This Week in Tech 1029: Never Lick a Badger Twice

Summary

Summary of TWiT This Week in Tech Episode 1029: "Never Lick a Badger Twice"

Release Date: April 28, 2025

In Episode 1029 of TWiT's "This Week in Tech," host Leo Laporte engages with a panel of technology experts, including attorney Kathy Gellis, Daniel Rubino from Windows Central, and Abrar Al Heedi from CNET. The discussion spans a range of pressing tech issues, predominantly focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) advancements, their societal and ethical implications, and significant developments in the tech industry.

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1. AI Advancements and the Decline of Prompt Engineering

The episode opens with a discussion on a Wall Street Journal report declaring the "hottest AI job of 2023"—prompt engineering—as already obsolete. Laporte expresses surprise, noting, “I was learning to be a prompt engineer and now those AIs, they're too smart. They don't need me anymore” (02:55).

Daniel Rubino elaborates, stating, “It seems pretty weird to have like... prompt engineering jobs... becoming obsolete due to AI advancements” (03:10). The panel agrees that AI's ability to intuit user intent diminishes the need for specialized prompt engineers, signaling a rapid evolution in AI capabilities that outpaces current job roles.

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2. AI Consciousness and Ethical Considerations

The conversation shifts to the ethical implications of AI, particularly the notion of AI welfare and consciousness. Kathy Gellis raises concerns, commenting, “We haven't invented Mr. Data yet... we are just dealing with fancy software” (04:10). She emphasizes the importance of maintaining control over AI tools to prevent over-reliance on non-sentient programs.

Daniel Rubino adds, “We don't know what [consciousness] is... the AI will get so good it'll act like a person and we'll get tricked” (05:40). This leads to a broader discussion on the necessity of integrating ethical frameworks into AI development to safeguard against unintended consequences.

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3. Microsoft’s Recall Feature in Windows 11

A significant portion of the episode delves into Microsoft's introduction of the "Recall" feature in Windows 11. Laporte describes it as a tool that records user activity, allowing queries like, “What was I looking at on Thursday when I was searching for razor blades?” (10:29).

Kathy Gellis expresses apprehension regarding data control and privacy, stating, “I have ethical duties to know how my technology works and control this data” (11:29). The panel debates the balance between AI utility and user privacy, with concerns about Microsoft's requirement to keep the feature enabled by default for functionality.

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4. Privacy and Control Over Data

The discussion intensifies around privacy issues related to AI features like Recall. Gellis articulates a sense of loss of control over personal data, highlighting the challenges faced by professionals like lawyers and doctors who must comply with ethical standards regarding data privacy (12:56).

Laporte counters with potential benefits, suggesting that features like Recall could enhance productivity by remembering user activities across devices (13:19). However, the debate underscores the tension between leveraging AI for convenience and safeguarding individual privacy rights.

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5. Google’s Antitrust Case and Potential Sale of Chrome

A prominent segment covers the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust lawsuit against Google, labeling it a search monopoly. The court's proposed remedy includes the sale of Google Chrome, raising questions about the feasibility and impact of such a move.

Daniel Rubino expresses skepticism, noting, “It doesn't seem like what the government is asking actually solves the problem” (26:30). Gellis adds that divesting Chrome could negatively affect the open-source Chromium project and the broader browser ecosystem, potentially stifling innovation and reducing market diversity (29:14).

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6. Challenges in Competing with Google Search

The panel discusses the dominance of Google Search and the difficulties in persuading users to switch to alternatives like Bing, even when incentivized. Laporte references a study where paying users to switch saw only a 22% retention rate with Bing after two weeks (35:26).

Rubino counters by sharing his personal experience, stating, “Bing is just 6%... but I find it’s not so bad... and it’s gotten a lot better” (35:37). This highlights the entrenched position of Google in the search market and the substantial challenges competitors face in gaining market share.

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7. Issues with AI Search Accuracy and Legal Implications

The reliability of AI-powered searches is scrutinized, particularly in legal contexts. Gellis warns about AI's propensity to generate inaccurate information, which can have serious implications, such as in legal briefs. She recounts instances where AI "hallucinated" legal cases, leading to erroneous submissions (78:16).

Laporte concurs, emphasizing the necessity for users to verify AI-generated information, especially in professional settings where accuracy is paramount (85:16).

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8. Meta Trial and the Evolution of Social Media

Mark Zuckerberg's trial concerning Meta (formerly Facebook) is discussed, particularly his admission that social media has shifted focus from connecting friends to entertainment and global content discovery. Heidi remarks, “I spend a lot of time on TikTok... Instagram copies what TikTok does” (54:09), underscoring the platform's pivot away from its original mission.

Kathy Gellis criticizes Zuckerberg's lack of alignment with user needs, noting, “He has so little intuition for the needs and desires of his users” (55:00). The panel reflects on Meta's acquisition of Instagram and its impact, with Rubino highlighting how such moves were intended to neutralize rising competitors (61:22).

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9. Nest Thermostat Support Ending

A brief update mentions that Google will cease support for first and second-generation Nest Learning thermostats on October 25th, 2025. Laporte reflects on the implications of forced obsolescence in IoT devices, emphasizing the importance of considering long-term support when investing in smart home technology (82:48).

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10. PC Shipments, AI Integration, and Hardware Innovations

The episode touches on the recent increase in PC shipments, attributed to factors like the end-of-life for Windows 10 and the introduction of AI-driven features in new hardware. Rubino explains, “Shipments are definitely different than sales... companies are building up stock because of the threat of tariffs” (84:05).

Discussions also highlight advancements in hardware, such as the integration of Neural Processing Units (NPUs) in laptops, which facilitate more efficient AI operations. Laporte notes the burgeoning capabilities of AI tools like Topaz AI for photo editing, enabled by these hardware innovations (90:18).

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11. AI Tools in Software and Hardware

The panel explores how AI is revolutionizing software and hardware, particularly in creative tools. Rubino shares his positive experience with Topaz AI, an application that enhances and upscales digital photos, illustrating the practical benefits of AI in media editing (91:12).

Laporte underscores the necessity for user awareness and verification when utilizing AI tools, especially given their potential for inaccuracies (91:51).

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12. Elon Musk and Tesla Whistleblower Claims

Towards the episode's end, Laporte brings attention to allegations against Elon Musk and Tesla, including claims from a former Tesla engineer about threats of deportation in response to safety concerns raised within the company. Gellis discusses the broader implications of such whistleblower accusations on corporate accountability and legal protections (134:57).

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Conclusion

Episode 1029 of "This Week in Tech" offers an in-depth exploration of AI's rapid advancements and their multifaceted impact on jobs, ethics, and privacy. The panel critically examines significant antitrust actions against tech giants like Google and Meta, highlighting the intricate balance between innovation and regulation. Additionally, updates on hardware innovations and corporate practices provide listeners with a comprehensive overview of the current tech landscape.

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Timestamp Reference:

• Timestamps are referenced in the format MM:SS corresponding to the transcript sections where notable quotes occur.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. A great panel ahead for you. Abrar Al Heedhi is here. So is Daniel Rubino from Windows Central. Our attorney, Kathy Gellis. We will talk, of course, about legal action, but we're also going to talk a lot about AI. According to the Wall Street Journal, the hottest AI job of last year is obsolete. This year, Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over and an electric pickup truck you can pick up for just $20,000, radio not included. All that and more coming up next on Twit. Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT this Week in Tech. Episode 1029, recorded Sunday, April 27, 2025. Never lick a badger twice. It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech, the show. We get together and talk about the latest tech news with my favorite people. Today, Kathy Gellis is in the house. She writes for Tech Dirk. She is a attorney at law specializing in all of the issues in front of us these days. Kathy, it's great to see you. Welcome.

[Kathy Gellis]

Thanks for having me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Your hair is growing back nicely. I like the curls. Were you that curly before?

[Kathy Gellis]

I don't think so. I feel definitely more poodly than I used to.

[Leo Laporte]

The poodle y. Kathy Gillis, also here, Daniel Rubino, editor in chief at Windows Central. Hello, Daniel. Good to see you.

[Daniel Rubino]

Thanks for having me.

[Leo Laporte]

Welcome back, everyone.

[Daniel Rubino]

Here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yay. And Abrar Alheidi, who's doing double duty, she hosted Tech News Weekly this week.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Hello. How are you?

[Leo Laporte]

Now senior technology reporter at C. Right.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I'm honored for both to have been on, you know, your program twice.

[Leo Laporte]

You're just a superstar. You're a superstar.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Br I'm going to record that and play that whenever I feel down.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, boy. There's a lot of news this week. Google's in the news. They had a good quarter. Mark Zuckerberg's on trial. He says social media is over. Apple is, you know, saying we're moving to India. But let's start with the Wall Street Journal, which says the hottest AI job of 2023 is already obsolete. Oh, no. I was learning to be a prompt engineer and now those AIs, they're too smart. They don't need me anymore. I love these. I don't know why the Journal does these. It's like this is the new lifestyle piece, isn't it? Prompt engineering jobs, once buzzy and high paying, are becoming obsolete due to AI advancements. You know why? Apparently the AI model According to the Wall Street Journal now intuits your intent, negating the need for specialized prompt engineers.

[Daniel Rubino]

It seems pretty weird to have like I understood early on the prompt engineering stuff because people were creating like, especially with the images, they would get very specific on the type of lens being used, the type of film to simulate. So of understood that. But you would think that over time, yeah, the AI would get smart enough where just like kind of really figure out what you mean.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it also has enough inputs from. It's talked to enough people now it kind of knows what people want.

[Kathy Gellis]

On this weekend's. Wait, wait, don't tell me. They were talking about being polite to your AI and cost money. Yeah, and then they were talking about how like, yeah, it uses up resources and you know, oh, we can make some Sam Altman pay for it if we, we are really polite.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's so mean. That's like, oh, let's make it more expensive.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, yes, but then it was also pointed out and I think the joke was like apologizing and there goes one rainforest and stuff. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Actually the Economic Times had a piece. Should we start taking the welfare of A.I. seriously? Well, no, no, pretty much this is a. I should give credit to the author. Where is the author's name? I don't see it anywhere. But the author writes in the first person, so I'm sure it's somebody. Maybe it's an AI. Apparently the author heard that researchers at Anthropic, the makers of Claude, were starting to study, quote, model welfare, end quote, the idea that an AI might soon become conscious and deserv some kind of moral status.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, yes, eventually, but this isn't. We haven't invented Mr. Data yet. Like if all of a sudden we do spawn artificial intelligence where there's sentience and signs of life and things like that, then yeah, okay, we build in the ethics for how we deal with that, but at the moment we're just dealing with fancy software. And you know, you don't have to be polite to your basic program as it goes through the command, so you shouldn't have to be here. That's not what it is and that's not what it's for. And if we convince ourselves that the more we think that AI is already in true artificial intelligence, I think the more trouble we create for ourselves because we end up relying upon it for things that it just can't deliver on.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah, I just get really bothered by this. Everybody throws consciousness around just like, like.

[Leo Laporte]

We even know what that is.

[Daniel Rubino]

Consciousness. Yeah, we don't know what it is. We don't know how to define it. We don't know how to measure it. Is it on the spectrum? At what point does it actually become conscious? Like we just don't know. What will happen is the AI will get so good it'll act like a person and we'll get tricked.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we're at that point actually, don't you?

[Daniel Rubino]

I mean, yeah. When people are saying thank you and please, that was a joke. Right. But you know, and it's costing a lot of money to do the processing.

[Kathy Gellis]

Right.

[Daniel Rubino]

People are already getting to that, that stage where it feels like you're talking to and that'll just continue to increase. But I mean, they should build into these models. I get the idea too. You might want to be friendly to the AI, not because it's going to try to kill you, but because you may be able to affect its behavior. Just like if it was another being. Right. If you're always abusive to it, it might be mean back to you, but that should be something. They could program around. But they need to figure out how this stuff works in the first place. So I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I think this comes along with the terror. The same people who are concerned about, you know, AI being an existential threat to humanity. Like we better be nice to it or it could come and get us. Yeah. As the. As the author ends up saying she cares more about carbon based life forms. In fact, if AI gets smarter, we might even want to care more. Microsoft has finally pushed recall out into Windows 11. So more people are going to now see AI. Well, maybe not because it's just copilot plus PCs. Right?

[Daniel Rubino]

Correct.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So that's a. Is that Daniel. A limited number of people. I mean, how well are those selling?

[Daniel Rubino]

So, you know, getting to like the whole shipments and everything like that. We are seeing positive growth in the industry. Is it a lot?

[Leo Laporte]

What? Really?

[Daniel Rubino]

Probably not, but yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's been years of just kind of downward spiraling.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah. I think there's a lot of potential here now that there are some like legit features. Actually I would say like Click to Do is actually more interesting almost than what's that.

[Kathy Gellis]

Although.

[Daniel Rubino]

So Click to Do is sort of like Google Vision and Circle to Search, but it's built into your PC and it's built into the snipping tool too. So you can basically point it anywhere on your computer at the screen and basically inquire what is on your screen and ask for more information. You can copy text, you can do Things like you could, if you're on the web and you find an image, say if it's a person, you can like right click on the image with click to do and then it'll take just the cut out the background and just keep the silhouette of the person and then you can just copy and paste that to another image. Like it really makes manipulation of data on the computer like to a whole new level. Where before you'd almost need some more sophisticated skills.

[Leo Laporte]

Is Microsoft doing agentic AI yet? Where like it's the. It controls the browser and it goes out and does stuff for you. Is that here?

[Daniel Rubino]

They're getting there. So they did announce something similar to that. For one, they're going to be delivering avatars pretty soon which would be user choice and they'll have a pre selected bunch. But in fact.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you mean? Like the like copilot will have a face?

[Daniel Rubino]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh wow.

[Daniel Rubino]

It'll be whatever you want. At first they'll go and give you like a pre selected bunch just to get it out there. But eventually they're going to use the power of generative AI so you could just tell it what you want the avatar to be and it'll generate it for you. I told them they should allow it so you can upload photos of like friends, family or animals. I want to make my dog my AI, right? Yeah, that's a good idea. Yeah. So they're going to that stage and it is now going to that next level. Right. Beyond generative chat stuff where it's going to start to actually proactively do things. I think a lot of this will have to come when they build it deeper into the operating system, which they're also working on. But yeah, we're getting there into stages. But recall, I don't use it a ton, but what's cool about it is you don't even notice it's running. Like it's just there and when you bring it up, it's a beautiful looking app. Like they really did a great job of designing it and it functions well. There's no hiccups with it. It's really kind of remarkable technology. The only thing that's weird about it is yeah, you need a new PC, preferably an intel one or AMD or Qualcomm that qualifies with the NPU. But something like my Core i9 desktop I'm on right now with a 4080 GPU doesn't have this. So it's like. It's weird that my laptop has it, but my super powerful desktop.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's more powerful, but it's not a copilot plus PC. Yeah, it doesn't have a copilot button on the keyboard, so.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah. So will they bring it to PC desktop PCs?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Daniel Rubino]

I assume so.

[Leo Laporte]

It's pretty controversial. I mean, it's funny. On the one hand it doesn't do as much as I would want it to do. On the other hand, it does way more than security people want it to do. It records everything that's going on, does screenshots and analyzes it with a variety of AI models. And then it's queryable. It's a queryable database. So you can say, hey, on Thursday I was looking at a website for razor blades. What was that? And it will, it will be able to answer that question.

[Kathy Gellis]

Can this be turned off?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it has to be turned on.

[Kathy Gellis]

Okay, so is it. It's off by default. It's object. Okay. Because this is not compliant with anything that lawyers use Windows based technology to do. You cannot have an art of an AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Not just lawyers.

[Kathy Gellis]

Doctors. Yeah. Anybody who's got duties.

[Leo Laporte]

Tax preparers.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah.

[Daniel Rubino]

It is locally processed. So this doesn't go to the cloud. It uses the MPU and it's on an enclave encrypted on the chip itself and only the user with the. Who owns the computer via.

[Leo Laporte]

Would that make it okay, Cathy, if you're a lawyer?

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, it helps but I think the, the overarching concern I have is how little control I feel like I have over my data these days because like I can't even figure out OneDrive. It keeps slurping up things I didn't need for it to slurp and it, and it doesn't. It's. Some of the stuff is in the cloud, some of the stuff is not. It's very confusing. This makes me really, really uncomfortable because I have ethical duties plus I want to keep my own stuff private and I'm having a difficult time controlling what goes where. I've got some ethical obligations to know how my technology works and control this data and I'm not, you know, I'm reasonably with it and I am feeling like I'm completely at the mercy of this technology and I'm not going to be able to meet my ethical duties. This is a problem, I think that, that and that. I think it's a bigger problem than just this. The sense of loss of control that I'm having over so much of my technology, but particularly with what is where is really alarming and I kind of don't. AI is not interesting to me until we solve do I get control back over my tools, then when I have the control over my tools, then I'm much more on board with using all this fancy stuff that can do all these cool things. But we're leaping over a really important step and we're comprom how much we need that important step to actually be taken care of first.

[Leo Laporte]

That was one of the original complaints was it was on by default and Microsoft responded by turning it off by default, which I think is.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, I don't even think it's.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's what I was saying is that's one side of the argument that people say, oh my God. The other side of the argument, people like me who want more AI say, yeah, but it's only on one machine. I want to be really useful. Recall would be capturing everything I do every day.

[Daniel Rubino]

Ross machines. Yeah, actually Zach Boudo and I were talking about that on the podcast. He wants it like that too. So if I'm on my desktop, but I was doing something on my laptop, I can recall the information from there that may come down the road. I will say to address what Kathy was talking about, you know, this has been delayed for almost a year because of these concerns. So they went back to the drawing board. How it works is like when you get the feature on the PC or you're getting for the first time, it gives you a white screen and it clearly walks you through what it is, where the information is. Then you can either enable it or don't. Even if it's enabled, it just sits there in a taskbar and you can right click and pause it and turn it off. And so if you're in a session, you don't want it to record anything. You can do that as well. You can also tell it specific apps you don't want it to save.

[Leo Laporte]

In theory, it's not going to keep track of your credit card numbers when you buy something, right.

[Daniel Rubino]

It blocks out like credit card information, Social Security numbers, all that. All that information is automatically blocked from it. So they have done. They do give the user a ton of control. To me, it's very obvious what it's doing, how to turn it off. It's very easy to use. It's very fast too. But yeah, I mean, it's one of those things people can easily just turn it off, just like anything else in Windows and never think about it again. But I think they did a really good job with, you know, like, I Said all the data is local, stays on that PC. You can't take it anywhere. It's encrypted. When you even launch the app, it uses facial recognition before it even shows you anything. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So it has to use Windows hello to unlock it. That's one of the reasons you need a copilot bus PC. Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

That's a separate issue. Facial recognition on your devices is a Fourth and Fifth Amendment disaster. So I would never recommend that anybody actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you use a fingerprint reader?

[Kathy Gellis]

Absolutely not.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so you only use a pin.

[Kathy Gellis]

Something where you enter. You have to enter information, because otherwise this is the way it should be. But the constitutional case law at the moment is, the way they're analyzing it is that action of entering data is constitutionally regarded as something different than using your biometrics.

[Leo Laporte]

Something in your brain is different than something that you want.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, I don't think that really works in terms of what the Fourth and Fifth Amendment are supposed to protect. But at the moment, that's the state of the case laws.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, I'm glad. I'm glad they're at least doing that. I mean, there was some. In some jurisdictions, they say, all right, we can compel you to have to give us your password.

[Kathy Gellis]

I'm not entirely comfortable with the state of the law, even in those more protective things. But at the moment, there is a schism. You are more likely, depending on whose jurisdiction is reaching you, to have protection if you enter that information than if it's your essence is all of a sudden crossing the border. Open these things all.

[Leo Laporte]

But now crossing the border, do whatever they want, right?

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah. I mean, this is no way to run a railroad. And we've got bigger issues here. But given the state of the law, biometrics are just. Don't, don't.

[Leo Laporte]

This is an interesting point we are at right now with AI, where there's people like you, Kathy, who say, no, never, not on my watch. There's people like me who say, I want more. I don't think AI can do everything I want it to do unless it has everything that I'm doing. Now, I admit that people like you, Kathy, probably think I'm nuts because I'm giving bad guys and. Or the government, you know, access to everything everywhere.

[Kathy Gellis]

I'm not necessarily. I'm not necessarily against your camp, but I'm also not in the camp that.

[Leo Laporte]

You think you want the choice. I think you want the choice.

[Kathy Gellis]

I understand that I'm kind of in the middle ground. Like, I'm not in the camp that is no AI ever. And that's a very strong camp full of some really, you know, vehement, vehement opinions. I'm not in your camp where, you know, you're seeing the promise and the potential and willing to go along for the ride because this is kind of cool and exciting.

[Leo Laporte]

Where do you sit, where do you sit on all this?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I tend to lean more towards the cautious end, but only because I have a personal bias as a writer where I'm scared that AI is going to replace all.

[Leo Laporte]

Take your job.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, yeah. So I tend to be a little bit more cautious about that. So. And I also just. I. I don't personally tend to have a need for it in my everyday life. So that's why I don't really. I think if it makes your life easier and more helpful, I think it's easier to be like, oh, this is great. But I personally haven't found a reason to really tap into most of those tools.

[Leo Laporte]

I would submit that probably nobody needs AI.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It's true.

[Kathy Gellis]

That is quite the Leo concession, but.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I know.

[Leo Laporte]

No, but I. You might want it. Nobody needs a smartphone either. Nobody needs an ipod either.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Daniel Rubino]

There was a. There was a period where I had to try to convince my friends that smartphones are going to be a big thing, that they're going to want one. They're like, come on. But I need to email someone. I'll just wait till I get home. Why do I need to do it on my phone?

[Kathy Gellis]

There's a period where a lot of.

[Daniel Rubino]

People didn't have a PC. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So I don't need the Internet in the palm of my hand. What are you crazy?

[Daniel Rubino]

Right? Yeah, it does make sense. I will say, you know, I do get the caution and all that and, you know, that's fine. Like I always say, we need these discussions. They need to be public. We need to be, you know, upfront with these companies about what we want, where we want to control our data. At the same time, this is inevitable. Like, it's just going to happen.

[Leo Laporte]

So Darren Okey, who is an AI advocate in our club, Twit Discord, said, nobody needs the wheel either. Leo, it's not a bad point. Not a bad point.

[Kathy Gellis]

I think the argument of who needs the wheel is there's more people than who necessarily needs AI. But I would say you don't need.

[Leo Laporte]

A car, you don't need a bicycle. You could walk everywhere.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, physical levers. We don't need a lever. We can just pull the thing out.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's. I Think his point, which is that AI is that lever is a lever.

[Daniel Rubino]

Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

So I think there's a. The thing that frustrates me the most with AI is the giant disconnect between a lot of the. Excluding you, Leo, but between a lot of the advocates for it and the people who are dead set against it. The dead set against it are missing that there's some really cool things that it can do. It's a helpful tool. And I think a lot of the zealots are also missing what the actual concerns are. I just want to knock everybody's heads together because I want to get the good without getting the bad. And I'm just watching everybody talk past each other because I'm not, I'm not fond with how this is all getting developed and rolled out. I am on team control. I want to have a lot more control over my devices, my data, my technology. With that in mind, I then want to go choose to use some of the cool things that AI can do because that will be useful to me. But right now, and I think this is also what a lot of the dead againsters are saying is we're feeling ruled by technology. We can feel ourselves losing control. We can feel ourselves sort of, you know, people are pushing this on us without adequately regarding all the downsides that may be happening and controlling for them. And that's a problem. And that's also bad for the people who want to make AI and profit from AI. It's a dumb way to develop because all it's doing is antagonizing the public.

[Leo Laporte]

We haven't even mentioned the fact that although you kind of referred to it at the beginning, it burns down rainforests at every turn. Actually you had a story, I thought it was kind of interesting. In Windows Central, Sam Altman says OpenAI is no longer compute constrained. It's not struggling with computing power. I don't understand, Daniel. I thought that was the big constraint.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah, well, Microsoft was the exclusive provider for their systems.

[Leo Laporte]

So he says we don't have to get it from Microsoft anymore is what he's saying.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah, basically they were saying they needed even more power. Microsoft wasn't able to meet that. So they go out other companies and yeah, request even more power. This is, you know, what we're seeing in real time is the slow breakup of OpenAI and Microsoft. And OpenAI increasingly sees that it has a very bright future on its own. They're releasing, you know, they're looking to making hardware with Johnny Ives.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they're going to make a device kind of like the R1 or the humane pin or something, an AI hardware. I think the thought is, well, the smartphone's time has come now we're going to make an AI smartphone kind of thing.

[Daniel Rubino]

Something. Yeah, I'm a little skeptical of it, but we'll see some smart people doing that. But yeah, they're also looking to, of course, doing their own social network. They said in a court case this week.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that real, do you think?

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. I think internally they're, they're messing around with that. And they said in a court case this week that given the opportunity, they would buy Google Chrome and make it an AI browser around OpenAI. So they're seeing, you know, they're going from the whole, we're not a profit, you know, to, oh, we're going to turn to a massive corporation and make a ton of money. And then you have Microsoft, who doesn't want to be tied to someone else's AI. Right. So Microsoft is developing their own. Going down. Their own.

[Leo Laporte]

They have their own models. Yeah.

[Daniel Rubino]

And so they'll continue to go down that route. And you see these companies split off eventually.

[Leo Laporte]

It's funny because the speculation for Apple, we talked about this on Tuesday on MacBreak Weekly, is that they do need to do the opposite. They need to stop relying on their own models. It's not going well. They need help. They need to go to Anthropic and OpenAI and everybody else and say, you guys do the AI. I don't know if Apple will do that because of privacy concerns. Apple's kind of between a rock and a hard place. I do want to take a break because you mentioned the Chrome thing before the show. Bonita said my producer, why would anybody want Chrome? How can you? But that may be what's going on. Everybody seems to want it. We'll talk about that in just a bit. Abrar Al Heati is here, senior technology reporter at cnet. Great to see you. Daniel Rubino, editor in chief at Windows Central. And Kathy Gellis, attorney at law, CG counsel, C O U N S E L dot com. She's also Kathy Gillis on Blue Sky. Kathy with the C. Good to have all three of you. We're gonna move on in just a minute, but first, a word from our sponsor. This episode of this Week in Tech is brought to you by Kinsta. When you run an online business, you have many different hats to wear, right? So Kinsta makes it easy for businesses. They are managed WordPress hosting and they are experts in WordPress hosting. Their team will handle everything. They bundle up all the essentials, everything you need to make sites stress free with speeds that will wow your visitors. We know this by the way. If a slide is slow, people don't waste. They don't. They're bored, they're tired, they move on. Not with Kinsta. Sites pop up and security that never sleeps. You don't have to worry about it because they take care of it. Plus, a dashboard so intuitive you'll wonder why Everything in life isn't this easy when you hit a snag. There are real humans there, real WordPress experts 24, 7, 365 days a year. In short, Kinsta is perfect for those who want professional results. Without all the technology and the technical background, Kinsta doesn't just host WordPress websites. They deliver blazing speed. Your website could run as much as 200% faster with ironclad security and reliability. And if you're worried about moving to Kinsta, no, don't worry. Worry. They'll migrate your entire website for free. Plus you've got a 30 day money back guarantee. So there's no risk at all. When it comes to security. Kinsta is in a league of its own. This is really important when it comes to WordPress. It's one of the few WordPress hosting providers that backs its promises with multiple enterprise certification. Kinsta's custom control panel is intuitive, but don't worry, you're never on your own. You'll get real WordPress pros there anytime you need them. Not AI chatbots. Experts will respond in minutes and tackle even the trickiest problems. Who uses Kinsta? The big boys, TripAdvisor, NASA indeed uses Kinsta among the 120,000 businesses that trust Kinsta for their WordPress websites. Tired of being your own website support team? Switch your host into Kinsta and get your first month free. And don't worry about the move. They'll handle a whole transition for you. No tech expertise required. Just visit kinsta.com TWIT to get started. That's K-I-N-S-T.com TWIT Kinsta. We thank him so much for supporting this week in tech. Thank you, Kinsta. All right, so why are we even talking about Google Chrome being for sale? Well, this is part of the government's stated aims. The FTC and the Department of Justice suing Google. They won. Google is a monopoly, according to the court. And now the court is looking at remedies. And one of the remedies the government has asked for is the sale of Chrome how does that work?

[Kathy Gellis]

I think one of the things Google is saying is that they say you can't. They say they can, they cannot. Yeah, no, it's like that's a weird thing to say.

[Leo Laporte]

Only Google can run Chrome, says Google.

[Kathy Gellis]

I don't know if I buy that, but what it would be deprived of if it couldn't have it, given that web engines are essentially not interesting external software, but so rolled into what you need for basic functionality of a whole lot of stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Parisa Tabriz, who's the general manager of Chrome at Google, says chrome today represents 17 years of collaboration between the Chrome people trying to disentangle. That's unprecedented. Part of the problem is Chrome is based on Chromium, which is an open source project, and Blink, which is the engine, also an open source project. And so it is technically not owned by Google. Now the fact is that almost everybody who works on those projects is Google employee. So I, but honestly, you've got the Chromium. Couldn't you just. I don't get, I don't know what you're getting when you buy an open source project. What are you getting?

[Kathy Gellis]

Abrar.

[Leo Laporte]

Who does this? Is the government not understand what's going on?

[Kathy Gellis]

Yes.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Usually my take, I think that's usually my take on these things because the other piece of it is, you know, they have this idea where if after 5 years I believe if things haven't gotten better in the search space, that they would then force Google to spin off Android. I mean, it's just like this very, like very drastic measures that they're thinking about and you know, it's not surprising that they've ruled that Google is a monopoly. But I don't know what is solved if OpenAI then acquires Chrome. You know, I don't like, does it has that fixed anything? I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Judge Amit Mehta, who ruled that Google was a search monopoly, by the way, that's this case is a search monopoly. There's another case they lost last week that they were an ad monopoly, but that's a separate case. In this case, the government's meta is now doing the penalty phase. Like, okay, what are the remedies gonna be? A three week hearing and the government says among other things, they want it to sell Google and share some of the data it collects to create the search results. It's also asked the judge not meta the company judge, meta the judge to ban Google from paying for search engine defaults. Now I don't think this hurts Google, but it sure hurts Apple. Mozilla and Samsung. It's estimated Google pays Apple, what, $20 billion a year. It's a big part of its services revenue.

[Kathy Gellis]

And are they still paying for Mozilla to create.

[Leo Laporte]

They still give Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars a year, without which there is no Mozilla, there's no Firefox.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah. So if Google doesn't have Chrome, it means that they're not funding the engineering work to develop Chrome and they're not funding these other browser, Mozilla to build Firefox. And like this is. This doesn't help the public. This remedy would make the public worse off than.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that. I hope the judge is going to be smart enough to know that. Look, that's not. You got to support. In fact, I would say the judge should say no. Google should give more money to Firefox. Google should support the alternative. It also. The government also asked the judge to ban Google for paying. Oh no, we mentioned that. That would also apply to. We're learning now. Google pays a lot of money to Samsung and others for them to use Gemini, their AI product.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Not surprising.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we're finding a lot of stuff out. These trials are always kind of revelatory.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Early on Friday, a computer science expert for the Justice Department, James Mickens, testified that Google could easily transfer ownership of Chrome to another company without breaking its functionality. Mickens is a professor of computer science at Harvard. The divestiture of Chrome is fee. I want him to sound like the guy. Professor Frink. The divestiture of Chrome is feasible from a technical perspective. It would be feasible to transfer ownership and not break too much.

[Kathy Gellis]

But that's not the whole question. I mean, you're talking about, okay, antitrust.

[Leo Laporte]

We wouldn't break much.

[Kathy Gellis]

It wouldn't break much. I mean, the whole point with why we care about having antitrust law is that consumers don't have enough market choices. So if you do a remedy that ultimately has the effect of eliminating market choices, you have not.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the wrong direction, isn't it? Yeah. Google says they invest hundreds of millions of dollars into the open source Chromium project. A thousand engineers within the division have contributed to the project. She says 89 Tabri says 90% of the code for chromium since 2015 has been has come from Google. Although I think Microsoft probably has contributed back some from its Edge, which is based on Chromium, right?

[Daniel Rubino]

It does, yep.

[Leo Laporte]

In internal documents, Google says it intends to develop Chrome into an agentic browser which incorporates AI agents. In other words, Google has Plans for Chrome, Judge. Your Honor, please don't make us sell it. It's hard to think of what the remedy would, should be or would be, obviously.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah, I'm struggling with this too. I don't like the idea of companies paying billions to other companies to use their product, their software. I feel like that, that is kind of unfair, right. Even like with Gemini. Right. So I don't have a problem necessarily that Gemini might ship with Android operating system and part of that Google suite of stuff, that's fine. But, you know, like, Microsoft has its copilot, right? And so. But people have to go and download that. And it's separate. It does. It is kind of unfair in terms of. It doesn't really give Microsoft a shot at that. But I don't. You know, the browser stuff, same thing. It. The problem with this is, you know, back in the day, Microsoft got sued because they were bundling their browser into Windows and forcing it as the default option. And people lost their minds over it. We're basically doing the same thing now, because a browser is basically almost an operating system at this point. It's so complicated. It can do so much stuff. I mean, that's what, you know, Google has built an operating system around almost. So now within the browser itself, you're going to make it an agent of AI thing, right? So they're going to bootstrap all their services into that as well. So it continues to get more and more complicated and it favors that company. And that's where this idea of a monopoly, I think, really starts to come to focus. But how do you solve that? Because there are alternative browsers. We have that great story coming up about being paid not to use Google search and how, you know, people were using Bing and like, hey, it's not actually so bad. So these services are out there, but it's, it's hard to get people to switch to them. But I don't know, it's a very complicated problem. Same with the social network.

[Leo Laporte]

You're talking about a study. This is really kind of fascinating from the Washington Post. The government wants you to get paid not to use Google Search. A group of researchers say it's identified a hidden reason we use Google for web searches. We've never tried the other guys. We've never given them a real shot. Now, who paid for this study? I wonder. I wonder if Google had something to do with it. The research suggests our mass devotion to Googling can be altered by bribing people to try search alternatives to see what they like. Microsoft may be Paid for this? I don't know. About nine out of ten web searches we do is through Google. They have 90% of the web search market, at least According to the 2020 figures cited in the monopoly ruling against Google last year. Bing is just 6%. So a group of academics from Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT designed a novel experiment to figure out what might shake up Google's popularity. They recruited 2,500 paid participants, remotely monitored their web searches on computers for months. You wouldn't like that, would you, Kathy? The core of the experiment was paying some participants. Most received a mere $10 to use Bing rather than Google for two weeks. Now, I'm going to ask our chat room. If I said I'd pay you $10 to use Bing for two weeks, I bet you most of them, without even thinking about it, would say, oh, no, no way. Bing's terrible, right? They maybe never even used it. I use Bing, couldn't pay me to use Bing. But those people who did it, 22% were still using it many weeks later.

[Daniel Rubino]

I think this is where I think. Sorry. Just like I think the issue with this too, is, like, it really. There's that quote in there that the person tried and like Bing, bing's actually not so bad. And I think that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Daniel Rubino]

If you're, at least in the United States, there's not a ton of difference between Bing and Google search. Sometimes they give you different results. It might have better results on one over the other, but I go back and forth and try them and I get different things. I like how Bing does images better than Google does in terms of browsing images and stuff. Right. So it's not like there's a drastic difference. I will say Bing is not as good outside the US as it is inside. This is an issue that Microsoft struggles with. So there.

[Leo Laporte]

That's interesting, huh?

[Daniel Rubino]

I think people do make a lot of, like, it's. I don't know. And whenever I hear people like Google search is so much better, I'm like, no, it's not.

[Leo Laporte]

It's actually gotten much worse.

[Daniel Rubino]

And it's gotten a lot worse. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I don't even use Google anymore. I use cocky and perplexity and I use AI to do my searching.

[Kathy Gellis]

This whole lawsuit is, I think, kind of ridiculous. I mean, even before we get into the remedy problem, where, I mean, what you were talking about, about things being bundled together, it's a concept in antitrust law called tying, that if you. If it's sort of a take it or leave it with this other to use this one thing, you now have to use this other thing. And they're going to close out competitors who now can't compete on the other thing because nobody's going to choose to pay when they can get something for free. But I'm not entirely sure how a case saying you've got a monopoly in search is affected or either it's the problem or it's the solution that you have to divest of a browser. Unless they were really arguing that tying somehow created the, the, the monopoly and search. But I always found, and I know the lawsuit changed over time, but when it was first announced, I have a TechTurk post from 2020 where I thought the original filing was just ridiculous in how they were arguing the monopoly and search in the first place. And the the headline on it is trademark generic side. And one DOJ admits that its antitrust lawsuit against Google is utter garbage because the way they drafted it was sort of by pointing out all the competition as part of their complaint as evidence that there was no competition. It was bizarre. But look, okay, I can accept maybe you still with a well pled complaint can get that Google has a little bit too mark much marketplace power. But it clearly isn't a monopoly in that we're talking about how you can use Bing and you can use all.

[Leo Laporte]

Judge Mehta disagreed with you though, right? He ruled that they were.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, I haven't looked at the case because I need to see how the thing was queued up and what the actual legal questions were and what he was looking at. And there may be more tussling among the lawyers to figure it out. But I'm a little bit, I mean and also now we're at remedy court, we may be going up to appeals. Well and maybe it's going to be looked at with say that's nuts. If you're in a marketplace with other competitors and those other and your product is declining in market share while the other ones are already ascending as a matter of law, can you have too much market power? But then even if you say yes, then you get into the question of what's the remedy? And just randomly gutting the company and slicing off other pieces that are going.

[Leo Laporte]

To have market it's hard to come.

[Kathy Gellis]

Up with a remedy.

[Leo Laporte]

This study led the Colorado attorney general to ask the judge. He said I know what you could do. Pay people to use something besides Google search.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean they can argue don't tie the things together. And then the remedy is like, oh, you created a problem because you Tied your search to your other products and then the remedy is don't tie your search to the other products and make sure it's nice and easy that people can slide around and use some other ones. That would make sense, but that doesn't seem like what the issue is or what's on the table.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. I don't know what the remedy could possibly be. By the way, there are a lot of people who think Chrome is worth something. Yahoo wants to buy it. OpenAI wants to buy it it and perplexity wants to buy it. Incidentally, it's interesting, the CEO of Perplexity, which is developing its own browser, I think Comet is the name of it, has been very open saying, yeah, we want to use Comet so we can find out more about people and sell product and AIM ads at them. Like he's being very open about it. I mean, I guess that's what Google's doing.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

But yeah, and that's my question is does the user experience get better because another company is now in China?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it would only get worse. Right?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Like that's if we're actually thinking about the impact on consumers and everyday people. If in the end, you know, that experience goes even more downhill, what have we solved?

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah, yeah, here's the solution. Everybody's got to get rid of all their browsers. We just all use Chromium and everybody contributes. You do the open source project?

[Kathy Gellis]

No, no, no. It's links or bust. You know, maybe some gopher, like let's.

[Leo Laporte]

Just link L, Y, N, X. She's talking about the command line text only browser.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, it's a deep cut.

[Leo Laporte]

We didn't need wheels either.

[Daniel Rubino]

Right back Netscape, let's go Netscape.

[Kathy Gellis]

We'll make Netscapes fancy schmancy. You got to go to Mosaic if you're going to go up from.

[Leo Laporte]

Firefox is open, open source. It's not just the Mozilla Foundation. There are a lot of spinoffs of Firefox. I use one called Zen that I love. There's a lot of choice. But the truth is most people just use Chrome partly because, you know, it's got the brand, partly because Google pays companies, especially phone companies, to put Chrome to use Chrome, notably not Apple. But on all the Android devices, Chrome is present A lot of times it's just simple.

[Daniel Rubino]

Like people are just familiar with it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Daniel Rubino]

And they just like that experience, you know, because like I tell people all the time, I think Brave is one of the best browsers out there. I love Brave. They're doing Some really good stuff out there. Yeah. And if you go use it, it's like, it's not just like Chromium though. Like they put in some like really cool features in there that no one else does. And then you have Opera, they have their new Opera Air, I think it's called, which is a very unique take on a browser.

[Leo Laporte]

Browser.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah, yeah. You can play music in the background like it does. Like there's a lot of innovation in this space and people just tried these browsers to be like, oh, these are actually pretty cool. It's not just like clones of the same browser. And Microsoft's Edge has done a ton of like innovation and there's like so many features that they built into it. But it's tough because you get tell people about all this but then at the end of the day they're going to be like, yeah, but I know Chrome, I know where everything is. I know how.

[Leo Laporte]

We should point out that the trial only said Google has a monopoly in search. This isn't really about Chrome.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, that's why I can't figure out where Chrome.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the judge recognizes that search is based on signals that Google gets from Chrome. So what they're trying to do is. And among the other remedies, maybe a more sensible one is for Google to open its search index. So I think this would be a great solution so that other companies can compete. You know, one of the people who testified in the trial was a browser company called I paid for it. I loved it. Was it Neva? What was. Was a great browser. The founder said we can't compete because Chrome is so dominant. There's just no money in it. So they actually abandoned the browser market.

[Kathy Gellis]

So a huge critical question, what is the browser that handles large amounts of tabs the best?

[Leo Laporte]

Because that's all that really matters.

[Kathy Gellis]

It's totally all that really matters.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's Chrome, isn't it? I don't know.

[Daniel Rubino]

No, I think Edge has done a lot of work around that because they, well, they use the feature but I think now it's part of the Chromium thing where the sleeping tabs. Where the tabs.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

I have a couple of use cases. One the sleeping tabs. So it doesn't just, just chew up all the memory when you open more than a dozen. But the second thing is who has. I'd be interested in who has a native tab handler that handles it really well because I'm fond of arc, which.

[Leo Laporte]

Is a Chromium based browser that I thought did tabs they do vertical tabs very well. And one of the reasons I'm using the Zen browser, it's basically the Arc interface with the Firefox engine. And I want to support a third party engine. So take a look at Zen browser. It's an open source, free, I'll say.

[Daniel Rubino]

Also like in Edge right now there's a. You can hit the little icon at the top if it should be in your browser. If not, it's in the menu called browser essentials. And it's a health system of the browser. So I'm looking at mine. I have a switch that save power with efficient mode and you can click on or off shows me 23 tabs are sleeping to save resources and it shows 85% savings. It shows me the memory being used. The tab perform performance is healthy right now. So they have like all these features built into it that help you manage the tech. Because I got an idea. I'm one of those people. I have. I sometimes have 120 tabs.

[Kathy Gellis]

I got an idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Why don't you close your freaking tabs?

[Kathy Gellis]

120. That is nothing. Add at least a zero and you might get my current.

[Leo Laporte]

Why, why, why? Why do you have so many tabs?

[Kathy Gellis]

I'm busy.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no way just control.

[Kathy Gellis]

W Every time I close a tab. Gosh darn it. I totally needed that. And like now I'm all interrupted. I'm not gonna be able to find it again. I have a lot going.

[Daniel Rubino]

See, that's why you need Windows Recall. It'll do that. You just tell what you were looking for.

[Leo Laporte]

Tab hoarders.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I don't think I have more than like six open at a time ever.

[Kathy Gellis]

Oh my God.

[Leo Laporte]

I. I believe in tab sanitation. You get rid of. Get rid of the tabs you don't need. It's a good idea. Just clean up after you're sand.

[Kathy Gellis]

So right now I do have more than normally I 1200. I don't usually cross a thousand, but I usually hang out somewhere around. Usual for me.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you need a better tool. I don't know what.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, I do need another tool. Hence the question.

[Daniel Rubino]

They are starting to use AI now to group your tabs, which is pretty cool.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean I could group them. I want the control and it's just right now I just don't have that control of.

[Leo Laporte]

Also our chat room is suggesting, I think surge strip said Opera does a good job with tabs too.

[Daniel Rubino]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Opera is very innovative. I would look at Vivaldi too. That's a chromium based browser that has a lot of. I don't like it because there's so much customization. It's like I feel guilty that I haven't used all the features and switched all the switches. All right, let's take a little break and somebody help Kathy with a tab hoarding. Okay.

[Kathy Gellis]

I don't have a problem. I could quit my tabs anytime.

[Leo Laporte]

You're not alone. A lot of our listeners tell me they have hundreds and hundreds of tabs open. I think Steve Gibson, our security guy, also does the same thing. But I do think that there is a trend of people closing their tabs more than they used to.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, I would like.

[Leo Laporte]

The young people are closing their tabs.

[Kathy Gellis]

Kids today, they just.

[Leo Laporte]

Kids closer tabs.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, I would like to close. I'd like to be able to bunch them and manage them because a lot of them are. Firefox does that now and just waiting for me.

[Leo Laporte]

Grouping. Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

Does it? Okay. I haven't figured out how to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

It would be a good thing to have projects right. Where you have all the tabs. And I think that's why I use like Zen and Arc, because you can create. You can pin stuff that you always want and then you can create tab groupings and so that you have different. You know, it's a little bit more compartmentalized. It's a first step to cleaning up.

[Kathy Gellis]

It's an important step. I was talking about control. I know my needs. I just want to be able to be the master of the solution.

[Leo Laporte]

I think a lot of people, and I think it's writers will have a lot of tasks. It's like their research and they'll have a lot of. Is that right, Abrar?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Do you think that too? Most of my co workers are that way, but yeah, apparently I'm the only abnormal one. I don't know who doesn't have that many.

[Leo Laporte]

I think when you're done though, you know, like the pieces so satisfying, then you should close the.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That's true. Yes. Agree.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yes. Hi, this is Benito. I got one quick, quick question for you, Kathy. How many unread emails do you have?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I have more than 22,000.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, in terms of unread, a lot. But in terms of anything I need to read.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

None.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't read at all. Who reads it all anymore?

[Daniel Rubino]

Well, you don't clear it out. Like I'm a zero inbox person, so.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Me too.

[Kathy Gellis]

I can't.

[Daniel Rubino]

I can't have a number next to my inbox.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't Yeah, I turn that off.

[Daniel Rubino]

Too far gone at this point. I have, like, that. I'm like 15 years, I think, on email or something. It's just like, it's. It's too far gone. But it's kind of cool, though, because I. I do go Back to email 2012. Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's a sensible use of email.

[Kathy Gellis]

I actually also like the. When they rolled it out, a lot of people thought it was stupid, but it gives it funnels, like, into the five categories automatically. If you said it and a lot of people mocked it, I actually find that extremely useful and generally pretty apt and controllable if it gets things wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

How many of you use Gmail as your primary mail? Gmail?

[Daniel Rubino]

I mean, I use it. I use it for work, but I use Outlook as my personal.

[Leo Laporte]

Outlook is your personal.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

How about a monopoly, huh? I'm just kidding.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, it makes sense. It's amazing how many people use Gmail.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, I use it as a client. I don't like to give out my Gmail address because I reserve the right to walk away from it. But it's a really nice client to just handle all the email that comes in.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I like to pay for my email because I think I want to own it. I don't want Google to own my email. I like to pay for it, I guess, with workspace, and the company uses workspace. We're paying for it. It's the worst of both worlds. All right, let's take a little break. You're watching this week in Tech, Abrar Alheidi. It's wonderful to have you. Daniel Rubino, Kathy Gellis, and of course, you, dear, dear listener. So nice to have you all on this Sunday afternoon, evening, Monday morning, depending on where you're watching our show today, brought to you by Monarch Money. I've been using this, and I love it. Finances are. It can be messy. They can be confusing. Monarch Money acts like your personal cfo, giving you full visibility and control so you can stop earning and start growing. It's more than your average budgeting app. Monarch Money is a complete financial command center for your account, for your investments, for your goals. Don't just, you know, manage your money. Start building wealth. And by the way, right now's a good time to do it. 50% off your first year of Monarch Money. But just because you're listening, I use Monarch Money. I love it. I have every account in it, and it made it very easy to get all my accounts in it. And now I have a dashboard, so I Know exactly how I'm doing. Start managing your finances to build the life you actually want. I can tell you this. Without a clear financial picture, financial dreams can feel out of reach. But Monarch makes managing money simple, even for busy lives. With all your accounts, your credit cards, your investments, your bank accounts all in one place, you'll always know where your money stands without the hassle. I can see my net worth right away. Maybe don't want to these days, but I can see it right away. I can see it going down. It's nice, though, to see exactly where everything is. The problem is, you know, ignorance is not bliss. You need. You need to keep track of this stuff. It's important. Track your spending, your savings, your investments, and do so effortlessly. Then you can focus on what matters most, making your biggest life goals a reality. Monarch Money is the finance tool people actually love. Join over a million households named Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025. The top recommended personal finance app by users and experts. Over 30,000 five star reviews. And I love it, too. Add mine. I've been using it. I swear, as soon as I started using it, I said, I want a year. I want to subscribe right now. Get control of your overall finances with Monarch Money. Use code [e-mail] in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first [e-mail] with code twit. Well, Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over, but 4chan's not. How's that about merging two stories into one big headline? 4chan is back online. It was hacked. And it was. I think Wired declared it dead. All of the moderator emails were leaked that they call them janitors on 4chan, and rightly so, because it's kind of a mess. I'm not sure I'm happy that 4chan's back. Design. No, I. I know none of you use 4chan, but do you for your jobs, ever visit?

[Daniel Rubino]

Nope.

[Leo Laporte]

No. You all right, well, 4chan was.

[Daniel Rubino]

That's a. That's too chaotic for me.

[Leo Laporte]

Crazy. Yeah, it's crazy, actually. I feel like x.com has become much like 4chan. I stopped using X for the same reason. I. It just. It brings me down, man.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, well, Mark Zuckerberg says, don't worry, social media is over. As you know, Meta is on trial this week. An antitrust trial. Have you been following this, Kathy, or do you care? Oh, you're muted. Your microphone's been coming and going. Hello? Push A button.

[Kathy Gellis]

User error. Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

User error. So have you been following the Mark Zuckerberg Meta trial?

[Kathy Gellis]

Not that closely.

[Leo Laporte]

It's funny, neither have I. I don't care.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of other things I'm tracking a lot more closely that matters to my world. And it just feels like so yesterday's issues, and nobody's going to get any of the issues right. The one side is going to be wrong, the other side is going to be wrong. It's just not wor. Like, I'll clean up the mess after they finish making it.

[Leo Laporte]

Zuckerberg on the witness stand, admitted that social media is less social. He had to testify for 10 hours over three days last week. This is part of the FTC's antitrust trial against Meta. Zuckerberg said the company has lately been involved in, quote, the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what's going on, not so much about your friends.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I think there's some validity to that, just based off of my own experience. Like, I spend a lot of time on TikTok, for example, and I don't want to see my friends post on.

[Leo Laporte]

TikTok's never been about your friends.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It's never been about your friends. Right. And so then I think what Instagram does, for example, is it copies what TikTok does, and so it wants to show you stuff from creators that you don't actually know. And so it's kind of Mark Zuckerberg's fault. I mean, I don't. Like, you're the one who owns the platform that is then copying what other people are doing and, and showing people things necessarily relevant to, you know, the people they actually know. I didn't. Did. Did he say that it was a bad thing, that it's no longer like that?

[Leo Laporte]

It's. He just says, we've re refocused. I mean, really, the promise of Facebook from day one was connecting people, right? Connecting you with your friends, your family, your high school classmates, your college classmates, your work colleagues, whatever. And. And for the longest time, the only reason I thought to use Facebook was so you could stay in touch with those people.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Exactly. Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

But he says that over time. That's an old idea, that over time, people have started using Facebook less for that and more. Because, like, you use TikTok for that.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Exactly.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah. They change your feed less because you're.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Not seeing those people.

[Leo Laporte]

They did it on. They did it to us. Right?

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah, they pumped in news for a long time. You know, then there was all this other Distraction. It made it hard to find people, the people you follow, their content, you know, so it's like, now they're kind of undoing that stuff, but it's a little bit too late.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, he has so little intuition for the needs and desires of his users. And he keeps ending up creating the environment and then frustrating people. And he changes habits that.

[Leo Laporte]

That.

[Kathy Gellis]

Because we have no choice in it. Then those habits go bad. Then he complains about, you know, people aren't using the platform. If he followed what. What the users were doing and what the users wanted, he would have a successful platform where he wouldn't be saying oops right now and having people just wander away. And now it's a lot easier to wander away because, like, people are starting to wander away for political reasons. And it's much easier because people are like, you know, is this really a loss for me? I'm not getting the value out of it that I either used to have or thought I would get, or even if I was still getting it, half the people I wanted to connect to, they've all left. I mean, just how to not grow your site and just alienate your users because you just don't understand them and what they want and what they're going to use your technology for.

[Leo Laporte]

A couple of weeks ago, I was doing my taxes and I needed some entertainment, and I just received an email from Dan Patterson, who's been on the show for a long time. He said, you know, my first time on the show was March 2009. And he said I was on with, get this, Jason Calacanis, Gina Trapani, David Prager, Sam Levine of freaks and geeks, LeVar Burton of Star Trek, and Kevin Pollock, the comic. And I thought, wow, that was a pretty good show. So I was listening to the show, and the funniest thing, the big story, was the huge uproar over Facebook moving to the news feed. Do you remember that in 2009, that was the beginning of it becoming a different platform. And they were. At the time, there was no TikTok. They were jealous of Twitter.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Daniel Rubino]

And right.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

To some degree, I guess MySpace was pretty much dead by then.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my. They'd beat MySpace.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They. They were trying to be like, Twitter. Like, no, not what your friends. It's what's going on. They had, I think, the intuition, probably correct, that we wanted to be entertained when we picked up our phone.

[Daniel Rubino]

It's all about time on site. Right. They. It was all about trying to create, give you enough stuff so you never leave the platform. If the, you know, Facebook and your.

[Leo Laporte]

Friends aren't doing enough to do that.

[Kathy Gellis]

Right?

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah. If that's all it was, you just connect your job. I'm done. Let me go check out the news. Let me go look at this stuff. You're leaving the platform and, you know, is trying to do the same thing. And that's the problem. That's why we can't have nice things. You create, like, a really cool tool, and then it's like, no, we need more. This is why, by the way, I still love Drudge Report. I will always defend this because he never, like, did more than that site. He just creates that front page, never changed the font.

[Leo Laporte]

It even looks the same as it did 15 years ago. Right.

[Daniel Rubino]

He didn't try to create a media company and try to create a magazine, and he just stuck to it. And it's still the same thing for 15 years ago. It's just awesome. Whether you agree with some of his politics or not, actually, he's been pretty funny lately. But, like, I just appreciate the fact that he just stuck to that. And it hasn't changed because it's, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Know who he's copying? Craig Newmark and Craigslist, which never changed either. Right.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. If somebody created a website where you would just follow your friends and family, the problem is you got the network effect. Like, everybody's on Facebook. But if you could somehow magically change it so that Facebook were once again just your friends and family, would that be good? Would people want that?

[Kathy Gellis]

I think so.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I have been told.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I think if all of these services.

[Daniel Rubino]

Were just their original version of their services, they would still be pretty successful. You know, like, Facebook was still regular Facebook. If Twitter was still regular Twitter, if, like, Instagram was regular Instagram, I think they'd all do just fine.

[Leo Laporte]

If you go to feeds on Facebook and then you select friends, you. Well, there's still some ads, there's sponsored stuff in there, but this is basically people I follow.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's the Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's boring as hell.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah. See, I think. I don't think I would enjoy that very much because when I. I still. I do still go on X and I actually, like. I'm. I'll admit it, I kind of enjoy some of the viral stuff that I see on my feed.

[Leo Laporte]

And you go to the for you.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Tab, not the for you tab. And I don't. I can't remember the last time I clicked on the following tab. I know. Which is. But I do. I do Resent the fact that I don't see content people I follow on my for you tab as much. I actually really don't like that. But if I had to choose between the two, I'm more likely to laugh at stuff on my for you tab than I am on my following tab. So Mark's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. You go there for entertainment. You don't go there to see what your family's up to.

[Kathy Gellis]

But I. I don't know. I get that from the people that I follow. Like, I do want to see that. And I think it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe it's a better mix.

[Kathy Gellis]

Entertaining.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I think it has to be a mix.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what you want abroad, right? Maybe there should be a knob that you could say a little more of my following in there, would you?

[Kathy Gellis]

I want all the people that I choose to follow. I don't mind getting extra with it, but I'm not getting the former, you know, and then, like, depending on how much time I have, how bored I am, you know, give me more, give me more. Because I ran out of all my friends stuff. I don't mind having access to more. But I. It's. The more is coming at the cost of, like, the basics of what I'm there for, and that's not helpful.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

And I feel like this conversation about what Facebook has become ties directly to another headline that came out of this trial about how Mark Zuckerberg feels like Instagram cannibalized Facebook's success. Which is really interesting to kind of dive into his true feelings about an app that he spent a lot of money acquiring and then was like, ooh, this is complicated, because it's not the app that he created and he has this connection with, but it's an app that was doing. Starting to really take off and kind of leave Facebook in the dust. And so to kind of see a piece of how he was thinking about Instagram was a really interesting revelation.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually. The founder of Instagram, Kevin Systrom, testified, and I don't think he testified in defense of Meta, because he said basically, once Meta bought Instagram, they starved us.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They didn't want us to succeed. They were basically killing or trying to.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Kill Instagram, apparently, apparently denied a lot of requests for more staff. But then that also makes me wonder, would Instagram be what it is today without having been bought out by Facebook? Right. I don't know the answer to that.

[Leo Laporte]

They were tiny. I mean, it was. I remember because it was a billion dollars. And I thought, for an app, for an app, a billion dollars for an app. Of course, WhatsApp ended up being like $32 billion. So I guess I was wrong about that. But even then, Instagram had 15, I think 10 or 15 employees. It was tiny, it was small for a billion dollars. And it's come out in the trial basically that the reason they bought it, they were threatened by it. They bought it to put, put, you know, to protect the blue site, Facebook.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

But then Instagram still grew, right? It still became what it is today. So it's like this weird two sided thing, which is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Systrom said he left meta in 2018 because he felt like Mark wanted Instagram to die. Although at that time Instagram was already 1 billion users. It was, it was all. It was 40% of Facebook's size and still only 1,000 employees compared to 35,000 at Facebook. SYSTROM testified. We were by far the fastest growing team. We produced the most revenue, and relative to what we should have been at the time, I felt we could have been much larger. So he left. He left. So really one of the things that's going to come out of this case, I think, who knows? Well, who knows if the FTC will continue to pursue it? Maybe if Mark Zuckerberg gives Donald Trump enough money, they'll lose interest. Whatever. He tried, he tried. Facebook gave Trump $23 million in a settlement. Right. And millions for his inaugural wasn't enough. Trump even said, I'm still a little mad at you. So the trial continues, but it's likely that what they're gonna ask for is a breakup of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, three different, different companies. It'd be major, it would be a.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Big deal because, you know, going back to when Facebook first acquired Instagram, I think a big piece of why people then signed up for Instagram and Mass is because there was that familiarity of like, oh, Facebook now has this platform that I had never heard of before. And then they kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and look what happened with threads. Yeah, Threads grew instantly because it was your Instagram account.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I mean, I'm sure we all remember that day that everyone just joined in like hordes and thought that Twitter was dead, right? Because everyone was running threads. And God, I can't remember the last time I opened threads. Now was this moment of hype, right? Because it was a clear connection between something that you were already using. So it'd be interesting if that actually did end up getting separated, would there.

[Leo Laporte]

Be, I guess there would be President Cathie for breaking the company up. I mean, that's what happened with Ma. Bell, it's what happened with Standard Oil. I mean, that's what antitrust actions often do result in. In fact, the government wanted to break Microsoft up in the late 90s when they went after them.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, how you break it, I think I'm befuddled by this slicing off Chrome because in theory, you want to split up what you've overly dominated where you don't have enough. There's not enough diversity in the market. So it seems weird to say, okay, you've got a search problem, so therefore you should cut off another part of your company. Now, what you were saying is that the Chrome feeds into the search, but it just seems way too far removed to not actually solve the problem back.

[Leo Laporte]

You could see Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp being standalone companies strong in their own right in three different areas.

[Kathy Gellis]

I worry a lot about what would feed WhatsApp if Facebook. I essentially read that as a situation where Facebook is subsidizing it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you know, financially, is what you're saying.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because WhatsApp is dominant in everywhere but the United States. Right. All over the world.

[Kathy Gellis]

Right. And you kind of need it to keep going. But what's its standalone profit? I mean, I don't really understand why Facebook. Well, I guess Facebook kind of wanted. My read on it is they wanted access to the technology so that they could roll in the encryption into its messaging. And it's really hard to develop that from scratch. So better to buy somebody where you get all that IP and you can use it. And now Facebook messenger is starting to encrypt stuff. So. But otherwise, I sort of worry now that they've done that, that they'll just starve the WhatsApp and that would be a big problem.

[Leo Laporte]

You'd almost have to tell Facebook to stop doing Messenger. To make WhatsApp succeed. I use WhatsApp. It used to charge a dollar a year, which obviously is not enough. Did they still do that? I don't remember paying anything, but who knows?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I've never paid.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

So it's free, and it's a major medium in a lot of places where a dollar would be ridiculously expensive.

[Leo Laporte]

And probably the reason Facebook continues to run it is they're getting ad information about you. They're getting location information. They can't see your messages. Those are encrypted. But they're getting enough information to make it valuable for an ad play on. There's no ads on WhatsApp yet, although they've made noises about thinking about that. But that's probably why Instagram And Facebook ads are so effective because they've got even more information than just those two apps. Yes.

[Daniel Rubino]

People should just use Telegram anyway. It's a better app.

[Leo Laporte]

I love Telegram. Even though it's, you know, there's issues.

[Kathy Gellis]

It's. It's not the thing that you can rely on for a lot of the stuff that you. Yeah. Like, it may be good for as a communication.

[Leo Laporte]

Who cares if somebody can read my messages? Really? I mean.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, no, you, you, you need. I think the problem with Telegram is it gives a false sense of security and how much security you have in your messages. And you need it to not go in eyes open if you're using.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not as sexy as Signal, but if you want real security, you use Signal or I guess what's Telegram's open source, though, right?

[Daniel Rubino]

Like, you can go look at the code.

[Leo Laporte]

Telegram.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And they. You roll your own encryption. Encryption, which is not industry standard, let's put it that way. It's not. Yeah, it's probably not good. The way they defend is say, well, we've offered $200,000. Anybody can crack it, and no one has. But the experts who've looked at it say, this is encryption as written by somebody who doesn't know how encryption works.

[Daniel Rubino]

It's just funny because on Telegram, I find the innovation of features is just.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I love it. The groups and the stickers and the. Yeah, I agree.

[Daniel Rubino]

I mean, they come up with so many ways to keep advancing. It's really interesting. I don't really use it even for, like, that feed. I use it as messenger because no one uses it.

[Kathy Gellis]

Not so much in this country. It's quite popular in other countries.

[Leo Laporte]

Telegram.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, that's the key, right? You got to use whatever. And I just use, I think, text messages because everybody uses it.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah. So far as a personal messenger, I agree. There's a lot of competition in the United States. SM still reigns there or Facetime or whatever. Europe. WhatsApp is definitely big for that feature. Telegram, I would say, got notoriety because of. You can go find groups on topics of things you're interested in, including terrorism and other.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, there's all sorts of skeezy stuff on Telegram. We know that.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah. Right. And so you can stop.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Daniel Rubino]

I mean, that's just kind of the nature of the Internet.

[Kathy Gellis]

But, you know, the other thing about some of these things is you want something that's going to use the Internet connection of your phone as opposed to the telephony aspects of the phone, because they tend to be cheaper if just buy one data plan and then you just stick whatever app on top of that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why WhatsApp got dominant very quickly over SMS. But here in the United States it's free. So that's why it hasn't been dominant in the United States. I think probably text messaging is dominant in the United States.

[Kathy Gellis]

SMS got a lot cheaper because it was really being overcharged for like.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. But it's free now. It's free, it's fun.

[Kathy Gellis]

But it took a long time to get that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I understand.

[Daniel Rubino]

Well, that's why it used to be ridiculously expensive.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the story of WhatsApp. Yeah, that's why. And Telegram and, and all these other data based messengers. But, but those days are gone. And the problem is habits die hard. And there's a network effect. You've got to have the messaging system, all the people you want to talk to use. And I would, I tried to, I did some years ago because I like you. I really liked Telegram. Daniel and I tried to get everybody I knew to move to Telegram. Nobody knew. Zero.

[Daniel Rubino]

It's really hard. It was like switching browsers.

[Leo Laporte]

My wife and I for a while use Telegram with our son. We just add up. Text messaging.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, I mean I would, I wouldn't want. It sounds like it offers nice things as a communications client. Client. But the thing, but the real need that I have is, well, increasingly is security in the communications itself.

[Leo Laporte]

So you signal. Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

So I use Signal a lot and I prefer it to WhatsApp, which I used to avoid deliberately because it's, it's privacy practices. Yeah. We're slurping contact.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the best way to share war plans, I find.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Always many people. Many people agree.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. Well, I mean for, for people like you and me, signal is more than adequate. Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It is important for people to understand that if somebody's compromised your device that they can read your signal messages. It's only encrypted on the way between devices, but as soon as it gets to a device, it's not encrypted. So you know, if you care that much, I would hope you would know about OPSEC and protecting yourself and so forth.

[Kathy Gellis]

And maybe I've used Signal with people. Security force. You would also.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I use Signal with people who. With whom I want to have a private conversation. They're not many of them. Everybody else I just text. And if you're, if you're Apple to Apple, it's encrypted. It says Encrypted as signal to secure a signal. I don't know. I think it would be fine. Like you, Kathy, I find it hard to even care about Meta anymore.

[Kathy Gellis]

More of the company. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That's why I don't follow this trial. I feel like we should talk about it, especially when Mark Zuckerberg says social. So 2010.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, it's, I, I, I just can't tune into it a little bit because other more things are breaking and, and this feels very old news and you know, and they're going to do whatever they're going to do and.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

This is also too early for me to like show up and what am I going to do? Affect the outcome of this trial. At some point there'll be briefing. At some point there'll be amicus briefs probably on appeal. I'll care then. I can't fix this now anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. We do have a little bit more Google news. We didn't get it all. They decided not to abandon third party cookies. They had this whole big plan for a privacy sandbox that was going to protect everybody and they were going to get rid of third party cookies. And then they talked to advertisers and guess what? The advertiser said don't. And Google said, oh, okay. And that's the end of the privacy sandbox.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That's pretty much how everything shakes out in the world.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Advertisers said no. So they said, oh yeah, okay. And by the way, Google's quarterly results were out and they topped Wall Street's expectations. 12 revenue growth. 46% increase in net income earnings of $2.81 a share. They had a great quarter. So there, so there. DOJ that's not going to go as.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well when they get to the antitrust for the sir for the, for the ad.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. They're going to do a $70. Sorry, 70 billion dollar. A little bit more $70 billion stock buyback program, which shareholders love. And of course it helped their stock price. I don't usually do financial news, but it's, you know, in, in the context of what we're talking about, it's good to point out they're doing just fine. Search numbers growing. They are using AI now in search. Have you tried the, tried the Google A. You can't. Are you eating rocks? Are you putting Elmer's glue on your pizza? They've gotten P. Past that now. Yes or no?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yes, they have gone. Although there was that headline. I don't know if you guys caught it this week, but people noticed that With AI overviews, if you type any saying, like, never like a badger twice or whatever, and then you type meaning afterwards that it's like, oh, this saying.

[Leo Laporte]

Means it makes up an answer.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Roll with it. So. So that's kind of fun.

[Kathy Gellis]

But it was really bad. And this was only a couple weeks ago, so I imagine it's still bad with anything involving location. I wanted to find something. What was it like? Swimming programs in northern New Jersey. It could not deal with location. It was. It like, acknowledged where I was asking them for, but it was giving me ones that were like, down the street from me, which is California. And then even when I'm like, no near this town in New Jersey, it like, was finding stuff, like, at the other end of the state. So no, the AI is. Well, actually that was a complaint about the search. Maybe not even the AI.

[Leo Laporte]

But they're not wrong, though. You really can't lick a badger twice.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

You can't. I think it's hard to get it the first time.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't like it. They really. They really don't. This was hysterical. So they came up, never wash a rabbit in a cabbage. And AI overview said the saying never wash a rabbit in the cabbage is a humorous way of saying that bathing rabbits is unnecessary and potentially harmful.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Okay, can I share something that's totally exposing myself? But sometimes when I'm writing and I. I want to include some sort of saying and I just want to make sure that I have it correctly. I will Google it just to, like, make sure that I didn't make that up. And I have noticed that AI overviews will always support whatever I've typed and been like, yeah, this means this. But then I scroll. Thankfully, I scroll and I see that no other result has that exact thing. There might be, like, you know, if I'm right, then it shows that if I'm wrong, it shows a tweak.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's a new way of hallucinating.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

So, you know, they're also thrilled.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

But yeah, the AI overviews are everywhere. To the dismay. Can't Get Away publisher. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. That's an issue, you know, and I have to say I am guilty because I use perplexity or chatgpt for a lot of my searching. And honestly, I'll end up never going to the site. They extract the good stuff from your beautiful site.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And sometimes they'll give you credit. They'll say, abrar Al Hedi says. But usually not.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Usually not.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And you don't get the link. Link.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Exactly.

[Kathy Gellis]

I'm I'm picky. There's a couple of instances where I really needed something that was that brief and what it is ending up summarizing is maybe also something I could see in the snippet preview and that's all I needed. But I don't trust the AI most of the time, so. And in fact, I'll. One of the things I do appreciate is it's got like little links for where it got whatever it is attempting to tell you is reality. And it's necessary, like, especially if it sounds good, I need to follow that link because I don't trust what it's giving me otherwise. So in small instances where like, yeah, thank you. I don't need to go click on that thing that I just needed a teeny tiny bit from. But if I needed more than a teeny tiny bit, I have to go follow it because I can't trust it and.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

And sometimes you can tell because you look at the summary and then you look at the results and they don't match.

[Daniel Rubino]

I mean, that's true too. I mean, there's definitely different levels here of search and information processing that people go through. If you're going to buy, buy, you know, a brand new car, you're probably not just going to look at the. Ask the AI. It gives you a little paragraph and you're like, all right, I'm gonna go buy that one. You know, you're probably going to then go down the funnel of like reading reviews and then maybe going to Reddit reading personal experiences and all this. I will say, though, you know this idea that, well, sometimes the AI is inaccurate. It's like, well, luckily we have no issue with disinformation, with just search.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. A lot of humans are often inaccurate. I. I mean, how often do you ask for directions and they give you. And they send you the wrong way? I mean, humans.

[Daniel Rubino]

How about this one? Just do the research yourself. It's like common expression on the Internet, you know, like, oh, you don't believe in climate science. I did the research. I did and it's like, so. I mean, people are already searching and getting very wrong answers.

[Leo Laporte]

You just see the mypillow guy used an AI to write a brief in his case.

[Daniel Rubino]

Oh, my gosh, I didn't.

[Leo Laporte]

The Judge found nearly 30 mistakes, including cases that do not exist.

[Kathy Gellis]

Again, at this point, this.

[Leo Laporte]

Learn your lesson.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, I mean, this is the first couple times because, like, one of the first was Michael Cohen or his lawyer got hallucinated five cases, but the fact. And they kind of got off lightly. There was a little bit of sanctions for some of them of like, I think they have to pay the other side aside some money for the time spent responding to it. But you know, okay, fine, mistakes were made. To still be making the mistakes at this point is inexcusable. And I do, I've done this a couple times where I speak to some law students about, I do a day class on AI and legal ethics and I run through the ethical rules governing the practice of law and sort of talk about different ways that they're going to implicate that AI using AI in some context is going to implicate one of these laws. And we, we talk through them and work through them and at this point there is no excuse to just forge ahead and being oblivious and pretend that the ethical rules aren't implicated at all. Because they're almost all implicated, not just the case hallucinations.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what I always say, you can't lick a badger twice. I just, I think that's pretty obvious by now. Let's take a little break and we'll have more to talk about. And just a bit you're watching this week in Tech, our show this time brought to you by our friends at outSystems, the leading AI powered application and agent development platform for more than 20 years. This has been a long time. The mission of Outsystems is to give every company the power to innovate through software. You know that if you're on an IT team, you're faced usually with two choices. It's the old build or buy conundrum, right? You buy off the shelf SaaS products for speed, but you lose flexibility and certainly differentiation because everybody else is using it too. Or you build custom software at great expense and in time and resources. Well, there's now a third. It's not just build or buy. Now AI forges the way for another path. The fusion of AI low code, which is something Outsystems has been doing for two decades. And DevSecOps automation into a single development platform. Your teams suddenly will build custom applications using AI agents as easily as buying generic off the shelf sameware. And the good thing about ad systems, flexibility, security and scalability, it comes standard with AI powered low code teams can build custom future proof applications at the speed of buying. Fully automated architecture, security, integrations all built in data flows, there permissions, all the stuff you need, you gotta have. Outsystems is the last platform you need to buy because you can use it to build anything and customize and Extend your core systems, Build your future with OutSystems. Visit outsystems.com TWIT to learn more. That's outsystems.com we thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. And you support us when you go to that address. Outsystems.com TWIT thank you, OutSystems. One more Google story I left out, and I feel bad about this one. Those Nest thermostats you bought back in the day, they're going to stop supporting them on October 25th. The first and second generation Nest Learning thermostats, and it's going to completely stop launching new Nest products in Europe. So I had a bunch of those thermostats. I didn't bring them when we moved, but I'm glad I didn't. What do you do if you have a Nest thermostat, first or second generation?

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah, I mean, I used to have a Nest thermostat and they were great. Gorgeous hardware. Yeah. I mean, it worked really well and there's like no reason to replace it outside of forced obsolescence here, which is really kind of disturbing.

[Leo Laporte]

So it'll still work as a thermostat. You can turn the knob, you just got the Surface, but it won't receive updates. It won't be supported in the. In the apps, the Nest and home.

[Kathy Gellis]

Apps, if it's not receiving updates. This is a liability to have in your house because it's still connected to the network and then anybody else is resetting. Your good point. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, it's not the worst thing.

[Daniel Rubino]

In the world, but you can tell it to turn WI fi off.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, turn off the WI fi and then you're going to have, you know, basically a thermostat, a knob on your wall. A beautiful, beautiful knob.

[Kathy Gellis]

Welcome back to 1950.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, retro. It's just something I always do these stories because it's something to remember when you buy an IoT device. You're buying software that's going to. At some point the company's going to say, yeah, that's it on. On that one. Pretty much. It is that way from now on. Right. You said that PC shipments are going up, Daniel. Is that because of tariffs?

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah. So some caveats here. Right. So got. Always we use the proper word here, shipments. Right. So shipments are definitely different than sales. And so we have seen a. I believe it's between. Well, depend if you're going with canalysis or count Counterpoint, I think it was. Yeah, it's between 6 and 10% that's a big jump.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's people shipping their PCs into the US for later sale. It's putting them in the supply chain. Yeah.

[Daniel Rubino]

So there's a lot of thought here that of course companies are building up stock because of the threat of tariffs, because you know, those tariffs could literally double the price of a laptop, in which case no one's going to buy them. But they're already here. You know, then it's not an issue. In fact, like, you know, Microsoft is, you know, we've been reporting, going to be launching new Surface devices. You know, they presumably brought a bunch already into the country here that will last them a couple months for sales. But if this goes on for six months, you know, then they're going to run out again, you know, so then there's an issue there. So, you know, this is good. They are expecting, you know, like I've mentioned this before, just three things kind of really driving this one. Windows 10 is coming to end of life for consumers. You know, technically it's a security thing and they should upgrade or switch to a laptop.

[Leo Laporte]

October, what, 25th, it's the end of the line for Windows 10.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah, yeah. And so but for enterprise, this is critical. Right. They don't really have a choice. They need to go buy new laptops. We're also coming up on the, you know, five years after Covid where so many companies bought new laptops for employees.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what depressed the market for those five years is that people bought up in 2020 and then they said, well, we're good for a while. But five years, is that when people.

[Daniel Rubino]

Typically kind of, that's, that's the upgrade cycle pretty much. Obviously companies want it to be less than that. That's always a challenge. But it's usually about five years. So you have that and then of course you have the Copilot A Plus Copilot Plus PCs, which is starting to drive now. Up until very recently there, there wasn't much reason to get one of those PCs. But now with recall and click to do and some other features that are coming, there's a lot more argument to, you know, kind of get this PCs, especially for businesses who will evaluate them. I would also just say, you know, laptops for the first time. And this includes Apple of course too, with this new processors, we got to the point where this is like the dream laptop. You can get three PC.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you talking specifically about the Snapdragons?

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah, yeah, but even intel too. I mean, what I'm saying is like you're Getting like legit, legit 10 to 15 hours of battery life now out of a laptop, even on the Internet. Yeah, yeah. I'm actually really surprised with. I'm using the. I think. Yeah. So it's the Core Ultra Gen 2. They did a lot. I'm pretty. The gap between what intel and Qualcomm is in terms of battery life is pretty narrow now. I'll still say Qualcomm. Yeah. I'll just say Qualcomm has advantages in heat and I think they're a little bit more responsive in my opinion. But their intel is still doing quite well here. But you can now get a laptop that gets like 10 hours of legit battery life that has a beautiful display, really good, you know, quad speakers. It's like this is what we've always dreamed of a laptop of actually being versus like, oh, it gets me about four to five hours of battery life. Right. And the cameras are really good. You know, and now you're getting this AI stuff, so it'll be interesting to see if consumers buy them.

[Leo Laporte]

But what happened? Why? What, why this leap in technology? Did Qualcomm drive this? But the release of the Snapdragon Elite.

[Daniel Rubino]

Well, I think Apple did really right.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, Apple, yeah.

[Daniel Rubino]

Bringing over the A series, developing the A series and then translating that to the M series, really, you know, I mean, there was no comparison between an M1 and an intel processor. It's really true night and day, you know. But now Qualcomm has come out with its Snapdragon X and they're going to come out with their Gen 22 this fall, which I heard is a significant jump. They're using the Orion version 3 cores where they're skipping version 2 for those. It's going to be very.

[Leo Laporte]

This is why competition is so good. Right. It drives people to do better. Now Intel's been struggling mightily.

[Daniel Rubino]

Not so much in the PC chips. They struggle because the fabs are extremely expensive and they're trying to build that out. They also have some other businesses, including Server. They really kind of missed out on AI, you know, so that those aren't doing well. But there, if you look at the numbers, even on their latest reports, the chip sales for laptops and PCs have actually been positive for them.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Daniel Rubino]

It's the rest of the business that's been struggling, so. But I will. I'm actually really surprised with their Gen 2 chips for core Ultra. They're a lot better than I expected them to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but.

[Daniel Rubino]

But yeah, I mean, it's a great Time to buy this hardware I'm using right now. Actually, I have it right here. This is the Asus who. I was never a huge Asus fan, but this is the ZenBook A14 and it was announced at $899. It's actually going for $999. But the thing gets like 15 hours of battery life. It has an OLED display. It's absolutely gorgeous. And it's going to come down in price I think pretty soon as well. And it's just, just like for below $1,000, you can get a laptop that I regularly use, even though I have like two or $3,000 laptops to use.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, how much does a. Is AI driving these sales? Are. Are people looking for machines that can do AI?

[Daniel Rubino]

I think businesses are more so than consumers. I think consumers are definitely like it's a buzz thing. They don't understand its practical applications. What do you mean? I already have chat GPT. Why do I need a. You know, so I think, think Microsoft needs to, you know, something like recall and click to do some of these features as they come online could potentially drive sales. But I think we still need that quote unquote killer app for consumers to be able to see that. But we're seeing more and more, you know, you're going to start to see some major like photography and video apps start to use the npu.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Daniel Rubino]

Which is really going to be the big deal here. We. Because npus are so much more efficient than a GPU for processing AI. And when you're using, you know, local processing for images or video like that npu, it's going to just make a world of difference for creators. And I think that's really where you're going to start to see this stuff is for people who use their laptops for media creation. You're going to have so much more advantage with AI and specifically the NPU hardware that's built onto these chips.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a really good point. I was thinking, oh, you know, most people use the AI on the server. They're not running agent AI locally, they're not running local models. But they are in some cases with software, things like image editing software that is local.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah, Topaz I use. It's a.

[Leo Laporte]

They have amazing tool. Yes.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah. Their Upscaler app is insane if no one knows. Go look up Topaz AI.

[Leo Laporte]

I've played with a few applications.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like I find photos from 15, 10, 10 years ago, whatever digital. They like little tiny things and you can upscale and create some really Good quality work out of them. They just literally came out a couple days ago with their ARM version, ARM64 version for Qualcomm chips for one of theirs. And you know you're going to start to see them start to use the NPUs more on this stuff. But like this is.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're going back to old images that you took and using the Topaz AI upscaler to fix them and you're getting good. Here's an example from their page of a bird and with the up. So it's a little blurry.

[Daniel Rubino]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's probably a telephoto shot with the upscaler the detail and the feathers and everything suddenly becomes clear. I mean it's a noticeable difference. You're seeing stuff like that in your.

[Daniel Rubino]

I mean actually kind of like a personal story. But my best friend's mother passed away a number of years ago and this was back before we barely had digital cameras and so we had some. I had a smartphone photo or he had a smartphone photo that was really just not great quality and he gave it to me and I used this app and played around with it and it was able to create a very usable recreation of that image that looks significantly better. So being able to do that with old photos and old digital. Digital photos is really kind of just cool technology. But they also have general photo and video editors too.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Daniel Rubino]

That just do all the kind of Photoshop stuff as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Topaz has been around a long time as a plug in company but they've really jumped on this AI bandwagon and I think they're doing some. So is as is Adobe. I mean so is everybody really.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yep. Although it's interesting, Adobe's primarily using the gpu. They're not really committing to NPU usage because I think most of their audience is so built in to.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Daniel Rubino]

You know, using the GPUs already. Whereas someone like Topaz is new but they're leaning heavy into AI which benefits the NPU more. So.

[Leo Laporte]

So ah, do they have hardware requirements or is it just slower if you don't have the horsepower?

[Daniel Rubino]

I think it's just price slower because right Now I use two topaz but I have a 4080 GPU and you can hear the Tensor cores going when it's doing stuff which is kind of cool. But with an NPU it's going to be a lot different. Yeah. I love the Tensor core sound. It's so great. Yeah. And you're going to see stuff like even like virus scanning, email, all this kind of stuff will be offloaded to the npu. A lot of security software that runs in the background on your computer could be offloaded to the npu.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very interesting. You really are going to want to have that capability on your next computer.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

How about RAM as well? Right? Is that that.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah. The Qualcomm laptops all ship with default 16 gigs of RAM. They don't. There's no such thing as an.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that enough?

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah, I think so. Although Zack Bowen just wrote an article on our site talking about he thinks 24 gigs of RAM should be the new standard.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

Are we going backwards? Like, weren't we going to a point where all the chip, all the chipping had been separate and we were busy putting it all on one main chip chip and now we're sort of like, oh wait, separate might have actually been the way to go. And so we're.

[Daniel Rubino]

It's still, I mean it's a little bit of both. They're still technically on one SoC, but it is. They have an Intel's on this too. They call them actually chiplets. They've actually broken up the components. But the reason they've done that is so they can shut them off when they're not being used for greater power efficiency, which is really kind of cool. So that's how intel does a lot of its power efficiencies. It turns off certain parts of the chip and we're talking like milliseconds of time. But over time that adds up to a lot. So when you buy like a Qualcomm laptop, you're getting their, their gpu, their NPU and their CPU as well as their image processing everything all on one single chip. So it's still there. You can't pull them out separately but.

[Leo Laporte]

And then if you want a heavy duty machine, you might get a gpu, a discrete gpu you from Nvidia down the road. But those are very expensive. Apple has this kind of secret thing that I think the secret sauce that I think might help them in the next couple of years, which is all their memory is unified memory. So it is available to both the GPU and the cpu, which means you can have as many of my Macs are 64 gigs, some of them are more. You could have a 92 gig, 96 gig Mac and most of that memory would be available to the AI in the gpu. And that is.

[Daniel Rubino]

We're seeing that with amd, some AMD chips you can do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Unified memory is really a very powerful tool in certain situations. Having more RAM available to the gpu. Apple's solution to this tariff problem is to, and this is a surprise, say they're going to start moving their phone manufacturer away from China to India.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I believe that's something they've been toying with for a while, is this idea of diversifying their manufacturing. But obviously this is the big push that gets them to like really ramp that up.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they, you know, they like their laptops are made in Vietnam. Now they have iPhone assembly in Brazil, India, Vietnam as well as China. But they're now saying we want to make every US iPhone in India.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is, that's a big change. Right. Ironically, some of this was due to tariffs. Brazil and India have big tariffs for hardware not made in those countries. So Apple initially opened plants there so that they would be able to make them locally, but now it's turning out. Oh, that worked out pretty well. There's also been a lot of fear about what's going to happen to Taiwan, I think. And, and Apple's chips are made in Taiwan by tsmc. So yeah, it makes sense for a company to do this. I'm surprised that Apple is as far along the path as they say they are. They say as soon as next year they will be able to assemble all US sold iPhones in India.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah. I guess the really drastic thing is how quickly they're pushing this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they have to double the iPhone output to do that.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah, yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

No, it's wild. And I think, I believe I read about something related to them also bolstering US based manufacturing too, which is interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

So. Well, this is, you know, the whole point of tariffs was to get the iPhone made in the U.S. right? Yeah, that ain't gonna happen. I think it's pretty clear that we don't have the capability for a variety of reasons. So really, in a way it's backfiring because now Apple's gonna make them in India.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Right. Other foreign country.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. It didn't bring those jobs to the United States where it can. Apple's making stuff in the US but it's a very small number of things.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, that doesn't work.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean, maybe in 10 years we will be making the U.S. i don't know. But experts seem to agree that making an iPhone in the United States is non starter, at least for a while.

[Daniel Rubino]

I mean the strength for China here was that, that not only did they do the manufacturing, they supplied all the parts, including the rare earth mineral metals for these devices. And this was all in like Shenzhen. So if you ever want to Just go build something electronic. If you go to Shenzhen, like, it's all there, it's all there. You can get your screws, you can get your screens, you can get the glue, you can get the factory to assemble it all. You can get the, the stuff for the chips. Yeah, your processors come from Taiwan. Like it's all right there. And that all reduces the costs. And even if you move to India, it's like, okay, but you still going have to import, you know, various components there.

[Leo Laporte]

Almost all of them will come from China. Right? Yeah, you're just assembling in India and.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, that ends up, you know, the most important thing is to not make the iPhone more expensive for consumers.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Look like that's going to be like, right.

[Leo Laporte]

60 million iPhones sold in the US annually. And they intend, they hope they're going to have to not only double their output, they're going to have to build two more factories in India to do this. And by the way, the factories are being built by the Chinese company that makes the iPhones in China, Foxconn and others. But Foxconn is building. Tata Electronics, which is an Indian company, is also building assembly plants.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah, the expertise to manufacture those, to make the plant plants, who manufactures those is an entire skill. Like they say they. We don't even have the companies here in the US who could even make the plants and all the tools to assemble this stuff, let alone then build it out and then hire all the staff and bring everything in. It's a very complicated thing. And China really has dominated that market. Kind of closed the loop on everything there.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. There is still a 26% trade tariff with India. So Apple does not dodge the bullet entirely. But it's better than 145%, I guess. Yeah. Which I think at that point no one would buy an iPhone if we're 145% more expensive. That's just not going to happen. Yeah, 26 is a big jump.

[Daniel Rubino]

I think people would still buy an iPhone.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Really, Just not as many.

[Leo Laporte]

So if an iPhone costs 2,500 or $3,000, it comes to luxury.

[Kathy Gellis]

Good becomes like a rich people thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Like.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah, but then what if somebody cut our rate?

[Leo Laporte]

Was not that rich. I know.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

What if somebody pays you to use an Android phone and then, ah, give.

[Leo Laporte]

Me $10 a week and I'll think about it.

[Kathy Gellis]

I just, I didn't even buy one of the, the flippy phones that I really, really want to have because I want a smaller phone and I wanted the ones that could bend in the Middle so they fit in my pocket better and I couldn't spend that money on the phone.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you didn't mean a flip fold. You mean flip phone. You mean a folding phone, A folding phone phone. There's a big difference. If you meant something like this is the Samsung flip.

[Kathy Gellis]

Right. I wanted something like that. And. But the price point is just insane where I can't justify spending that money on a phone and carrying around something worth that much money in my pocket. It just didn't. It didn't make sense for us. It was worth also more than my laptop. So like, which I'm built to sort of protect the laptop because, oh, that's the expensive one and the phone is the cheaper and so it's really upside down. If.

[Leo Laporte]

But Benito's right. I know people with $200,000 watches on their wrists, which seems to me insane.

[Kathy Gellis]

For a number of reasons.

[Leo Laporte]

But you know, that's I guess a way of showing your affluence, I guess, right. As a $3,000 iPhone.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Well, and then wait till Apple makes a foldable phone itself and then see how much you spend next year.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what the rumor is next year. And that will be. See, that's another way you can handle that is by making it so many so different features so different that you can't compare prices. Right, right. Of course. It's $3,000. It folds.

[Kathy Gellis]

The $3,000 for a phone is not. There's still a lot of economic harm going here because it's not like Apple would love to sell the number of iPhones it sells for more money than it sells them. But at a certain point you stop selling the units. And so, okay, you sell one unit for all the money that they need to make, but they don't get all that 3,000. That's going to go to the tariffs and much more expensive production. So Apple is going to basically be lo losing their ability to profit because their profit margin on every unit is not going to be much bigger than it is. But there's going to be so many fewer units sold because the market for three thousand dollar phones is tinier than the market for the phones at the current price point.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's take a little break then. I'll ask you if you got your Nintendo Switch first. You're watching this weekend tech with Kathy Gallis and Abrar al Heiti. I like to throw bonito. You're good bonito though. You keep up. He's good, isn't he? I do the. I do a different order each time. And. And it still doesn't throw him in. Daniel Rubino from. Look at that from Windows Central. Very good vignette is the best. Our show today, brought to you by Drata. You've heard me talk about Drata before. If you're leading, risking compliance at your company. Company. Hey, that's a tough job. You've got my sympathy. You're wearing at least 10 hats. At the same time, managing security risks. You got compliance demands, regulatory demands, budget constraints, all while trying not to be seen as the roadblock that's slowing down business. Right? But GRC isn't just about checking boxes. It's a revenue driver. It can be really a revenue driver. Tell your boss that. That builds trust. You gotta do that, right? Accelerates deals, strengthens, Strengthens security. Compliance really is a seal of approval. That's why modern GRC leaders turn to Drata, a trust management platform that automates the tedious tasks so you can focus on reducing risk, proving compliance, and scaling your program. Life is a lot easier with Drata. You can automate security questionnaires. You can automate evidence collection, compliance tracking. You'll stay audit ready with real time monitoring. And you can simplify security reviews with Drata's Trust center and AI powered questionnaire assistance. Instead of spending hours proving trust, build it faster. With Drata ready to modernize your GRC program. Visit drata.com weekintech to learn more. Okay, that's a different URL now, so make sure you get it right. Right. Drata.com weak intech w e E K I N T C H thank you, Drata, for sponsoring this week in Tech. Did you get online to buy your Switch? I have a feeling. I don't know why I'm looking at you, Daniel Rabino, like you might be a Switch user.

[Daniel Rubino]

Steam Deck.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, Steam Deck.

[Daniel Rubino]

And if not that, I'll use the Asus Rog because it's which is just a Steam Deck.

[Leo Laporte]

Under Running Windows, there's no Mario.

[Daniel Rubino]

Running Windows. Yeah, Daniel.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no Mario, there's no Mario Kart. How are you gonna live?

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah, you know, it's funny because I actually do have a Switch. I bought one years ago before there was a Steam Deck. And I even bought the Pokemon Limited Edition 1. Even though I don't care about Pokemon or know anything about it. But I love the colors. And I loved it. I used it, but I never used it really to play Nintendo I ip. I can't stand Nintendo ip. I liked Luigi's Haunted Mansion. That was about the only one. But I Used it because into Nintendo's credit they got a lot of independent games on their store that was basically like a Valve Steam store lights. And so I used that for a long time and I generally enjoyed it. But then Steam Deck came out and it just gave me everything I really wanted.

[Leo Laporte]

I bought the Animal Crossing version.

[Daniel Rubino]

Oh yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

See the colors. And I have to say in Covid this was kind of a lifesaver because I could play games on my Switch and zone out right. And just build my little Animal Crossing village. But I hadn't played in quite a few years. It's apparently sold out now. The Switch two pre orders everywhere, Gamestop, Walmart, Target, Best Buy and many of the retailers went down during the pre orders which by the way were delayed. They opened them after all on the 24th. This week was going to be April 9th. You could only pre order it if you had a long time Switch account and you'd played 50 hours or more of Switch games in the past year. So they really eliminated scalpers, which I think was very smart. Nevertheless, the stores went down, there were crowds. It was crazy. I still am waiting for my email from Nintendo to allow me to buy one. I hope I can get one. They did not raise the prices, which some thought they might due to tariffs on Japan still selling the console for $450 and the bundle with Mario Kart World for $500. But good luck getting it. Did anybody chat room did you get your Switch 2s? I wanted to want to know anybody? Yeah, I feel like to me, I like the Switch better than the Steam Deck because the games are made for that size screen and that device, whereas Steam Deck. I was playing games that were made for big screens and big computers and I just, it felt.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah, it depends. I mean they do have the, the Steam Deck verified thing. So when you're looking at to buy games, they can be optimized for Steam Deck. Like developers can do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Daniel Rubino]

And yeah. And you get a little thing. So it depends. If you're playing really old games, you may struggle to do that. I, I play. I have had no issues with it. I think Steam Deck is the best of both worlds. Well, so long as you're not into the Nintendo ip but.

[Leo Laporte]

Zelda, okay. No, I track. So I'm a big. I play valheim on a 55 inch monitor and I tried to play on the Steam Deck. You know same with the Xbox. I can't really play it on xd.

[Daniel Rubino]

I think that's the thing, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Like you have to look for games.

[Daniel Rubino]

That are good on Steam Deck design stuff. Like Hades. Hades might be a good game on Steam Deck. Hades is.

[Leo Laporte]

But Hades is great on the Steam deck too. Exactly. That's what I mean.

[Kathy Gellis]

That's what I mean.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And so, I mean, on the Switch as well, though. So.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah, I think the advantage was that, you know, especially now with the Windows PC versions coming out, there's just a lot, lot more options. You know, like, I had the first switch, as I just mentioned, but the ergonomics on that thing are atrocious. So I had to buy, like, the clip on, like, handles for it. The display resolution was terrible. The audio wasn't great. Steam Deck, you know, made all that better. And now you have, like, with the PC versions, like, Lenovo's Legion Go is an 8.8-inch display. It's huge, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that might be.

[Daniel Rubino]

You have all these choices. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you have all these different options, which I think is. That's the beauty of a PC market is you can get these different designs and choices to what you prefer.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Daniel Rubino]

Whereas the Switch, you're just going to get what they like. I'd even like how the. The controllers came off of the Switch. Like, I understood the purpose, but I never used it like that. But I hated it because it just made the device super creaky to use. So when it came out, the light version, I was, like, even more enthralled because I'm like, okay, this is what I want. I just want a handheld device, not something that turns into a console, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Actually, I use it that way, though. In fact, one of the reasons I wanted to get the new switch is because it's 4k on my TV if I dock it. I don't know. I don't know. Oh, here I am in my little town I'm ready to go wandering. Oh, there's a message. My phone is ringing. Whatever. Could it be Timmy? It's Timmy. Okay. It's a really dopey game, and I apologize. Can't play it on Steam Deck, though, I gotta say, so Japanese. All right, what else? I got distracted. I apologize. Oh, you wanted to talk about the $20,000 pickup?

[Kathy Gellis]

Oh, I just thought it was interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is one way to get around tariffs. Buy something made in the US like this $20,000 pickup truck.

[Kathy Gellis]

I saw the article for it, and I saw some people speaking like, yes, if I needed something, that's exactly what I would get. And I was reading it, and I was. And I came away from the article really rooting for Their six success.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

Where one of the things they're basically talking about and kind of getting back to our conversation about bundling is that cars have gotten gratuitously over complicated and you really. The function of what you need is not that significant. You need something that goes fuel with fuel efficiency and safety. And this has enough modularity to it that everything that you want to have your vehicle do on top of that, that you can still have that happen. But you can pick the stuff that you want and you can do it a lot more via aftermarket things you can do it yourself that you don't have. And you. And in that article they talk about like from the founders talking about like the car companies keep ramming so much down your throat. I think they call it as the curation of what you get when you buy a car.

[Leo Laporte]

My BMW initially they wanted to rent you seat warmers like it's built in, but you had to pay a monthly fee to use them. Fortunately there was such. There were such complaints that they abandoned that. But it is the case that as soon as you go in you're getting upsold. But you want the better stereo, right. You want the leather seats, right. You want the paddle shifters.

[Kathy Gellis]

Not just the upselling. It's also that what they were talking about is like you'd get these combination. Let's say you want like the. The shiniest and the premisest of all of it. And it's like yeah, you get it in two colors because like the way it's curated, if you want that package then you can get this one with these two things and like you' not getting the choice that you want to have. Whereas if you start with just sort of the basics, you've got the chassis of the vehicle, it's got the wheels, it's got the engine. Now you can add things to it to make it the car that you.

[Leo Laporte]

Really don't worry about the color, it's not painted.

[Kathy Gellis]

And so they're. They're thinking that basically that's going to make financial sense. You can still have a pretty one. You just get. You achieve your prettiness not by paint you and because the art. The Verge article. Yeah, you have it because they were also talking about in the Verge article that building a paint factory like one of the reasons the cost.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the paint shop's very expensive and.

[Kathy Gellis]

They semi to build a paint factory.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why the cyber truck is on is unpainted.

[Kathy Gellis]

Right. So what they're talking about is. And then there's also talking about how the factories themselves are. Can be much, much smaller buildings like much easier and cheaper to build the factories because the, they don't do the steel. They don't. I don't follow this completely but like the way the metal works in a normal car they're not using that, that material where they don't need to. And the material they are using you can use a much smaller footprint that doesn't need to have such a big factory in order.

[Leo Laporte]

They're molded of plastic.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah. And I was wondering about that. They said they're passing all the crash test things but they're also injection molded.

[Leo Laporte]

Polypropylene composite material which makes them more durable and scratch resistant. So maybe you don't need to paint the that and they're saying Saturn did that. Remember the Saturns had plastic panels.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, yeah. So there's a whole bunch of things where like if we just break down a card of what we basically need it's basic simplicity. It's going to be a lot cheaper to produce and you can still end up with something fancy if you want.

[Leo Laporte]

But you'll, you know where they're smart they don't have an, a radio or stereo or entertainment system. They just have a, a place for you to put your phone.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It's all people need. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

But really isn't that right? I mean.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

And no one wants a touchscreen either.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the phone does everything I want it to do. It'd be nice if I could maybe put a tablet there or something so.

[Kathy Gellis]

I have a little more real estate Talking about modularity. So basically you can add a graphic screen if you want. You can add Bluetooth, speakers. So like everything. Because I was kind of like a car with no radio really. Like I remember my dad's car in 1981 and like that was kind of annoying. We didn't have a radio in it.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's electric.

[Kathy Gellis]

We survived. And, and you know you can add one and it's. And it's also going to be like third party modularity is like a huge thing to, to have in cars.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That's kind of interesting. That's a kind of interesting idea I think.

[Kathy Gellis]

And it's Chinese repair is built in like they basically will have that unless it's involving like a safety system or electrical or something like that that you can do it yourself. And we've got YouTube videos for you to watch. Like they, they really, they, they. It's like what a car really should be. And we've just gotten away from it because we've just put all this overtone on how we do cars.

[Daniel Rubino]

I will also say one of the big things, and this is still why I'll defend Tesla a bit, was they got rid of dealerships. Yeah, dealerships are really the big, that's the big block to a lot of this stuff. Like the reason why it's so hard to get, get these, the upgrades you want and all that. It's because you have to go in, you have to negotiate. It's just a nightmare. I still, you know, I bought my Tesla in 2019. It was everything I wanted. I just went online, clicked I wanted it, here's 200. Gave him my old car, did the financing, all within like 20 minutes. Picked a car I want, I'd have to talk to a human being. And then I got a text message that the car was ready and I just went, picked it up and that was it. And it was just like it goes to show you what you can do. It's even with software updates. Right. They just go right to the car. But it's the automotive companies and the dealerships. I mean if you guys remember, I'm sure Leo, you remember it, they tried to block Tesla sales in Texas.

[Leo Laporte]

Absolutely.

[Daniel Rubino]

Didn't have it. You know, because of the dealership.

[Leo Laporte]

Some states it's against the law to sell a car without a dealer.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Wow.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because the dealers went and lobbied the state legislature saying no, no, it would be unsafe.

[Kathy Gellis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Shouldn't be able to do that.

[Daniel Rubino]

So I'm all for this. I mean it reminds me if it's basically the PC model, right. If you know, PCs came out and now look at like especially for gaming, right. Like there's like 9,000 million accessories you can buy for a desktop PC. You can build them the way you want. You can have glass screens and all this LED stuff. It's all because of people came out with the format and then allowed innovation to happen through third party developers. And it's basically an open system. So I think this is great for cars, you know. Yeah, you start off with the basic thing that you can afford. And this is also good for people who can't. They want a car but they can't afford a $40,000 one. But they want one and they can build it out over time as they get more money.

[Leo Laporte]

Like that's 27,5 before your rebate and those rebates are scheduled to expire so it may end up being more expensive. But I think this is one of the benefits of an electric vehicle because basically they're golf carts and you just put More you want to put a computer. A Tesla is a golf cart with a fancy computer system on it. Really? I figured that out when I got my first Tesla. I went, oh, you know, that's all it really is.

[Daniel Rubino]

There's really no maintenance and there's no maintenance tires.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. They say they can make it safely. I liked your, before the show, we were talking a little bit about it. Daniel, he said, this is going to create a raft of third party businesses based on should it be successful based on upgrading this. The best selling vehicle in the United States by far is the Ford F150 pickup. It's a big pickup, but people like trucks, right? They want a truck, they don't need them.

[Daniel Rubino]

Every day I see people with pickups, I'm like, why do you have a pickup? You don't need a pickup.

[Leo Laporte]

I kind of want, it's every once in a while you want to haul something, something, you know, a little larger. You want to take this sofa down to the dump or whatever. It's kind of nice to have one. It's good to have a friend with a pickup. I found you really only need a.

[Kathy Gellis]

Friend with the truck. You don't need the truck itself.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Daniel Rubino]

But, right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, somebody's got to buy it. Your friend's got to buy it.

[Daniel Rubino]

I mean, what's important for this though is like the standards of the pieces need to be set so that if.

[Kathy Gellis]

Other, other companies start making modular cars.

[Daniel Rubino]

All the pieces work for all the different cars.

[Leo Laporte]

Wouldn't that be awesome? Awesome. They say, for instance, they have an SUV up You're talking about though, Daniel.

[Daniel Rubino]

Like all the parts work together with all the companies. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So we need EV compatibles, like PC compatibles.

[Daniel Rubino]

The only difference is, I would say is that PC market, that functionality grew with the PC market. We're already talking about an existing market of huge car manufacturers.

[Leo Laporte]

Big market. Yeah.

[Daniel Rubino]

And you'd have to get them to all agree to step back, back, you know, so, but if this was the first time we're talking about cars and like, oh, have you heard about getting a car? I would say that, yeah, you'd have the chance here to make that happen. But you know, now that you already have all these businesses, I think getting them all to agree on that would be unless the government forced it. But, you know, well, I, I, I.

[Kathy Gellis]

Mean, what's the evolution that will happen for this? So you've got this company that's going to take a leadership position. I think they're going to decide given their ethos and also the Economics that is in their interest. Interest to have open standards for their cars because it'll help sell more cars and they'll still be first to market on cars that can take these standards. So I think they are actually one of the things I really liked about it is I think they're betting the business on business choices that are actually much better for the public in the market. And I want that to succeed. I want that to be the market where we stop having everything being so monopolized and proprietary. So this is really exciting. And maybe with that company leadership, they will see it is in their interest to basically, you know, we've innovated it, but here's our open standard.

[Leo Laporte]

So we buried the lead on this a little bit. I did so intentionally. First of all, the name of the company, Slate Truck. It's based in Michigan. And who's the primary investor? Jeff Bezos. Yeah.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah. I mean, it is the Amazon model. A lot of ways, I bet you.

[Leo Laporte]

Suddenly it gets a lot more interesting, doesn't it? Yeah, you know.

[Daniel Rubino]

Well, I would say prime delivery.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, I would. Oh, yeah. But I think, think it's not that. I think that everything he does is smart. You know, he's gonna find a nut every so often. And, you know, I think this is a smart play. And, you know, I, I think there's a reason that, like, money is getting attracted to it, because if this succeeds, it's a path to success that's been underexploited. And if it can succeed, I think it's good for everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

So Bezos hired a kind of a skunk works or built kind of a skunk works in 2022 called rebuild manufacturing. And this came out of that skunk works. It was kind of a spin off, but there are other investors, including the owner of the Dodgers and the CEO of Guggenheim Partners, Mark Walter, Thomas Tull, lead investor. So it's an interesting idea. I wish them well. They've raised a lot of money. This is not just some guy a in a garage who said, you know, I think I could build a cheap electric truck. This is an interesting play and sure.

[Daniel Rubino]

Bezos would also like it because he can give Elon Musk a bit of ribbing.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, he loves doing that since they're.

[Daniel Rubino]

Already competing and with the space stuff now be the car market. Right. But it goes to show you, I mean, you know, for all of Musk's, you know, issues, you know, Tesla did significantly disrupt the car market. And I think for the better, there's still a lot that needs to be done. But this is.

[Leo Laporte]

I give him a lot of. I don't. I hate. And I hate doing it, but I give him a lot of credit.

[Kathy Gellis]

Sometimes the things that we want to give him credit for were things that other people did and that he's taking the credit for, maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

And he certainly got a lot of federal funding to make it possible. But I think without Tesla, I don't know if you would have the ev. Boom. The first EV I bought was a Tesla Model X. And I'll be honest, this is back in 2015, before we really knew the full Elon story. I was kind of moved. I was in tears. I took a tour of the factory in Fremont and I thought, this is amazing. This guy is changing the world.

[Daniel Rubino]

And they were built here in the United States. And that was a weird thing too, because I was just gonna say because. Oh, sorry.

[Kathy Gellis]

No, I would just attribute it more to the bones of the company. I think the reason where this falls down is when we think it's the cult of personality and that his personal, personal thing in. And his personal money would be the differentiation I'd make. There's some really cool things with what Tesla innovated without making it the cult of personality.

[Leo Laporte]

He wrote the checks. It's just like Jeff Bezos. If Slate Truck becomes a thing, Jeff's going to take the lion's share of the credit, even though he's done none of the engineering. And I think it's the same thing. There is something to be said for the guy who puts up the. Takes the risk and puts up the.

[Daniel Rubino]

I think he was also a pretty good marketer, though, so, like, we can't take.

[Leo Laporte]

And he's a very good. I mean, yeah, we do have a couple of Tesla stories we'll get to in just a moment, but first we're going to take a word from our sponsor. It's great to have all of you. Great to have you. Club Twit members. You know, thanks to Club 2, we're able to stream our show now on eight different platforms. So if you want to watch live on a Sunday afternoon from 2 to 5pm Pacific, 5 to 80 Eastern, you can. Club Twit members can watch in our Club Twit Discord, but We've also got YouTube, we've got Twitch, we've got TikTok. Is the TikTok up today? We put in the TikTok computer over here. I don't know if they.

[Kathy Gellis]

Not yet up today.

[Leo Laporte]

Not yet. Okay, we're still working on that. TikTok wants us to use TikTok to stream it. So we have a dedicated machine over there in my corner. It's going to do that soon. TikTok x.com we got. We've got LinkedIn, we've got Facebook and we've got Kick so 7 right now. Soon to be 8 different platforms. If you're not yet a member of Club Twit, I really would love to have you in the club. It makes a big difference to us. Lisa just told me it is 25% of our revenue now. So it's a significant portion of what we do and we need it because the ad revenue, as much as we have does not pay for everything we do and we want to do more. And thanks to the club we are. We're able to. We have some great events. The Untitled Linux show, which is in our club, just celebrated its 200th episode. Congratulations to the guys. We've got a photo workshop with Chris Markwart coming up on Thursday. We're going to assess your seasonal pictures. Seasonal was the topic. I'm sorry. Friday, May 2nd at 1pm Pacific. We also have Stacy's Book Club coming up on the 16th. Really good book. I do recommend it. I've just finished it. The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin. It's a short one, it's a novella and we are going to stream a bunch of keynotes and we're doing it in the club only because we've been getting Takedowns Lately on YouTube. So we've decided, you know what, the club will get the streams. So Paul and Richard and I will talk about the Microsoft build keynote on May 19th. We'll do Google I O the following day on May 20th with I think Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martin will join me. We're going to have a GizWiz reunion on May 23rd. Dick DeBartolo celebrating his Was It 2000th episode. Our AI user group went great on Friday. That was a lot of fun. And then in June it's going to be wwdc. Micah and I will analyze the not and because we're doing it in the club now, we can do not only the big keynote but also the State of the Union immediately following or take over the channel on Monday. All of these things in the club only. So please consider going to Twitt TV Club Twit and joining the fun. You get ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to a special discord just for club members. All those special events. I think it's worth seven bucks a month, $84 a year. Twit TV Club Twit this episode of Twit brought to you by my good friends at Express VPN. Going online without ExpressVPN, I don't know. It'd be like leaving your laptop unattended at the coffee shop while you run off to the back bathroom. Most of the time you're probably fine. But what if one day you come out of the bathroom and your laptop is gone? That's why everybody needs ExpressVPN. Every time you connect to an unencrypted network in cafes and hotels and airports and so on, your online data is not secure. Any hacker on the same network can gain access and steal your personal data. It doesn't take much technical knowledge to hack somebody that way, just some inexpensive hardware. 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Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com twit that's E X P R E-S-S vpn.com twit and you can get an extra four months free when you buy a two year package. Expressvpn.com twit we thank them so much for supporting this week in Tech. I saved the Elon news for the end of the show. There is actually quite a bit. There is a Tesla whistleblower who says Elon wanted to use ICE to deport her and her team for raising an issue about the brakes. She's a former Tesla engineer, Christina Balin, who was fired in 2014. She said at that time, Elon threatened the entire team with deportation because they took her side when she brought up a brake safety issue directly to Elon. Now, one of the things, one of the magic things that Tesla's famous for, Elon has said it many times in meetings and stuff, is my door is always open if there's a problem. I want you to talk to whoever needs to be talked to, regardless of where they are in the hierarchy, where you are in the hierarchy, even if it's going to me. He sent out an email to the entire company to that effect in 2013. So she saw the email. She said she went to meet with Musk because she was concerned. It was actually a problem that happened in other vehicles too. I think Toyota had a recall because the floor mat could get stuck under the brake and she felt like that was something that she was worried about with the floor mats on the Model S. She said Tesla had chosen suppliers based on friendships, not quality. So she made a meeting with Elon to tell him about it. She says when she showed up to the meeting, it was instead attended by a lawyer and some large men in uniforms. Probably security team, but okay. Tesla forced her to resign her position during that meeting meeting, she says the lawyer threatened to deport many members of her team who are currently waiting on green card applications if she didn't resign. Now this is just, I gotta say it's just a whistleblower accusation, but I think maybe now with what we've seen in other circumstances, its stats starts to ring a little bit more true. For instance, Doge has done quite a bit to help Tesla's business. You actually wrote about this, Kathy, at Techter.

[Kathy Gellis]

Not that bit, but about, well, Tesla.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, I'll give the. I'll, I'll, we'll get to that then. Okay. It's not related, but Tesla did get the feds to weaken the rule for, for self driving vehicles for reporting. A new autonomous vehicle framework would make it easier for Tesla and other companies to research self driving cars that don't meet all federal safety standards. This is particularly seen as a boon for Elon's promised Tesla automated taxi fleet.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I don't know if this will help people who are already feeling uneasy about self driving cars if the regulations are knocked down. Um, and I'm sure companies like Waymo that have kind of had to get all those regulations probably aren't thrilled that, you know, now someone like Tesla can kind of swoop in and do away with all that.

[Leo Laporte]

But the new rules would allow companies like Tesla, not just Tesla, other companies too, to Shield from public view crash details, including the automation version involved in the incidents, the narratives, that's the word they used around the crashes on grounds that information like that is confidential business information. Waymo and Zoox will no longer need to report crashes that include property damage less than $1,000. Yeah, all of this benefits Elon's business. And this is the kind of self dealing I think that's going on. In fact, I honestly think this is what DOGE is really about, not saving money. It hasn't at all. DOGE is about other things entirely. Now we get to your article, Kat. Kathy.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, so. Well, there's a whole bunch of things, but yeah, they've been in all the agencies doing all the things. And that's a problem because from where they derive the authority to show up at these agencies and do anything is seriously questionable. And it would be questionable even if they showed up, truly were functioning in advisory capacity and saying, agency, you really should do this, you should fire all these people, you should cancel all these contracts. This and the other thing. Agencies themselves are still limited in terms of what they can do. And there's this big act called the APA that tends to govern most of this, that agencies can't be arbitrary and capricious in what they do. And he's been going in and getting the agencies to do all sorts of things. And this is creating a lot of litigation because everything that the agency then does is arguably in violation of the law. But a set of these lawsuits are going in because what the agency has done by giving the DOGE members themselves access to these databases is also protected by the Privacy act. Because what the Privacy act says is government is collecting a lot of sensitive data for very specific things. Like I put in my piece, if you need Social Security benefits, you're going to give the Social Security Administration a whole bunch of information so they can give you your benefits. But the Privacy act basically says you've got these buckets of information and that the agencies themselves are required to basically keep that information in the bucket. Very, very secure, kind of siloed, in effect, siloed and siloed even within the agencies themselves, where it's not even within the Social Security Administration. People didn't have. Oh, all those Social Security people can have access to this data. It's really metered out in terms of what training you need have, what jobs you had, what credentials. And even then you were still limited, so you couldn't get access to too much. And that's how they did business, which protected the data and was also what complied with the Privacy act laws. And you couldn't go agency to agency with. With all this data except under very specific, narrow things that do not apply here. So DOGE swooping in and a coming from outside the agency and getting into these buckets is a problem. And then they're also potentially taking the data out of the buckets and doing other things. Like there's all these articles about the super databases. They want to have to help figure out who's.

[Leo Laporte]

In the name of efficiency.

[Kathy Gellis]

Right, in the name of efficiency. So, but there's a number of problems and in this piece in particular with the litigation that's about the Privacy Act. And so there's a bunch of those cases EFF is involved with, one which is challenging doge's access to opm, which is basically HR for the government, the.

[Leo Laporte]

Office of Personnel Management.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah. And then this piece that I wrote the article about is they had got. They'd gone into the Social Security Administration. They wanted more access to the Social Security Administration. But there was a TRO that ended up on the books in March. And then the outcome of that TRO was the judge said, if this, you need to tell me if you needed more so I can analyze what you would need it for. And apparently. And one of the declarations that followed was, yeah, these four DOGE people need access to, not just an aggregate, the Social Security data, which was you don't get access to the identifying data. You get access only to in aggregate, where you can't chase down a specific person. And they said, these four people need access to the personally identifying information because we need to look for fraud. And the judge said in passing as part of this hearing hearing, you know, she's like, no, you don't get access to the data to then go investigate for a crime. So she denied that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a fishing expedition, right?

[Kathy Gellis]

It's a fishing expedition. So I thought that was a really interesting thing that came up. And it came up and then was kind of ignored because the rest of the litigation is really about the basics of the injunction and the basics of the Privacy act claims and, and things like that. But what she ended up pointing out was the echoes that the Privacy act has with the Fourth Amendment, because the Fourth Amendment is the big constit institutional thing that articulates essentially a right of privacy, although it's not phrased that way, but the people are allowed to be secure in their papers and effects from the government, unless the government has probable cause that there's a prime, a crime and that they do a search and seizure with particularity so they still don't get to go on a fishing expedition. And they got to have some good reason to be doing any investigation at all. So what do you have now? You have, you have. The government has this data that is collected essentially with the consent of the person, but the person is consented because it's a very limited consent.

[Leo Laporte]

We assumed we'd be protected.

[Kathy Gellis]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Our privacy. I mean. And you have no choice, by the way.

[Kathy Gellis]

And you have no choice, by the way, but the privacy.

[Leo Laporte]

If you want Social Security, you got to give them that information. Right, right.

[Kathy Gellis]

And the Privacy act basically says, we are going to make this a viable arrangement for everybody so that they can, can give this consent and the government can collect this data and do the job providing benefits for the public. So what Doge was sort of saying is, yeah, well, now that we got this data, woohoo, we've got all the evidence of the crime. And they're like, we want to look at the, you know, we want to violate people's privacy in order to look for the crime. And she kind of points out in passing, no, no, no, that's the other way around. You have to have reason to suspect there's a crime. And then maybe you get to look at the data.

[Leo Laporte]

And really it's the same reason the court prohibit police from saying, we would like the location information for everybody who was in the vicinity of that bank robbery last night. That's a fishing expedition in that case.

[Kathy Gellis]

I think one of the issues is it just doesn't have the particularity of what they're looking for. Like, you really have to have some sense of who did the thing that was wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

What are you looking for?

[Kathy Gellis]

Probable cause that this person did this crime. Then you get the warrant. Can't say that when it comes to digital stuff, the state of the law is appropriately protective. And these Privacy act cases really are just dealing with a statutory complaint rather than a constitutional one. But I thought it was interesting to note that colloquy between the judge and Doge and that echoes of the Fourth Amendment are showing up where. This is why we have the Privacy Act. It's so important because the people are supposed to be secure in their papers and effects to not have the government, like, know what's going on with all their, their private matters. And, and it's to make it that, you know, we can give up some privacy to the government without putting ourselves in jeopardy from what the government could do punitively, if so have the Courts.

[Leo Laporte]

About us have they nipped it in the bud?

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, in this particular instance, the TRO turned into a preliminary injunction restraining order.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah. And now there's a preliminary injunction and the government is appealing. What I do not know. And then the the appeals court asked for briefs on whether the injunction should be stayed. And I actually don't know the latest on that. I forgot to look today, but court listener hadn't updated. I feel like it was missing something. So I don't know what's going on, but I think it's enjoined at the moment. But we'll see what the. I think this is one that's in the 4th Circuit, so we'll see what the 4th Circuit does, whether they're going to stay it while the appeal pens or, or whether that'll hold, but then they'll still do the appeal thereafter. So all this is late breaking and everything is happen happening. Meanwhile, the one about OPM that I know about that EFF is doing, they just filed their official brief for the preliminary injunction and I think they've all they either have a TRO already or I think another case produced a TRO and they're using that for the moment. So, you know, tune in Monday or Tuesday and it all could be upside down and different. But I did think that what the judge was saying and this issue that surfaced is a really important one that the public should realize there's reasons we don't want the government poking around and things. And if DOGE is doing the poking, that is a problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah. And we talked last week about the story, which has since been suppressed, by the way. I think fully covered up that Doge, when it got into the National Labor Relations Board, exfiltrated a huge amount of data to address this unknown, and then gave access very quickly to an account from Russia to the NLRB database.

[Kathy Gellis]

Weird happened.

[Leo Laporte]

Something weird happened. Unfortunately, the whistleblower that told us all about it has been shut down pretty effectively by sissa, who said we're not going to investigate or cert. We're not going to investigate that. So we just don't know. I think that's the thing that's scariest. We don't know who these DOGE guys are, what they're doing. Who is this big balls. And why should he have access to my Social Security information? Information, yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

There's starting to be discovery in some of these cases to get at some of this information, but the ships have sailed. We're even.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't you feel like the courts move so Slowly that at this point, and Trump's moving so obviously so quickly, probably with the intent to bypass any, any restraint. Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, they are, they are when they play games with the restraining orders, but they are actually abiding, by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

They are abiding and by.

[Kathy Gellis]

But yeah, this is all very upside down. And yes, the courts are a little slow and a couple of the conservatives on the appeals court have been a little slow to appreciate what's going on. But because I think basically injunctions really should have been offered like tro's, really should have happened right out of the gate. And particularly for a lot of the agencies and a lot of the riffing.

[Leo Laporte]

There'S enough time, you can stop, you could pause for a moment, figure this out. You don't have to do it today.

[Kathy Gellis]

There was a ton. Exactly. There was a ton of damage where bells have been rung. But there is still time to stop some of the other ones. So we'll have to see this is all playing out.

[Leo Laporte]

But cannot unring the bell.

[Kathy Gellis]

Cannot unring the bell. Yeah, this, none of this should have happened. None of this has been legal. And let's say, you know, we get through this and we're able to sort of clean up the mess when the dust settles. I think a lot of the wrongness of a lot of what's going on will eventually get addressed, but they're going to cause a lot of damage in the process. And there's a whole bunch of problems at it. Like, are they firing people? Are they just violating their privacy? Are they affecting their payments? Are they making them dead? Because, oh, that was the other thing I pointed out in the Post where I said they're abiding by the injunctions. But how did all those people end up on the dead list? Like that suggests that they weren't maybe abiding by the injunctions quite as well as they really needed to. So we'll see what happens if there's any adjudication on that front.

[Leo Laporte]

Back in February, when all this began, began, Elon Musk tweeted on x that the IRS's direct file had been deleted. And that day I went out and I mentioned it on the show. I went out and tried it and I was able to set up and start a direct file. Well, maybe Elon knew something, because this week the president announced that, yes, they were going to kill IRS's free direct filing for your income tax is pushing you back to those paid alternatives like Intuit and HR Block. And I don't you got to give me A reason why that was a good idea.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Right. Although I'm sure Intuit was probably thrilled.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's a great. It's great for H and r blocking. Intuit. TurboTax loves it. Yep.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

They've been trying so hard to bury those programs.

[Leo Laporte]

They pretended it didn't exist. They, you know, they claimed they had free options every time. Time I, you know, I pay my mom's taxes through TurboTax. Good luck getting it for free.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, exactly.

[Daniel Rubino]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

And I thought, gee, that's great. That's how it should be. That's how it is in most developed nations. You have a system that you can file through the. The tax authority. Not here. All right, I see. I promised I wouldn't get upset. Keep my blood pressure low. Just calm down, Leo. It's gonna be okay. Thank you. Abrar el heedi. It's always. You know what? You have such a calming voice. I always feel better.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Thank you. On the show again, coming from you, it means a lot. All the kind things that you're saying are carrying.

[Leo Laporte]

I've put many people to sleep in my many years of broadcasting. I don't mean that you just lower the blood pressure.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yes, exactly. We all need to relax a little bit sometimes.

[Leo Laporte]

So great to have you. Senior Technology Reporter. Congratulations on the promotion.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Thank you so much.

[Leo Laporte]

CNET are the. You're who owns you now. ZDNet.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Zif Davis.

[Leo Laporte]

Ziff Davis.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yep. Just try to keep up. Okay? I know it's drawing.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you work with Jason Heiner? Is he. Is he.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

He's under the same umbrella as us, which is great because, you know, we worked back together in the CBS Interactive Day, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I love Jason.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

He's kind.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a really genuinely good person.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

He is.

[Leo Laporte]

Sru, obviously.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Thank you so much. Well, it takes one to know one, so thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, many would disagree, but thank you.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

They're wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

They're wrong. I am not one to lick a badger twice.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I just want you to know, never forget.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Never forget. Daniel Rubino, editor in chief of Windows Central magazine, a consistently reliable source for Windows news. And it is, you know, it's got. Microsoft's gotten a lot more interesting in the last few years, haven't. Haven't they?

[Daniel Rubino]

Yeah. I mean, this AI thing. They were in the right place at the right time. They're a really good place to kind of exploit the technology for.

[Leo Laporte]

Their article on Recall is on the front page. Windows Central.com. i thank you so much, Daniel, as always, for your expertise. I appreciate it.

[Daniel Rubino]

Thanks for having me, as always. Yeah, it's always a good time.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And Kathy Gellis, our, our Internet attorney. Attorney, she writes for Tech Dirt. She. Do you, do you actually practice or do you spend all your time writing.

[Kathy Gellis]

For Tech Dirt now? I prefer to do Fix it for everyone advocacy and whether that means writing for Tech Dirt. But I do practice. I write. The amicus briefs count as practice.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good point.

[Kathy Gellis]

And I do some work with other lawyers and other projects, like I'm working on a memo which gives some advice. And so I can do other projects, but I prefer the, you know, the writing where I think that's the way that I can make a difference. And so I like flexing that muscle comprehensively just for whichever audience, you know, is best to tackle at that moment.

[Leo Laporte]

SCOTUS has been fascinating. What's your SCOTUS report card now? Supreme Court of the United States?

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, they, they, they have created a mess for themselves because they, they, they have discounted their own precedent and got an extremely micromanage and also way that is really unprecedented.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that the fight over the word facilitate you're talking about?

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, so I think I'm referring more to the shadow docket. Like the shadow docket.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, the shadow docket.

[Kathy Gellis]

They don't like calling anything the shadow docket. They think that's not a real thing. But basically there was always a mechanism that when getting things in front of the Supreme Court was a very slow, selective process. But every so often, something would be an emergency and break and need some sort of quicker attention. And so the shadow docket was always kind of there, but then it's kind.

[Leo Laporte]

Of the emergency docket. It was the emergency thing, urgent cases.

[Kathy Gellis]

But then all of a sudden, you know, people were started splatting all sorts of stuff there and they started answering it. So now you're in a position where basically everything, including every case that Trump is litigating right now and every order that comes out of them, he keeps complaining and taking it up and up and up, and he's taking them all up to the shadow docket. There's like 11 things on the shadow docket right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, is that a single, a single justice rule on the shadow dockets or do they all get involved?

[Kathy Gellis]

So it kind of depends to the extent that we can discern any viable rules from this coming out of there's a justice who's essentially on duty for every court. And but for the big and for some stuff, they will either say yes or no by themselves and usually just for administrative stay or something like that. But. But for anything that's more than like a day's pause, they generally end up referring it to the whole court. But there's some question of whether they've really got the internal procedures to make sure that that happens. There's some suggestion, and we'll never know, that when it was coming out of the turn the planes around order, that something had gone up to Justice Alito and did Justice Alito actually refer that to the whole court or did he sit on it? Because we didn't get the ruling from that court until like 1am in the morning, which is just. How did that happen?

[Leo Laporte]

According to SCOTUS, blog set 11 pending shadow DACA cases and 6 of them are Trump cases.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And he's keeping them busy. And of course, they've been very busy. 81 denied applications as well.

[Kathy Gellis]

So they've always turned down a lot of stuff. But at the moment, because they've said yes to so much via the shadow docket, Trump is basically running to the shadow docket on everything. And so my Techter post earlier in the week was RIP Justice Roberts summer vacation. Because all these cases are going on, all these courts are looking and they're going to turn into something and are they going to be enjoined? And we've got some time to sort out whether, you know, the rest of the litigation or are we going to be in emergency mode for everything? And I don't think there's going to. If, if they aren't enjoined, the plaintiffs are going to run to the. To this, to the shadow docket. But if they are enjoying, then Trump is going to run to the shadow. So.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's going to end up there.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

One way or the other.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kathy, thank you. I, I really appreciate the work you do at Tech Dirt. I read it religiously.

[Kathy Gellis]

Oh, and let me wish everybody a happy World Intellectual Property Day for yesterday.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it was also Independent Bookstore Day. So you could have celebrated both by going out and buying somebody's intellectual property at an independent bookstore.

[Daniel Rubino]

Yes.

[Kathy Gellis]

I'm very cynical about WIPO's desire to make sure that we have this day celebrating it. But that's why I'm wearing this.

[Leo Laporte]

This is WIPO's holiday. Holiday.

[Kathy Gellis]

WIPO invented this. And then one of what I consider the ironies of the universe, they decided that my birthday should be the day that.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, happy birthday.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

You're in lead there. Happy birthday.

[Kathy Gellis]

So when I throw my parties, I try to get themed IP cakes. I mean, I sort of invent them. But like Safeway sold a John Deere cake. So I did that because that celebrated the 1201 rollings. One year I I had a Campbell soup can photograph printed on a cake because Warhol was pending. So I try to make it.

[Leo Laporte]

What was on your cake this year?

[Kathy Gellis]

I haven't had it yet so I can't tell you because it's going to be a surprise for everybody. But I do know what it will be. So next time you have me on, you can ask me how the cake turned out.

[Leo Laporte]

Belated Happy birthday, Kathy.

[Kathy Gellis]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

It's great to see all three of you. Thanks to all of you who join us every week for this Week in Tech. We really appreciate it. Tell your friends it's the way to keep up on what's going on in the world of tech. There is a lot. It's been a very busy last few years. We do the show every Sunday afternoon, 2 to 5pm Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern, 2100 UTC. I mentioned you can't watch live, but you don't have to. We it is a podcast. It has been for 20 years now, which means you can download audio or video either from our website, Twitter, TV. There's a YouTube channel dedicated this week in Tech. It's a good way to share clips with friends if you want to turn them on to the show and maybe something that we talked about today. And of course you can subscribe in your favorite podcast player. Do me a favor though, when you get there, whether it's itunes or pocket casts or overcast, please leave us a five star review, will you? Tell the world you don't have to write anything if you don't want to, but just tell the world. As we want to spread the word, we're here every week talking about a very interesting time in tech. Thanks to our wonderful panel. Thanks to you for joining us. Thanks to Benito Gonzalez, our fabulous producer, Lisa Laporte, our fabulous executive producer. And who's editing it today? Is it Kevin King gonna be chopping out the bad words. Okay. So thank you Kevin King, for doing what you do. We appreciate it and we will see you next time. And now as I have said for 20 years now, in our 21st year, another twit is in the can. See you next week. This is amazing.

[Kathy Gellis]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Kathy Gellis]

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