kindle store to buy it and it said the publishers demanded no DMA on this D. So we aren't going to copy protect it.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we just brought martinhen.com to its knees. So wait. Wait a minute or two to go there. It's a Kickstarter.

[Cory Doctorow]

No, I'm working on.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it working? Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's just me.

[Cory Doctorow]

It's just a redirect at my domain registrar. I use hover.

[Leo Laporte]

Should be able to.

[Cory Doctorow]

I like them.

[Leo Laporte]

Smush it right through to Kickstarter. Or you can just go to kickstarter.com and search for Martin Hench or Cory Doctorow. Corey, always a pleasure. Good luck on that documentary. That sounds fantastic. You always have like 18 different things you're doing. Don't.

[Cory Doctorow]

I know.

[Leo Laporte]

Book tour coming up.

[Cory Doctorow]

Big one. Lots of cities. So many cities. Let me see. Do I have that tab open? It's Boston, San Francisco, Louisiana, Seattle, Toronto, and some city in the Prairies. We haven't figured it out yet. And then.

[Leo Laporte]

You mean the flyover Prairies. Is that what you mean?

[Cory Doctorow]

Either Winnipeg or Calgary.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, nice.

[Cory Doctorow]

In Canada, we call those the Prairie Provinces. The Prairies. Okay. New York, York, Penn State, a College Station. And then on my way to DC, I'm going to do a day in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Baltimore, D.C. richmond, Virginia. Places I haven't been in years. South by Southwest. And a bookstore event in Austin. And then San Diego, Burbank, Chicago, Bloomington, Illinois. Never been there. And then one more like Bloomington.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Bloomington's nice.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, I.

[Leo Laporte]

And I lied. You can read the first chapter.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, you can get the first chapter. And the audiobook is up there too.

[Leo Laporte]

Pluralistic.net. corey's website has the. Has the picks and shovels, chapter one.

[Cory Doctorow]

So if you want, the audio is up there too, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, nice.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, all of Will's stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Corey. Always a pleasure. To have you on.

[Cory Doctorow]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Good luck surviving your long march.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. TheBezel.org for all the book information. Pluralistic.net is his website. He's on the mastodon at pluralistic. Nicholas De Leon, what are you working on right now for Consumer Reports?

[Nicholas De Leon]

Oh, I am. I spent all day Friday doing stuff on coffee makers.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, you were doing that. Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

Did you come up with a winner related to Ed.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Anything we've talked about?

[Leo Laporte]

Did you come up with a winner?

[Nicholas De Leon]

I don't think that's the purpose of this article is like how to like pick one.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Cory Doctorow]

Like that.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

There's so much coffee stuff at ces. Oh, you should have come for that.

[Leo Laporte]

I just.

[Cory Doctorow]

Do you like aeropresses?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. My Christmas present for Elisa was the new aeropress Pro or whatever they call it, the metal glass one.

[Cory Doctorow]

I just have my old one.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, get. It's glass and metal. It's beautiful.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, yeah.

[Nicholas De Leon]

I like the old French press. I'm very old school. I think that makes.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a bodum.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I'm with Nicholas. Yeah, French press.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a bodum. I have 13 ways to make coffee actually in my house.

[Nicholas De Leon]

A lot of people have a lot of way. I. I didn't know that people had so many ways and opinions about making coffee until very recently, actually. So this is all kind of new. But in terms of tech, we'll have something this week on all the AI, PC stuff. You know, we saw some of the Mets this year. Well, at last year as well. You know, one of the things we do, maybe it struggles, not the word, but like there's all these little AI applications and services. I don't know what the consumer uses for a lot of this stuff is yet. Like I use chat GPT.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you see a pearl on my temple and then you can ask me.

[Nicholas De Leon]

I'll interview you then for that story.

[Leo Laporte]

That's going to be. I keep buying stuff that's going to record my life and then tell me what happened, happened, because I figure I'm not. I don't remember it right. But it never lives up to its promise. Good, I will look forward to that. I've been a subscriber since the 80s, so I will. I will get my Consumer Reports and I will look for Nicholas De Leon, senior electronics reporter. Corey, this is the aeropress Premium, which now is back. Yeah, it's back ordering it.

[Cory Doctorow]

I think I might. My birthday.

[Leo Laporte]

I think Williams Sonoma has it. I got it from Williams Sonoma. They have seemed to have some sort of exclusive with a number of coffee companies. But it's beautiful. It's aluminum and stainless steel and glass. It's just beautiful.

[Cory Doctorow]

If I buy something aluminum, I have to argue with my wife about whether it's aluminium.

[Leo Laporte]

She's British, I take it. Are you who's who?

[Cory Doctorow]

She's British.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Did you. Canadian doesn't. Don't Canadians say aluminum?

[Cory Doctorow]

We don't. We don't insert random syllables.

[Leo Laporte]

Good, because it'll make it much easier to absorb you into the 51st state if you just pronounce aluminum properly. Thank you.

[Cory Doctorow]

So long as. So long as it comes with, like, 50 electoral college votes, I'm in.

[Leo Laporte]

Wouldn't that be nice?

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, I never thought of it that way. I mean, you're gonna get two just like everybody else.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

We'll bring in Canada and Puerto Rico and. Yeah, I'm cool with that. Let's do that.

[Leo Laporte]

And Greenland. Greenland might.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Greenland, yeah, let's do Greenland. Why not?

[Cory Doctorow]

Do you know, I just.

[Leo Laporte]

Already in the electoral colleges. It.

[Cory Doctorow]

If. If they sanction Denmark for not selling Greenland and don't allow imports, America will cut off its supply of Ozempic.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, we go for you.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Elon will fly his private jet over there and grab his. His weekly supply.

[Leo Laporte]

Father Robert Balisar. They call him the digital Jesuit. He is, of course, a priest. And his app is called Jesuit Pilgrimage. App. App. And you can follow him on blue skies. Padresj and he's doing amazing things that he can't tell us about because God would get mad.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Well, you know, it's. It's a team effort, and I don't want to put one single face on the team effort.

[Cory Doctorow]

Don't think it's kind of a trinity.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Three of them now.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Sure, why not? It's a group.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry with the sacrilege. I apologize. I. I apologize.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Stateside, I've stayed side for another month, so it's all good. It's not till I have to go back that I have to, you know, get holy again, but. No, normally you can find me just outside my residence up on the roof. So if you're ever at St. Peter's just look for the rooftops and you'll probably see me with God.

[Leo Laporte]

Look for the one with a white smoke. Is that what you're saying?

[Father Robert Ballecer]

That's. That's what I do. That's. That's pretty much what I do. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I have got to come out and visit you and get. And get this. The special tour st. I will. We were there last year. Unbelievable. And I Would like to do what you did, Corey and ca. Christmas Eve mass there. That would be.

[Cory Doctorow]

It was pretty amazing. Wow. I mean, I was 12 and I still remember it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you'll never forget it.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Now, Leo. What I can do is I. My. My access card allows me to bring in two guests. So we could just sit near the train station, which is right next to Pope Francis's apartment. And, you know, you can just watch them come in and out.

[Cory Doctorow]

Use his wifi.

[Leo Laporte]

Can I use his WI fi? That's the question. I bet you Robert knows the password.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

I know all the passwords. I have them someplace. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

What a great show, man. I just want to keep going. I'm sorry I've kept you so long, but, you know, it's always when it's a show like this, I don't want to stop. Thank you, Robert. Thank you, Nicholas. Thank you, Corey. You guys are the best. Have a wonderful evening and I'll see you soon, I hope, on this Week in Tech. And thanks to all of you who watched. We do this show, as you probably know, Sundays, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2200 UTC. You don't have to watch then because it's a podcast. You can watch or listen whenever you want. But we do a live stream of the show in its production on eight different platforms. Club members get to watch in Discord. But there's also. Because I'm trying to be a big YouTube star. YouTube.com TWIT live. It's not gonna happen, is it? We're also on Twitch, Twitch TV, TWiT. We also are on Kik because, you know, I want to cover all the bases. X.com LinkedIn we're even streaming live on Facebook and TikTok at least for one more week. You know what, come to think of it, I think we could continue to stream on TikTok even after they're banned. They're not going to prevent that. So I don't know what we're going to do after January 19th, but I think we'll just keep streaming on those eight platforms. If you don't want to watch live, I understand. In fact, I encourage you to either go to the website Twitter TV or to our YouTube channel, Twitter TV Twit. There's actually links to all the shows. Have a dedicated YouTube channel for the video. That's a good thing to know about because it's easy to share. Clip. If you want us, take a little bit of, you know, E.B. white's bibliography and send it to your. Your friends. You know, Molly White's grandpa wrote some books. You could just clip that on YouTube. They make it very easy and send it off. And it's a good way of sharing what you see here, maybe grow our audience a little bit. Best thing for you to do though in general is subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way you'll get it automatically, you'll have it, it'll be downloaded ready for your Monday morning commute. Thanks to everyone. Thanks to our wonderful club members. We appreciate your support. Thanks to all of you for watching. We are this is a this is a special year for the network. We are in our 20th year now. Our 20th anniversary is coming up in April. 20 years of doing this show and every single show for the last 2020 years. I've ended the same way right now. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the cane.

[Cory Doctorow]

AT.

[Leo Laporte]

T Mobile we'll give you four free 5G phones and four lines for only $25 per line per month with eligible trade ins.

[Cory Doctorow]

And no, it's not a contest.

[Leo Laporte]

It's every day for a limited time.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Everyone's a winner on America's load largest 5G network. Minimum of 4 lines for $25 per.

[Leo Laporte]

Line per month with autopay discount using debit or bank account.

[Cory Doctorow]

$5 more per line without autopay.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Up to $830 off each phone via 24 monthly bill credits plus taxes, fees.

[Leo Laporte]

And $10 device connection charge for well qualified customers.

[Cory Doctorow]

Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and.

[Father Robert Ballecer]

Balance on required finance agreement due bill.

[Cory Doctorow]

Credits end if you pay off devices early.

[Leo Laporte]

Ctmobile. Com.